Night School (5 page)

They took Lufthansa in the
early evening, sitting together among mostly young people traveling mostly alone, some of them scruffy, some of them weird, some of them like a postgraduate field trip. The flight got them back to the States two hours after they left Germany, in the middle of the evening, eight hours in the air minus six time zones, and they collected the old Caprice from the short-term garage, and drove it through the dark to McLean, and parked it next to the newer Caprices, which looked like they hadn’t been moved. Next to them were two black vans. They went inside and found everyone including Ratcliffe and Sinclair crammed in the office. Waiting for them. But they hadn’t been waiting long. Rank had its advantages. Ratcliffe said, “You’re right on time. The FAA kept us informed about Lufthansa, and the police kept us informed about the traffic.”

Reacher said, “What have we missed?”

Ratcliffe said, “A piece of the puzzle. What do you know about computers?”

“I saw one once.”

“They all have a thing inside that sets the date and the time. A little circuit. Very basic, very cheap, and developed a very long time ago, back when punch cards were the gold standard and data had to be squeezed into eighty columns only. To save bits they wrote the year as two digits, not four. As in, 1960 was written as 60. 1961 was 61. And so on. They had to save space. All well and good. Except that was then and this is now, and before we know it 1999 is going to change to 2000, and no one knows if the two-digit systems will roll over properly. They might think it’s 1900 again. Or 19,100. Or zero. Or they might freeze solid. There could be catastrophic failures all around the world. We could lose utilities and infrastructure. Cities could go dark. Banks could crash. You could lose all your money in a puff of smoke. Not even smoke.”

Reacher said, “I don’t have any money.”

“But you get the point.”

“Who designed the circuit? What do they say?”

“They’re all either long retired or long dead. And they didn’t expect the programs to last more than a few years anyway. So there’s no documentation. It was just a bunch of geeks standing around a lab bench, trying to figure things out. No one remembers the exact details. No one is smart enough to work it out again backward. And there’s a feeling they might have misunderstood the Gregorian calendar. They might have forgotten 2000 is a leap year. Normally anything divisible by a hundred isn’t. But something divisible by four hundred is. So it’s a real mess.”

“How does this relate?”

“The world is increasingly dependent on computers. The internet could be a big thing by the year 2000. Which would multiply the problem, because everything would be connected to everything else. So the stakes are getting higher. People are starting to worry. They’re waking up to the dangers. In response smart entrepreneurs are trying to write software patches.”

“Which are what?”

“Like magic bullets. You install their new code and you fix your problem. There’s a lot of money to be made. The market is huge. Millions of people all around the world need to get this done ahead of time. It’s urgent. So urgent we anticipate people will install first and think second. Which leaves them vulnerable.”

“To what?”

“Another fragment of conversation. We picked up a whisper there’s a finished patch for sale. Supposedly it looks good, but it isn’t. It’s a Trojan Horse. Like a virus or a worm, but not exactly. It’s a four-digit calendar, but it can be paused remotely, on command. Through the internet. Which gets bigger every day. Computers all over the world will crash. Government, utilities, corporations and individuals. Think of the power that gives a person. Think of the chaos. Think of the blackmail potential. Someone would pay a hundred million for that kind of capability.”

“That’s a stretch,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? People would pay a hundred million for a lot of things. Why assume this thing in particular?”

Better to hear the pitch all the way through.

Ratcliffe said, “It takes a certain type of talent to write a thing like that. A certain type of mind, too. A kind of outlaw sensibility. Not that they see it that way, of course. It’s more of a hipster thing with them. Not an uncommon type, they tell me, among software programmers. And about four hundred of them just got together at an overseas trade convention. Four hundred of the hippest geeks in the world. About half of them were Americans.”

“Where?”

“The convention was in Hamburg, Germany. They were there while you were there. The convention broke up this morning. They all left town today.”

Reacher nodded. “I think we saw some of them on the plane. Young and scruffy.”

“But the convention was still in full swing on the day of the messenger’s rendezvous. There were two hundred American programmers right there in town. Maybe one of them slipped away for an hour.”

Reacher said nothing.

Ratcliffe said, “Our people tell me such conventions in Western Europe have a different flavor. They tend to attract the oddballs and the radicals.”

