Brennan said, “Call him.”
She did. They heard the local end of the conversation, which started with repeated answers to what must have been are-you-sure questions, and then continued with arrangements around a place called Sammy’s, which from the sound of it could have been anything from a strip club to a noodle shop, but which turned out to be a television production company.
Ian Massee was in a meeting about his documentary.
Temperance Brennan was welcome to come right over.
In fact they would send a car.
“No,” Brennan said, and called an Uber.
THE PRODUCTION COMPANY WAS ONE of a dozen sharing space in Crystal City. They went in assuming every microphone was live and every camera recording. Ian Massee met them in the corridor. He was a fair-haired version of the guy who had driven Reacher out of Baltimore. No doubt once a chiseled and slender youth, now bloated and rotted by stress and anger and bad food and too long in the bar.
But in the moment he was pleasant enough. He took Reacher to be Brennan’s bodyguard, which he seemed to expect, as if it would be crazy for her to come without one. At first he seemed stunned to be in her presence. She was the key to the conspiracy. He was face-to-face with the woman who knew everything.
He was face-to-face with the woman who had killed Jonathan Yeow.
Then eventually he spoke, by asking politely if they would precede him into an office. He held a door. Reacher went first. Brennan followed. It was a multipurpose space. Technical equipment was stacked all around. There were white laminate desks. There were two men sitting on them. One was a wild-eyed guy with long gray hair and a four-day beard. He was very tall and very thin, and he was dressed in a fine-wale corduroy suit, gone all pouched and baggy from constant use. He was wearing fingerless gloves. Maybe the wintertime equivalent of wearing sunglasses inside.
The other guy had a missing hand.
He was short and solid under an impassive face, wearing a blue suit, sitting straight, all slabs and angles, all symmetrical, except on one side was a hand and on the other was a hook. Or, to be fair to the scientists who developed it, a sophisticated prosthesis ending in two controllable fingers, normally held an inch apart, but capable of being clamped. The fingers were shaped like hooks. For efficiency. The pirates had it right from the beginning.
Ian Massee introduced the wild-eyed guy with the long gray hair as Paul Warwick. He was an award-winning documentary maker. Then Massee introduced the one-handed guy as Samuel Rye. He was the money. He owned the production company. The three of them stretched the introductions into self-effacing laments about what they could lose. Warwick could lose his reputation. Rye could lose his fortune. Massee could lose his chance to tell the truth.
Brennan said, “It’s not the truth. I don’t understand how you think it could be. You know nothing. You’ve seen nothing.”
Massee paused a beat, preparing a reply, but Warwick jumped in first, all restless energy. He said, “We have plenty of evidence.”
“You don’t. There is no evidence.”
“We have travel orders. A second person left the same base at the same time.”
“Traffic in and out of bases is constant. It doesn’t imply a connection. It’s a meaningless coincidence.”
“There was trace evidence of a second man in the car where Calder Massee was killed.”
“Where Calder Massee killed himself,” Brennan corrected. “I’m sure it was a staff car, or a rental. Hundreds of men had been in it. That’s another red herring.”
“There’s more than that.”
Brennan sat down on a third desk.
She said, “Tell me.”
Reacher stood behind her.
Warwick said, “Calder Massee was an air force colonel with a security clearance. That was a jackpot combination in 1987. The Cold War was still on. The air force had all the cool toys. They had the bombers endlessly prowling overhead. But someone was leaking. Calder Massee was wrongly suspected and falsely accused. While in custody he was badly beaten. When the real leak was found, Massee was killed too, to cover up the embarrassing mistake.”
Brennan said, “That’s a speech, not evidence.”
“We have the order deploying the assassin.”
“We?”
“Yeow has it. Or had it.”
“Where is it now?”
“We don’t know.”
“Are you going to do the program without it?”
Warwick didn’t answer.
Massee said, “My brother was a patriot and an honorable man. He was not a spy.”
No one answered.
Reacher looked at Samuel Rye and asked, “How much money will you lose?”
“It’s not the money,” Rye said. “It’s truth and justice.”
“Big words.”
“My company is built on them.”
“Truth is Dr. Brennan never laid eyes on Yeow.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“So the government did it.”
“The government wouldn’t use a plastic bag,” Reacher said. “Believe me.”
“So who?”
“Would a rival do it to hurt you?”
“To kill my show? It’s possible.”
Rye went quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, “But you know what? Screw them. I just decided. We’re going to do the show anyway.”
Warwick punched the air. He said, “Great decision, Sammy. Real cutting edge. Because losing Yeow doesn’t really hurt us. It actually helps us. We’ll be totally up front about it. We’ll say, this is the story, and brave Jonathan Yeow was murdered while confirming it. The audience will draw its own conclusions. Don’t you see? The message is even stronger with a dead guy.”
Brennan said, “You’re disgusting.”
“Says the killer,” Massee said.
It got tense for a second. Then Reacher stepped out from behind Brennan’s desk. Six five, two fifty, hands the size of dinner plates. He figured he could snap Warwick in two like a pencil, and then tear Rye’s prosthesis off and stuff it down his throat. He figured Massee would have a heart attack all by himself, before throwing his first punch.
He said, “We’re leaving now. But I’m sure we’ll see you again.”
THEY WALKED A BLOCK TO a neutral corner and waited five minutes for another Uber. Brennan spent the time on her phone, bouncing from link to link, following industry gossip about Samuel Rye’s rivals. Then she hit a trade paper headline that said “Rye Signs Controversial Documentary Maker.” There was a picture. Mad eyes, long gray hair, beanpole build. Paul Warwick. She started reading.
The car came and they got in. She said, “Warwick sounds like a piece of work. There are numerous complaints he routinely bullies witnesses, fakes documents, and completely ignores any information that doesn’t fit his story.”
Reacher said, “How did your prints get on the bag?”
“I don’t know.”
“How thorough was your examination of Calder Massee’s remains?”
“What, now you think I’m incompetent too?”
“Did you limit it to the head?”
“Of course not. I examined the whole skeleton.”
“Any broken bones?”
“No.”
“Did you read the original German report from 1987?”
“Of course I did.”