'We got a woman with a busted nose in the hospital, got delivered there in a Tahoe owned by the same people.'

'Maybe she was the driver. We had three vehicles involved, and we only got one driver. There was the Suburban that caused the accident, driver disappeared. Then there was an Olds Bravada which drove away into an alley, driver and pa.s.senger disappeared. The Suburban was corporate, some financial trust in the district.'

'Cayman Corporate Trust?' O'Hallinan asked. 'That's who owns our Tahoe.'

'Right,' the guy said. 'The Bravada is down to a Mrs Jodie Jacob, but it was reported stolen prior. That's not your woman with the busted nose, is it?'

'Jodie Jacob? No, our woman is Sheryl somebody.'

'OK, probably the Suburban driver. Is she small?'

'Small enough, I guess,' O'Hallinan said. 'Why?'

'The airbag deployed,' the guy said. 'Possible a small woman could be injured that way, by the airbag. It happens.'

'You want to check it out?'

'No, our way of thinking, we got their vehicle, they want it, they'll come to us.'

O'Hallinan hung up and Sark looked at her enquiringly.

'So what's that about?' he asked. 'Why would she say she walked into a door if it was really a car wreck?'

O'Hallinan shrugged. 'Don't know. And why would a real-estate woman from Westchester be driving for a firm out of the World Trade Center?'

'Could explain the injuries,' Sark said. 'The airbag, maybe the rim of the steering wheel, that could have done it to her.'

'Maybe,' O'Hallinan said.

'So should we check it out?'

'We should try, I guess, because if it was a car wreck it makes it a closed instead of a probable.'

'OK, but don't write it down anywhere, because if it wasn't a car wreck it'll make it open and pending again, which will be a total pain in the a.s.s later.'

They stood up together and put their notebooks in their uniform pockets. Used the stairs and enjoyed the morning sun on the way across the yard to their cruiser.

The same sun rolled west and made it seven o'clock in St Louis. It came in through an attic dormer and played its low beam across the four-poster from a new direction. Jodie had gotten up first, and she was in the shower. Reacher was, alone in the warm bed, stretching out, aware of a m.u.f.fled chirping sound somewhere in the room.

He checked the nightstand to see if the phone was ringing, or if Jodie had set an alarm clock he hadn't noticed the night before. Nothing there. The chirping kept on going, m.u.f.fled but insistent. He rolled over and sat up. The new angle located the sound inside Jodie's carry-on bag. He slid out of bed and padded naked across the room. Unzipped the bag. The chirping sounded louder. It was her mobile telephone. He glanced at the bathroom door and pulled out the phone. It was chirping loudly in his hand. He studied the b.u.t.tons on it and pressed send. The chirping stopped.

'h.e.l.lo?' he said.

There was a pause. 'Who's that? I'm trying to reach Mrs Jacob.'

It was a man's voice, young, busy, hara.s.sed. A voice he knew. Jodie's secretary at the law firm, the guy who had dictated Leon's address.

'She's in the shower.'

'Ah,' the voice said.

There was another pause.

'I'm a friend,' Reacher said.

'I see,' the voice said. 'Are you still up in Garrison?'

'No, we're in St Louis, Missouri.'

'Goodness, that complicates things, doesn't it? May I speak with Mrs Jacob?'

'She's in the shower,' Reacher said again. 'She could call you back. Or I could take a message, I guess.'

'Would you mind?' the guy said. 'It's urgent, I'm afraid.'

'Hold on,' Reacher said. He walked back to the bed and picked up the little pad and the pencil the hotel had placed on the nightstand next to the telephone. Sat down and juggled the mobile into his left hand.

'OK, shoot,' he said. The guy ran through his message. It was very non-specific. The guy was choosing his words carefully to keep the whole thing vague. Clearly a friend couldn't be trusted with any secret legal details. He put the pad and pencil down again. He wasn't going to need them.

'I'll have her call you back if that's not clear,' he said ambiguously.

'Thank you, and I'm sorry to interrupt, well, whatever it is I'm interrupting.'

'You're not interrupting anything,' Reacher said. 'Like I told you, she's in the shower right now. But ten minutes ago might have been a problem.'

'Goodness,' the guy said again, and the phone went dead.

Reacher smiled and studied the b.u.t.tons again and pressed end. He dropped the phone on the bed and heard the water cut off in the bathroom. The door opened and she came out, wrapped in a towel and a cloud of steam.

'Your secretary just called on your mobile,' he said. 'I think he was a little shocked when I answered.'

She giggled. 'Well, there goes my reputation. It'll be all over the office by lunchtime. What did he want?'

'You've got to go back to New York.'

'Why? He give you the details?'

He shook his head.

'No, he was very confidential, very proper, like a secretary should be, I guess. But you're an ace lawyer, apparently. Big demand for your services.'

She grinned. 'I'm the best there is. Didn't I tell you that? So who needs me?'

'Somebody called your firm. Some financial corporation with something to handle. Asked for you personally. Presumably because you're the best there is.'

She nodded and smiled. 'He say what the problem is?'

