The Hard Way

now.

----

    The first of the ten hours passed in silence. The phone didn’t ring. Nobody said a word. Reacher sat still and felt the chance of a happy outcome receding fast. He pictured the bedroom photograph in his mind and felt Kate and Jade moving away from him. Like a comet that had come close enough to Earth to be faintly visible but had then flung itself into a new orbit and was hurtling away into the frozen wastes of space and dwindling to a faint speck of light that would surely soon vanish forever.
    “I did everything they asked,” Lane said, to nobody except himself.
    Nobody replied.

----

    The lone man surprised his temporary guests by moving toward the window, not the door. Then he surprised them more by using his fingernails to pick at the duct tape seam that held the cloth over the glass. He peeled the tape away from the wall until he was able to fold back a narrow rectangle of fabric and reveal a tall slim sliver of New York City at night. The famous view. A hundred thousand lit windows glittering against the darkness like tiny diamonds on a field of black velvet. Like nowhere else in the world.
    He said, “I know you love it.”
    Then he said, “But say goodbye to it.”
    Then he said, “Because you’re never going to see it again.”

----

    Halfway through the second hour Lane looked at Reacher and said, “There’s food in the kitchen, if you want some.” Then he smiled a thin humorless smile and said, “Or to be technically accurate there’s food in the kitchen whether you want some or not.”
    Reacher didn’t want food. He wasn’t hungry. He had eaten a hot dog not long before. But he wanted to get the hell out of the living room. That was for sure. The atmosphere was like eight men sitting around a deathbed. He stood up.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    He walked quietly into the kitchen. Nobody followed him. There were dirty plates and a dozen open containers of Chinese food on the countertop. Half-eaten and cold and pungent and congealed. He left them alone and sat on a stool. Glanced to his right at the open office door. He could see the photographs on the desk. Anne Lane, identical to her sister Patti. Kate Lane, gazing fondly at the child that had been cut out of the picture.
    He listened hard. No sound from the living room. Nobody coming. He got off the stool and stepped inside the office. Stood still for a moment.
Desk, computer, fax machine, phones, file cabinets, shelves.
    He started with the shelves.
    There were maybe eighteen linear feet of them. There were phone books on them, and manuals for firearms, and a one-volume history of Argentina, and a book called
Glock: The New Wave in Combat Handguns,
and an alarm clock, and mugs full of pens and pencils, and an atlas of the world. The atlas was old. The Soviet Union was still in it. And Yugoslavia. Some of the African countries still had their former colonial identities. Next to the atlas there was a fat Rolodex full of five hundred index cards with names and phone numbers and MOS codes on them.
Military Occupational Specialties.
Most of them were 11-Bravo. Infantry. Combat arms. At random Reacher flipped to
G
and looked for Carter Groom. Not there. Then
B
for Burke. Not there, either. So clearly this was the B-team candidate pool. Some names had black lines through them with KIA or MIA notations written on the corners of the cards.
Killed in Action, Missing in Action.
But the rest of the names were still in the game. Nearly five hundred guys, and maybe some women, ready and available and looking for work.
    Reacher put the Rolodex back and touched the computer mouse. The hard drive started up and a dialog box on the screen asked for a password. Reacher glanced at the open door and tried
Kate.
Access was denied. He tried
O5LaneE
for Colonel Edward Lane. Same result. Access denied. He shrugged and gave it up. The password was probably the guy’s birthday or his old service number or the name of his high school football team. No way of knowing, without further research.
    He moved on to the file cabinets.
    There were four of them, standard store-bought items made of painted steel. Maybe thirty inches high. Two drawers in each of them. Eight drawers total. Unlabeled. Unlocked. He stood still and listened again and then slid the first drawer open. It moved quietly on ball bearing runners. It had twin hanging rails with six file dividers made of thin yellow cardboard slung between them. All six were full of paperwork. Reacher used his