The Hard Way Part 42

"OK," Lane said. "I'll show you the money." He slid the duffel off his knees and placed it on the floor and unzipped it. Reacher glanced right. Glanced left. Saw the kid about to throw the tattered bear again. Saw him catch the expression on Lane's face and saw him shrink back toward his mother. Reacher shuffled forward on his chair and leaned down. The duffel was full of money. One of the O-Town bales, newly opened, part depleted.

"No trouble on the flight?" he asked.

Lane said, "It was X-rayed. n.o.body got their panties in a wad. You'll get it home OK. a.s.suming you earn it first."

Reacher pulled back the torn plastic and put a fingernail under one of the paper bands. It was tight. Therefore full. There were four equal stacks of twenty bricks each. Total of eighty bricks, an even number. A hundred hundreds in each brick. Eighty times a hundred times a hundred was eight hundred thousand.

So far, so good.

He lifted the edge of a bill and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. Glanced across the lobby to the bra.s.s sign at the Xerox station: By statute some doc.u.ments may not be photocopied. But these hadn't been. They were real. He could feel the engraving. He could smell the paper and the ink. Unmistakable.

"OK," he said, and sat back.

Lane leaned down and zipped the duffel. "So where is he?"

Reacher said, "First we have to talk."

"You better be kidding me."

"There are civilians there. Innocent people. Non-combatants. A family."

"So?"

"So I can't have you charging in there like maniacs. I can't allow collateral damage."

"There won't be any."

"I need to be sure of that."

"You have my word."

Reacher said, "Your word ain't worth s.h.i.+t."

"We won't be shooting," Lane said. "Let's be clear on that. A bullet is too good for Taylor. We'll go in and we'll get him and we'll bring him out without harming a hair on his or anyone else's head. Because that's the way I want it. I want him all in one piece. I want him alive and well and conscious and feeling everything. He'll tell us about his partner and then he'll die, long, slow, and hard. Over a week or two. So a gunfight is no good to me. Not because I care about non-combatants, true. But because I don't want any accidents with Taylor. I would hate to give it to him easy. You can take my word on that."

"OK," Reacher said.

"So where is he?"

Reacher paused. Thought about Hobart, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and kindly white-haired doctors in lab coats holding artificial limbs.

"He's in Norfolk," he said.

"Where's that?"

"It's a county, north and east of here. About a hundred and twenty miles."

"Where in Norfolk?"

"A place called Grange Farm."

"He's on a farm?"

"Flat country," Reacher said. "Like a pool table. With ditches. Easy to defend."

"Nearest big city?"

"It's about thirty miles south and west of Norwich."

"Nearest town?"

Reacher didn't reply.

"Nearest town?" Lane asked again.

Reacher glanced back at the reception desk. By statute some doc.u.ments may not he photocopied. He watched a Xerox machine at work, a ghostly stripe of green light cycling horizontally back and forth beneath a lid. He glanced at the hara.s.sed mother and heard her voice in his head: Why don't you draw a picture of something you're going to see? He looked at the kid's doll, missing an arm. Heard Dave Kemp's voice, in the country store: It felt like a thin hook. Not many pages. A rubber band around it. Recalled the tiny imperceptible impact of the kid's tattered bear skidding on the tile and landing against his shoe.

Lane said, "Reacher?"

Reacher heard Lauren Pauling's voice in his mind: A little is sometimes all you need. Going out, they don't care as much as when you're coming in.

Lane said, "Reacher? h.e.l.lo? What's the nearest town?"

Reacher dragged his focus back from the middle distance, slowly, carefully, painfully, and he looked directly into Lane's eyes. He said, "The nearest town is called Fenchurch Saint Mary. I'll show you exactly where it is. Be ready to leave in one hour. I'll come back for you."

Then he stood up and concentrated hard on walking infinitely slowly across the lobby floor. One foot in front of the other. Left, then right. He caught Pauling's eye. Walked out the door. Down the concrete steps. He made it to the sidewalk.

Then he ran like h.e.l.l for the parking garage.

CHAPTER 63

REACHER HAD PARKED the car, so he still had the keys. He blipped the door from thirty feet away and wrenched it open and threw himself inside. Jammed the key in the ignition and started the motor and shoved the stick in reverse. Stamped on the gas and hurled the tiny car out of the parking s.p.a.ce and braked hard and spun the wheel and took off again forward with the front tires howling and smoking. He threw a ten-pound note at the barrier guy and didn't wait for the change. Just hit the gas as soon as the pole was raised forty-five degrees. He blasted up the ramp and shot straight across two lanes of oncoming traffic and jammed to a stop on the opposite curb because he saw Pauling hurrying toward him. He threw open her door and she slid inside and he took off again and he was twenty yards down the road before she got the door closed behind her.

