She waved to him and skipped across to the revolving door. The security guys saw her coming and nodded her through to the elevator bank. She was upstairs in her office before one o'clock. Her secretary followed her inside with a thin file in his hand.

'There you go,' he said, ceremoniously.

She opened it up and flipped through eight sheets of paper.

'h.e.l.l is this?' she said.

'They were thrilled about it at the partners' meeting,' the guy said.

She went back through the pages in reverse order. 'I don't see why. I never heard of either of these corporations and the amount is trivial.'

'That's not the point, though, is it?' the guy said.

She looked at him. 'So what is the point?'

'It's the creditor who hired you,' he said. 'Not the guy who owes all the money. It's a pre-emptive move, isn't it? Because word is getting around. The creditor knows if you get alongside the guy who owes him money, you can cause him a big problem. So he hired you first, to keep that from happening. It means you're famous. That's what the partners are thrilled about. You're a big star now, Mrs Jacob.'

SIXTEEN

Reacher drove slowly back to lower Broadway. He b.u.mped the big car down the ramp to the garage. Parked it in Jodie's slot and locked it. He didn't go upstairs to the apartment. He walked back up the ramp to the street and headed north in the sun to the espres...o...b..r. He had the counter guy put four shots in a cardboard cup and sat at the chromium table Jodie had used when he was checking the apartment the night he had got back from Brighton. He had walked back up Broadway and found her sitting there, staring at Rutter's faked photograph. He sat down in the same chair she had used and blew on the espresso foam and smelled the aroma and took the first sip.

What to tell the old folks? The only humane thing to do would be to go up there and tell them nothing at all. Just tell them he had drawn a blank. Just leave it completely vague. It would be a kindness. Just go up there, hold their hands, break the news of Rutter's deception, refund their money, and then describe a long and fruitless search backward through history that ended up absolutely nowhere. Then plead with them to accept he must be long dead, and beg them to understand n.o.body would ever be able to tell them where or when or how. Then disappear and leave them to live out the short balance of their lives with whatever dignity they could find in being just two out of the tens of millions of parents who gave up their children to the night and the fog swirling through a ghastly century.

He sipped his way through the coffee, with his left hand clenched on the table in front of him. He would lie to them, but out of kindness. Reacher had no great experience of kindness. It was a virtue that had always run parallel to his life. He had never been in the sort of position where it counted for anything. He had never drawn duty breaking bad news to relatives. Some of his contemporaries had. After the Gulf, duty squads had been formed, a senior officer from the unit concerned teamed up with a military policeman, and they had visited the families of the casualties, walking up long lonely driveways, walking up stairs in apartment houses, breaking the news that their formal uniformed arrival had already announced in advance. He guessed kindness counted for a lot during that type of duty, but his own career had been locked tight inside the service itself, where things were always simple, either happening or not happening, good or bad, legal or not legal. Now two years after leaving the service, kindness was suddenly a factor in his life. And it would make him lie.

But he would find Victor Hobie. He unclenched his hand and touched the burn scar through his shirt. He had a score to settle. He tilted the cup until he felt the espresso mud on his teeth and tongue. Then he dropped the cup in the trash and stepped back out to the sidewalk. The sun was full on Broadway, coming slightly from the south and west of directly overhead.

He felt it on his face and turned towards it and walked down to Jodie's building. He was tired. He had slept only four hours on the plane. Four hours, out of more than twenty-four. He remembered reclining the enormous first-cla.s.s seat and falling asleep in it. He had been thinking about Hobie then, like he was thinking about him now. Victor Hobie had Costello killed, so he could stay hidden. Crystal floated into his memory. The stripper, from the Keys. He shouldn't be thinking about her again. But he was saying something to her, in the darkened bar. She was wearing a T-shirt and nothing else. Then Jodie was talking to him, in the dim study at the back of Leon's house. His house. She was saying the same thing he was saying to Crystal. He was saying he must have stepped on some toes up north, given somebody a problem. She was saying he must have tried some kind of a shortcut, got somebody alerted.

