The Hard Way, Page 7

  Reacher left Gregory working with his cell phone on the sofa and wandered back through the kitchen to Lane's office. Lane was at his desk, but he wasn't doing anything productive. Just swinging his chair back and forth through a tiny arc and staring at the twin photographs in front of him. His two wives. One lost. Maybe both lost.

  "Did the FBI find the guys?" Reacher asked. "The first time, with Anne?"

  Lane shook his head.

  "But you knew who they were."

  "Not at the time," Lane said.

  "But you found out later."

  "Did I?"

  "Tell me how."

  "It became a threshold question," Lane said. "Who would do such a thing? At first I couldn't imagine anyone doing it. But clearly someone had, so I revised the threshold of possibilities downward. But then everyone in the world seemed to be a possibility. It was beyond my understanding."

  "You surprise me. You move in a world where hostage-taking and abduction aren't exactly unknown."

  "Do I?"

  "Foreign conflicts," Reacher said. "Irregular forces."

  "But this was domestic," Lane said. "This was right here in New York City. And it was my wife, not me or one of my men."

  "But you did find the guys."

  "Did I?"

  Reacher nodded. "You're not asking me if I think it could be the same people all over again. You're not speculating. It's like you know for sure it isn't."

  Lane said nothing.

  "How did you find them?" Reacher asked.

  "Someone who knew someone heard some talk. Arms dealers, up and down their network."

  "And?"

  "There was a story about four guys who had heard about a deal I had done and concluded that I had money."

  "What happened to the four guys?"

  "What would you have done?"

  "I would have made sure they couldn't do it again."

  Lane nodded. "Let's just say I'm completely confident that this isn't the same people doing it again."

  "Have you heard any new talk?" Reacher asked.

  "Not a word."

  "A rival in this business?"

  "I don't have rivals in this business. I have inferiors and junior partners. And even if I did have rivals, they wouldn't do something like this. It would be suicide. They would know that sooner or later our paths would cross. Would you risk antagonizing a bunch of armed men you're likely to stumble across under the radar somewhere in the back of beyond?"

  Reacher said nothing.

  "Will they call again?" Lane asked.

  "I think they will."

  "What will they ask for?"

  "Ten," Reacher said. "That's the next step. One, five, ten, twenty."

  Lane sighed, distracted.

  "That's two bags," he said. "Can't get ten million dollars in one bag."

  He showed no other outward reaction. Reacher thought: One plus five already gone, plus one promised to me, plus ten more. That's seventeen million dollars. This guy is right now looking at a running total of seventeen million dollars, and he hasn't even blinked yet.

  "When will they call?" Lane asked.

  "Drive time plus argument time," Reacher said. "Late afternoon, early evening. Not before."

  Lane kept on swinging his chair through its tiny arc. He lapsed into silence. Then there was a quiet knock at the door and Gregory stuck his head in the room.

  "I got what we need," he said, to Reacher, not to Lane. "The building on Spring Street? The owner is a bankrupt developer. One of his lawyer's people is meeting us there in an hour. I said we were interested in buying the place."

  "Good work," Reacher said.

  "So maybe you should revise what you said about a mirror on a stick."

  "Maybe I should. Maybe I will one day."

  "So let's go."

  They were met at the 72nd Street curb by another new BMW 7-series sedan. This one was black. This time the driver stayed behind the wheel and Gregory and Reacher climbed in the back. The woman who was watching the building saw them go, and she noted the time.

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE GUY FROM the bankrupt developer's lawyer's office was a reedy paralegal of about thirty. His suit pockets were bagged out from all the keys he carried. Clearly his firm specialized in distressed real estate. Gregory gave him an OSC business card and introduced Reacher as a contractor whose opinion he valued.

  "Is the building habitable?" Gregory asked. "I mean, as of right now?"

  "You worried about squatters being in there?" the reedy guy asked back.

  "Or tenants," Gregory said. "Or anybody."

