Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

ten minutes late for something. The guy at the desk let us go. He’d seen lots of people rushing out of his office like they were ten minutes late for something.
    We got into Roscoe’s car. Finlay opened the big envelope and pulled out the stuff on Sherman Stoller. Folded it into his pocket.
    “That’s ours, for the time being,” he said. “It might get us somewhere.”
    “I’ll get the arrest report from Florida,” Roscoe said. “And we’ll find an address for him somewhere. Got to be a lot of paperwork on a trucker, right? Union, medical, licenses. Should be easy enough to do.”
    We rode the rest of the way back to Margrave in silence. The station house was deserted, apart from the desk guy. Lunch break in Margrave, lunch break in Washington, D.C. Same time zone. Finlay handed me a scrap of paper from his pocket and stood guard on the door to the rosewood office. I went inside to call the woman who may have been my brother’s lover.

    THE NUMBER FINLAY HAD HANDED ME REACHED MOLLY Beth Gordon’s private line. She answered on the first ring. I gave her my name. It made her cry.
    “You sound so much like Joe,” she said.
    I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to get into a whole lot of reminiscing. Neither should she, not if she was stepping out of line and was in danger of being overheard. She should just tell me what she had to tell me and get off the line.
    “So what was Joe doing down here?” I asked her.
    I heard her sniffing, and then her voice came back clear.
    “He was running an investigation,” she said. “Into what, I don’t know specifically.”
    “But what sort of a thing?” I asked her. “What was his job?”
    “Don’t you know?” she said.
    “No,” I said. “We found it very hard to keep in touch, I’m afraid. You’ll have to start from the beginning for me.”
    There was a long pause on the line.
    “OK,” she said. “I shouldn’t tell you this. Not without clearance. But I will. It was counterfeiting. He ran the Treasury’s anticounterfeiting operation.”
    “Counterfeiting?” I said. “Counterfeit money?”
    “Yes,” she said. “He was head of the department. Ran the whole show. He was an amazing guy, Jack.”
    “But why was he down here in Georgia?” I asked her.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. What I aim to do is find out for you. I can copy his files. I know his computer password.”
    There was another pause. Now I knew something about Molly Beth Gordon. I’d spent a lot of time on computer passwords. Any military cop does. I’d studied the pyschology. Most users make bad choices. A lot of them write the damn word on a Post-it note and stick it on the monitor case. The ones who are too smart to do that use their spouse’s name, or their dog’s name, or their favorite car or ball player, or the name of the island where they took their honeymoon or balled their secretary. The ones who think they’re really smart use figures, not words, but they choose their birthday or their wedding anniversary or something pretty obvious. If you can find something out about the user, you’ve normally got a better than even chance of figuring their password.
    But that would never work with Joe. He was a professional. He’d spent important years in Military Intelligence. His password would be a random mixture of numbers, letters, punctuation marks, upper and lower case. His password would be unbreakable. If Molly Beth Gordon knew what it was, Joe must have told her. No other way. He had really trusted her. He had been really close to her. So I put some tenderness into my voice.
    “Molly, that would be great,” I said. “I really need that information.”
    “I know you do,” she said. “I hope to get it tomorrow. I’ll call you again, soon as I can. Soon as I know something.”
    “Is there counterfeiting going on down here?” I asked her. “Is that what this could be all about?”
    “No,” she said. “It doesn’t happen like that. Not inside the States. All that stuff about little guys with green eye-shades down in secret cellars printing dollar bills is all nonsense. Just doesn’t happen. Joe stopped it. Your brother was a genius, Jack. He set up procedures years ago for the special paper sales and the inks, so if somebody starts up, he gets nailed within days. One hundred percent foolproof. Printing money in the States just doesn’t happen anymore. Joe made sure of that. It all happens abroad. Any fakes we get here are shipped in.