Ratcliffe left after
that, with his bodyguards, in his black van. Sinclair continued the briefing. She said the focus would switch to computer programmers. She said the FBI had a new unit dedicated to such matters. Waterman would liaise with it, but only through her or Ratcliffe or the president, or with anyone else who might be useful, but again, not directly. White would identify all two hundred Americans, and start background checks. Reacher would have no immediate role, but should remain on the premises. Just in case. The Department of Defense had computers, and programmers, and in fact the first real concerns about the date issue had come from there. Maybe the bad guy had been drumming up demand ahead of arranging supply.

Waterman and White went to work, but Reacher stayed in the office. Him and Sinclair, all alone. She looked at him, top to bottom, and said, “Is there a question you would like to ask me?”

He thought:
Did you eat dinner yet?
She was in another black dress, knee length, shaped to fit pretty tight, with more dark nylons and more good shoes. And the face and the hair, the unaffected style, combed with her fingers. And no wedding band.

But he said, “You really think this is something that guys who climb ropes in Yemen would like to buy?”

“We don’t see why not. They’re not unsophisticated. In a way the price tag proves it. That’s either a rogue corporation’s support, or a rogue government’s backing, or access to a very rich family’s capital. Any of which would suggest familiarity with modernity, certainly including computer systems.”

“That’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’re talking yourself into it.”

“What’s your point?”

“Improvisation is a good thing. But panic is a bad thing. You’re clutching at straws. You might be wrong. What happened to leave no stone unturned?”

“Do you have another viable line of inquiry?”

“Not as yet.”

Sinclair asked, “What happened in Hamburg?”

“Not much,” Reacher said. “We saw the apartment. How’s the Iranian?”

“He’s fine. He checked in this morning. Nothing doing. Some local excitement four streets away. A prostitute was murdered.”

“We saw it,” Reacher said. “We saw a lot of things. Including way too many destinations. We can’t start at the far end. We’re going to have to follow the messenger from the apartment to the meeting.”

“Too risky.”

“No other way.”

“You could find the American before the meeting even rolls around. That would be another way. And probably a better way for all concerned.”

“You’re getting pressure from above.”

“The administration would be very pleased to wrap it up soon, yes.”

“Hence it feels good to narrow it down. It feels like progress. Two hundred feels better than two hundred thousand. I understand that. But what feels good isn’t always the smart play.”

Sinclair was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “OK, when the others don’t need you, you’re free to work on your own.”

Which was a
restriction of a different sort. The gravity squeezed out the freedom. It felt like one strike and you’re out. One attempt at a theory.

Neagley said, “Every avenue comes back to the exact same question. What is the guy selling?”

Reacher said, “I agree.”

“So what is it?”

“You wrote the list.”

“I didn’t. The list is blank. What kind of intelligence would they want from us? What’s worth a hundred million dollars to them? They already know what they need to know. They can read it in the newspaper. Our army is bigger than their army. End of story. If it comes to it, we’ll kick their ass. Why would they spend a hundred million dollars to find out precisely how and how bad? What good would that do them?”

“Hardware, then.”

“But what? Things are either too cheap and plentiful or else they need a whole regiment of engineers to make them work. There’s no middle ground. A hundred million is a weird price point.”

Reacher nodded. “I said the same thing to White. He thought tanks and planes.”

“What hardware would they want from us? Give me one good example. Something designed for use in the field, obviously, in the heat of battle, by an average infantry soldier. Because that’s the standard they must be aiming for. Something simple, rugged, and reliable. Something with a big red switch. And a big yellow arrow pointing forward. Because they don’t have specialist training or a regiment of engineers.”

“There are lots of things.”

“I agree. Man-portable shoulder-launch ground-to-air missiles would be useful. They could bring down civilian airliners. Over cities. Except they already have thousands. We gave thousands to the rebels and the Soviets left thousands behind. And now the new Russia is busy selling the thousands they brought back. And if that’s not enough they can get cheap knock-offs from China. Or North Korea. It would be physically impossible to spend a hundred million dollars on shoulder-launch missiles. They’re too common. Too cheap. It’s Economics 101. It would be like spending a hundred million dollars on dirt.”