He stopped dead on the street with his heart thumping. Leon. Costello. Leon and Costello, together, talking. Costello had gone up to Garrison and talked with Leon just before he died. Leon had run down the problem for him. Find a guy called Jack Reacher because I want him to check on a guy called Victor Hobie, Leon must have said. Costello, calm and businesslike, must have listened well. He had gone back to the city and scoped out the job. He had thought hard and tried a shortcut. Costello had gone looking for the guy called Hobie before he had gone looking for the guy called Reacher.

He ran the last block to Jodie's parking garage. Then lower Broadway to Greenwich Avenue was two and three-quarter miles, and he got there in eleven minutes by slipstreaming behind the taxis heading up to the west side of Midtown. He dumped the Lincoln on the sidewalk in front of the building and ran up the stone steps into the lobby. He glanced around and pressed three random b.u.t.tons.

'UPS,' he called.

The inner screen buzzed open and he ran up the stairs to suite five. Costello's mahogany door was closed, just like he had left it four days ago. He glanced around the hallway and tried the k.n.o.b. The door opened. The lock was still latched back, open for business. The pastel reception area was undisturbed. The impersonal city. Life swirled on, busy and oblivious and uncaring. The air inside felt stale. The secretary's perfume had faded to a trace. But her computer was still turned on. The watery screensaver was swirling away, waiting patiently for her return.

He stepped to her desk and nudged the mouse with his finger. The screen cleared and revealed the database entry for Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot, which was the last thing he had looked at before calling them, back when he had never heard of anybody called Mrs Jacob. He exited the entry and went back to the main listing without any real optimism. He had looked for jacob on it and got nowhere. He didn't recall seeing hobie there, either, and H and J are pretty close together in the alphabet.

He spooled it up from bottom to top and back again, but there was nothing in the main listing. No real names in it at all, just acronyms for corporations. He stepped out from behind the desk and ran through to Costello's own office. No papers on the desk. He walked around behind it and saw a metal trash can in the kneehole s.p.a.ce. There were crumpled papers in it. He squatted down and spilled them out on the floor. There were opened envelopes and discarded forms. A greasy sandwich wrapper. Some sheets of lined paper, torn out from a perforated book. He straightened them on the carpet with his palm. Nothing hit him in the eye, but they were clearly working notes. They were the kind of jottings a busy man makes to help him organize his thoughts. But they were all recent. Costello was clearly a guy who emptied his trash on a regular basis. There was nothing from more than a couple of days before he died in the Keys. Any shortcuts involving Hobie, he would have taken them twelve or thirteen days ago, right after talking with Leon, right at the outset of the investigation.

Reacher opened the desk drawers, each one in turn, and found the perforated book in the top on the left-hand side. It was a supermarket notebook, partly used up, with a thick backbone on the left and half the pages remaining on the right. He sat down in the crushed leather chair and leafed through the book. Ten pages in, he saw the name Leon Garber. It leapt out at him from a mess of pencilled notes. He saw Mrs Jacob, SGR&T. He saw Victor Hobie. That name was underlined twice, with the casual strokes a pensive man uses while he is thinking hard. It was circled lightly with overlapping oval shapes, like eggs. Next to it, Costello had scrawled CCT?? There was a line running away across the page from CCT?? to a note saying 9am. 9am was circled, too, inside more oval scrawlings. Reacher stared at the page and saw an appointment with Victor Hobie, at a place called CCT, at nine o'clock in the morning. Presumably at nine o'clock in the morning of the day he was killed.

He bounced the chair backward and scrambled around the desk. Ran back to the computer. The database listing was still there. The screensaver had not cut in. He scrolled the list to the top and looked at everything between B and D. CCT was right there, jammed between CCR&W and CDAG&Y. He moved the mouse and clicked on it. The screen scrolled down and revealed an entry for cayman corporate trust. There was an address listed in the World Trade Center. There were telephone and fax numbers. There were notes listing enquiries from law firms. The proprietor was listed as Mr Victor Hobie. Reacher stared at the display and the phone started ringing.