"North," he said. "Which way is north?"

"North? North is behind us," she said. "Go around the traffic circle."

Hyde Park Corner. He blew through two red lights and swerved the car like a dodgem from one lane to another. Came all the way around and back onto Park Lane in the other direction doing more than sixty miles an hour. Practically on two wheels.

"Where now?" he said.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?"

"Just get me out of town."

"I don't know how."

"Use the atlas. There's a city plan."

Reacher dodged buses and taxis. Pauling turned pages, frantically.

"Go straight," she said.

"Is that north?"

"It'll get us there."

They made it through Marble Arch with the engine screaming. They got green lights all the way past the Marylebone Road. They made it into Maida Vale. Then Reacher slowed a little. Breathed out for what felt like the first time in half an hour.

"Where next?"

"Reacher, what happened?"

"Just give me directions."

"Make a right onto St. John's Wood Road," Pauling said. "That will take us back to Regent's Park. Then make a left and go out the same way we came in. And please tell me exactly what the h.e.l.l is going on."

"I made a mistake," Reacher said. "Remember I told you I couldn't shake the feeling I was making a bad mistake? Well, I was wrong. It wasn't a bad mistake. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was the biggest single mistake ever made in the history of the cosmos."

"What mistake?"

"Tell me about the photographs in your apartment."

"What about them?"

"Nieces and nephews, right?"

"Lots of them," Pauling said.

"You know them well?"

"Well enough."

"Spend time with them?"

"Plenty."

"Tell me about their favourite toys."

"Their toys? I don't really know about their toys. I can't keep up. X-boxes, video games, whatever. There's always something new."

"Not the new stuff. Their old favourites. Tell me about their favourite old toys. What would they have run into a fire to save? When they were eight years old?"

"When they were eight years old? I guess a teddy bear or a doll. Something they'd had since they were tiny."

"Exactly," Reacher said. "Something comforting and familiar. Something they loved. The kind of thing they would want to take on a journey. Like the family next to me in the lobby just now. The mother got them all out of the suitcase to quiet them down."

"So?"

"What did those things look like?"

"Like bears and dolls, I guess."

"No, later. When the kids were eight years old."

"When they were eight? They'd had them forever by then. They looked like c.r.a.p."

Reacher nodded at the wheel. "The bears all worn, with the stuffing out? The dolls all chipped, with the arms off?"

"Yes, like that. All kids have toys like that."

"Jade didn't. That's precisely what was missing from her room. There were new bears and new dolls. Recent things she hadn't taken to. But there were no old favourites there."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that if Jade had been kidnapped on the way to Bloomingdale's on a normal everyday morning I would have found all her favourite old toys still in her room afterward. But I didn't."

"But what does that mean?"

"It means Jade knew she was leaving. It means she packed." Reacher made the left at Regent's Park and headed north, toward the M-l, which would carry them all the way back to the M-25 beltway. After the turn he drove on a little more sedately. He didn't want to get arrested by any English traffic cops. He didn't have time for that. He figured he was right then about two hours ahead of Edward Lane. It would take an hour for Lane to realize he had been ditched, and then it would take at least another hour for him to get hold of a car and organize a pursuit. So, two hours. Reacher would have liked more, but he figured two hours might be enough.

Might be.

Pauling said, "Jade packed?"

"Kate packed, too," Reacher said.

"What did Kate pack?"

"Just one thing. But her most precious thing. Her best memory. The photograph with her daughter. From the bedroom. One of the most beautiful photographs I've ever seen."

Pauling paused a beat.

"But you saw it," she said. "She didn't take it."

Reacher shook his head. "I saw a photocopy. From Staples, colour digital, laser, two bucks a sheet. Brought home and slipped into the frame. It was very good, but not quite good enough. A little vivid in the colours, a little plastic in the contours."

"But who packs for a kidnap? I mean, who the h.e.l.l gets the chance?"

"They weren't kidnapped," Reacher said. "That's the thing. They were rescued. They were liberated. They were set free. They're alive somewhere. Alive and well and happy. A little tense, maybe. But free as birds." They drove on, slow and steady, through the northern reaches of London, through Finchley and Swiss Cottage, toward Hendon.