The Hard Way

Then make a left and go out the same way we came in. And please tell me exactly what the hell is going on.”
    “I made a mistake,” Reacher said. “Remember I told you I couldn’t shake the feeling I was making a bad mistake? Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad mistake. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was the biggest single mistake ever made in the history of the cosmos.”
    “What mistake?”
    “Tell me about the photographs in your apartment.”
    “What about them?”
    “Nieces and nephews, right?”
    “Lots of them,” Pauling said.
    “You know them well?”
    “Well enough.”
    “Spend time with them?”
    “Plenty.”
    “Tell me about their favorite toys.”
    “Their toys? I don’t really know about their toys. I can’t keep up. X-boxes, video games, whatever. There’s always something new.”
    “Not the new stuff. Their old favorites. Tell me about their favorite old toys. What would they have run into a fire to save? When they were eight years old?”
    “When they were eight years old? I guess a teddy bear or a doll. Something they’d had since they were tiny.”
    “Exactly,” Reacher said. “Something comforting and familiar. Something they loved. The kind of thing they would want to take on a journey. Like the family next to me in the lobby just now. The mother got them all out of the suitcase to quiet them down.”
    “So?”
    “What did those things look like?”
    “Like bears and dolls, I guess.”
    “No, later. When the kids were eight years old.”
    “When they were eight? They’d had them forever by then. They looked like crap.”
    Reacher nodded at the wheel. “The bears all worn, with the stuffing out? The dolls all chipped, with the arms off?”
    “Yes, like that. All kids have toys like that.”
    “Jade didn’t. That’s precisely what was missing from her room. There were new bears and new dolls. Recent things she hadn’t taken to. But there were no old favorites there.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “I’m saying that if Jade had been kidnapped on the way to Bloomingdale’s on a normal everyday morning I would have found all her favorite old toys still in her room afterward. But I didn’t.”
    “But what does that mean?”
    “It means Jade knew she was leaving. It means she packed.”

----

    Reacher made the left at Regent’s Park and headed north, toward the M-1, which would carry them all the way back to the M-25 beltway. After the turn he drove on a little more sedately. He didn’t want to get arrested by any English traffic cops. He didn’t have time for that. He figured he was right then about two hours ahead of Edward Lane. It would take an hour for Lane to realize he had been ditched, and then it would take at least another hour for him to get hold of a car and organize a pursuit. So, two hours. Reacher would have liked more, but he figured two hours might be enough.
    Might be.
    Pauling said, “Jade packed?”
    “Kate packed, too,” Reacher said.
    “What did Kate pack?”
    “Just one thing. But her most precious thing. Her best memory. The photograph with her daughter. From the bedroom. One of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen.”
    Pauling paused a beat.
    “But you saw it,” she said. “She didn’t take it.”
    Reacher shook his head. “I saw a photocopy. From Staples, color digital, laser, two bucks a sheet. Brought home and slipped into the frame. It was very good, but not quite good enough. A little vivid in the colors, a little plastic in the contours.”
    “But who packs for a kidnap? I mean, who the hell gets the chance?”
    “They weren’t kidnapped,” Reacher said. “That’s the thing. They were rescued. They were liberated. They were set free. They’re alive somewhere. Alive and well and happy. A little tense, maybe. But free as birds.”

----

    They drove on, slow and steady, through the northern reaches of London, through Finchley and Swiss Cottage, toward Hendon.
    “Kate believed Dee Marie,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened. Out there in the Hamptons. Dee Marie told her about Anne, and warned her, and Kate believed her. Like Patti Joseph said, there was something about the story and something about her husband that made Kate believe. Maybe she was already feeling the same kind of things that Anne had felt five years before. Maybe she was already planning to go down the same road.”
    Pauling said, “You know what this means?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “Taylor helped them.”
    “Of