  "There's nobody in there," the guy said. "I can assure you of that fact. No water, no power, no gas, capped sewer. Also, if I'm thinking of the right building, there's another feature that makes it highly unlikely."

  He juggled his keys and unlocked the Thompson Street alley gate. The three men walked east together, behind the chocolate shop, to the target building's red rear door.

  "Wait," Gregory said. Then he turned to Reacher and whispered, "If they're in there, we need to think about how we do this. We could get them both killed right here."

  "It's unlikely they're in there," Reacher said.

  "Plan for the worst," Gregory said.

  Reacher nodded. Stepped back and looked up and checked the windows. They were black with filth and dusty black drapes were drawn tight behind them. Street noise was loud, even in the alley. Therefore,

  their approach thus far was still undetected.

  "Decision?" Gregory asked.

  Reacher looked around, pensive. Stepped up next to the lawyer's guy.

  "What makes you so sure there's nobody in there?" he asked.

  "I'll show you," the guy said. He shoved the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Then he raised his arm to stop Gregory and Reacher from crowding in too closely behind him. Because the feature that made current habitation of the building unlikely was that it had no floors.

  The back door was hanging open over a yawning ten-foot pit. At the bottom of the pit was the original basement floor. It was knee-deep in trash. Above it was nothing at all. Just fifty feet of dark void, all the way up to the underside of the roof slab. The building was like a giant empty shoe box set on its end. Stumps of floor joists were faintly visible in the gloom. They had been cut off flush with the walls. The remains of individual rooms were still clearly delineated by patches of different wallpapers and vertical scars where interior partitions had been ripped out. Bizarrely all the windows still had their drapes.

  "See?" the lawyer's guy said. "Not exactly habitable, is it?"

  There was a ladder set next to the rear door. It was a tall old wooden thing. A nimble person could grasp the door frame and swing sideways and get on it and climb down into the basement trash. Then that person could pick his way forward to the front of the building and root through the garbage with a flashlight and collect anything that had fallen the thirteen feet from the letter slot above.

  Or, a nimble person could be already waiting down there and could catch whatever came through the slot like a pop-up in the infield.

  "Was that ladder always there?" Reacher asked.

  "I don't recall," the guy said.

  "Who else has keys to this place?" Reacher asked.

  'Everyone and his uncle, probably," the guy said. "This place has been vacant nearly twenty years. The last owner alone tried half a dozen different separate schemes. That's half a dozen architects and contractors and God knows who else. Before that, who knows what went on? The first thing you'll need to do is change the locks."

  "We don't want it," Gregory said. "We were looking for something ready to move into. You know, maybe a little paint. But this is off the charts."

  "We could be flexible on price," the guy said.

  "A dollar," Gregory said. "That's all I'd pay for a dump like this."

  "You're wasting my time," the guy said.

  He leaned in over the yawning void and pulled the door
closed. Then he relocked it and walked back up the alley without another word. Reacher and Gregory followed him out to Thompson Street. The guy relocked the gate and walked away south. Reacher and Gregory stayed where they were, on the sidewalk.

  "Not their base, then," Gregory said, clipped and British.

  "Mirror on a stick," Reacher said.

  "Just a dead drop for the car keys. They must be up and down that ladder like trained monkeys."

  "I guess they must."

  "So next time we should watch the alley."

  "I guess we should."

  "If there is a next time."

  "There will be," Reacher said.

  "But they've already had six million dollars. Surely there's going to come a point where they decide they've got enough."

  Reacher recalled the feel of the mugger's hand in his pocket.

  "Look south," he said. "That's Wall Street down there. Or take a stroll on Greene Street and look in the store windows. There's no such thing as enough."

  "There would be for me."

  "For me, too," Reacher said.

  "That's my point. They could be just like us."

  "Not exactly like us. I never abducted anyone. Did you?"

  Gregory didn't answer that. Thirty-six minutes later the two men were back in the Dakota, and the woman who was watching the building had made another entry in her log.

