SEVENTY-THREE

THE SAME NIGHT PORTER WAS ON DUTY. ALONE. HE WAS slumped on a chair behind the desk, staring morosely into space. There were fogged old mirrors in the lobby. My jacket was puffed out in front of me. I felt I could see the shape of the MP5’s pistol grip and the curve of its magazine and the tip of its muzzle. But I knew what I was looking at. I assumed the night porter didn’t.

I walked up to him and said, ‘Remember me?’

He didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no. Just gave a kind of all-purpose shrug that I took to be an invitation to open negotiations.

‘I don’t need a room,’ I said.

‘So what do you need?’

I took five twenties out of my pocket. A hundred bucks. Most of what I had left. I fanned the bills so he could see all five double-digits and laid them on his counter.

I said, ‘I need to know the room numbers where you put the people who came in around midnight.’

‘What people?’

‘Two women, thirteen men.’

‘Nobody came in around midnight.’

‘One of the women was a babe. Young. Bright blue eyes. Not easy to forget.’

‘Nobody came in.’

‘You sure?’

‘Nobody came in.’

I pushed the five bills towards him. ‘You totally sure?’

He pushed the bills right back.

He said, ‘I’d like to take your money, believe me. But nobody came in tonight.’

I didn’t take the subway. I walked instead. A calculated risk. It exposed me to however many of the six hundred federal agents happened to be in the vicinity, hut I wanted my cell phone to work. I had concluded that cell phones don’t work in the subway. I had never seen anyone using one down there. Presumably not because of etiquette. Presumably because of a lack of signal. So I walked. I used 32nd Street to get over to Broadway, and then I followed Broadway south, past luggage outlets and junk jewellery stores and counterfeit perfume wholesalers, all of them closed up and shuttered for the night. It was dark down there, and messy. A micro-neighbourhood. I could have been in Lagos, or Saigon.

I paused at the corner of 28th Street to let a taxi slide by. The phone in my pocket started to vibrate.

I backed into 28th and sat down on a shadowed stoop and opened the phone.

Lila Hoth said, ‘Well?’

I said, ‘I can’t find you.’

‘I know.’

‘So I’ll deal.’

‘You will?’

‘How much cash have you got?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘All of it.’

‘Have you got the stick?’

‘I can tell you exactly where it is.’

‘But you don’t actually have it?’

‘No.’

‘So what was the thing you showed us in the hotel?’

‘A decoy.’

‘Fifty thousand dollars.’

‘A hundred.’

‘I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars.’

I said, ‘You can’t get on a bus or a train or a plane. You can’t get out. You’re trapped, Lila. You’re going to die here. Don’t you want to die a success? Don’t you want to be able to send that coded e-mail home? Mission accomplished?’

‘Seventy-five thousand.’

‘A hundred.’

‘OK, but only half tonight.’

‘I don’t trust you.’

‘You’ll have to.’

I said, ‘Seventy-five, all of it tonight.’

‘Sixty.’

‘Deal.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Way uptown,’ I lied. ‘But I’m on the move. I’ll meet you in Union Square in forty minutes.’

‘Where is that?’

‘Broadway, between 14th Street and 17th.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Safe enough.’

‘I’ll be there,’ she said.

‘Just you,’ I said. ‘Alone.’

She clicked off.

I moved on two blocks to the north end of Madison Square Park and sat on a bench a yard from a homeless woman who had a shopping cart piled high like a dump truck. I fished in my pocket for Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I read it in the dim glow of a street light. I dialled her cell number. She answered after five rings.

‘This is Reacher,’ I said. ‘You told me to call you if I needed you.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Am I still off the hook with the NYPD?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So tell your counterterrorism people that forty minutes from now I’ll be in Union Square and I’ll be approached by a minimum of two and a maximum of maybe six of Lila Hoth’s crew. Tell your guys they’re theirs for the taking. But tell them to leave me alone.’

‘Descriptions?’

‘You looked in the bag, right? Before you delivered it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then you’ve seen their pictures.’

‘Where in the square?’

‘I’ll aim for the southwest corner.’

‘So you found her?’

‘First place I looked. She’s in a hotel. She paid off the night porter. And put a scare in him. He denied everything and called her room from the desk the minute I was out of the lobby.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she called me less than a minute later. I like coincidences as much as the next guy, but that kind of timing is too good to be true.’

‘Why are you meeting with her crew?’

‘I set up a deal with her. I told her to come alone. But she’ll double-cross me and send some of her people instead. It will help me if your guys grab them up. I don’t want to have to shoot them all.’

‘Got a conscience?’

‘No, I’ve got thirty rounds of ammunition. Which isn’t really enough. I need to parcel it out.’

Nine blocks later I entered Union Square. 1 walked all around it once and crossed it on both diagonals. Saw nothing that worried me. Just somnolent shapes on benches. One of New York City’s zero-dollar hotels. I sat down near the statue of Gandhi and waited for the rats to come out.

SEVENTY-FOUR

TWENTY MINUTES INTO MY FORTY I SAW THE NYPD’s counterterrorism squad begin to assemble. Good moves. They came in beat-up unmarked sedans and confiscated minivans full of dents and scrapes. I saw an off-duty taxicab park outside a coffee shop on 16th Street. I saw two guys climb out of the back and cross the road. Altogether I counted sixteen men, and I was prepared to accept that I had missed maybe four or five others. If I didn’t know better I would have suspected that a long late session in a martial arts gym had just let out. All the guys were young and fit and bulky and moved like trained athletes. They were all carrying gym bags. They were all inappropriately dressed. They had on Yankees warm-up jackets, or dark windbreakers like mine, or thin fleece parkas, like it was already November. To hide their Kevlar vests, I guessed, and maybe their badges, which would be on chains around their necks.

None of them eyeballed me directly but I could tell they had spotted me and identified me. They formed up in ones and twos and threes all around me and then they stepped back in the dark and disappeared. They just melted into the scenery. Some sat on benches, some lay in nearby doorways, some went places I didn’t see.

Good moves.

Thirty minutes into my forty I was feeling pretty optimistic.

Five minutes later, I wasn’t.

Because the feds showed up.

Two more cars stopped, right on Union Square West. Black Crown Vics, waxed and bright and shiny. Eight men stepped out. I sensed the NYPD guys stirring. Sensed them staring through the dark, sensed them glancing at each other, sensed them asking: Why the hell are those guys here?

I was good with the NYPD. Not so, with the FBI and the Department of Defense.

I glanced at Gandhi. He told me nothing at all.

I pulled out the phone again and hit the green button to bring up Theresa Lee’s number. She was the last call I had made. I hit the green button again to dial. She answered immediately.

I said, ‘The feds are here. How did that happen?’