The Hard Way

others to keep his cover intact. Held him a few days, then turned him loose.”
    “When?”
    “He just got out. The ME figures he was dead about three hours after walking through the gates.”
    “Then we don’t know anything about him,” Reacher said. “He’s completely unrelated.”
    This time it was Brewer who said: “You sure?”
    Reacher nodded. “I promise.”
    Brewer gave him a long hard look, cop to cop. Then he just shrugged and said, “OK.”
    Reacher said, “Sorry we can’t help.”
    “Shit happens.”
    “You still got Patti’s photograph?”
    “Photographs,” Brewer said. “She gave me two. Couldn’t decide which one was better.”
    “You still got them?”
    “In my pocket.”
    “Want to leave them with me?”
    Brewer smiled, man to man. “You planning on returning them personally?”
    “I could,” Reacher said. “But first I want to look at them.”
    They were in a standard white letter-size envelope. Brewer pulled it from his inside pocket and laid it on the table. Reacher saw the name
Taylor
and the words
For Brewer
written on the front in blue ink and neat handwriting. Then Brewer left. Just stood up and walked back out to the street with the same kind of speed and energy and hustle he had used on the way in. Reacher watched him go and then he turned the envelope facedown and squared it on the table in front of him. Looked at it hard but left it unopened.
    “What have we got?” he asked.
    “We’ve got the same as we always had,” Pauling said. “We’ve got Taylor and the guy who can’t talk.”
    Reacher shook his head. “Taylor
is
the guy who can’t talk.”

CHAPTER 54
    PAULING SAID, “THAT’S absurd. Lane wouldn’t employ anyone who can’t talk. Why would he? And nobody mentioned it. You asked about Taylor several times. They said he was a good soldier. They didn’t say he was a good soldier except he can’t talk. They’d have mentioned that little detail, don’t you think?”
    “Two words,” Reacher said. “All we need to do is add two words and the whole thing makes perfect sense.”
    “What two words?”
    “We’ve been saying the guy can’t talk. Truth is, he can’t
afford to
talk.”
    Pauling paused a long moment.
    Then she said: “Because of his accent.”
    Reacher nodded. “Exactly. All along we’ve been saying nobody was missing, but by definition Taylor was missing from the start. And Taylor was behind this whole damn thing. He planned it, and he set it up, and he executed it. He rented the apartment and he bought the chair. He probably did other stuff we didn’t catch up with yet. And everywhere he went, he couldn’t risk opening his mouth. Not even once. Because he’s English. Because of his accent. He was realistic. He knew he had to be leaving a trail. And if whoever was tracking him came along later and heard all about an average-looking forty-year-old man with an English accent, they would have made him in a second. It would have been a total no-brainer. Who else would anyone have thought of? Because he was the last one to see Kate and Jade alive.”
    “He did the same thing as Knight, five years ago. That’s how the takedown worked.”
    “Exactly,” Reacher said again. “It’s the only way to explain it. Possibly he drove them to Bloomingdale’s but certainly he didn’t stop there. He just pulled a gun and kept on going. Maybe threatened to shoot Kate in front of the kid. That would have kept her quiet. Then he just dropped off the radar and started relying on a kind of double alibi he had created for himself. First, he was presumed dead. And second, all anyone would ever remember of him was a guy that couldn’t speak. A guy with no tongue. It was a perfect piece of misdirection. Weird, exotic, absolutely guaranteed to get us chasing off in the wrong direction.”
    Pauling nodded. “Brilliant, in a way.”
    “It was all anyone remembered,” Reacher said. “Like that old Chinese man? All he really recalled was the way the guy gulped like a fish. And the super on Sixth Avenue? We said, tell us about the guy, and he said he keeps his mouth tight shut all the time because he’s embarrassed that he can’t talk. That was the beginning and the end of his description. The obvious thing and the only thing. Everything else was trivial by comparison.”
    “Open the envelope,” Pauling said. “Confirm it.”
    So Reacher lifted the envelope’s flap and slid the two photographs out, facedown. He tapped the back of the top