“Possible,” Reacher said. “This whole thing is a percentage game.”
They set out walking, and found the street they had seen before, where the four cop cars had been parked. Where the hooker had been killed. They made a left, toward the safe house, close but not too close, and they checked the side streets on the way. Not easy to do. Not like some parts of the world. There were no big signs. No flashing neon, no shingles swinging in the wind. Prohibited, presumably. On grounds of good taste. Every commercial unit had to be eyeballed individually. They saw a car rental franchise occupying two side-by-side addresses. Other operations were also self-explanatory. But some weren’t. Reacher stepped into a lobby with armchairs and a reception desk, thinking it was a hotel, but it turned out to be a tanning salon, with the booths in back. The woman at the desk laughed, and then tried to suppress it, and then further atoned by mentioning a boutique establishment a block away. Which turned out to be a good-looking place. There was a guy in a top hat, standing ready to open the door.
“You got money?” Neagley asked.
“Ratcliffe will pay,” Reacher said.
“He doesn’t know we’re here.”
“We’ll call him. We should anyway.”
“From where?”
“A room. Yours or mine.”
“We won’t have rooms. They won’t let us check in without money.”
Reacher pulled out his wad of walking-around money. Logged out, but never logged back in. A modest sum. Neagley had the same.
Reacher said, “We’ll get one room. For the time being. Until the NSC calls them.”
Neagley paused a beat, and said, “OK.”
They went in.
—
At that moment the American was three streets away, slowing to a stop outside the car rental franchise they had just seen. He had stopped for an early lunch in Groningen. With a glass of wine. Therefore he lingered, to let it wear off. Just in case. The laws were tough. So he took a walk. It was a pretty town. Then he drove on, across the nominal border, and he hit the fast road through Bremen. He enjoyed every mile. Like a premature nostalgic feeling. It would be a long time before he saw Europe again. Maybe never.
He gave back the key and walked away, out of the neighborhood, toward the water. Toward his place. Rented, with less than a month left on the lease. Waste not, want not. Good timing.
—
The room they got had dark green wallpaper and pewter accents all over the place. But the phone worked. Reacher got the duty NSC guy, who undertook to finance their stay through the consulate. Then White came on the line and said, “Vanderbilt went back four years with the Switzerland thing. Then he cross-checked. There were exactly one hundred Americans in Germany that day who had visited Zurich on a prior occasion.”
“Good data,” Reacher said. “But not definitive. He might have used the Cayman Islands. Or Luxembourg. Or Monaco. Or maybe he went to Zurich for a vacation. I did, once, and I sure as hell didn’t go to a bank while I was there.”
White said, “Understood.”
“But tell Vanderbilt thanks.”
Then Waterman got on, and said, “They’re nervous about you.”
Reacher said, “Who are?”
“Ratcliffe and Sinclair.”
“He said we should roll the dice. No point all doing it in the same place.”
“Getting anywhere?”
“Are you?”
“We’re nowhere.”
“So are we. And there’s no point being nowhere all in the same place either.”
“Sinclair will want to speak to you.”
“Tell her I’ll check in later. After the consulate comes through. That might give them an incentive.”
“And there’s mail from the Department of the Army for Sergeant Neagley.”
“Urgent?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Put it on hold until I’ve spoken with Sinclair.”
“Can we agree on a time?”
“Tell her two hours from now,” Reacher said.
—
They went to find the bar where Helmut Klopp had seen the rendezvous. It was twenty minutes away, the same as it was from the safe house, but on a different vector. Like two spokes of the same wheel. They walked past it, not slowing down, not speeding up, looking straight ahead, inspecting the place obliquely. It was on the ground floor of an older building made of stone, which once might have been a tenement or a factory, probably burned out in the wartime firestorm but deemed repairable. The bar had a center door in a planked wood fa?ade. But it wasn’t a rustic look. Not like the side of a barn way out in the country. The planks were tight and true and planed smooth. They were dark gold in color, heavily varnished and shiny, like a rowboat on a lake in a park. There were small windows, with cream lace café curtains hung behind the bottom halves, and loops of small paper flags hung on strings behind the top halves. All the paper flags were German. The light inside looked dim and amber.
Neagley said, “We have two people following us.”
Reacher said, “Where?”
“On the corner fifty yards behind us.”
He didn’t look.