He got the hit on his fourth call. The first three precincts were unable to help, without sounding any too regretful about it. The fourth call started the same way, a ring tone, a quick transfer, a long pause, then a wheezing acknowledgement as the phone was answered deep in the bowels of some grimy file room.

'I'm looking for a guy called Costello,' he said. 'Retired from the job and set up private, maybe on his own, maybe for somebody else. Probably about sixty.'

'Yeah, who are you?' a voice replied. Identical accent. Could have been Costello himself on the line.

'Name's Carter,' Reacher said. 'Like the president.'

'So what you want with Costello, Mr Carter?'

'I got something for him, but I lost his card,' Reacher said. 'Can't find his number in the book.'

"That's because Costello ain't in the book. He only works for lawyers. He don't work for the general public'

'So you know him?'

'Know him? Of course I know him. He worked detective out of this building fifteen years. Not surprising I would know him.'

'You know where his office is?'

'Down in the Village someplace,' the voice said, and stopped.

Reacher sighed away from the phone. Like pulling teeth.

'You know where in the Village?'

'Greenwich Avenue, if I recall.'

'You got a street number?'

'No.'

'Phone number?'

'No.'

'You know a woman called Jacob?'

'No, should I?'

'Just a long shot,' Reacher said. 'She was his client.'

'Never heard of her.'

'OK, thanks for your help,' Reacher said.

'Yeah,' the voice said.

Reacher hung up and walked back up the steps and inside. Checked the Manhattan white pages again for a Costello on Greenwich Avenue. No listing. He put the books back on the shelf and went back out into the sun, and started walking.

Greenwich Avenue is a long straight street running diagonally south-east from Fourteenth Street and Eighth to Eighth Street and Sixth. It is lined on both sides with pleasant low-rise Village buildings, some of them with scooped-out semi-bas.e.m.e.nt floors in use as small stores and galleries. Reacher walked the northern side first, and found nothing. Dodged the traffic at the bottom and came back on the other side and found a small bra.s.s plaque exactly halfway up the street, fixed to the stone frame of a doorway. The plaque was a well-polished rectangle, one of a cl.u.s.ter, and it said Costello. The door was black, and it was open. Inside was a small lobby with a notice board of ridged felt and press-in white plastic letters, indicating the building was subdivided into ten small office suites. Suite five was marked Costello. Beyond the lobby was a gla.s.s door, locked. Reacher pressed the buzzer for five. No reply. He used his knuckle and leaned on it, but it got him nowhere. So he pressed six. A voice came back, distorted.

'Yes?'

'UPS,' he said, and the gla.s.s door buzzed and clicked open.

It was a three-floor building, four if you counted the separate bas.e.m.e.nt. Suites one, two and three were on the first floor. He went up the stairs and found suite four on his left, six on his right, and five right at the back of the building with its door tucked under the angle of the staircase as it wound up to the third storey.

The door was a polished mahogany affair, and it was standing open. Not wide open, but open enough to be obvious. Reacher pushed it with his toe, and it swung on its hinges to reveal a small, quiet reception area the size of a motel room. It was decorated in a pastel colour somewhere between light grey and light blue. Thick carpet on the floor. A secretary's desk in the shape of a letter L, with a complicated telephone and a sleek computer. A filing cabinet and a sofa. There was a window with pebbled gla.s.s and another door leading straight ahead to an inner office.

The reception area was empty, and it was quiet. Reacher stepped inside and closed the door behind him with his heel. The lock was latched back, like the office had been opened up for business. He padded across the carpet to the inner door. Wrapped his hand in his shirt-tail and turned the k.n.o.b. Stepped through into a second room of equal size. Costello's room. There were framed black-and-white photographs of younger versions of the man he had met in the Keys standing with police commissioners and captains and local politicians Reacher did not recognize. Costello had been a thin man, many years ago. The pictures showed him getting fatter as he got older, like a diet advertis.e.m.e.nt in reverse. The photographs were grouped on a wall to the right of a desk. The desk held a blotter and an old-fashioned inkwell and a telephone, and behind it was a leather chair, crushed into the shape of a heavy man. The left-hand wall held a window with more obscure gla.s.s and a line of locked cabinets. In front of the desk was a pair of client chairs, neatly arranged at a comfortable and symmetrical angle.