He tore his eyes from the screen and glanced at the console on the desk. It was silent. The ringing was in his pocket. He fumbled Jodie's mobile out of his jacket and clicked the b.u.t.ton.

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

'I've got some news,' Nash Newman replied.

'News about what?'

'About what? What the h.e.l.l do you think?'

'I don't know,' Reacher said. 'So tell me.'

So Newman told him. Then there was silence. Just a soft hiss from the phone representing six thousand miles of distance and a soft whirring noise from the fan inside the computer. Reacher took the phone away from his ear and stared between it and the screen, left and right, left and right, dazed.

'You still there?' Newman asked. It came through faint and electronic, just a faraway squawk from the earpiece. Reacher put the phone back to his face.

'You sure about this?' he asked.

'I'm sure,' Newman said. 'One hundred per cent certain. It's totally definitive. Not one chance in a billion that I'm wrong. No doubt about it.'

'You sure?' Reacher asked again.

'Positive,' Newman said. 'Totally, utterly positive.'

Reacher was silent. He just stared around the quiet empty office. Light blue walls where the sun was coming through the pebbled gla.s.s of the window, light grey where it wasn't.

'You don't sound very happy about it,' Newman said.

'I can't believe it,' Reacher said. 'Tell me again.'

So Newman told him again.

'I can't believe it,' Reacher said. 'You're absolutely totally sure about this?'

Newman repeated it all. Reacher stared at the desk, blankly.

'Tell me again,' he said. 'One more time, Nash.'

So Newman went through it all for the fourth time.

'There's absolutely no doubt about it,' he added. 'Have you ever known me be wrong?'

's.h.i.t,' Reacher said. 's.h.i.t, you see what this means? You see what happened? You see what he did? I've got to go, Nash. I need to get back to St Louis, right now. I need to get into the archive again.'

'You do indeed, don't you?' Newman said. 'St Louis would certainly be my first port of call. As a matter of considerable urgency, too.'

'Thanks, Nash,' Reacher said, vaguely. He clicked the phone off and jammed it back in his pocket. Then he stood up and wandered slowly out of Costello's office suite to the stairs. He left the mahogany door standing wide open behind him.

Tony came into the bathroom carrying the Savile Row suit on a wire hanger inside a dry cleaner's bag. The shirt was starched and folded in a paper wrapper jammed under his arm. He glanced at Marilyn and hung the suit on the shower rail and tossed the shirt into Chester's lap. He went into his pocket and came out with the tie. He pulled it out along its whole length, like a conjuror performing a trick with a concealed silk scarf. He tossed it after the shirt.

'Show time,' he said. 'Be ready in ten minutes.'

He went back out and closed the door. Chester sat on the floor, cradling the packaged shirt in his arms. The tie was draped across his legs, where it had fallen. Marilyn leaned down and took the shirt from him. Slipped her fingers flat under the edge of the paper and opened it up. She balled the paper and dropped it. Shook out the shirt and undid the top two b.u.t.tons.

'Nearly over,' she said, like an incantation.

He looked at her neutrally and stood up. Took the shirt from her and pulled it on over his head. She stepped in front of him and snapped the collar up and fixed his tie.

'Thanks,' he said.

She helped him into the suit and came around in front of him and tweaked the lapels.

'Your hair,' she said.

He went to the mirror and saw the man he used to be in another life. He used his fingers and smoothed his hair into place. The bathroom door opened again and Tony stepped inside. He was holding the Mont Blanc fountain pen.

'We'll lend this back to you, so you can sign the transfer.'

Chester nodded and took the pen and slipped it into his jacket.