“What, then?”

“There’s nothing. We have no theory.”

Ten o’clock in the evening, in McLean, Virginia.

Which was half
past seven the next morning in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The messenger was once again waiting in the antechamber. Early sun was coming in a high window, catching motes of dust, and stirring newborn flies. Tea was brewing in the kitchen.

Eventually the messenger was led to the same small hot room. It too had a high window, with a shaft of morning sun, and dancing dust, and waking flies. The same two men sat below the sunbeam, on the same two pillows. Both bearded, one short and fat, one tall and lean, both in the same plain white robes and the same plain white turbans.

The tall man said, “You are to leave today with our answer.”

The messenger inclined his head, respectfully.

The tall man said, “The way of the world is to bargain. But we’re not buying camels. So our answer is simple.”

The messenger inclined his head again, and turned it a little, as if presenting his ear.

The tall man said, “Tell the American we will pay his price.”

Four hours later it was
eight o’clock in the morning in
Hamburg, Germany, and the city’s chief medical examiner was starting work at the central morgue. He had completed his autopsy late the previous evening. Unpaid overtime, but homicide was rare, and careers could be built. Now he wanted to review his notes before presenting his conclusions.

The victim was a tall pale-skinned Caucasian female. According to her papers she had been thirty-six years and eight months old at the time of her death. Which was consistent with the physical evidence. The woman had been in good shape. A dieter, judging by her low body fat. A gym member, judging by her muscle tone. She had eaten a couscous salad about six hours prior to death, and had swallowed semen about an hour before. Then she had been strangled from behind, savagely, by a right-handed assailant. The tissue damage was marginally greater on the right side, indicating stronger fingers.

The victim’s pale skin had permitted perimortem bruising in other locations. Not dramatic, but well defined. In particular there were incipient contusions on the backs of her elbows, from her assailant’s knees. He had pinned her down, straddling her, riding her like a pony. And her buttocks were faintly bruised, from the pressure of his. He was bony, in the medical examiner’s opinion. Strong, but wiry. Sharp-edged, in the hands, and at the knees. A skinny-ass dude, they would say on the television. Possibly charged with energy, possibly nervous in his manner, and capable of violent outbursts.

A picture was emerging.

And best of all, the linear measurement between the bruises on the victim’s buttocks and on her elbows was self-evidently the precise distance between the sharp base of the assailant’s pelvic girdle and his kneecaps. Which after standard deductions for the joints in question gave the precise length of his femur. And the length of the femur was considered an infallible guide to a person’s height.

The assailant was one meter seventy-three tall. In American, five feet eight inches. And American had to be quoted, because the victim was a prostitute. GIs still had money to spend. But either way, not a dwarf and not a giant.

The medical examiner clipped a personal note to the back of the file. Not standard practice, but he was a little caught up in the excitement. The note said in his opinion the guilty party was a right-handed man of average height, probably less than average weight, with pronounced bone structure, and a strong physique, but wiry rather than muscular. Like a long-distance runner, perhaps.

Then the medical examiner sealed the file in an envelope, and asked for it to be biked immediately to the chief of detectives, in the city’s police department.

The chief of
detectives was not thrilled to get it. Not at first. He got more excited later. His name was Griezman. He was considered successful. His department’s ninety-percent record was impressive. But on this occasion Griezman didn’t want impressive. He wanted a short investigation, and then he wanted the case far away in the distance, on the other side of the divide, firmly in the ten percent of cold and forgotten failures.

He had read the notes from his detectives. One said normally the victim drove from her home to the hotel, late in the evening, and parked in the garage, and worked the bar. But that night no one had seen her arrive. Normally the client would use his own hotel room. Normally she would leave in the middle of the night, or sometimes early the next morning. The bartenders and the housekeeping staff might be able to generate a list of men she had been seen with.

Another note said it was unusual for her to entertain clients at her own apartment. Unusual for hotel hookers generally. Perhaps the client had been a repeat customer. Known and trusted. In which case close investigation of regular clients might pay dividends. Over the past year or two, perhaps. It was assumed the relationship had begun in the bar. Perhaps the hotel workers would remember the original meeting. Most of them had been there a very long time.

A third note said she was extremely expensive.