Reacher stepped back to the outer office. There was a smell of perfume in the air. He threaded around the secretary's desk and found a woman's bag, open, neatly stowed against the vanity panel to the left of the chair. The flap was folded back, revealing a soft leather wallet and a plastic pack of tissues. He took out his pencil and used the eraser end to poke the tissues aside. Underneath them was a clutter of cosmetics and a bunch of keys and the soft aroma of expensive cologne.

The computer monitor was swirling with a watery screensaver. He used the pencil to nudge the mouse. The screen crackled and cleared and revealed a half-finished letter. The cursor was blinking patiently in the middle of an uncompleted word. That morning's date sat underneath a letterhead. Reacher thought about Costello's body, sprawled out on the sidewalk next to the Key West graveyard, and he glanced between the tidy placement of the absent woman's bag, the open door, the uncompleted word, and he shivered.

Then he used the pencil to exit the word processor. A window opened and asked him if he wanted to save the changes to the letter. He paused and hit no. Opened the file manager screen and checked the directories. He was looking for an invoice. It was clear from looking around that Costello ran a neat operation. Neat enough to invoice for a retainer before he went looking for Jack Reacher. But when did that search start? It must have followed a clear sequence. Mrs Jacob's instructions coming at the outset, nothing except a name, a vague description about his size, his Army service. Costello must then have called the military's central storage facility, a carefully guarded complex in St Louis that holds every piece of paper relating to every man and woman who has ever served in uniform. Carefully guarded in two ways, physically with gates and wire, and bureaucratically with a thick layer of obstruction designed to discourage frivolous access. After patient inquiries he would have discovered the honourable discharge. Then a puzzled pause, staring at a dead end. Then the long shot with the bank account. A call to an old buddy, favours called in, strings pulled. Maybe a blurry faxed printout from Virginia, maybe a blow-by-blow narrative of credits and debits over the telephone. Then the hurried flight south, the questions up and down Duval, the two guys, the fists, the linoleum knife.

A reasonably short sequence, but St Louis and Virginia would have been major delays. Reacher's guess was getting good information out of the records office would take three days, maybe four, for a citizen like Costello. The Virginia bank might not have been any quicker. Favours aren't necessarily granted immediately. The timing has got to be right. Call it a total of seven days' bureaucratic fudge, separated by a day's thinking time, plus a day at the start and a day at the end. Maybe altogether ten days since Mrs Jacob set the whole thing in motion.

He clicked on a subdirectory labelled invoices. The right-hand side of the screen came up with a long field of file names, stacked alphabetically. He ran the cursor down the list and spooled them up from the bottom. No Jacob in the Js. Mostly they were just initials, long acronyms maybe standing for law firm names. He checked the dates. Nothing from exactly ten days ago. But there was one nine days old. Maybe Costello was faster than he thought, or maybe his secretary was slower. It was labelled sgr&t-09. He clicked on it and the hard drive chattered and the screen came up with a thousand-dollar retainer against a missing persons inquiry, billed to a Wall Street firm called Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot. There was a billing address, but no phone number.

He quit file manager and entered the database. Searched for sgr&t again and came up with a page showing the same address, but this time with numbers for phone, fax, telex and e-mail. He leaned down and used his fingers and thumb to pull a couple of tissues from the secretary's pack. Wrapped one around the telephone receiver and opened the other flat and laid it across the keypad. Dialled the number by pressing through it. There was ring tone for a second, and then the connection was made.

'Spencer Gutman,' a bright voice said. 'How may we help you?'

'Mrs Jacob, please,' Reacher said, busily.

'One moment,' the voice said.

