The Hard Way

heading south, with two hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash wrapped in a plastic Whole Foods shopping bag.

----

    Reacher met Pauling at her apartment and gave her the bag and said, “Take out what I owe you and hide the rest. It’s enough to get Hobart started with the preliminaries at least.”
    Pauling took the bag and held it away from her body like it was contagious. “Is this the African money?”
    Reacher nodded. “Direct from Ouagadougou. Via Edward Lane’s closet.”
    “It’s dirty.”
    “Show me money that isn’t.”
    Pauling paused a beat and then opened the bag and peeled off some bills and put them on the kitchen counter. Then she refolded the bag and put it in the oven.
    “I don’t have a safe here,” she said.
    “The oven will do,” Reacher said. “Just don’t forget and start to cook something.”
    She took four bills from the stack on the counter and handed them to him.
    “For clothes,” she said. “You’re going to need them. We leave for England tonight.”
    “Your guy got back to you?”
    She nodded. “Taylor was on British Airways to London less than four hours after Burke put the money in the Jaguar.”
    “Alone?”
    “Apparently. As far as we can tell. He was seated next to some British woman. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a partner who checked in separately and sat somewhere else. That would have been a fairly basic precaution. There were sixty-seven unaccompanied adult American males on the flight.”
    “Your guy is very thorough.”
    “Yes, he is. He got the whole manifest. By fax. Including the baggage manifest. Taylor checked three bags.”
    “Overweight charge?”
    “No. He was in business class. They might have let it slide.”
    Reacher said, “I don’t need four hundred dollars for clothes.”
    Pauling said, “You do if you’re traveling with me.”

----

    I was an MP,
Reacher had said to Hobart.
I’ve done everything before.
But he hadn’t. Thirty minutes later he was doing something he had never done in his life. He was buying clothes in a department store. He was in Macy’s on Herald Square, in the men’s department, in front of a cash register, holding a pair of gray pants, a gray jacket, a black T-shirt, a black V-neck sweater, a pair of black socks, and a pair of white boxer shorts. His choices had been limited by the availability of suitable sizes. Inseam, arm length, and chest. He was worried that his brown shoes would be a color clash. Pauling told him to buy new shoes, too. He vetoed that idea. He couldn’t afford them. So she said brown shoes would be just fine with gray pants. He shuffled to the head of the line and paid, three hundred and ninety-six dollars and change, with tax. He showered and dressed back at Pauling’s apartment and took his creased and battered passport and Patti Joseph’s envelope of photographs out of his old pants and shoved them in his new pants. Took his folding toothbrush out of his old shirt pocket and put it in his new jacket pocket. Carried his old clothes down the corridor to the compactor room and dropped them in the garbage chute. Then he waited with Pauling downstairs in the lobby, neither of them saying much, until the car service showed up to take them to the airport.

CHAPTER 56
    PAULING HAD BOOKED them business class on the same flight that Taylor had taken forty-eight hours previously. It was maybe even the same plane, assuming it flew a round-trip every day. But neither one of them could have been in Taylor’s actual seat. They were in a window-and-aisle pair, and the Homeland Security manifest had shown that Taylor had been in the first of a block of four in the center.
    The seats themselves were strange bathtub-shaped cocoons that faced alternating directions. Reacher’s window seat faced aft and next to him Pauling faced forward. The seats were advertised as reclining into fully flat beds, which might have been true for her but was about twelve inches shy of being true for him. But the seats had compensations. The face-to-face thing meant that he was going to spend seven hours looking directly at her, which was no kind of a hardship.
    “What’s the strategy?” she asked.
    “We’ll find Taylor, Lane will take care of him, and then I’ll take care of Lane.”
    “How?”
    “I’ll think of something. Like Hobart said, everything in war is improvisation.”
    “What about the others?”
    “That will be a snap decision. If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane gone, then I’ll