Griezman closed his eyes.

He already knew that. And he knew she worked the bar. The notes were wrong in some respects. It wasn’t unusual for her to use her own apartment. Not at all. Sometimes quite naturally she would meet people in the bar who weren’t staying in the hotel. Local gentlemen, perhaps unwinding after a hard day at the office. With homes of their own nearby, but of course those could not be used. Because of wives, and families, and so on.

Local gentlemen, like himself.

He had been her client. Almost a year earlier. Three times. OK, four. All at her place. The first time from the hotel, indeed.
What’s your room number? I’m not actually staying here. I’m just here for a drink
. They had gone in separate cars. He had an insurance policy, recently matured and paid out, with a bonus, all of it supposed to go in the savings account. For the children. And now she was dead. Murdered. He would be on the list of men she had been seen with. Close investigation would be disastrous. Someone would remember. He would be fired, obviously. And divorced, of course. And shamed.

He opened the medical examiner’s envelope. He read the cold, hard facts. He knew that neck. It was long and slender and exquisitely pale. He knew she liked couscous. He knew she swallowed.

He turned the last page and saw the personal note.
Right-handed, average height, underweight, pronounced bone structure, wiry rather than muscular.

Like a long-distance runner
.

Griezman smiled.

He was two meters tall, and weighed 136 kilograms. Six feet six inches and three hundred pounds, in American. Most of it fat. He ate sausage and mashed potatoes for breakfast. The last time he had seen a bone had been on an X-ray.

Nothing like a long-distance runner.

He told his secretary to call a meeting. His team came in. His detectives. He said, “It’s time to set some new parameters. Let’s say the victim drove to the hotel, but got picked up before she got in the door. A chance meeting in the garage itself, maybe. Possibly a regular client. Possibly a long-time-no-see thing. Which tells us he’s rich enough for her, but doesn’t stay in the hotel, or she’d have suggested his room as first preference. So he was either local or bunking elsewhere. The question is, did he have a car? Probably, because he was in the garage. But possibly not, because the garage is also a shortcut to the other side of the block. In which case the victim might have driven him to her home herself. In which case we should fingerprint the inside of her car. The door handles and the seat belt latch at least.”

His detectives made notes.

Then Griezman said, “And best of all we now have really solid intelligence from the coroner. The perpetrator is average height and skinny. That’s scientific information. And that’s what we’re looking for. Nothing else. Forget the past clients, unless they happen to be average height and skinny. We’re not interested in anyone else. No doubt a waste of time, because no doubt he’s a sailor with back pay, long gone over the ocean, but we have to be seen to do something. But focus. Don’t waste time. Average height, skinny, his prints in her car. Check those boxes. Nothing else. No wild goose chases. Save your energy for the next thing.”

The detectives filed out, and Griezman breathed out, and leaned back in his chair.

At that moment
the American was in Amsterdam, showering. He had gotten up late. He was in a hotel one street away from prime time. It was small and clean and some of the guests were airline pilots. It was that kind of place. He had been down for coffee and had seen the German papers in the breakfast room. No headlines. They were nowhere. He was safe.

At that moment
the messenger was in a Toyota pick-up truck, just five miles into three hundred by road. To be followed by four separate airports, and three safe houses. All arduous, but the worst came first. The road was rough. Hard on the truck, and hard on the passenger. It was fatiguing. In places it was barely a road at all. In places it was more like an extinct riverbed. But such was the price of seclusion.

The sun rolled
west, first lighting up the Delaware coast, and then the eastern shore of Maryland, and then D.C. itself, the city temporarily magnificent in the early light, as if designed specifically for that single moment of the day. Then dawn reached McLean, and the catering truck arrived in the corporate park, with coffee and breakfast. Everyone was awake and waiting. Landry and Vanderbilt and Neagley were quartered in the second of the three buildings on the Educational Solutions campus. Same deal, beds where desks had been. The NSC guys played team tag out of the third building, always one on duty, always one asleep.

White said, “All but ten of the programmers are either back in the States already or ticketed en route. The missing ten are expats. They live in Europe and Asia. One of them lives right there in Hamburg.”

“Congratulations,” Reacher said. “You cracked the case.”

