Running Blind

“So face it, OK?” Blake said. “You’re ours, now.”

There was silence. Then Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll pass on that.”

“Then you go to jail.”

“Just one question, first,” Reacher said.

“Which is?”

“Did I kill Lorraine Stanley?”

Blake shook his head. “No, you didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“You know how we know. We had you tailed, all that week.”

“And you gave a copy of the surveillance report to my lawyer, right?”

“Right.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“OK what, smart guy?”

“OK nuts to you, is what,” Reacher said.

“You want to expand on that?”

Reacher shook his head. “You figure it out.”

The room went quiet.

“What?” Blake said.

Reacher smiled at him. “Think about strategy. Maybe you can lock me up for Lamarr, but you can’t ever claim I’m also the guy who killed the women, because my lawyer has got your own report proving that I’m not. So what are you going to do then?”

“What does that matter to you?” Blake said. “You’re locked up anyway.”

“Think about the future,” Reacher said. “You’ve told the world it’s not me, and you’re swearing blind it’s not Lamarr, so you’ve got to be seen to keep on looking, right? You can’t ever stop, not without people wondering why. Think about the negative headlines. Elite FBI unit gets nowhere, tenth year of search. You’d just have to swallow them. And you’d have to keep the guards in place, you’d have to work around the clock, more and more manpower, more and more effort, more and more budget, year after year, searching for the guy. Are you going to do that?”

Silence in the room.

“No, you’re not going to do that,” Reacher said. “And not doing that is the same thing as admitting you know the truth. Lamarr is dead, the search has stopped, it wasn’t me, therefore Lamarr was the killer. So it’s all or nothing now, for you guys. It’s make-your-mind-up time. If you don’t admit it was Lamarr, then you use up all your resources for the rest of history, pretending to look for a guy you know for sure doesn’t exist. And if you do admit it was Lamarr, then you can’t lock me up for killing her, because in the circumstances it was absolutely justifiable.”

Silence again.

“So, nuts to you,” Reacher said.

There was silence. Reacher smiled.

“So now what?” he asked.

They were quiet for a long moment. Then they recovered.

“We’re the Bureau,” Deerfield said. “We can make your life very difficult.”

Reacher shook his head.

“My life’s already very difficult,” he said. “Nothing you guys can do to make it any harder. But you can stop with the threats, anyway. Because I’ll keep your secret.”

“You will?”

Reacher nodded. “I’ll have to, won’t I? Because if I don’t, it’ll all just come back on Rita Scimeca. She’s the only living witness. She’ll get pestered to death, prosecutors, police, newspapers, television. All the sordid details, how she was raped, how she was naked in the tub with the paint. It’ll hurt her. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Silence again.

“So, your secret is safe with me,” Reacher said.

Blake stared at the tabletop. Then he nodded.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll buy that.”

“But we’ll be watching you,” Deerfield said. “Always. Never forget that.”

Reacher smiled again.

“Well, don’t let me catch you at it,” he said. “Because you should remember what happened to Petrosian. You guys never forget that, OK?”

IT FINISHED LIKE that as a tie, as a wary stalemate. Nothing more was said. Reacher stood up and threaded his way around the table and out of the room. He found an elevator and made it down to street level. Nobody came after him. There were double doors, scarred oak and wired glass. He pushed them open and stepped out into the chill of some dark deserted Portland street in the middle of the night. Stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking at nothing in particular.

“Hey, Reacher,” Harper called.

She was behind him in the shadow of a pillar flanking the entrance. He turned and saw the gleam of her hair and a stripe of white where her shirt showed at the front of her jacket.

“Hey yourself,” he said. “You OK?”

She stepped across to him.

“I will be,” she said. “I’m going to ask for a transfer. Maybe over here. I like it.”

“Will they let you?”

She nodded. “Sure they will. They’re not going to rock any boats as long as the budget hearings are on. This is going to be the quietest thing that ever happened. ”

“It never happened at all,” he said. “That’s how we left it, upstairs.”

“So you’re OK with them?”

“As OK as I ever was.”

“I’d have stood up for you,” she said. “Whatever it took.”

He nodded. “I know you would. There should be more like you.”

“Take this,” she said.

She held out a slip of flimsy paper. It was a travel voucher, issued by the desk back at Quantico.

“It’ll get you to New York,” she said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’ll say I lost it. They’ll wire me another one.”

She stepped close and kissed his cheek. Stepped away and started walking.

“Good luck,” she called.

“To you too,” he called back.

HE WALKED TO the airport, twelve miles on the shoulders of roads built for automobiles. It took him three hours. He exchanged the FBI voucher for a plane ticket and waited another hour for the first flight out. Slept through four hours in the air and three hours of time zones and touched down at La Guardia at one o’clock in the afternoon.

He used the last of his cash on a bus to the subway and the subway into Manhattan. Got out at Canal Street and walked south to Wall Street. He was in the lobby of Jodie’s office building a few minutes after two o’clock, borne along by sixty floors of workers returning from lunch. Her firm’s reception area was deserted. Nobody at the counter. He stepped through an open door and wandered down a corridor lined with law-books on oak shelves. Left and right of him were empty offices. There were papers on desks and jackets over the backs of chairs, but no people anywhere.

He came to a set of double doors and heard the heavy buzz of conversation on the other side. The chink of glass on glass. Laughter. He pulled the right-hand door and the noise burst out at him and he saw a conference room jammed full of people. They were in dark suits and snowy white shirts and suspenders and quiet ties, and severe dark dresses and black nylon. There was a wall of blinding windows and a long table under a heavy white cloth loaded with ranks of sparkling glasses and a hundred bottles of champagne. Two bartenders were pouring the foamy golden wine as fast as they could. People were drinking it and toasting with it and looking at Jodie.

She was rippling through the crowd like a magnet. Wherever she walked, people stepped up and formed a crowd around her. There was a constantly changing sequence of small excited circles with her at every center. She turned left and right, smiling, clinking glasses, and then moved on randomly like a pinball into new acclaim. She saw him at the door at the same moment he saw himself reflected in the glass over a Renoir drawing on the wall. He was unshaven and dressed in a crumpled khaki shirt dried stiff with random green stains. She was in a thousand-dollar dress fresh from the closet. A hundred faces turned with hers and the room fell silent. She hesitated for a beat, like she was making a decision. Then she fought forward through the crowd and flung her arms around his neck, champagne glass and all.

“The partnership party,” he said. “You got it.”

“I sure did,” she said.

“Well, congratulations, babe,” he said. “And I’m sorry I’m late.”

She drew him into the crowd and people closed around them. He shook hands with a hundred lawyers the way he used to with generals from foreign armies. Don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you. The top boy was an old red-and-gray-faced man of about sixty-five, the son of one of the names on the brass plaque in reception. His suit must have cost more than all the clothes Reacher had ever worn in his life. But the mood of the party meant there was no edge in the old guy’s attitude. He looked like he would have been delighted to shake hands with Jodie’s elevator man.