“And this. We need to keep up appearances, right? All these lawyers everywhere?” It was the platinum Rolex. Chester took it from him and latched it on his wrist. Tony left the room and closed the door. Marilyn was at the mirror, styling her hair with her fingers. She put it behind her ears and pursed her lips together like she’d just used lipstick, although she hadn’t. She had none to use. It was just an instinct. She stepped away to the middle of the floor and smoothed her dress down over her thighs.
“You ready?” she asked.
Chester shrugged. “For what? Are you?”
“I’m ready,” she said.
SPENCER GUTMAN RICKER and Talbot’s driver was the husband of one of the firm’s longest-serving secretaries. He had been a dead-wood clerk somewhere who hadn’t survived his company’s amalgamation with a lean and hungry competitor. Fifty-nine and unemployed with no skills and no prospects, he had sunk his payoff into a used Lincoln Town Car and his wife had written a proposal showing it would be cheaper for the firm to contract him exclusively rather than keep a car service account. The partners had turned a blind eye to the accounting mistakes in the proposal and hired him anyway, looking at it somewhere halfway between pro bono and convenience. Thus the guy was waiting in the garage with the motor running and the air on high when Jodie came out of the elevator and walked over to him. He buzzed his window down and she bent to speak.
“You know where we’re going?” she asked.
He nodded and tapped the clipboard lying on the front passenger sheet.
“I’m all set,” he said.
She got in the back. By nature she was a democratic person who would have preferred to ride in front with him, but he insisted passengers take a rear seat. It made him feel more official. He was a sensitive old man, and he had caught the whiff of charity around his hiring. He felt that to act very properly would raise his perceived status. He wore a dark suit and a chauffeur’s cap he had found in an outfitter’s in Brooklyn.
As soon as he saw in the mirror that Jodie was settled, he moved away around the garage and up the ramp and outside into the daylight. The exit was at the back of the building and it put him on Exchange Place. He made the left onto Broadway and worked across the lanes in time for the right into the Trinity Street dogleg. He followed it west and turned, coming up on the World Trade Center from the south. Traffic was slow past Trinity Church, because two lanes were blocked by a police tow truck stopped alongside an NYPD cruiser parked at the curb. Cops were peering into the windows, as if they were unsure about something. He eased past and accelerated. Slowed and pulled in again alongside the plaza. His eyes were fixed at street level, and the giant towers loomed over him unseen. He sat with the motor running, silent and deferential.
“I’ll be waiting here,” he said.
Jodie got out of the car and paused on the sidewalk. The plaza was wide and crowded. It was five minutes to two, and the lunch crowd was returning to work. She felt unsettled. She would be walking through a public space without Reacher watching over her, for the first time since things went crazy. She glanced around and joined a knot of hurrying people and walked with them all the way to the south tower.
The address in the file was the eighty-eighth floor. She joined the line for the express elevator behind a medium-sized man in an ill-fitting black suit. He was carrying a cheap briefcase upholstered with brown plastic stamped to make it look like crocodile skin. She squeezed into the elevator behind him. The car was full and people were calling their floor numbers to the woman nearest the buttons. The guy in the bad suit asked for eighty-eight. Jodie said nothing.
The car stopped at most floors in its zone and people jostled out. Progress was slow. It was dead-on two o’clock when the car arrived on eighty-eight. Jodie stepped out. The guy in the bad suit stepped out behind her. They were in a deserted corridor. Undistinguished closed doors led into office suites. Jodie went one way and the guy in the suit went the other, both of them looking at the plates fixed next to the doors. They met up again in front of an oak slab marked Cayman Corporate Trust. There was a wired-glass porthole set off-center in it. Jodie glanced through it and the guy in the suit leaned past her and pulled it open.
“We in the same meeting?” Jodie asked, surprised.
She followed him inside to a brass-and-oak reception area. There were office smells. Hot chemicals from copying machines, stewed coffee somewhere. The guy in the suit turned back to her and nodded.
“I guess we are,” he said.
She stuck out her hand as she walked.
“I’m Jodie Jacob,” she said. “Spencer Gutman. For the creditor.”
The guy walked backward and juggled his plastic briefcase into his left and smiled and shook hands with her.
“I’m David Forster,” he said. “Forster and Abelstein.”
They were at the reception counter. She stopped and stared at him.
“No, you’re not,” she said blankly. “I know David very well.”
The guy looked suddenly tense. The lobby went silent. She turned the other way and saw the guy she had last seen clinging to the door handle of her Bravada as Reacher hauled away from the collision on Broadway. He was sitting there calmly behind the counter, looking straight back at her. His left hand moved and touched a button. In the silence she heard a click from the entrance door. Then his right hand moved. It went down empty and came back up with a gun the color of dull metal. It had a wide barrel like a tube and a metal handgrip. The barrel was more than a foot long. The guy in the bad suit dropped his plastic case and jerked his hands in the air. Jodie stared at the weapon and thought: but
The guy holding it moved his left hand again and hit another button. The door to the inner office opened. The man who had crashed the Suburban into them was standing there framed in the doorway. He had another gun in his hand. Jodie recognized the type from movies she’d seen. It was an automatic pistol. On the cinema screen it fired loud bullets that smashed you six feet backward. The Suburban driver was holding it steady on a point to her left and the other guy’s right, like he was ready to jerk his wrist either way.
The guy with the shotgun came out from behind the counter and pushed past Jodie. Went up behind the guy with the bad suit and rammed the shotgun barrel into the small of his back. There was a hard sound, metal on metal, muffled by cloth. The guy with the shotgun put his hand up under the jacket and came out with a big chromium revolver. He held it up, like an exhibit.
“Unusual accessory for a lawyer,” the man in the doorway said.
“He’s not a lawyer,” his partner said. “The woman says she knows David Forster very well and this ain’t him.”
The man in the doorway nodded.
“My name is Tony,” he said. “Come inside, both of you, please.”
He stepped to one side and covered Jodie with the automatic pistol while his partner pushed the guy claiming to be Forster in through the open door. Then he beckoned with the gun and Jodie found herself walking toward him. He stepped close and pushed her through the door with a hand flat on her back. She stumbled once and regained her balance. Inside was a big office, spacious and square. Dim light from shaded windows. There was living-room furniture arranged in front of a desk. Three identical sofas, with lamp tables. A huge brass-and-glass coffee table filled the space between the sofas. There were two people sitting on the left-hand sofa. A man and a woman. The man wore an immaculate suit and tie. The woman wore a wrinkled silk party dress. The man looked up, blankly. The woman looked up in terror.
There was a man at the desk. He was sitting in the gloom, in a leather chair. He was maybe fifty-five years old. Jodie stared at him. His face was divided roughly in two, like an arbitrary decision, like a map of the western states. On the right was lined skin and thinning gray hair. On the left was scar tissue, pink and thick and shiny like an unfinished plastic model of a monster’s head. The scars touched his eye, and the lid was a ball of pink tissue, like a mangled thumb.
He was wearing a neat suit, which fell over broad shoulders and a wide chest. His left arm was laid comfortably on the desk. There was the cuff of a white shirt, snowy in the gloom, and a manicured hand, palm down, the fingers tapping an imperceptible rhythm on the desktop. His right arm was laid exactly symmetrical with his left. There was the same fine summer-weight wool of the suit coat, and the same snowy white shirt cuff, but they were collapsed and empty. There was no hand. Just a simple steel hook protruding at a shallow angle, resting on the wood. It was curved and polished like a miniature version of a sculpture from a public garden.
