The Hard Way, Page 20

  BETWEEN THEM IN their previous lives and afterward Reacher and Pauling had approached probably a thousand buildings that may or may not have contained hostile suspects. They knew exactly how to do it. There was efficient back-and-forth tactical discussion. They were coming from a position of weakness, in

  that neither of them was armed and Hobart had met Pauling twice before. She had interviewed Lane's whole crew at length after Anne Lane's disappearance. Chances were Hobart would remember her even after the traumatic five-year interval. Balancing those disadvantages was Reacher's strong conviction that the Hudson Street apartment would be empty. He expected to find nothing there except hastily tossed closets and one last can of rotting trash.

  There was no doorman. It wasn't that kind of a building. It was a boxy five-story tenement faced with dull red brick and a black iron fire escape. It was the last hold-out on a block full of design offices and bank branches. It had a chipped black door with an aluminum squawk box chiseled sideways into the frame. Ten black buttons. Ten nametags. Graziano was written neatly against 4L.

  "Walk-up," Pauling said. "Central staircase. Long thin front-to-back apartments, two to a floor, one on the left, one on the right. Four-L will be on the fourth floor, on the left."

  Reacher tried the door. It was locked and solid.

  "What's at the back?" he asked.

  "Probably an air shaft between this and the back of the building on Greenwich."

  "We could rappel off the roof and come in through her kitchen window."

  "I trained for that at Quantico," Pauling said. "But I never did it for real."

  "Neither did I," Reacher said. "Not a kitchen. I did a bathroom window once."

  "Was that fun?"

  "Not really."

  "So what shall we do?"

  Normally Reacher would have hit a random button and claimed to be a UPS or FedEx guy. But he wasn't sure whether that would work with this particular building. Courier deliveries probably weren't regular occurrences there. And he figured it was almost four o'clock in the afternoon. Not a plausible time for pizza or Chinese food. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner. So he just hit every button except 4L's and said in a loud slurred voice, "Can't find my key." And at least two households must have had an errant member missing because the door buzzed twice and Pauling pushed it open.

  Inside was a dim center hallway with a narrow staircase on the right. The staircase ran up one floor and then doubled back and started over again at the front of the building. It was covered in cracked linoleum. It was illuminated with low wattage bulbs. It looked like a death trap.

  "Now what?" Pauling asked.

  "Now we wait," Reacher said. "At least two people are going to be sticking their heads out looking for whoever lost their key."

  So they waited. One minute. Two. Way above them in the gloom a door opened. Then closed again. Then another door opened. Closer. Second floor, maybe. Thirty seconds later it slammed shut.

  "OK," Reacher said. "Now we're good to go."

  He put his weight on the bottom tread of the staircase and it creaked loudly. The second tread was the same. And the third. As he stepped onto the fourth Pauling started up behind him. By the time he was halfway up the whole structure was creaking and cracking like small arms fire.

  They made it to the second floor hallway with no reaction from anywhere.

  In front of them at the top of the stairs were two paired doors, one on the left and one on the right. 2L and 2R. Clearly these were railroad flats with front-to-back corridors that dog-legged halfway along their lengths to accommodate the entrances. Probably there were wall-mounted coat hooks just inside the doors. Straight ahead to the living rooms. Kitchens in the back. Turn back on yourself at the door, you would find the bathroom, and then the bedroom at the front of the building, overlooking the street.

  "Not so bad," Reacher said, quietly.

  Pauling said, "I wouldn't want to carry my groceries up to five."

  Since childhood Reacher had never carried groceries into a home. He said, "You could throw a rope off the fire escape. Haul them up through the bedroom."

  Pauling said nothing to that. They turned one-eighty together and walked the length of the hallway to the foot of the next flight of stairs. Stepped noisily up to three. 3L and 3R were right there in front of them, identical to the situation one floor below and presumably identical to the situation one floor above.

  "Let's do it," Reacher said.

  They walked through the hallway and turned and glanced up into the fourth floor gloom. They could see

  4R's door. Not 4L's. Reacher went first. He took the stairs two at a time to cut the number of creaks and cracks by half. Pauling followed, putting her feet near the edges of the treads where any staircase is quieter. They made it to the top. Stood there. The building hummed with the kind of subliminal background noises you find in any packed dwelling in a big city. Muted traffic sounds from the street. The blare of car

  horns and the wail of sirens, dulled by the thickness of walls. Ten refrigerators running, window air conditioners, room fans, TV, radio, electricity buzzing through faulty fluorescent ballasts, water flowing through pipes.

