The Hard Way

kinds of treaties.”
    “The Pentagon loves mercenaries. It employs them all the time.”
    “But it likes them to go where it sends them. It doesn’t like them to fill their down time with unauthorized sideshows.”
    “Is that where they lost Knight and Hobart? On a sideshow?”
    “Somewhere in Africa,” Pauling said.
    “Does this guy have the details?”
    “Some of them. He’s reasonably senior, but he’s new. He’s not going to tell you his name, and you’re not allowed to ask. Deal?”
    “Does he know my name?”
    “I didn’t tell him.”
    “OK, that sounds fair.”
    Then her cell phone chimed. She answered it and listened and looked around.
    “He’s in the plaza,” she said. “He can see us but he doesn’t want to walk right up to us. We have to go to a coffee shop on Second. He’ll follow.”

----

    The coffee shop was one of those mostly brown places that survive on equal parts counter trade, booth trade, and to-go coffee in cardboard cups with Greek decoration on them. Pauling led Reacher to a booth all the way in back and sat so she could watch the door. Reacher slid in next to her. He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. Long habit, even in a place with plenty of mirrors, which the coffee shop had. They were tinted bronze and made the narrow unit look wide. Made everyone look tan, like they were just back from the beach. Pauling waved to the waitress and mouthed
coffee
and held up three fingers. The waitress came over and dumped three heavy brown mugs on the table and filled them from a Bunn flask.
    Reacher took a sip. Hot, strong, and generic.
    He made the Pentagon guy before he was even in through the door. There was no doubt about what he was. Army, but not necessarily a fighting man. Maybe just a bureaucrat. Dull. Not old, not young, corn-colored buzz cut, cheap blue wool suit, white broadcloth button-down shirt, striped tie, good shoes polished to a mirror shine. A different kind of uniform. It was the kind of outfit a captain or a major would wear to his sister-in-law’s second wedding. Maybe this guy had bought it for that very purpose, long before a spell of résumé-building temporary detached duty in New York City appeared in his future.
    The guy paused inside the door and looked around.
Not looking for us,
Reacher thought.
Looking for anyone else who knows him. If he sees somebody, he’ll fake a phone call and turn around and leave. Doesn’t want any awkward questions later. He’s not so dumb after all.
    Then he thought:
Pauling’s not so dumb, either. She knows people who can get in trouble just by being seen with the wrong folks.
    But the guy evidently saw nothing to worry about. He walked on back and slid in opposite Pauling and Reacher and after a brief glance at each of their faces he centered his gaze between their heads and kept his eyes on the mirror. Up close Reacher saw that he was wearing a black subdued-order crossed-pistols lapel pin and that he had mild scarring on one side of his face. Maybe grenade or IED shrapnel at maximum range. Maybe he
had
been a fighting man. Or maybe it was a childhood shotgun accident.
    “I don’t have much for you,” the guy said. “Private-enterprise Americans fighting overseas are rightly considered to be very bad news, especially when they go fight in Africa. So this stuff is very compartmentalized and need-to-know and it was before my time, so I simply don’t know very much about it. So all I can give you is what you can probably guess anyway.”
    “Where was it?” Reacher asked.
    “I’m not even sure of that. Burkina Faso or Mali, I think. One of those small West African places. Frankly there are so many of them in trouble it’s hard to keep track. It was the usual deal. Civil war. A scared government, a bunch of rebels ready to come out of the jungle. An unreliable military. So the government pays through the nose and buys what protection it can on the international market.”
    “Does one of those countries speak French?”
    “As their official language? Both of them. Why?”
    “I saw some of the money. In plastic wrap printed in French.
Banque Centrale,
Central Bank.”
    “How much?”
    “More than you or I would earn in two lifetimes.”
    “U.S. dollars?”
    Reacher nodded. “Lots of them.”
    “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
    “Did it work this time?”
    “No,” the guy said. “The story that did the rounds was that Edward Lane took the money and ran. Can’t blame