The Hard Way

Bloomingdale’s at all?”
    “It’s the obvious place. It’s Mrs. Lane’s favorite store. She gets all her stuff there. She loves that big brown bag.”
    “But who would have known that?”
    Burke was quiet for a spell.
    “That’s a very good question,” he said.
    Then the phone rang.

CHAPTER 15
    THE RING TONE sounded weird, coming in over ten high-quality automobile speakers. It filled the whole car. It sounded very loud and rich and full and precise. The cellular network’s harsh electronic edge was taken right off it. It purred.
    “Shut up now,” Burke said.
    He leaned to his right and hit a button on the Samsung.
    “Hello?” he said.
    “Good evening,” a voice said back, so slowly and carefully and mechanically that it made four separate words out of two. Like:
Good-Eve-Ven-Ing.
    It was a hell of a voice. It was completely amazing. It was so heavily processed that there would be no chance of recognizing it again without the electronic machine. The machines were commercial items sold in spy stores. Reacher had seen them. They clamped over the telephone mouthpiece. On one side was a microphone, which was backed by circuit boards, and then came a small crude loudspeaker. Battery powered. There were rotary dials that shaped the sound. Zero to ten, for various different parameters. The dials on this machine must have been cranked all the way to eleven. The high frequencies were entirely missing. The low tones had been scooped out and turned around and reconstituted. They boomed and thumped like an irregular heartbeat. There was a phase effect that hissed and roared on every drawn breath and made the voice sound like it was hurtling through outer space. There was a metallic pulse that came and went. It sounded like a sheet of heavy steel being hit with a hammer. The volume was set very high. Over the BMW’s ten speakers the voice sounded huge and alien. Gigantic. Like a direct connection to a nightmare.
    “Who am I speaking with?” it asked, slowly.
    “The driver,” Burke said. “The guy with the money.”
    “I want your name,” the voice said.
    Burke said, “My name is Burke.”
    The nightmare voice asked, “Who’s that in the car with you?”
    “There’s nobody in the car with me,” Burke said. “I’m all alone.”
    “Are you lying?”
    “No, I’m not lying,” Burke said.
    Reacher figured there might be a lie detector hooked up to the other end of the phone. Probably a simple device sold in the same kind of spy stores as the distortion machines. Plastic boxes, green lights and red lights. They were supposed to be able to detect the kind of voice stress that comes with lying. Reacher replayed Burke’s answers in his head and figured they would pass muster. It would be a crude machine and Delta soldiers were taught to beat better tests than a person could buy retail on Madison Avenue. And after a second it was clear that the box had indeed lit up green because the nightmare voice just went ahead calmly and asked, “Where are you now, Mr. Burke?”
    “Fifty-seventh Street,” Burke said. “I’m heading west. I’m about to get on the West Side Highway.”
    “You’re a long way from where I want you.”
    “Who are you?”
    “You know who I am.”
    “Where do you want me?”
    “Take the highway, if that’s what you prefer. Go south.”
    “Give me time,” Burke said. “Traffic is real bad.”
    “Worried?”
    “How would you feel?”
    “Stay on the line,” the voice said.
    The sound of distorted breathing filled the car. It was slow and deep.
Unworried,
Reacher thought.
A patient person, in control, in command, safe somewhere.
He felt the car sprint and hook left.
Onto the highway
through a yellow light,
he thought.
Take care, Burke. A traffic stop could be real awkward tonight.
    “I’m on the highway now,” Burke said. “Heading south.”
    “Keep going,” the voice said. Then it lapsed back to breathing. There was an audio compressor somewhere in the chain. Either in the voice machine itself or in the BMW’s stereo. The breathing started out quiet and then ramped up slowly until it was roaring in Reacher’s ears. The whole car was filled with it. It felt like being inside a lung.
    Then the breathing stopped and the voice asked, “How’s the traffic?”
    “Lots of red lights,” Burke said.
    “Keep going.”
    Reacher tried to follow the route in his head. He knew there were plenty of lights between 57th Street and 34th Street. The Passenger Ship Terminal,