  CHAPTER

  11

  REACHER HAD A late breakfast delivered from a gourmet deli on Edward Lane's tab and he ate it alone in the kitchen. Then he lay down on a sofa and thought until he was too tired to think anymore. Then he closed his eyes and dozed, and waited for the phone to ring.

  Kate and Jade were sleeping, too. It was nature's way. They had been unable to sleep at night, so exhaustion had overtaken them midway through the day. They were on their narrow beds, close together, deep in slumber. The lone man opened their door quietly and saw them. Paused a moment, just looking. Then he backed out of the room and left them alone. No hurry, he thought. In a way he was enjoying this particular phase of the operation. He was addicted to risk. He always had been. No point in denying it. It made him who he was.

  Reacher woke up and found himself all alone in the living room except for Carter Groom. The guy with the shark's eyes. He was sitting in an armchair, doing nothing.

  "You pulled guard duty?" Reacher asked.

  "You're not exactly a prisoner," Groom said. "You're in line to get a million bucks."

  "Does that bother you?"

  "Not really. You find her, you'll have earned it. The workman is worthy of his hire. Says so in the

  Bible."

  "Did you drive her often?"

  "My fair share."

  "When Jade was with her, how did they ride?"

  "Mrs. Lane always rode in the front. She was basically embarrassed about the whole chauffeur thing. The kid in the back, obviously."

  "What were you, back in the day?"

  "Recon Marine," Groom said. "First Sergeant."

  "How would you have handled the takedown at Bloomingdale's?"

  "Good guy or bad guy?"

  "Bad guy," Reacher said.

  "How many with me?"

  "Does it matter?"

  Groom thought for less than a second and shook his head. "Lead guy is the important guy. Lead guy could be the only guy."

  "So how would it have gone down?"

  "Only one way to do it clean," Groom said. "You'd have to keep all the action inside the car, before they even got out. Bloomie's is on the east side of Lexington Avenue. Lex runs downtown. So Taylor would pull over on the left and stop opposite the main entrance. Double parked, just temporarily. Whereupon our guy would grab the rear door and slide in right next to the kid. She's belted in behind her mother. Our guy puts a gun straight to the kid's head and grabs her hair with his free hand and holds on tight. That's game over

  right there. Nobody on the street is worried. For them, it's a pickup, not a drop-off. And Taylor would do what he's told from that point on. What choice does he have? He's got Mrs. Lane screaming in the seat next to him. And what can he do anyway? He can't flip the lever and shove the seat off its runners back on the guy, because the Jaguar's got electric seats. He can't turn around and fight, because the gun is to the kid's head. He can't use violent evasive driving maneuvers because he's in slow traffic and the guy has hold of the kid's hair and won't get thrown loose anyway. Game over, right there."

  "And then what?"

  "Then our guy makes Taylor drive somewhere quiet. Maybe in town, more likely out of town. Then he shoots him, spine shot through the seat, so he doesn't bust the windshield. He makes Mrs. Lane dump him out. Then he makes her drive the rest of the way. He wants to stay in the back with the kid."

  Reacher nodded. "That's how I see it."

  "Tough on Taylor," Groom said. "You know, that final moment, the guy tells him to pull over, put the transmission in Park, sit tight. Taylor will have known what was coming."

  Reacher said nothing.

  "They haven't found his body yet," Groom said.

  "You optimistic?"

  Groom shook his head. "It's not somewhere populated, that's all it means. It's a balance. You want rid of the guy early, but you keep him alive until the location is safe. He's most likely in the countryside somewhere with the coyotes gnawing on him. Race against time whether someone finds him before he's all eaten up."

  "How long was he with you?"

  "Three years."

  "Did you like him?"

  "He was OK."

  "Was he good?"

  "You already asked Gregory."

  "Gregory might be biased. They were from the same unit. They were Brits together overseas. What did you think?"