"He makes out like he's the big dog. He told me he had no rivals or partners."
"Then he was lying. Or maybe in a sense he was telling the truth. Because he's at the bottom of the pile. Strictly speaking he has no equals. Only superiors."
"Was he subcontracting in Burkina Faso, too?" Reacher asked.
"He must have been," Pauling said. "Otherwise why isn't he in the records as a principal?"
"Was our government involved there?"
"It's possible. Certainly my official friend seems a little tense."
Reacher nodded. "That's why he's helping, isn't it? This is not one MP to another. This is a bureaucracy trying to control the situation. Trying to manage the flow of information. This is someone deciding to feed us stuff privately so we don't go blundering about and making a lot of noise in public."
Pauling said nothing. Then her phone went off again. She tried to pick it up with the charger attached but the wire was too short. She unclipped it and answered. Listened for fifteen seconds and turned to a new page in her pad and wrote a dollar sign, and then two numbers, and then six zeroes. She clicked off the phone and spun the pad around so that Reacher could see what she had written.
"Twenty-one million dollars," she said. "In cash. That's how rich Lane got in Africa."
"You were right," Reacher said. "Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor."
Pauling nodded. "The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government's central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work."
"Beggars can't be choosers," Reacher said.
Then he said: "OK."
"OK what?"
"What's half of twenty-one?"
"Ten and a half."
"Exactly. Kate's ransom was exactly half of the Burkina Faso payment."
Silence in the room.
"Ten and a half million dollars," Reacher said. "It always was a weird amount. But now it makes some kind of sense. Lane probably skimmed fifty percent as his profit. So Hobart got home and figured he was entitled to Lane's share for his suffering."
"Reasonable," Pauling said.
"I would have wanted more," Reacher said. "I would have wanted all of it."
Pauling slid her fingernail down the fine print on the H page of the phone book and used the speaker to try the first two Hobart numbers again. She got the same two answering machines. She hung up. Her little office went quiet. Then her cell buzzed again. This time she unclipped the charger first and flipped the phone open. Said her name and listened for a moment and then turned to another fresh page in her yellow pad and wrote just three lines.
Then she closed her phone.
"We have his address," she said.
Chapter 35
PAULING SAID, "HOBART moved in with his sister. To a building on Hudson Street that I'm betting is on the block between Clarkson and Leroy."
"A married sister," Reacher said. "Otherwise we would have found her name in the phone book."
"Widowed," Pauling said. "I guess she kept her married name, but she lives alone now. Or at least she did, until her brother came home from Africa."
The widowed sister was called Dee Marie Graziano and she was right there in the phone book at an address on Hudson. Pauling dialed up a city tax database and confirmed her domicile.
"Rent-stabilized," she said. "Been there ten years. Even with the cheap lease it's going to be a small place." She copied Dee Marie's Social Security number and pasted it into a box in a different database. "Thirty-eight years old. Marginal income. Doesn't work much. Doesn't even get close to paying federal income taxes. Her late husband was a Marine, too. Lance Corporal Vincent Peter Graziano. He died three years ago."
"In Iraq?"
"I can't tell." Pauling closed the databases and opened Google and typed Dee Marie Graziano. Hit the return key. Glanced at the results and something about them made her click off Google and open LexisNexis. The screen rolled down and came up with a whole page of citations.
"Well, look at this," she said.
"Tell me," Reacher said.
"She sued the government. State and the DoD."
"For what?"
"For news about her brother."
Pauling hit the print button and fed Reacher the pages one by one as they came off the machine. He read the hard copy and she read the screen. Dee Marie Graziano had waged a five-year campaign to find out what had happened to her brother Clay James Hobart. It had been a long, hard, bitter campaign. That was for sure. At the outset Hobart's employer Edward Lane of Operational Security Consultants had signed an affidavit swearing that Hobart had been a subcontractor for the United States Government at the relevant time. So Dee Marie had gone ahead and petitioned her congressman and both her senators. She had called out of state to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate. She had written to newspapers and talked to journalists. She had been prepped for the Larry King show but had been canceled prior to the recording. She had hired an investigator, briefly. Finally she had found a pro bono lawyer and sued the Department of Defense. The Pentagon had denied any knowledge of Clay James Hobart's activities subsequent to his last day in a USMC uniform. Then Dee Marie had sued the Department of State. Some fifth-rung State lawyer had come back and promised that Hobart would be put on file as a tourist missing in West Africa. So Dee Marie had gone back to pestering journalists and had filed a string of Freedom of Information Act petitions. More than half of them had already been denied and the others were still choked in red tape.
"She was really going at it," Pauling said. "Wasn't she? Metaphorically she was lighting a candle for her brother every single day for five years."
"Like Patti Joseph," Reacher said. "This is a tale of two sisters."
"The Pentagon knew Hobart was alive after twelve months. And they knew where he was. But they kept quiet for four years. They let this poor woman suffer."
"What was she going to do anyway? Lock and load and go to Africa and rescue him single-handed? Bring him back to stand trial for Anne Lane's homicide?"
"There was never any evidence against him."
"Whatever, keeping her in the dark was probably the best policy."
"Spoken like a true military man."
"Like the FBI is a fount of free information?"
"She could have gone over there and petitioned the new government in Burkina Faso personally."
"That only works in the movies."
"You're very cynical, you know that?"
"I don't have a cynical bone in my body. I'm realistic, is all. Shit happens."
Pauling went quiet.
"What?" Reacher said.
"You said lock and load. You said Dee Marie could lock and load and go to Africa."
"No, I said she couldn't."
"But we agree that Hobart picked up a new partner, right?" she said. "As soon as he got back? One that he trusts, and real fast?"
"Clearly," Reacher said.
"Could it be the sister?"
Reacher said nothing.
"The trust would be there," Pauling said. "Wouldn't it? Automatically? And she was there, which would explain the speed. And the commitment would have been there, on her part. Commitment, and a lot of anger. So is it possible that the voice you heard on the car phone was a woman?"