The Hard Way

leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up to the officer class and take over, I’ll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.”
    “Brutal.”
    “Compared to what?”
    “Taylor won’t be easy to find,” she said.
    “England’s a small country,” he said.
    “Not that small.”
    “We found Hobart.”
    “With help. We were given his address.”
    “We’ll get by.”
    “How?”
    “I’ve got a plan.”
    “Tell me.”
    “You know any British private investigators? Is there an international brotherhood?”
    “There might be a sisterhood. I’ve got some numbers.”
    “OK, then.”
    “Is that your plan? Hire a London PI?”
    “Local knowledge,” Reacher said. “It’s always the key.”
    “We could have done that by phone.”
    “We didn’t have time.”
    “London alone is eight million people,” Pauling said. “Then there’s Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds. And a whole lot of countryside. The Cotswolds. Stratford upon Avon. And Scotland and Wales. Taylor stepped out the door at Heathrow two days ago. He could be anywhere by now. We don’t even know where he’s from.”
    “We’ll get by,” Reacher said again.

----

    Pauling took a pillow and a blanket from a stewardess and reclined her seat. Reacher watched her sleep for a while and then he lay down too, with his knees up and his head jammed against the bathtub wall. The cabin lighting was soft and blue and the hiss of the engines was restful. Reacher liked flying. Going to sleep in New York and waking up in London was a fantasy that could have been designed expressly for him.

----

    The stewardess woke him to give him breakfast.
Like being in the hospital,
he thought.
They wake you up to feed you.
But the breakfast was good. Mugs of hot coffee and bacon rolls. He drank six and ate six. Pauling watched him, fascinated.
    “What time is it?” she asked.
    “Five to five,” he said. “In the morning. Which is five to ten in the morning in this time zone.”
    Then all kinds of muted bells went off and signs went on to announce the start of their approach into Heathrow Airport. London’s northerly latitude meant that at ten in the morning in late summer the sun was high. The landscape below was lit up bright. There were small clouds in the sky that cast shadows on the fields. Reacher’s sense of direction wasn’t as good as his sense of time but he figured they had looped past the city and were approaching the airport from the east. Then the plane turned sharply and he realized they were in a holding pattern. Heathrow was notoriously busy. They were going to circle London at least once. Maybe twice.
    He put his forehead against the window and stared down. Saw the Thames, glittering in the sun like polished lead. Saw Tower Bridge, white stone, recently cleaned, detailed with fresh paint on the ironwork. Then a gray warship moored in the river, some kind of a permanent exhibit. Then London Bridge. He craned his neck and looked for Saint Paul’s Cathedral, north and west. Saw the big dome, crowded by ancient winding streets. London was a low-built city. Densely and chaotically packed near the dramatic curves of the Thames, spreading infinitely into the gray distance beyond.
    He saw railroad tracks fanning out into Waterloo Station. Saw the Houses of Parliament. Saw Big Ben, shorter and stumpier than he remembered it. And Westminster Cathedral, white, bulky, a thousand years old. There was some kind of a giant Ferris wheel on the opposite bank of the river. A tourist thing, maybe. Green trees, everywhere. He saw Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park. He glanced north of where the palace gardens ended and found the Park Lane Hilton. A round tower, bristling with balconies. From above it looked like a squat wedding cake. Then he glanced a little farther north and found the American Embassy. Grosvenor Square. He had once used an office there, in a windowless basement. Four weeks, for some big-deal army investigation he could barely recall. But he remembered the neighborhood. He remembered it pretty well. Too rich for his blood, until you escaped east into SoHo.
    He asked Pauling, “Have you been here before?”
    “We did exchange training with Scotland Yard,” she said.
    “That could be useful.”
    “It was a million years ago.”
    “Where did you stay?”
    “They put us up in a college dormitory.”
    “You know any hotels?”
    “Do you?”
    “Not the sort where they