There was tinny music and then a man's voice. He sounded quick, but deferential. Maybe an a.s.sistant.

'Mrs Jacob, please,' Reacher said again.

The guy sounded busy and hara.s.sed. 'She already left for Garrison, and I really don't know when she'll be in the office again, I'm afraid.'

'Do you have her address in Garrison?'

'Hers?' the guy said, surprised. 'Or his?'

Reacher paused and listened to the surprise and took a chance.

'His, I mean. I seem to have lost it.'

'Just as well you did,' the voice said back. 'It was misprinted, I'm afraid. I must have redirected at least fifty people this morning.'

He recited an address, apparently from memory. Garrison, New York, a town about sixty miles up the Hudson River, more or less exactly opposite West Point, where Reacher had spent four long years.

'I think you'll have to hurry,' the guy said.

'Yes, I will,' Reacher said, and hung up, confused.

He closed the database and left the screen blank. Took one more glance at the missing secretary's abandoned bag and caught one more breath of her perfume as he left the room.

The secretary died five minutes after she gave up Mrs Jacob's ident.i.ty, which was about five minutes after Hobie started in on her with his hook. They were in the executive bathroom inside the office suite on the eighty-eighth floor. It was an ideal location. s.p.a.cious, sixteen feet square, way too big for a bathroom. Some expensive decorator had put shiny grey granite tiling over all six surfaces, walls and floor and ceiling. There was a big shower stall, with a clear plastic curtain on a stainless-steel rail. The rail was Italian, grossly over-specified for the task of holding up a clear plastic curtain. Hobie had discovered it could take the weight of an unconscious human, handcuffed to it by the wrists. Time to time, heavier people than the secretary had hung there, while he asked them urgent questions or persuaded them as to the wisdom of some particular course of action.

The only problem was soundproofing. He was pretty sure it was OK. It was a solid building. Each of the Twin Towers weighs more than half a million tons. Plenty of steel and concrete, good thick walls. And he had no inquisitive neighbours. Most of the suites on eighty-eight were leased by trade missions from small obscure foreign nations, and their skeleton staffs spent most of their time up at the UN. Same situation on eighty-seven and eighty-nine. That was why he was where he was. But Hobie was a man who never took an extra risk if he could avoid it. Hence the duct tape. Before starting, he always lined up some six-inch strips, stuck temporarily to the tiling. One of them would go over the mouth. When whoever it was started nodding wildly, eyes bulging, he would tear off the strip and wait for the answer. Any screaming, he would slam the next strip on and go to work again. Normally he got the answer he wanted after the second strip came off.

Then the tiled floor allowed a simple sluicing operation. Set the shower running hard, throw a few bucketfuls of water around, get busy with a mop, and the place was safe again as fast as water drains down eighty-eight floors and away into the sewers. Not that Hobie ever did the mopping himself. A mop needs two hands. The second young guy was doing the mopping, with his expensive pants rolled up and his socks and shoes off. Hobie was outside at his desk, talking to the first young guy.

'I'll get Mrs Jacob's address, you'll bring her to me, OK?'

'Sure,' the guy said. 'What about this one?'

He nodded towards the bathroom door. Hobie followed his glance.

'Wait until tonight,' he said. 'Put some of her clothes back on, take her down to the boat. Dump her a couple of miles out in the bay.'

'She's likely to wash back in,' the guy said. 'Couple of days.'

Hobie shrugged.

'I don't care,' he said. 'Couple of days, she'll be all bloated up. They'll figure she fell off a motorboat. Injuries like that, they'll put it down to propeller damage.'