He shrugged. 'Your usual, I guess. Somebody owes somebody else some money, sounds like they're all squabbling over it. You have to go to a meeting tomorrow afternoon and try to talk some sense into one side or the other.'

Another of the thousands of phone calls taking place during the same minute in the Wall Street area was a call from the law offices of Forster and Abelstein to the premises of a private detective called William Curry. Curry was a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD's detective squads, and he had taken his pension at the age of forty-seven and was looking to pay his alimony by working private until his ex-wife got married again or died or forgot about him. He had been in business for two lean years, and a personal call from the senior partner of a white-shoe Wall Street law firm was a breakthrough event, so he was pleased, but not too surprised. He had done two years of good work at reasonable rates with the exact aim of creating some kind of reputation, so if the reputation was finally spreading and the big hitters were finally calling, he was pleased about it without being astonished by it.

But he was astonished by the nature of the job.

'I have to impersonate you?' he repeated.

'It's important,' Forster told him. 'They're expecting a lawyer called David Forster, so that's what we have to give them. There won't be any law involved. There probably won't be anything involved at all. Just being there will keep the lid on things. It'll be straightforward enough. OK?'

'OK, I guess,' Curry said. He wrote down the names of the parties involved and the address where the performance was due to take place. He quoted double his normal fee. He didn't want to look cheap, not in front of these Wall Street guys. They were always impressed by expensive services. He knew that. And, given the nature of the job, he figured he would be earning it. Forster agreed the price without hesitation and promised a cheque in the mail. Curry hung up the phone and started through his closets in his head, wondering what the h.e.l.l he could wear to make himself look like the head of a big Wall Street firm.

THIRTEEN

St Louis to Dallas-Fort Worth is 568 miles by air, and it took a comfortable ninety minutes, thirty of them climbing hard, thirty of them cruising fast, and thirty of them descending on approach. Reacher and Jodie were together in business cla.s.s, this time on the port side of the plane, among a very different clientele than had flown with them out of New York. Most of the cabin was occupied by Texan businessmen in sharkskin suits in various shades of blue and grey, with alligator boots and big hats. They were larger and ruddier and louder than their East Coast counterparts, and they were working the stewardesses harder. Jodie was in a simple rust-coloured dress like something Audrey Hepburn might have worn, and the businessmen were stealing glances at her and avoiding Reacher's eye. He was on the aisle, in his crumpled khakis and his ten-year-old English shoes, and they were trying to place him. He saw them going around in circles, looking at his tan and his hands and his companion, figuring him for a roughneck who got lucky with a claim, then figuring that doesn't really happen any more, then starting over with new speculations. He ignored them and drank the airline's best coffee from a china cup and started thinking about how to get inside Wolters and get some sense out of DeWitt.

A military policeman trying to get some sense out of a two-star general is like a guy tossing a coin. Heads brings you a guy who knows the value of co-operation. Maybe he's had difficulties in the past inside some unit or another, and maybe he's had them solved for him by the MPs in an effective and perceptive manner. Then he's a believer, and his instinct goes with you. You're his friend. But tails brings you a guy who has maybe caused his own difficulties. Maybe he's botched and blundered his way through some command and maybe the MPs haven't been shy about telling him so. Then you get nothing from him except aggravation. Heads or tails, but it's a bent coin, because on top of everything any inst.i.tution despises its own policemen, so it comes down tails a lot more than it comes up heads. That had been Reacher's experience. And, worse, he was a military policeman who was now a civilian. He had two strikes against him before he even stepped up to the plate.

The plane taxied to the gate and the businessmen waited and ushered Jodie down the aisle ahead of them. Either plain Texan courtesy or they wanted to watch her legs and her a.s.s as she walked, but Reacher couldn't mount any serious criticism on that issue because he wanted to do exactly the same thing. He carried her bag and followed her down the jet way and into the terminal. He stepped alongside her and put his arm around her shoulders and felt a dozen pairs of eyes drilling into his back.

'Claiming what's yours?' she asked.

'You noticed them?' he asked back.

She threaded her arm around his waist and pulled him closer as they walked.

'They were kind of hard to miss. I guess it would have been easy enough to get a date for tonight.'

'You'd have been beating them off with a stick.'

'It's the dress. Probably I should have worn trousers, but I figured it's kind of traditional down here.'

'You could wear a Soviet tank driver's suit, all grey-green and padded with cotton, and they'd still have their tongues hanging out.'

She giggled. 'I've seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big moustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women.'

The terminal was chilled with air conditioning and they were hit with a forty-degree jump in temperature when they stepped out to the taxi line. June in Texas, just after ten in the morning, and it was over a hundred and humid.

'Wow,' she said. 'Maybe the dress makes sense.'

They were in the shade of an overhead roadway, but beyond it the sun was white and bra.s.sy. The concrete baked and shimmered. Jodie bent and found some dark gla.s.ses in her bag and slipped them on and looked more like a blonde Audrey Hepburn than ever. The first taxi was a new Caprice with the air going full blast and religious artefacts hanging from the rearview mirror. The driver was silent and the trip lasted forty minutes, mostly over concrete highways that shone white in the sun and started out busy and got emptier.

