The Hard Way

let you in wearing four hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. Mostly the sort where you wear your shoes in bed.”
    “We can’t stay anywhere close to Lane and his guys. We can’t be associated with him. Not if we’re going to do something to him.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “What about somewhere really great? Like the Ritz?”
    “That’s the opposite problem. Four hundred dollars is too shabby for them. And we need to stay low-profile. We need the kind of place where they don’t look at your passport and they let you pay cash. Bayswater, maybe. West of downtown, a clear run back to the airport afterward.”
    Reacher turned to the window again and saw Windsor Castle slide by below. And a wide six-lane east-west highway with slow traffic driving on the left. Then suburbs, two-family houses, curving roads, tiny green back yards, garden sheds, and then acres of airport parking full of small cars, many of them red. Then the airport fence. Then the chevrons at the start of the runway. Close to the ground the plane seemed huge again after feeling cramped for seven hours. After being a narrow tube it became a two-hundred-ton monster doing two hundred miles an hour. It landed hard and roared and braked and then suddenly it was quiet and docile again, rolling slowly toward the terminal. The purser welcomed the passengers to London over the public address system and Reacher turned and looked across the cabin at the exit door. Taylor’s first few steps would be easy enough to follow. After baggage claim and the taxi rank the job would get a whole lot harder. Harder, but maybe not impossible.
    “We’ll get by,” he said, even though Pauling hadn’t spoken to him.

CHAPTER 57
    THEY FILLED IN landing cards and had their passports stamped by an official in a gray suit.
My name on a piece of English paper,
Reacher thought.
Not good.
But there was no alternative. And his name was already on the airline passenger manifest, which could apparently get faxed all over the place at the drop of a hat. They waited at the carousel for Pauling’s bag and then Reacher got stopped in Customs not because he had suspicious luggage but because he had none at all. Which made the guy stopping him a Special Branch cop or an MI5 agent in disguise, Reacher thought, not a real Customs guy. Traveling light was clearly a red flag. The detention was brief and the questions were casual, but the guy got a good look at his face and was all over his passport.
Not good.
    Pauling changed a wad of the O-Town dollars at a Travelex booth and they found the fast train to Paddington Station. Paddington was a good first stop, Reacher figured. His kind of an area. Convenient for the Bayswater hotels, full of trash and hookers. Not that he expected to find Taylor there. Or anywhere close. But it would make a good anonymous base camp. The railroad company promised the ride into town would be fifteen minutes, but it turned out to be closer to twenty. They came out to the street in central London just before twelve noon. West 4th Street to Eastbourne Terrace in ten short hours. Planes, trains, and automobiles.
    At street level that part of London was bright and fresh and cold and to a stranger’s eyes it seemed full of trees. The buildings were low and had old cores and sagging roofs but most of them had new frontages tacked on to disguise age and disrepair. Most things were chains or franchises except for the ethnic take-out food stores and the town car services, which still seemed to be mom-and-pop operations. Or cousin-and-cousin. The roads had good smooth blacktop heavily printed with instructions for drivers and pedestrians. The pedestrians were warned to
Look Left
or
Look Right
at every possible curb and the drivers were guided by elaborate lines and arrows and crosshatching and
Slow
signs anywhere the direction deviated from absolutely straight, which was just about everywhere. In some places there was more white on the road than black.
The welfare state
, Reacher thought.
It sure as hell takes care of you.
    He carried Pauling’s bag for her and they walked south and east toward Sussex Gardens. From previous trips he recalled groups of row houses joined together into cheap hotels, on Westbourne Terrace, Gloucester Terrace, Lancaster Gate. The kind of places that had thick crusted carpet in the hallways and thick scarred paint on the millwork and four meaningless symbols lit up above the front doors as if some responsible standards agency had