  4L's door had been painted a dull institutional green many years previously. Old, but there was nothing wrong with the job. Probably a union painter, well trained by a long and painstaking apprenticeship. The careful sheen was overlaid with years of grime. Soot from buses, grease from kitchens, rail dust from the subways. There was a clouded spy lens about level with Reacher's chest. The 4 and the L were separate cast-brass items attached straight and true with brass screws.

  Reacher turned sideways and bent forward from the waist. Put his ear on the crack where the door met the jamb. Listened for a moment.

  Then he straightened up.

  "There's someone in there," he whispered.

  CHAPTER

  37

  REACHER BENT FORWARD and listened again. "Straight ahead. Awoman, talking." Then he straightened up and stepped back. "What's the layout going to be?"

  "A short hallway," Pauling whispered. "Narrow for six feet, until it clears the bathroom. Then maybe it opens out to the living room. The living room will be maybe twelve feet long. The back wall will have a window on the left into the light well. Kitchen door on the right. The kitchen will be bumped out to the back. Maybe six or seven feet

  deep."

  Reacher nodded. Worst case, the woman was in the kitchen, a maximum twenty-five feet away down a straight and direct line of sight to the door. Worse than worst case, she had a loaded gun next to her on the countertop and she knew how to shoot.

  Pauling asked, "Who's she talking to?" Reacher whispered, "I don't know."

  "It's them, isn't it?"

  "They'd be nuts to still be here."

  "Who else can it be?" Reacher said nothing.

  Pauling asked, "What do you want to do?"

  "What would you do?"

  "Get a warrant. Call a SWAT team. Full body armor and a battering ram."

  "Those days are gone."

  "Tell me about it."

  Reacher took another step back. Pointed at 4R's door.

  "Wait there," he said. "If you hear shooting, call an ambulance. If you don't, follow me in six feet behind."

  "You're just going to knock?"

  "No," Reacher said. "Not exactly."

  He took another step back. He was six feet five inches tall and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church's, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather. Size twelve. The soles were heavy composite items bought in from a company called Dainite. Reacher hated leather soles. They wore out too fast and stayed wet too long after rain. Dainites were better. Their heels were a five-layer stack an inch and a quarter thick. The Cheaney leather welt, the
Dainite welt, two slabs of hard Cheaney leather, and a thick Dainite cap.

  Each shoe on its own weighed more than two pounds.

  4L's door had three keyholes. Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into. The door itself was probably hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Same for the frame. Cheap to start with, damp and swelled all through a hundred summers, dry and shrunken all through a hundred winters. A little eaten-out and wormy.

  "Stand by now," Reacher whispered.

  He put his weight on his back foot and stared at the door and bounced like a high jumper going for a record. Then he launched. One pace, two. He smashed his right heel into the door just above the knob and wood splintered and dust filled the air and the door smashed open and he continued running without breaking stride. Two paces put him in the center of the living room. He stopped dead there. Just stood still and stared. Lauren Pauling crowded in behind him and stopped at his shoulder.

  Just stared.

  The apartment was laid out exactly as Pauling had predicted. A dilapidated kitchen dead ahead, a

  twelve-foot living room on the left with a worn-out sofa and a dim window onto a light well. The air was hot and still and foul. In the kitchen doorway stood a heavyset woman in a shapeless cotton shift. She had long brown hair parted in the center of her head. In one hand she held an open can of soup and in the other she held a wooden spoon. Her eyes and her mouth were open wide in bewilderment and surprise. She was trying to scream, but shock had punched all the air out of her lungs.

  In the living room, horizontal on the worn-out sofa, was a man. Not a man Reacher had ever seen before.

  This man was sick. Prematurely old. He was savagely emaciated. He had no teeth. His skin was yellow and glittered with fever. All that was left of his hair were long wisps of gray.

  He had no hands. He had no feet.

  Pauling said, "Hobart?"

  There was nothing left that could surprise the man on the sofa. Not anymore. With a lot of effort he just moved his head and said, "Special Agent Pauling. It's a pleasure to see you again."

  He had a tongue. But with nothing else but gums in his mouth his speech was mumbled and indistinct. And weak. And faint. But he could talk. He could talk just fine.

  Pauling looked at the woman and said, "Dee Marie Graziano?"