'And this. We need to keep up appearances, right? All these lawyers everywhere?' It was the platinum Rolex. Chester took it from him and latched it on his wrist. Tony left the room and closed the door. Marilyn was at the mirror, styling her hair with her fingers. She put it behind her ears and pursed her lips together like she'd just used lipstick, although she hadn't. She had none to use. It was just instinct. She stepped away to the middle of the floor and smoothed her dress down over her thighs.

'You ready?' she asked.

Chester shrugged. 'For what? Are you?'

'I'm ready,' she said.

Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot's driver was the husband of one of the firm's longest-serving secretaries. He had been a dead-wood clerk somewhere who hadn't survived his company's amalgamation with a lean and hungry compet.i.tor. Fifty-nine and unemployed with no skills and no prospects, he had sunk his payoff into a used Lincoln Town Car and his wife had written a proposal showing it would be cheaper for the firm to contract him exclusively rather than keep a car service account. The partners had turned a blind eye to the accounting mistakes in the proposal and hired him anyway, looking at it somewhere halfway between pro bono and convenience. Thus the guy was waiting in the garage with the motor running and the air on high when Jodie came out of the elevator and walked over to him. He buzzed his window down and she bent to speak.

'You know where we're going?' she asked.

He nodded and tapped the clipboard lying on the front pa.s.senger seat.

'I'm all set,' he said.

She got in the back. By nature she was a democratic person who would have preferred to ride in front with him, but he insisted pa.s.sengers take the rear seat. It made him feel more official. He was a sensitive old man, and he had caught the whiff of charity around his hiring. He felt that to act very properly would raise his perceived status. He wore a dark suit and a chauffeur's cap he had found in an outfitters in Brooklyn.

As soon as he saw in the mirror that Jodie was settled, he moved away around the garage and up the ramp and outside into the daylight. The exit was at the back of the building and it put him on Exchange Place. He made the left on to Broadway and worked across the lanes in time for the right into the Trinity Street dogleg. He followed it west and turned, coming up on the World Trade Center from the south. Traffic was slow past Trinity Church, because two lanes were blocked by a police tow truck stopped alongside an NYPD cruiser parked at the kerb. Cops were peering into the windows, as if they were unsure about something. He eased past and accelerated. Slowed and pulled in again alongside the plaza. His eyes were fixed at street level, and the giant towers loomed over him unseen. He sat with the motor running, silent and deferential.

'I'll be waiting here,' he said.

Jodie got out of the car and paused on the sidewalk. The plaza was wide and crowded. It was five minutes to two, and the lunch crowd was returning to work. She felt unsettled. She would be walking through a public s.p.a.ce without Reacher watching over her, for the first time since things went crazy. She glanced around and joined a knot of hurrying people and walked with them all the way to the south tower.

The address in the file was the eighty-eighth floor. She joined the line for the express elevator behind a medium-sized man in an ill-fitting black suit. He was carrying a cheap briefcase upholstered with brown plastic stamped to make it look like crocodile skin. She squeezed into the elevator behind him. The car was full and people were calling their floor numbers to the woman nearest the b.u.t.tons. The guy in the bad suit asked for eighty-eight. Jodie said nothing.

The car stopped at most floors in its zone and people jostled out. Progress was slow. It was dead-on two o'clock when the car arrived on eighty-eight. Jodie stepped out. The guy in the bad suit stepped out behind her. They were in a deserted corridor. Undistinguished closed doors led into office suites. Jodie went one way and the guy in the suit went the other, both of them looking at the plates fixed next to the doors. They met up again in front of an oak slab marked Cayman Corporate Trust. There was a wired-gla.s.s porthole set off-centre in it. Jodie glanced through it and the guy in the suit leaned past her and pulled it open.

'We in the same meeting?' Jodie asked, surprised.

She followed him inside to a bra.s.s-and-oak reception area. There were office smells. Hot chemicals from copying machines, stewed coffee somewhere. The guy in the suit turned back to her and nodded.

'I guess we are,' he said.

She stuck out her hand as she walked.

