The Hard Way

“It’s dirty.”

“Show me money that isn’t.”

Pauling paused a beat and then opened the bag and peeled off some bills and put them on the kitchen counter. Then she refolded the bag and put it in the oven.

“I don’t have a safe here,” she said.

“The oven will do,” Reacher said. “Just don’t forget and start to cook something.”

She took four bills from the stack on the counter and handed them to him.

“For clothes,” she said. “You’re going to need them. We leave for England tonight.”

“Your guy got back to you?”

She nodded. “Taylor was on British Airways to London less than four hours after Burke put the money in the Jaguar.”

“Alone?”

“Apparently. As far as we can tell. He was seated next to some British woman. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a partner who checked in separately and sat somewhere else. That would have been a fairly basic precaution. There were sixty-seven unaccompanied adult American males on the flight.”

“Your guy is very thorough.”

“Yes, he is. He got the whole manifest. By fax. Including the baggage manifest. Taylor checked three bags.”

“Overweight charge?”

“No. He was in business class. They might have let it slide.”

Reacher said, “I don’t need four hundred dollars for clothes.”

Pauling said, “You do if you’re traveling with me.”

I was an MP, Reacher had said to Hobart. I’ve done everything before. But he hadn’t. Thirty minutes later he was doing something he had never done in his life. He was buying clothes in a department store. He was in Macy’s on Herald Square, in the men’s department, in front of a cash register, holding a pair of gray pants, a gray jacket, a black T-shirt, a black V-neck sweater, a pair of black socks, and a pair of white boxer shorts. His choices had been limited by the availability of suitable sizes. Inseam, arm length, and chest. He was worried that his brown shoes would be a color clash. Pauling told him to buy new shoes, too. He vetoed that idea. He couldn’t afford them. So she said brown shoes would be just fine with gray pants. He shuffled to the head of the line and paid, three hundred and ninety-six dollars and change, with tax. He showered and dressed back at Pauling’s apartment and took his creased and battered passport and Patti Joseph’s envelope of photographs out of his old pants and shoved them in his new pants. Took his folding toothbrush out of his old shirt pocket and put it in his new jacket pocket. Carried his old clothes down the corridor to the compactor room and dropped them in the garbage chute. Then he waited with Pauling downstairs in the lobby, neither of them saying much, until the car service showed up to take them to the airport.

CHAPTER 56

PAULING HAD BOOKED them business class on the same flight that Taylor had taken forty-eight hours previously. It was maybe even the same plane, assuming it flew a round-trip every day. But neither one of them could have been in Taylor’s actual seat. They were in a window-and-aisle pair, and the Homeland Security manifest had shown that Taylor had been in the first of a block of four in the center.

The seats themselves were strange bathtub-shaped cocoons that faced alternating directions. Reacher’s window seat faced aft and next to him Pauling faced forward. The seats were advertised as reclining into fully flat beds, which might have been true for her but was about twelve inches shy of being true for him. But the seats had compensations. The face-to-face thing meant that he was going to spend seven hours looking directly at her, which was no kind of a hardship.

“What’s the strategy?” she asked.

“We’ll find Taylor, Lane will take care of him, and then I’ll take care of Lane.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something. Like Hobart said, everything in war is improvisation.”

“What about the others?”

“That will be a snap decision. If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane gone, then I’ll leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up to the officer class and take over, I’ll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.”

“Brutal.”

“Compared to what?”

“Taylor won’t be easy to find,” she said.

“England’s a small country,” he said.

“Not that small.”

“We found Hobart.”

“With help. We were given his address.”

“We’ll get by.”

“How?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

“Tell me.”

“You know any British private investigators? Is there an international brotherhood?”

“There might be a sisterhood. I’ve got some numbers.”

“OK, then.”

“Is that your plan? Hire a London PI?”

“Local knowledge,” Reacher said. “It’s always the key.”

“We could have done that by phone.”

“We didn’t have time.”

“London alone is eight million people,” Pauling said. “Then there’s Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds. And a whole lot of countryside. The Cotswolds. Stratford upon Avon. And Scotland and Wales. Taylor stepped out the door at Heathrow two days ago. He could be anywhere by now. We don’t even know where he’s from.”

“We’ll get by,” Reacher said again.

Pauling took a pillow and a blanket from a stewardess and reclined her seat. Reacher watched her sleep for a while and then he lay down too, with his knees up and his head jammed against the bathtub wall. The cabin lighting was soft and blue and the hiss of the engines was restful. Reacher liked flying. Going to sleep in New York and waking up in London was a fantasy that could have been designed expressly for him.

The stewardess woke him to give him breakfast. Like being in the hospital, he thought. They wake you up to feed you. But the breakfast was good. Mugs of hot coffee and bacon rolls. He drank six and ate six. Pauling watched him, fascinated.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Five to five,” he said. “In the morning. Which is five to ten in the morning in this time zone.”

Then all kinds of muted bells went off and signs went on to a

He put his forehead against the window and stared down. Saw the Thames, glittering in the sun like polished lead. Saw Tower Bridge, white stone, recently cleaned, detailed with fresh paint on the ironwork. Then a gray warship moored in the river, some kind of a permanent exhibit. Then London Bridge. He craned his neck and looked for Saint Paul’s Cathedral, north and west. Saw the big dome, crowded by ancient winding streets. London was a low-built city. Densely and chaotically packed near the dramatic curves of the Thames, spreading infinitely into the gray distance beyond.

He saw railroad tracks fa