The Hard Way

evaluated the offered services and found them to be pleasing. Pauling rejected the first two places he found before understanding that there wasn’t going to be anything better just around the next corner. So she gave up and agreed to the third, which was four neighboring townhouses knocked through to make a single long sloping not-quite-aligned building with a name seemingly picked at random from a selection of London tourist-trade hot-button buzzwords: Buckingham Suites. The desk guy was from Eastern Europe and was happy to take cash. The rate was cheap for London, if expensive for anyplace else in the world. There was no register. The
Suites
part of the name seemed to be justified by the presence of a small bathroom and a small table in each room. The bed was a queen with a green nylon counterpane. Beyond the bed and the bathroom and the table there wasn’t a whole lot of space left.
    “We won’t be here long,” Reacher said.
    “It’s fine,” Pauling said.
    She didn’t unpack. Just propped her suitcase open on the floor and looked like she planned to live out of it. Reacher kept his toothbrush in his pocket. He sat on the bed while Pauling washed up. Then she came out of the bathroom and moved to the window and stood with her head tilted up, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys opposite.
    “Nearly ninety-five thousand square miles,” she said. “That’s what’s out there.”
    “Smaller than Oregon,” he said.
    “Oregon has three and a half million people. The U.K. has sixty million.”
    “Harder to hide here, then. You’ve always got a nosy neighbor.”
    “Where do we start?”
    “With a nap.”
    “You want to sleep?”
    “Well, afterward.”
    She smiled. It was like the sun coming out.
    “We’ll always have Bayswater,” she said.

----

    Sex and jet lag kept them asleep until four. Their one day’s start, mostly gone.
    “Let’s get going,” Reacher said. “Let’s call on the sisterhood.”
    So Pauling got up and fetched her purse and took out a small device that Reacher hadn’t seen her use before. An electronic organizer. A Palm Pilot. She called up a directory and scrolled down a screen and found a name and an address.
    “Gray’s Inn Road,” she said. “Is that near here?”
    “I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I think it’s east of here. Nearer the business district. Maybe where the lawyers are.”
    “That would make sense.”
    “Anyone closer?”
    “These people are supposed to be good.”
    “We can get there on the subway, I guess. The Central Line, I think. To Chancery Lane. I should have bought a derby and an umbrella. I would have fit right in.”
    “I don’t think you would have. Those City people are very civilized.” She rolled over on the bed and dialed the phone on the night table. Reacher heard the foreign ring tone from the earpiece, a double purr instead of a single. Then he heard someone pick up and he listened to Pauling’s end of the conversation. She explained who she was, temporarily in town, a New York private investigator, ex-FBI, a member of some kind of an international organization, and she gave a contact name, and she asked for a courtesy appointment. The person on the other end must have agreed readily enough because she asked, “How does six o’clock suit you?” and then said nothing more than “OK, thank you, six o’clock it is,” and hung up.
    Reacher said, “The sisterhood comes through.”
    “Brotherhood,” Pauling said. “The woman whose name I had seems to have sold the business. But they were always going to agree. Like that ten-sixty-two thing you tried with the general. What if they have to come to New York? If we don’t help each other, who will?”
    Reacher said, “I hope Edward Lane doesn’t have a Palm Pilot full of London numbers.”

----

    They showered and dressed again and walked down to the subway stop at Lancaster Gate. Or, in London English, to the tube station. It had a dirty tiled lobby that looked like a ballpark toilet, except for a flower seller. But the platform was clean and the train itself was new. And futuristic. Somehow, like its name, it was more tubular than its New York counterparts. The tunnels were rounded, like they had been sucked down to an exact fit for the cars. Like the whole system could be powered by compressed air, not electricity.
    It was a crowded six-stop ride through stations with famous and romantic names. Marble Arch, Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham