The Hard Way

is easy. Getting the person back is hard.”
    The phone stayed silent.
    “So should I stall?” Lane asked.
    “I would,” Reacher said. “Parcel it out. Keep it going. Buy some time.”
    The phone didn’t ring. No sound in the room except the hiss of cooled air and men breathing low. Reacher glanced around. Everyone was waiting patiently. Special Forces soldiers were good at waiting. For all the occasional spectacular action they saw, they spent a lot more time waiting, standing by, passing the time in readiness. And then nine times out of ten they were stood down, action canceled.
    The phone didn’t ring.
    “Good conclusions,” Lane said, to nobody in particular, through the silence. “Three guys, far away. Upstate. On a farm.”

----

    But Reacher was completely wrong. Just four miles away through the electric city darkness, right there on the island of Manhattan, a lone man pushed open a door to a small, hot room. Then he stepped back. Kate Lane and her daughter Jade passed in front of him without meeting his eyes. They stepped inside the room and saw two beds. The beds looked hard and narrow. The room felt damp and unused. The window was draped with black cloth. The cloth was duct-taped to the walls, across the top, across the bottom, down both sides.
    The lone man closed the door and walked away.

CHAPTER 5
    THE PHONE RANG at exactly one o’clock in the morning. Lane snatched it out of the cradle and said, “Yes?” Reacher heard a faint voice from the earpiece, distorted twice, first by a machine and then again by a bad connection. Lane said, “What?” and there was a reply. Lane said, “Put Kate on the phone. You’ve got to do that first.” Then there was a pause, and then there was a different voice. A woman’s voice, distorted, panicked, breathy. It said just one word, possibly Lane’s name, and then it exploded in a scream. The scream died into silence and Lane screwed his eyes shut and the electronic robot voice came back and barked six short syllables. Lane said, “OK, OK, OK,” and Reacher heard the line go dead.
    Lane sat in silence, his eyes clamped shut, his breathing fast and ragged. Then his eyes opened and moved from face to face and stopped on Reacher’s.
    “Five million dollars,” he said. “You were right. How did you know?”
    “It was the obvious next step,” Reacher said. “One, five, ten, twenty. That’s how people think.”
    “You’ve got a crystal ball. You can see the future. I’m putting you on the payroll. Twenty-five grand a month, like all these guys.”
    “This isn’t going to last a month,” Reacher said. “It can’t. It’s going to be all over in a couple of days.”
    “I agreed to the money,” Lane said. “I couldn’t stall. They were hurting her.”
    Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
    Gregory asked, “Instructions later?”
    “In an hour,” Lane said.
    The room went quiet again. More waiting. All around the room men checked their watches and settled back imperceptibly. Lane put the silent handset back in the cradle and stared off into space. But Reacher leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.
    “We need to talk,” he said, quietly.
    “About what?”
    “Background. We should try to figure out who these guys are.”
    “OK,” Lane said, vaguely. “We’ll go to the office.”
    He stood up slowly and led Reacher out of the living room and through a kitchen to a maid’s room in back. It was small and plain and square and had been fixed up as an office. Desk, computer, fax machine, phones, file cabinets, shelves.
    “Tell me about Operational Security Consultants,” Reacher said.
    Lane sat down in the desk chair and turned it to face the room.
    “Not much to tell,” he said. “We’re just a bunch of ex-military trying to keep busy.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Whatever people need. Bodyguarding, mostly. Corporate security. Like that.”
    There were two framed photographs on the desk. One was a smaller reprint of Kate’s stunning picture from the living room. A seven-by-five instead of a fourteen-by-eleven, in a similar expensive gold frame. The other was of another woman, about the same age, blonde where Kate was dark, blue eyes instead of green. But just as beautiful, and photographed just as masterfully.
    “Bodyguarding?” Reacher said.
    “Mostly.”
    “You’re not convincing me, Mr. Lane. Bodyguards don’t make twenty-five grand a month. Bodyguards are big dumb lumps lucky to make a tenth of that. And if you had guys