A reasonably short sequence, but St Louis and Virginia would have been major delays. Reacher’s guess was getting good information out of the records
office would take three days, maybe four, for a citizen like Costello. The Virginia bank might not have been any quicker. Favours aren’t necessarily granted immediately. The timing has got to be right. Call it a total of seven days’ bureaucratic fudge, separated by a day’s thinking time, plus a day at the start and a day at the end. Maybe altogether ten days since Mrs Jacob set the whole thing in motion.
He clicked on a subdirectory labelled invoices. The right-hand side of the screen came up with a long field of file names, stacked alphabetically. He ran the cursor down the list and spooled them up from the bottom. No Jacob in the Js. Mostly they were just initials, long acronyms maybe standing for law firm names. He checked the dates. Nothing from exactly ten days ago. But there was one nine days old. Maybe Costello was faster than he thought, or maybe his secretary was slower. It was labelled sgr&t-09. He clicked on it and the hard drive chattered and the screen came up with a thousand-dollar retainer against a missing persons inquiry, billed to a Wall Street firm called Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot. There was a billing address, but no phone number.
He quit file manager and entered the database. Searched for sgr&t again and came up with a page showing the same address, but this time with numbers for phone, fax, telex and e-mail. He leaned down and used his fingers and thumb to pull a couple of tissues from the secretary’s pack. Wrapped one around the telephone receiver and opened the other flat and laid it across the keypad. Dialled the number by pressing through it. There was ring tone for a second, and then the connection was made.
‘Spencer Gutman,’ a bright voice said. ‘How may we help you?’
‘Mrs Jacob, please,’ Reacher said, busily.
‘One moment,’ the voice said.
There was tinny music and then a man’s voice. He sounded quick, but deferential. Maybe an assistant.
‘Mrs Jacob, please,’ Reacher said again.
The guy sounded busy and harassed. ‘She already left for Garrison, and I really don’t know when she’ll be in the office again, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you have her address in Garrison?’
‘Hers?’ the guy said, surprised. ‘Or his?’
Reacher paused and listened to the surprise and took a chance.
‘His, I mean. I seem to have lost it.’
‘Just as well you did,’ the voice said back. ‘It was misprinted, I’m afraid. I must have redirected at least fifty people this morning.’
He recited an address, apparently from memory. Garrison, New York, a town about sixty miles up the Hudson River, more or less exactly opposite West Point, where Reacher had spent four long years.
‘I think you’ll have to hurry,’ the guy said.
‘Yes, I will,’ Reacher said, and hung up, confused.
He closed the database and left the screen blank. Took one more glance at the missing secretary’s abandoned bag and caught one more breath of her perfume as he left the room.
The secretary died five minutes after she gave up Mrs Jacob’s identity, which was about five minutes after Hobie started in on her with his hook. They were in the executive bathroom inside the office suite on the eighty-eighth floor. It was an ideal location. Spacious, sixteen feet square, way too big for a bathroom. Some expensive decorator had put shiny grey granite tiling over all six surfaces, walls and floor and ceiling. There was a big shower stall, with a clear plastic curtain on a stainless-steel rail. The rail was Italian, grossly over-specified for the task of holding up a clear plastic curtain. Hobie had discovered it could take the weight of an unconscious human, handcuffed to it by the wrists. Time to time, heavier people than the secretary had hung there, while he asked them urgent questions or persuaded them as to the wisdom of some particular course of action.
The only problem was soundproofing. He was pretty sure it was OK. It was a solid building. Each of the Twin Towers weighs more than half a million tons. Plenty of steel and concrete, good thick walls. And he had no inquisitive neighbours. Most of the suites on eighty-eight were leased by trade missions from small obscure foreign nations, and their skeleton staffs spent most of their time up at the UN. Same situation on eighty-seven and eighty-nine. That was why he was where he was. But Hobie was a man who never took an extra risk if he could avoid it. Hence the duct tape. Before starting, he always lined up some six-inch strips, stuck temporarily to the tiling. One of them would go over the mouth. When whoever it was started nodding wildly, eyes bulging, he would tear off the strip and wait for the answer. Any screaming, he would slam the next strip on and go to work again. Normally he got the answer he wanted after the second strip came off.