They stayed in McLean the rest of the afternoon and worked on eliminating personnel by matching maneuver reports to names. A guy couldn’t be driving a tank on the eastern plains and walking around Hamburg at the same time. The number of possibles dropped like a stone. Which felt like progress. Then the first reports from the airlines about Zurich started to come in. White’s guy Vanderbilt seemed to get the point, and he volunteered to work late on the cross-check while they flew, and then to call them when they landed with anything of significance.
Cooperation school, Reacher thought. Who knew?
—
Neagley drove them to the airport in Reacher’s Caprice and parked in the short-term garage on the government’s dime. Her version of civilian dress was mirrored sunglasses and a battered leather jacket over a T-shirt, with pants Reacher took to be old Marine Corps leftovers like his own, but which turned out to be a genuine Ralph Lauren item. She had a bag, and he didn’t. Their seats were in coach, but were luxury items compared to the canvas slings on a military transport. They ate the food, reclined an inch, and went to sleep.
—
Twenty-four hours after the American left, the hooker’s apartment was much less fragrant than it had been before. Or more fragrant, to be accurate, but with the wrong scent. It was becoming noticeable, out in the corridor, and through the kitchen vents. Her neighbors, already resentful, called the cops in the middle of the night. The dispatcher sent a squad car for a look. Or a sniff, as it turned out. Which resulted in the super being roused, with a pass key. Which led to four hours of detectives, and questions, and caution tape, and crime scene technicians, and then finally an ambulance and a rubber body bag.
Good news and bad news, from the police point of view. Hamburg was a rowdy port city, with a world-famous red light district, and drugs and graffiti at the train station, but even so homicide was relatively rare. Less than one a week. A dead body was still an event. Careers could be built. And the police department claimed a success rate close to ninety percent. That was the good news. The bad news was the remaining unsolved ten percent was all either stabbed junkies or strangled prostitutes. Occupational hazards. Not likely to be one for the textbooks. The perpetrator was probably at sea already, in a bunk on a ship, a hundred miles away, heading for the open ocean.
—
Reacher and Neagley had West Wing cash in their pockets, for operational purposes, so they took a Mercedes taxi into town from the airport, through watery sunshine and morning traffic. The street with their hotel was quiet and leafy, full of buildings made of glass and pale foreign brick, and lined both sides with small but expensive cars. Their rooms were on the fourth floor, modestly elevated, with rooftop views. Hamburg was an ancient Hanseatic city, with more than a thousand years of history behind it, but none of the roofs Reacher could see was more than fifty years old. Germany had bombed Britain, and Britain had bombed back, and had gotten pretty good at it. In 1943 they had started a firestorm that all but wiped Hamburg out. Flames a thousand feet high, temperatures of a thousand degrees, the air on fire, the roads on fire, rivers and canals boiling. Forty thousand dead in one raid. Britain had lost sixty thousand in the whole war. They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets, but dead on the money in that case.
The room phone rang. Neagley, arranging to meet for breakfast. Then it rang again. Vanderbilt, up late in McLean, Virginia, with the names of thirty-six Americans who had traveled from Hamburg to Zurich during the week in question. We’re going to catch all kinds of people, Reacher had said.
He went downstairs to the breakfast buffet, which was very European, with cured meats and smoked cheeses and exotic pastries. He sat with Neagley, at a table in a window. Nine o’clock in the morning, in Hamburg, Germany.
—
Nine o’clock in the morning in Hamburg, Germany, was half past twelve in the afternoon in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Lunch was being prepared in the kitchen of a white mud house. Outside was a hot desert climate, like Arizona. The messenger was waiting. He had arrived during the night, after four commercial airplanes and three hundred rough miles in a Toyota pick-up truck. He was given breakfast and shown to an antechamber. He had waited there before, many times. Back and forth, back and forth. Such was his life. He was the only man in the house without a beard or an AK47.
Eventually he was led to a small hot room. The air was full of flies, moving slowly. Two men sat on pillows, both bearded, one short and fat, the other tall and lean. Both were in plain white robes and plain white turbans.
The messenger said, “The American wants a hundred million dollars.”
The men in robes nodded. The tall one said, “We will discuss it tonight over dinner. Come back first thing in the morning, for our answer.”
—
Neagley had taken a Hamburg street plan from the concierge station. She opened it and tilted it to catch the light from the window. She said, “A fifty-minute absence suggests about a one-mile radius, don’t you think? Twenty minutes there, ten minutes talking, twenty minutes back. What kind of place would they use?”