  "Yes," the woman said.

  "My sister," Hobart said.

  Pauling turned back to him. "What the hell happened to you?"

  "Africa," Hobart said. "Africa happened to me."

  He was wearing stiff new denims, dark blue. Jeans, and a shirt. The sleeves and the pant legs were rolled to clear the stumps of his wrists and his shins, which were all smeared with a clear salve of some kind. The amputations were crude and brutal. Reacher could see the end of a yellow forearm bone protruding like a broken piano key. There was no stitching of the severed flesh. No reconstruction. Mostly just a thick mass of scarring. Like burns.

  "What happened?" Pauling asked again.

  "Long story," Hobart said.

  "We need to hear it," Reacher said.

  "Why? The FBI is here to help me now? After kicking down my sister's door?"

  "I'm not FBI," Reacher said.

  "Me either," Pauling said. "Not anymore."

  "So what are you now?"

  "A private investigator."

  Hobart's eyes moved to Reacher's face. "And you?"

  "The same," Reacher said. "More or less. Freelance. I don't have a license. I used to be an MP." Nobody spoke for a minute.

  "I was making soup," Dee Marie Graziano said.

  Pauling said, "Go ahead. Please. Don't let us hold you up."

  Reacher stepped back through the hallway and pushed the shattered door as far shut as it would go. When he got back to the living room Dee Marie was in the kitchen with a flame under a saucepan. She was pouring the soup from the can into it. Stirring the soup with the spoon as it flowed. Pauling was still staring at the broken abbreviated man on the sofa.

  "What happened to you?" she asked him for the third time.

  "First he eats," Dee Marie called.

  CHAPTER

  38

  HIS SISTER SAT on the sofa next to him and cradled Hobart's head and fed him the soup slowly and carefully with a spoon. Hobart licked his lips after every mouthful and from time to time started to raise one or other of his missing hands to wipe a dribble off his chin. He would look at first perplexed for a fleeting second and then rueful, as if he were amazed at how long the memory of simple physical routines endured even after they were no longer possible. Each time it happened his sister would wait patiently for his handless wrist to return to his lap and then she would wipe his chin with a cloth, tenderly, lovingly, as if he were her child and not her brother. The soup was thick and made from some kind of a light green vegetable, maybe lentils or celery or asparagus, and by the time the bowl was empty the cloth was badly stained.

  Pauling said, "We need to talk."

  "About what?" Hobart asked.

  "About you."

  "I'm not much to talk about. What you see is what you get."

  "And Edward Lane," Pauling said. "We need to talk about Edward Lane."

  "Where is he?"

  "When was the last time you saw him?"

  "Five years ago," Hobart said. "In Africa."

  "What happened there?"

  "I was taken alive. Not smart."

  "And Knight, too?" Hobart nodded.

  "Knight too," he said.

  "How?" Reacher asked.

  "You ever been to Burkina Faso?"

  "I've never been anywhere in Africa."

  Hobart paused for a long moment. He seemed to decide to clam up, and then he seemed to change his mind and decide to talk.

  "There was a civil war," he said. "There usually is. We had a city to defend. We usually do. This time it was the capital. We couldn't even say its name. I learned it later. It's called Ouagadougou. But back then we called it O-Town. You were an MP. You know how that goes. The military deploys overseas and changes names. We think we're doing it for intelligibility, but really we're depersonalizing the place, psychologically. Making it ours, so we don't feel so bad when we destroy it."

  "What happened there?" Pauling asked.

  "O-Town was about the size of Kansas City, Missouri. All the action was to the northeast. The tree line was about a mile outside the city limit. Two roads in, radial, like spokes in a wheel. One was north of northeast and the other was east of northeast. We called them the One O'clock Road and the Two O'clock Road. Like the face of a wristwatch? If twelve o'clock was due north, there were roads at the one o'clock position and the two o'clock position. The One O'clock Road was the one we had to worry about. That's the one the rebels were going to be using. Except they wouldn't exactly be using it. They would be flanking it in the jungle. They would be twenty feet off the shoulder and we'd never see them. They were nothing

  but infantry, with nothing that wasn't man-portable. They were going to be creeping along in the weeds, and we wouldn't see them until they passed the tree line and came out in the open."

  "Tree line was a mile away?" Reacher said.

  "Exactly," Hobart said. "Not a problem. They had a mile of open ground to cross and we had heavy machine guns."

  "So where was the problem?"