Gone Tomorrow

I looked at Jake, to see whether he wanted to be included, or whether he still figured that i

Lee said, ‘There are American troops in the Korengal Valley right now. I just read about it. In a magazine. I guess it never stops. I hope they’re doing better than the Russians did.’

‘They were Ukrainians,’ I said.

‘Is there a difference?’

‘I’m sure the Ukrainians think so. The Russians put their minorities out front, and their minorities didn’t like it.’

Jake said, ‘I get it about World War Three. At the time, I mean. But this is a quarter-century later. The Soviet Union isn’t even a country any more. How can a country be aggrieved about something, if it doesn’t even exist today?’

‘Geopolitics,’ Lee said. ‘It’s about the future, not the past. Maybe we want to do similar stuff again, in Pakistan or Iran or wherever. It makes a difference if the world knows we did it before. It sets up preconceptions. You know that. You’re a cop. You like it when we can’t mention prior convictions in court?’

Jake said, ‘So how big of a deal do you think this is?’

‘Huge,’ Lee said. ‘As big as can be. For us, anyway. Because overall it’s still small. Which is ironic, right? You see what I mean? If three thousand people knew, there’s not much anyone could do about it. Or three hundred, even. Or thirty. It would be out there, end of story. But right now only the three of us know. And three is a small number. Small enough to be contained. They can make three people disappear without anyone noticing.’

‘How?’

‘It happens, believe me. Who’s going to pay attention? You’re not married. Me either.’ She looked at me and asked, ‘Reacher, are you married?’

I shook my head.

She paused a second. She said, ‘No one left behind to ask questions.’

Jake said, ‘What about people where we work?’

‘Police departments do what they’re told.’

‘This is insane.’

‘This is the new world.’

‘Are they serious?’

‘It’s a cost-benefit analysis. Three i

‘We have rights.’

‘We used to.’

Jake said nothing in reply to that. I finished my coffee and washed it down with another glass of tap water. Lee called for the check and waited until it had arrived and I had paid it, and then she turned Leonid’s phone back on. It came to life with a merry little tune and locked on to its network and ten seconds after that its network recognized it and told it there was a text message waiting. Lee hit the appropriate button and started scrolling.

‘It’s from Docherty,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t dumped me yet.’

Then she read and scrolled, read and scrolled. I counted fifteen-second intervals in my head, and imagined the GPS chip sending out a little burst of data for every one of them, saying Here we are! Here we are! I got up to ten. A hundred and fifty seconds. Two and a half minutes. It was a long message. And it was full of bad news, according to Lee’s face. Her lips compressed and her eyes narrowed. She checked back on a couple of paragraphs and then she shut the thing down again and handed it back to me. I put it in my pocket. She looked straight at me and said,

‘You were right. The dead guys under the FDR Drive were Lila Hoth’s crew. I guess the 17th called everyone in the phone book and checked out the only one that didn’t answer. They broke into their offices and found billing records made out to Lila Hoth, in care of the Four Seasons Hotel.’

I didn’t answer.

She said, ‘But here’s the thing. Those billing records go back three months, not three days. And the other data is in. Homeland Security has no record of two women called Hoth ever entering the country. Certainly not three days ago on British Airways. And Susan Mark never called London, either from work or from home.’

FORTY-EIGHT

USE THE PHONE AND MOVE ON IMMEDIATELY, WAS THE rule. We took Broadway north. Taxis and police cruisers sped past us. Headlight beams washed over us. We hustled as far as Astor Place and then ducked underground and burned three of my four remaining Metrocard rides on the 6 train north. Where it all began. Another bright new R142A car. It was eleven in the evening and there were eighteen passengers in addition to ourselves. We got three spaces together on one of the eight-person benches. Lee sat in the middle. On her left Jake half turned and bent his head, ready for quiet talk. On her right I did the same thing. Jake asked, ‘So which is it? Are the Hoths phony or is the government already covering its ass by erasing data?’

Lee said, ‘Could be either.’

I said, ‘The Hoths are phony.’

‘You think or you know?’

‘It was too easy at Pe

‘How?’

‘They sucked me in. Leonid let me see him. He was wearing a jacket that looked bright orange under the lights. It was practically the same as the safety vests I saw some railroad workers wearing. It drew my eye. I was supposed to notice it. Then he let me hit him. Because I was supposed to take the phone from him and find out about the Four Seasons. They manipulated me. There are layers upon layers here. They needed to talk to me but they didn’t want me to see everything. They didn’t want to show their whole hand. So they set up a way in for me. They lured me to the hotel and tried a sweet, easy approach. Just one guy acting incompetent at the railroad station, and then the soft soap. They even had a back-up plan, which was coming to the precinct house and making the missing persons report. Either way I would have showed up eventually.’

‘What do they want from you?’

‘Susan’s information.’

‘Which was what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Not journalists,’ I said. ‘I guess I was wrong about that. Lila was acting one thing, acting another thing. I don’t know what she really is.’

‘Is the old woman for real?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are they now? They bailed out of the hotel.’

‘They always had somewhere else. They had two tracks ru

Lee said, ‘So the Hoths are covering their asses too.’

‘Wrong tense,’ I said. ‘They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.’

The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, ‘If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could have been.’

The doors closed. The train moved on.

Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, ‘What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.’

I said, ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’

You tipped her over the edge.

Your fault, specifically.

The train rattled into the 28th Street station.