Chapter 8

Brenda Amos clicked twice and typed in a passcode. Then she clicked again and leaned forward and read out loud. She said, “Late one September evening in 1943 a youth was found unconscious on the sidewalk of a downtown Laconia street. He had been beaten up. He was identified as a local twenty-year-old, already known to the police department as a loudmouth and a bully, but untouchable, because he was the son of the local rich guy. Therefore I guess there would have been much private celebration inside the department, but obviously for the sake of appearances they had to open an investigation. They had to go through the motions. It says here they went house to house the next day, not expecting to get much. But actually they got a lot. They got an old lady who had seen the whole thing through binoculars. The victim started an altercation with two other youths, clearly expecting to win, but the way it turned out he got his butt kicked instead.”

Reacher said, “Why was the old lady using binoculars late in the evening?”

“It says here she was a birdwatcher. She was interested in nighttime migration and continuous flight. She said she could make out the shapes against the sky.”

Reacher said nothing.

Amos said, “She identified one of the two other youths as a fellow member of a local birdwatching club.”

Reacher said, “My dad was a birdwatcher.”

Amos nodded. “The old lady identified him as a local youth personally known to her, name of Stan Reacher, then just sixteen years old.”

“Was she sure? I think he was only fifteen in September of 1943.”

“She seems to be sure about the name. I guess she could have been wrong about the age. She was watching from an apartment window above a grocery store, looking directly down the street toward a good-sized patch of night sky in the east. She saw Stan Reacher with an unidentified friend about the same age. They were walking toward her, away from the center of downtown. They passed through a pool of light from a street lamp, which allowed her to be confident in her identification. Then walking toward them in the other direction she saw the twenty-year-old. He also passed through a pool of light. The three youths all met face to face in the gloom between two lamps, which was unfortunate, but there was enough spill and scatter for her to see what was going on. She said it was like watching shadow puppets. It made their physical gestures more emphatic. The two smaller boys were still facing her. The bigger boy had his back to her. He seemed to be demanding something. Then threatening. One of the smaller boys ran away, possibly timid or scared. The other smaller boy stayed where he was, and then suddenly he punched the bigger boy in the face.”

Reacher nodded. Personally he called it getting your retaliation in first. Surprise was always a good thing. A wise man never counted all the way to three.

Amos said, “The old lady testified the smaller kid kept on hitting the bigger kid until the bigger kid fell down, whereupon the smaller kid kicked him repeatedly in the head and the ribs, and then the bigger kid struggled up and tried to run, but the smaller kid caught him and tripped him up, right in the next pool of light, which was apparently quite bright, which meant the old lady had no trouble seeing the smaller kid kicking the bigger kid a whole lot more. Then he quit just as suddenly as he had started, and he collected his timid pal, and they walked away together like nothing had happened. The old lady made contemporaneous notes on a piece of paper, plus a diagram, all of which she gave to the visiting officers the following day.”

“Good witness,” Reacher said. “I bet the DA loved her. What happened next?”

Amos scrolled and read.

“Nothing happened next,” she said. “The case went nowhere.”

“Why not?”

“Limited manpower. The draft for World War Two had started a couple of years before. The police department was operating with a skeleton staff.”

“Why hadn’t the twenty-year-old been drafted?”

“Rich daddy.”

“I don’t get it,” Reacher said. “How much manpower would they need? They had an eyewitness. Arresting a fifteen-year-old boy isn’t difficult. They wouldn’t need a SWAT team.”

“They had no ID on the assailant, and no manpower to go dig one up.”

“You said the old lady knew him from the birdwatching club.”

“The unknown friend was the fighter. Stan Reacher was the one who ran away.”

They gave Patty and Shorty a cup of coffee, and they sent them on their way, back to room ten. Mark watched them go, until they were halfway to the barn, until they looked like people who weren’t coming back. Whereupon he turned around and said, “OK, plug the phone back in.”

Steven did so, and Mark said, “Now show me the problem with the door.”