The covert habit had advantages, but it also had problems. Best way to get up to Garrison in a hurry would be to grab a rental car and head straight out. But a guy who chooses not to use credit cards and won't carry a driver's licence loses that option. So Reacher was back in a cab, heading for Grand Central. He was pretty sure the Hudson Line ran a train up there. He guessed commuters sometimes lived as far north as that. If not, the big Amtraks that ran up to Albany and Canada might stop there. He paid off the cab and pushed through the crowd to the doors. Down the long ramp and out into the giant concourse. He glanced around and craned his head to read the departures screen. Tried to recall the geography. Croton-Harmon trains were no good. They terminated way too far south. He needed Poughkeepsie at the minimum. He scanned down the list. Nothing doing. No trains out of there inside the next hour and a half that would get him to Garrison.

They did it the usual way. One of them rode ninety floors down to the underground loading bay and found an empty carton in the trash pile. Refrigerator cartons were best, or soda machines, but once he'd done it with the box from a thirty-five-inch colour television. This time, he found a filing cabinet carton. He used a janitor's trolley from the loading ramp and wheeled it into the freight elevator. Rode with it back up to the eighty-eighth floor.

The other guy was zipping her into a body bag in the bathroom. They folded it into the carton and used the remaining duct tape to secure the carton shut. Then they hefted it back on the trolley and headed for the elevator once more. This time, they rode down to the parking garage. Wheeled the box over to the black Suburban. Counted to three and heaved it into the back. Slammed the tailgate shut and clicked the lock. Walked away and glanced back. Deep tints on the windows, dark garage, no problem.

'You know what?' the first guy said. 'We fold the seat down, we'll get Mrs Jacob in there along with her. Do it all in one trip, tonight. I don't like going on that boat any more times than I have to.'

'OK,' the second guy said. 'Were there more boxes?'

'That was the best one. Depends if Mrs Jacob is big or small, I guess.'

'Depends if she's finished by tonight.'

'You got any doubts on that score? The mood he's in today?'

They strolled together to a different slot and unlocked a black Chevy Tahoe. Little brother to the Suburban, but still a giant vehicle.

'So where is she?' the second guy asked.

'A town called Garrison,' the first guy said. 'Straight up the Hudson, a ways past Sing Sing. An hour, hour and a half.'

The Tahoe backed out of the slot and squealed its tyres on its way around the garage. b.u.mped up the ramp into the sunshine and headed out to West Street, where it made a right and accelerated north.

FOUR

West Street becomes Eleventh Avenue right opposite Pier 56, where the westbound traffic spills out of Fourteenth Street and turns north. The big black Tahoe was caught in the congestion and added its horn to the frustrated blasts cannoning off the high buildings and echoing out over the river. It crawled nine blocks and made a left at Twenty-third Street, then swung north again on Twelfth. It got above walking speed until it pa.s.sed the back of the Javits Convention Center, and then it got jammed up again in the traffic pouring out of West Forty-second. Twelfth became the Miller Highway and it was still solid, all the way over the top of the huge messy acreage of the old rail yards. Then the Miller became the Henry Hudson Parkway. Still a slow road, but the Henry Hudson was technically Route 9A, which would become Route 9 up in Crotonville and take them all the way north to Garrison. A straight line, no turns anywhere, but they were still in Manhattan, stuck in Riverside Park, a whole half-hour after setting out.

It was the word processor that meant the most. The cursor, patiently blinking in the middle of a word.

The open door and the abandoned bag were persuasive, but not critical. Office workers usually take their stuff and close their doors, but not always. The secretary might have just stepped across the hall and got involved in something, a quest for bond paper or a plea for help with somebody's copying machine, leading to a cup of coffee and a juicy story about last night's date. A person expecting to be absent two minutes might leave her bag behind and her door open and end up being gone a half-hour. But n.o.body leaves computer work unsaved. Not even for a minute. And this woman had. The machine had asked him do you want to save the changes? Which meant she had got up from her desk without clicking on the save icon, which is a habit just about as regular as breathing for people who spend their days fighting with software.

Which put a very bad complexion on the whole thing. Reacher was through in Grand Central's other big hall, with a twenty-ounce cup of black coffee he had bought from a vendor. He jammed the lid down tight and squeezed the cash roll in his pocket. It was thick enough for what he was going to have to do. He ran back and around to the track where the next Croton train was waiting to leave.