“It’s a question of priority order. Is an expat more likely to be a bad guy or not? Should we look at them first or second?”

“Who is the guy in Hamburg?”

“We have a photograph. He’s a counterculture guy. Into computers early. He says sooner or later they’ll make the world more democratic. Which means he steals and breaks things and calls it politics, not crime. Or performance art.”

Vanderbilt dug out the picture. It was a head and shoulders shot at the top left of a page torn out of a magazine. An opinion piece, in what felt like an underground journal. The photograph was of a skinny white guy with a huge shock of hair. Like he had his finger in an outlet. Part mad professor, part merry prankster. He was forty years old.

White said, “The Hamburg head of station did a little walking surveillance. The guy isn’t home right now.”

Reacher said, “If he lives there, why did he schedule the first rendezvous while the convention was in town? That’s a busy week. And there are folks who know him. They might notice. Better to do it before or after.”

“Therefore in your opinion the timing proves it was a visitor to the convention.”

“In my opinion this whole thing is Alice in Wonderland.”

“As of now it’s all we’ve got.”

Reacher said, “How far do these messengers travel?”

“Not as far as here. Not yet. Not as far as we know. But they go all through Western Europe, and Scandinavia, and North Africa. And the Middle East, of course.”

“So the best you can do is keep track of the programmers who made it home, and wait for one of them to go back again for the second rendezvous. For the yes or no answer. But not necessarily to Hamburg. Your theory says Hamburg was convenient the first time around because of the convention. Therefore somewhere else might be more convenient the second time around. Paris, or London. Or Marrakesh. Your theory makes no prediction as to location.”

“We’ll know what ticket the guy buys. We’ll know where he’s headed.”

“He’ll buy at the last minute.”

“We’ll still know what plane he gets on.”

“But too late. What are you going to do then? Get the next flight out and arrive four hours after the deal is done?”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?”

“Your theory says at the same time the messenger will also be moving. Toward the same destination.”

“We don’t know what name he’ll be using or where he’ll be coming from. Or what passport he’ll be using. Pakistani, possibly. Or British. Or French. Too many variables. We looked back two days before the first rendezvous, and there were five hundred plausible contenders through the Hamburg airport alone. We can’t tell one from the other on paper. We wouldn’t know who to watch.”

“Drink more coffee,” Reacher said. “That usually fixes things up.”

In Hamburg it
was lunch time, and Chief of Detectives Griezman was minutes away from a fine spread in a cellar restaurant not far from his office. But first he had work to finish. Part of his role as chief was to pass on intelligence to those who needed it. Like an editor, or a curator. Someone had to be responsible. Someone’s fat ass had to get fired if the dots didn’t join up afterward. That’s why he got the big bucks, as they said on the television.

Naturally he tended toward caution. Better safe than sorry. Practically everything got sent somewhere. Before lunch every day. He scanned carbons and Xeroxes and made separate labeled piles, for this agency and that. His secretary had them biked out, while he was eating.

Near the top of the pile was another report from the prostitute investigation. Among the names gathered during the door-to-door inquiries in her street were a U.S. Army major and a noncommissioned officer who claimed to be there for the purposes of tourism. The reporting officer had followed up by checking with border control records at the airport. He had discovered both Americans had indeed arrived that morning, as claimed. Therefore both could be eliminated as suspects, but the reporting officer wished to point out they didn’t look like tourists.

Better safe than sorry. Griezman tossed the report into the space labeled U.S. Army Command HQ Stuttgart, where it was so far the only entry of the day.

Then he read a routine one-paragraph cover-your-ass statement from the uniformed branch. It said several days ago an individual member of the public had contacted them by telephone to report that in the late afternoon he had seen an American in conversation with a dark-skinned man probably from the Middle East, in a bar just out from downtown. The member of the public further claimed the dark-skinned man was acting in an agitated manner, no doubt due to life or death secrets related to regional unrest due to historic inequities. But local officers were quick to advise that the informant in question was a known paranoid and fanatic, known for making frequent phone calls of similar doomsday content, and anyway the Middle Easterner was entitled to act in an agitated manner, because it was a hardcore bar, and his presence would not have been welcomed or long tolerated. All that said, the matter was still considered worthy of recording.