“The problem is not with the door,” Robert said. “It’s with our reaction time.”

They crossed an inner hallway and opened a back parlor door. The room beyond it was small by comparison, but still a decent size. It was painted flat black. The window was boarded over. All four walls were covered with flat screen televisions. There was a swivel chair in the center of the room, boxed in by four low benches pushed together, loaded with keyboards and joysticks. Like a command center. Patty and Shorty were on the screens, live pictures, past the barn now, walking away from one bunch of hidden cameras, toward another, some focused tight and head-on, others set wider, with the strolling couple tiny in the distance.

Robert stepped over a bench and sat down in the chair. He clicked a mouse and the screens changed to a dim night-vision shot.

He said, “This is a recording from three o’clock this morning.”

The picture was hyped up and misty because of the night-vision enhancements, but it was clearly of room ten’s queen-sized bed, which clearly had two sleeping people in it. It was the camera in the smoke detector, wide enough to be called a fisheye.

“Except she wasn’t asleep,” Robert said. “Afterward I figured she slept about four hours, and then she woke up. But she didn’t move at all. Not a muscle. She gave absolutely no sign. By that point I was kind of laying back, frankly, taking it easy, because the last four hours had been pretty boring. Plus at that point as far as I knew she was still asleep. But actually she was lying there thinking. About something that must have made her mad. Because, watch.”

On the screens the scene stayed the same, and then it changed, fast, with no warning at all, when Patty suddenly flipped the covers aside and slid out of bed, controlled, neat, decisive, exasperated.

Robert said, “By the time I sat up and got my finger near the unlock button, she had already tried the door once. I guess she wanted air. I had to make a decision. I decided to leave it locked, because it felt more consistent. I left it locked until Peter went up there to fix the car. I unlocked it then because I figured one of them would want to come out to talk to him.”

“OK,” Mark said.

Robert clicked the mouse again and the screens changed to a daylight shot from a different angle. Patty and Shorty were sitting side by side on room ten’s unmade bed.

“This took place while we were eating breakfast,” Robert said.

“I was on duty,” Steven said. “Watch what happens.”

Robert pressed play. There was audio. Shorty was deflecting attention from his own shortcomings by ranting on about mechanics getting call-out charges. He was saying, “Which is basically like getting paid for still being alive. It’s not like that when you grow potatoes, let me tell you.”

Robert paused the recording.

Steven asked, “Now what happens next?”

Mark said, “I sincerely hope Patty points out the two trades are massively dissimilar in the economic sense.”

Peter said, “I sincerely hope Patty punches him in the face and tells him to shut up.”

“Neither one,” Steven said. “She gets exasperated again.”

Robert pressed play again. Patty got up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and she said, “I’m going out for some air.”

Steven said, “She’s really abrupt and jumpy. Right there she was zero to sixty in one-point-one seconds. I counted the video frames. I couldn’t get to the button in time. Then I saw Shorty was going to give it a go, so I unlocked it late. I thought if he got it open, where she couldn’t, she would somehow blame herself more than the door.”

“Is there a fix for this?” Mark asked.

“Forewarned is forearmed. I guess we need to concentrate harder.”

“I guess we’ll have to. We don’t want to spook them too soon.”

“How long before we make the final decision?”

Mark paused a long moment.

Then he said, “Make the final decision now, if you like.”

“Really?”

“Why wait? I think we’ve seen enough. They’re as good as we could ever hope to get. They’re from nowhere and no one knows they’re gone. I think we’re ready.”

“I vote yes,” Steven said.

“Me too,” Robert said.

“Me three,” Peter said. “They’re perfect.”

Robert clicked back to the live feed and they saw Patty and Shorty in their lawn chairs, on the boardwalk under their window, catching the wan rays of the afternoon sun.

“Unanimous,” Mark said. “All for one and one for all. Send the e-mail.”

The screens changed again, to a webmail page peppered with translations in foreign alphabets. Robert typed four words.

“OK?” he asked.

“Send it.”

He did.

The message said: Room Ten Is Occupied.