'I'm Jodie Jacob,' she said. 'Spencer Gutman. For the creditor.'

The guy walked backward and juggled his plastic briefcase into his left hand and smiled and shook hands with her.

'I'm David Forster,' he said. 'Forster and Abelstein.'

They were at the reception counter. She stopped and stared at him.

'No, you're not,' she said blankly. 'I know David very well.'

The guy looked suddenly tense. The lobby went silent. She turned the other way and saw the guy she had last seen clinging to the door handle of her Bravada as Reacher hauled away from the collision on Broadway. He was sitting there calmly behind the counter, looking straight back at her. His left hand moved and touched a b.u.t.ton. In the silence she heard a click from the entrance door. Then his right hand moved. It went down empty and came back up with a gun the colour of dull metal. It had a wide barrel like a tube and a metal handgrip. The barrel was more than a foot long. The guy in the bad suit dropped his plastic case and jerked his hands in the air. Jodie stared at the weapon and thought but that's a shotgun.

The guy holding it moved his left hand again and hit another b.u.t.ton. The door to the inner office opened. The man who had crashed the Suburban into them was standing there framed in the doorway. He had another gun in his hand. Jodie recognized the type from movies she'd seen. It was an automatic pistol. On the cinema screen it fired loud bullets that smashed you six feet backward. The Suburban driver was holding it steady on a point to her left and the other guy's right, like he was ready to jerk his wrist either way.

The guy with the shotgun came out from behind the counter and pushed past Jodie. Went up behind the guy with the bad suit and rammed the shotgun barrel into the small of his back. There was a hard sound, metal on metal, m.u.f.fled by cloth. The guy with the shotgun put his hand up under the jacket and came out with a big chromium revolver. He held it up, like an exhibit.

'Unusual accessory for a lawyer,' the man in the doorway said.

'He's not a lawyer,' his partner said. 'The woman says she knows David Forster very well and this ain't him.'

The man in the doorway nodded.

'My name is Tony,' he said. 'Come inside, both of you, please.'

He stepped to one side and covered Jodie with the automatic pistol while his partner pushed the guy claiming to be Forster in through the open door. Then he beckoned with the gun and Jodie found herself walking towards him. He stepped close and pushed her through the door with a hand flat on her back. She stumbled once and regained her balance. Inside was a big office, s.p.a.cious and square. Dim light from shaded windows. There was living-room furniture arranged in front of a desk. Three identical sofas, with lamp tables. A huge bra.s.s-and-gla.s.s coffee table filled the s.p.a.ce between the sofas. There were two people sitting on the left-hand sofa. A man and a woman. The man wore an immaculate suit and tie. The woman wore a wrinkled silk party dress. The man looked up, blankly. The woman looked up in terror.

There was a man at the desk. He was sitting in the gloom, in a leather chair. He was maybe fifty-five years old. Jodie stared at him. His face was divided roughly in two, like an arbitrary decision, like a map of the western states. On the right was lined skin and thinning grey hair. On the left was scar tissue, pink and thick and shiny like an unfinished plastic model of a monster's head. The scars touched his eye, and the lid was a ball of pink tissue, like a mangled thumb.

He was wearing a neat suit, which fell over broad shoulders and a wide chest. His left arm was laid comfortably on the desk. There was the cuff of a white shirt, snowy in the gloom, and a manicured hand, palm down, the fingers tapping an imperceptible rhythm on the desktop. His right arm was laid exactly symmetrical with his left. There was the same fine summer-weight wool of the suit coat, and the same snowy white shirt cuff, but they were collapsed and empty. There was no hand. Just a simple steel hook protruding at a shallow angle, resting on the wood. It was curved and polished like a miniature version of a sculpture from a public garden.

'Hobie,' she said.

He nodded slowly, just once, and raised the hook like a greeting.

'Pleased to meet you, Mrs Jacob. I'm just sorry it took so long.'

Then he smiled.

'And I'm sorry our acquaintance will be so brief.'