‘Thanks,’ he said.
She helped him into the suit and came around in front of him and tweaked the lapels.
‘Your hair,’ she said.
He went to the mirror and saw the man he used to be in another life. He used his fingers and smoothed his hair into place. The bathroom door opened again and Tony stepped inside. He was holding the Mont Blanc fountain pen.
‘We’ll lend this back to you, so you can sign the transfer.’
Chester nodded and took the pen and slipped it into his jacket.
‘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 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 seat.
‘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 the 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 outfitters 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 on to 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 kerb. 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