The Henry Hudson Parkway splits into a tangle of curling ramps around 170th Street and the north lanes come out again labelled Riverside Drive. Same road, same direction, no turn, but the complex dynamic of heavy traffic means that if one driver slows down more than the average, then the highway can back up dramatically, with hundreds of people stalled way behind, all because some out-of-towner a mile ahead became momentarily confused. The big black Tahoe was brought to a complete halt opposite Fort Washington and was reduced to a lurching stop-start crawl all the way under the George Washington Bridge. Then Riverside Drive broadens out and it got itself up into third gear before the label changed back to the Henry Hudson and the traffic in the toll plaza stopped it again. It waited in line to pay the money that let it off the island of Manhattan and away north through the Bronx.

There are two types of train running up and down the Hudson River between Grand Central and Croton-Harmon: locals and expresses. The expresses do not run any faster in terms of speed, but they stop less often. They make the journey last somewhere between forty-nine and fifty-two minutes. The locals stop everywhere, and the repeated braking and waiting and accelerating spin the trip out to anywhere between sixty-five and seventy-three minutes. A maximum advantage for the express of up to twenty-four minutes.

Reacher was on a local. He had given the trainman five and a half bucks for an off-peak one-way and was sitting sideways on an empty three-person bench, wired from too much coffee, his head resting on the window, wondering exactly where the h.e.l.l he was going, and why, and what he was going to do when he got there. And whether he would get there in time to do it, anyway, whatever it was.

Route 9A became 9 and curved gracefully away from the river to run behind Camp Smith. Up in Westchester, it was a fast enough road. Not exactly a racetrack, because it curved and bounced around too much for sustained high speed, but it was clear and empty, a patchwork of old sections and new stretches carved through the woods. There were housing developments here and there, with high timber fencing and neat painted siding and optimistic names carved into imposing boulders flanking the entrance gates. The Tahoe hustled along, one guy driving and the other with a map across his knees.

They pa.s.sed Peekskill and started hunting a left turn. They found it and swung head-on towards the river, which they sensed ahead of them, an empty break in the landscape. They entered the township of Garrison, and started hunting the address. Not easy to find. The residential areas were scattered. You could have a Garrison zip code and live way in the back of beyond. That was clear. But they found the right road and made all the correct turns and found the right street. Slowed and cruised through the thinning woods above the river, watching the mailboxes. The road curved and opened out. They cruised on. Then they spotted the right house up ahead and slowed abruptly and pulled in at the kerb.

Reacher got out of the train at Croton, seventy-one minutes after getting in. He ran up the stairs and across and down to the taxi rank. There were four operators lined up, all nose-in to the station entrance, all of them using old-model Caprice wagons with fake wood on the sides. First driver to react was a stout woman who tilted her head up like she was ready to pay attention.

'You know Garrison?' Reacher asked her.

'Garrison?' she said. 'That's a long way, mister, twenty miles.'

'I know where it is,' he said.

'Could be forty bucks.'

'I'll give you fifty,' he said. 'But I need to be there right now.'

He sat in front, next to her. The car stank like old taxis do, sweet cloying air-freshener and upholstery cleaner. There were a million miles on the clock and it rode like a boat on a swell as the woman hustled through the parking lot and up on to Route 9 and headed north.

'You got an address for me?' she asked, watching the road.

Reacher repeated what the a.s.sistant in the law firm had told him. The woman nodded and settled to a fast cruise.

'Overlooks the river,' she said.

She cruised for a quarter of an hour, pa.s.sed by Peekskill and then slowed, looking for a particular left. Hauled the huge boat around and headed west. Reacher could feel the river up ahead, a mile-wide trench in the forest. The woman knew where she was going. She went all the way to the river and turned north on a country road. The rail tracks ran parallel between them and the water. No trains on them. The land fell away and Reacher could see West Point ahead and on his left, a mile away across the blue water.

'Should be along here someplace,' she said.