Fort Wolters was a big permanent facility in the middle of nowhere with low elegant buildings and landscaping kept clean and tidy in the sterile way only the Army can achieve. There was a high fence stretching miles around the whole perimeter, taut and level all the way, no weeds at its base. The inner kerb of the road was whitewashed. Beyond the fence internal roads faced with grey concrete snaked here and there between the buildings. Windows winked in the sun. The taxi rounded a curve and revealed a field the size of a stadium with helicopters lined up in neat rows. Squads of flight trainees moved about between them.

The main gate was set back from the road, with tall white flagpoles funnelling down towards it. Their flags hung limp in the heat. There was a low square gatehouse with a red-and-white barrier controlling access. The gatehouse was all windows above waist level and Reacher could see MPs inside watching the approach of the taxi. They were in full service gear, including the white helmets. Regular Army MPs. He smiled. This part was going to be no problem. They were going to see him as more their friend than the people they were guarding.

The taxi dropped them in the turning circle and drove back out. They walked through the blinding heat to the shade of the guardhouse eaves. An MP sergeant slid the window back and looked at them enquiringly. Reacher felt the chilled air spilling out over him.

'We need to get together with General DeWitt,' he said. 'Is there any chance of that happening, Sergeant?'

The guy looked him over. 'Depends who you are, I guess.'

Reacher told him who he was and who he had been, and who Jodie was and who her father had been, and a minute later they were both inside the cool of the guardhouse. The MP sergeant was on the phone to his opposite number in the command office.

'OK, you're booked in,' he said. 'General's free in half an hour.'

Reacher smiled. The guy was probably free right now, and the half-hour was going to be spent checking that they were who they said they were.

'What's the general like, Sergeant?' he asked.

'We'd rate him SAS, sir,' the MP said, and smiled.

Reacher smiled back. The guardhouse felt surprisingly good to him. He felt at home in it. SAS was MP code for 'stupid a.s.shole sometimes', and it was a reasonably benevolent rating for a sergeant to give a general. It was the kind of rating that meant if he approached it right, the guy might co-operate. On the other hand, it meant he might not. It gave him something to ponder during the waiting time.

After thirty-two minutes a plain green Chevy with neat white stencils pulled up inside the barrier and the sergeant nodded them towards it. The driver was a private soldier who wasn't about to speak a word. He just waited until they were seated and turned the car around and headed slowly back through the buildings. Reacher watched the familiar sights slide by. He had never been to Wolters, but he knew it well enough because it was identical to dozens of other places he had been. The same layout, the same people, the same details, like it was built to the same master plan. The main building was a long two-storey brick structure facing a parade ground. Its architecture was exactly the same as the main building on the Berlin base where he was born. Only the weather was different.

The Chevy eased to a stop opposite the steps up into the building. The driver moved the selector into park and stared silently ahead through the windshield. Reacher opened the door and stepped out into the heat with Jodie.

'Thanks for the ride, soldier,' he said.

The boy just sat in park with the motor running and stared straight ahead. Reacher walked with Jodie to the steps and in through the door. There was an MP private stationed in the cool of the lobby, white helmet, white gaiters, a gleaming M-16 held easy across his chest. His gaze was fixed on Jodie's bare legs as they danced in towards him.

'Reacher and Garber to see General DeWitt,' Reacher said.

The guy snapped the rifle upright, which was symbolic of removing a barrier. Reacher nodded and walked ahead to the staircase. The place was like every other place, built to a specification poised uneasily somewhere between lavish and functional, like a private school occupying an old mansion. It was immaculately clean, and the materials were the finest available, but the decor was inst.i.tutional and brutal. At the top of the stairs was a desk in the corridor. Behind it was a portly MP sergeant, swamped with paperwork. Behind him was an oak door with an acetate plate bearing DeWitt's name, his rank and his decorations. It was a large plate.

'Reacher and Garber to see the general,' Reacher said.

The sergeant nodded and picked up his telephone. He pressed a b.u.t.ton.

'Your visitors, sir,' he said into the phone.

He listened to the reply and stood up and opened the door. Stepped aside to allow them to walk past.

Closed the door behind them. The office was the size of a tennis court. It was panelled in oak and had a huge dark rug on the floor, threadbare with vacuuming. The desk was large and oak, and DeWitt was in the chair behind it. He was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, dried out and stringy, with thinning grey hair shaved down close to his scalp. He had half-closed grey eyes and he was using them to watch their approach with an expression Reacher read as halfway between curiosity and irritation.

'Sit down,' he said. 'Please.'

There were leather visitor chairs drawn up near the desk. The office walls were crowded with mementoes, but they were all battalion and division mementoes, war-game trophies, battle honours, old platoon photographs in faded monochrome. There were pictures and cutaway diagrams of a dozen different helicopters. But there was nothing personal to DeWitt on display. Not even family snaps on the desk.

'How can I help you folks?' he asked.

His accent was the bland Army accent that comes from serving all over the world with people from all over the country. He was maybe a midwesterner, originally. Maybe from somewhere near Chicago, Reacher thought.