The Hard Way

Court Road, Holborn. The names reminded Reacher of the cards in a British Monopoly set he had found abandoned on a NATO base as a kid. Mayfair and Park Lane had been the prize properties. Where the Park Lane Hilton was. Where Lane and his six guys were due in about eighteen hours.
    They came up out of the Chancery Lane station at a quarter to six into full daylight and narrow streets that were choked with traffic. Black cabs, red buses, white vans, diesel fumes, small five-door sedans that Reacher didn’t recognize. Motorbikes, pedal bikes, sidewalks thick with people. Boldly striped pedestrian crossings, blinking lights, beeping signals. It was fairly cold but people were walking in shirtsleeves with jackets folded over their arms as if it was warm to them. There were no horns and no sirens. It was like the oldest parts of downtown Manhattan lopped off at the fifth floor and compressed in size and therefore heated up in speed but also somehow cooled down in temper and made more polite. Reacher smiled. Certainly he loved the open road and miles to go but he loved the crush of the world’s great cities just as much. New York yesterday, London today. Life was good.
    So far.
    They walked north on Gray’s Inn Road, which looked longer than they had anticipated. There were old buildings left and right, modernized on the ground floors, ancient above. A sign said that the house where Charles Dickens had lived was ahead and on the left. But for all that London was a historic city Dickens wouldn’t have recognized the place. No way. Not close. Even Reacher felt that things had changed a lot in the ten or so years since he had last been in town. He remembered red phone boxes and polite unarmed coppers in pointed hats. Now most of the phone boxes he saw were plain glass cabins and everyone was using cell phones anyway. And the cops he saw were patrolling in pairs, blank-faced, dressed in flak jackets and carrying Uzi machine pistols in the ready position. There were surveillance cameras on poles everywhere.
    Pauling said, “Big brother is watching you.”
    “I see that,” Reacher said. “We’re going to have to take Lane out of town. Can’t do anything to him here.”
    Pauling didn’t answer. She was checking doors for numbers. She spotted the one she wanted across the street on the right. It was a narrow maroon door with a glass fanlight. Through it Reacher could see a staircase that led to suites of rooms upstairs. Not dissimilar to Pauling’s own place three thousand miles away. They crossed the street between standing traffic and checked the brass plates on the stonework. One was engraved:
Investigative Services plc.
Plain script, plain message. Reacher pulled the door and thought it was locked until he remembered that British doors worked the other way around. So he pushed and found that it was open. The staircase was old but it was covered in new linoleum. They walked up two flights until they found the right door. It was standing open onto a small square room with a desk set at a forty-five-degree angle so that its occupant could see out the door and the window at the same time. The occupant was a small man with thin hair. He was maybe fifty years old. He was wearing a sleeveless sweater over a shirt and a tie.
    “You must be the Americans,” he said. For a second Reacher wondered how exactly he had known. Clothes? Teeth? Smell? A deduction, like Sherlock Holmes? But then the guy said, “I stayed open especially for you. I would have been on my way home by now if you hadn’t telephoned. I didn’t have any other appointments.”
    Pauling said, “Sorry to hold you up.”
    “Not a problem,” the guy said. “Always happy to help a fellow professional.”
    “We’re looking for someone,” Pauling said. “He arrived from New York two days ago. He’s English, and his name is Taylor.”
    The guy glanced up.
    “Twice in one day,” he said. “Your Mr. Taylor is a popular person.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “A man telephoned directly from New York with the same inquiry. Wouldn’t give his name. I imagined he was trying all the London agencies one by one.”
    “Was he American?”
    “Absolutely.”
    Pauling turned to Reacher and mouthed,
Lane.
    Reacher nodded. “Trying to go it alone. Trying to bilk me out of my fee.”
    Pauling turned back to the desk. “What did you tell the guy on the phone?”
    “That there are sixty million people in Great Britain and that possibly several hundred thousand