The Hard Way (Page 57)

He asked Pauling, "Have you been here before?"

"We did exchange training with Scotland Yard," she said.

"That could be useful."

"It was a million years ago."

"Where did you stay?"

"They put us up in a college dormitory."

"You know any hotels?"

"Do you?"

"Not the sort where they let you in wearing four hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. Mostly the sort where you wear your shoes in bed."

"We can’t stay anywhere close to Lane and his guys. We can’t be associated with him. Not if we’re going to do something to him."

"That’s for sure."

"What about somewhere really great? Like the Ritz?"

"That’s the opposite problem. Four hundred dollars is too shabby for them. And we need to stay low-profile. We need the kind of place where they don’t look at your passport and they let you pay cash. Bayswater, maybe. West of downtown, a clear run back to the airport afterward."

Reacher turned to the window again and saw Windsor Castle slide by below. And a wide six-lane east-west highway with slow traffic driving on the left. Then suburbs, two-family houses, curving roads, tiny green back yards, garden sheds, and then acres of airport parking full of small cars, many of them red. Then the airport fence. Then the chevrons at the start of the runway. Close to the ground the plane seemed huge again after feeling cramped for seven hours. After being a narrow tube it became a two-hundred-ton monster doing two hundred miles an hour. It landed hard and roared and braked and then suddenly it was quiet and docile again, rolling slowly toward the terminal. The purser welcomed the passengers to London over the public address system and Reacher turned and looked across the cabin at the exit door. Taylor’s first few steps would be easy enough to follow. After baggage claim and the taxi rank the job would get a whole lot harder. Harder, but maybe not impossible.

"We’ll get by," he said, even though Pauling hadn’t spoken to him.

Chapter 57

THEY FILLED IN landing cards and had their passports stamped by an official in a gray suit. My name on a piece of English paper, Reacher thought. Not good. But there was no alternative. And his name was already on the airline passenger manifest, which could apparently get faxed all over the place at the drop of a hat. They waited at the carousel for Pauling’s bag and then Reacher got stopped in Customs not because he had suspicious luggage but because he had none at all. Which made the guy stopping him a Special Branch cop or an MI5 agent in disguise, Reacher thought, not a real Customs guy. Traveling light was clearly a red flag. The detention was brief and the questions were casual, but the guy got a good look at his face and was all over his passport. Not good.

Pauling changed a wad of the O-Town dollars at a Travelex booth and they found the fast train to Paddington Station. Paddington was a good first stop, Reacher figured. His kind of an area. Convenient for the Bayswater hotels, full of trash and hookers. Not that he expected to find Taylor there. Or anywhere close. But it would make a good anonymous base camp. The railroad company promised the ride into town would be fifteen minutes, but it turned out to be closer to twenty. They came out to the street in central London just before twelve noon. West 4th Street to Eastbourne Terrace in ten short hours. Planes, trains, and automobiles.

At street level that part of London was bright and fresh and cold and to a stranger’s eyes it seemed full of trees. The buildings were low and had old cores and sagging roofs but most of them had new frontages tacked on to disguise age and disrepair. Most things were chains or franchises except for the ethnic take-out food stores and the town car services, which still seemed to be mom-and-pop operations. Or cousin-and-cousin. The roads had good smooth blacktop heavily printed with instructions for drivers and pedestrians. The pedestrians were warned to Look Left or Look Right at every possible curb and the drivers were guided by elaborate lines and arrows and crosshatching and Slow signs anywhere the direction deviated from absolutely straight, which was just about everywhere. In some places there was more white on the road than black. The welfare state, Reacher thought. It sure as hell takes care of you.

He carried Pauling’s bag for her and they walked south and east toward Sussex Gardens. From previous trips he recalled groups of row houses joined together into cheap hotels, on Westbourne Terrace, Gloucester Terrace, Lancaster Gate. The kind of places that had thick crusted carpet in the hallways and thick scarred paint on the millwork and four meaningless symbols lit up above the front doors as if some responsible standards agency had evaluated the offered services and found them to be pleasing. Pauling rejected the first two places he found before understanding that there wasn’t going to be anything better just around the next corner. So she gave up and agreed to the third, which was four neighboring townhouses knocked through to make a single long sloping not-quite-aligned building with a name seemingly picked at random from a selection of London tourist-trade hot-button buzzwords: Buckingham Suites. The desk guy was from Eastern Europe and was happy to take cash. The rate was cheap for London, if expensive for anyplace else in the world. There was no register. The Suites part of the name seemed to be justified by the presence of a small bathroom and a small table in each room. The bed was a queen with a green nylon counterpane. Beyond the bed and the bathroom and the table there wasn’t a whole lot of space left.

"We won’t be here long," Reacher said.

"It’s fine," Pauling said.

She didn’t unpack. Just propped her suitcase open on the floor and looked like she planned to live out of it. Reacher kept his toothbrush in his pocket. He sat on the bed while Pauling washed up. Then she came out of the bathroom and moved to the window and stood with her head tilted up, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys opposite.

"Nearly ninety-five thousand square miles," she said. "That’s what’s out there."

"Smaller than Oregon," he said.

"Oregon has three and a half million people. The U.K. has sixty million."

"Harder to hide here, then. You’ve always got a nosy neighbor."

"Where do we start?"

"With a nap."

"You want to sleep?"

"Well, afterward."

She smiled. It was like the sun coming out.

"We’ll always have Bayswater," she said.

Sex and jet lag kept them asleep until four. Their one day’s start, mostly gone.

"Let’s get going," Reacher said. "Let’s call on the sisterhood."

So Pauling got up and fetched her purse and took out a small device that Reacher hadn’t seen her use before. An electronic organizer. A Palm Pilot. She called up a directory and scrolled down a screen and found a name and an address.

"Gray’s Inn Road," she said. "Is that near here?"

"I don’t think so," Reacher said. "I think it’s east of here. Nearer the business district. Maybe where the lawyers are."

"That would make sense."

"Anyone closer?"

"These people are supposed to be good."

"We can get there on the subway, I guess. The Central Line, I think. To Chancery Lane. I should have bought a derby and an umbrella. I would have fit right in."

"I don’t think you would have. Those City people are very civilized." She rolled over on the bed and dialed the phone on the night table. Reacher heard the foreign ring tone from the earpiece, a double purr instead of a single. Then he heard someone pick up and he listened to Pauling’s end of the conversation. She explained who she was, temporarily in town, a New York private investigator, ex-FBI, a member of some kind of an international organization, and she gave a contact name, and she asked for a courtesy appointment. The person on the other end must have agreed readily enough because she asked, "How does six o’clock suit you?" and then said nothing more than "OK, thank you, six o’clock it is," and hung up.