“Vantresca will tell us,” she said.
He dialed The Washington Post from memory, having done it not long before. Once again the phone rang. Once again the call was answered.
Once again he said, “Ms. Buckley?”
“Yes?” a voice said.
“Barbara Buckley?”
“What do you want?”
“I have two things for you,” Reacher said. “Some good news, and a story.”
Chapter 41
In the background on the line Reacher heard all kinds of hustle and bustle. A big open space. Maybe a low hard ceiling. The clatter of keyboards. A dozen conversations. He said, “I’m guessing you’re at a desk in a newsroom.”
Barbara Buckley said, “No shit, Sherlock.”
“I’m guessing you’ve got tickers and cable news on screens all around you.”
“Hundreds of them.”
“Maybe right now one of them is showing regional coverage of a fire in a lumber yard in a city you know.”
No answer.
Reacher said, “The good news is the lumber yard was the Albanian gang’s HQ. It’s burning to the ground. Most of them are dead inside. The rest have fled. They’re history. The things they said to you don’t apply anymore. From when you had that meeting, a couple months ago. In the back room of the restaurant. Those threats are now gone forever. As of today. We believe it was important you should know as soon as possible. It’s a part of our victims’ rights protocol.”
“Is this the police department?”
“Strictly speaking, no.”
“But you are law enforcement?”
“Which has many levels.”
“Which level are you?”
“Ma’am, with the greatest possible respect, you’re a journalist. There are some things better not said out loud.”
“You mean, you could tell me, but then you would have to kill me?”
“Ma’am, we don’t really say that.”
“Are you speaking from there?”
“I would prefer not to discuss specific locations. But I will say it’s very warm here.”
“Wait,” she said. “How did you even find me? I didn’t report the threats to anyone.”
Reacher took a breath, ready to launch into the second part of his script, but she beat him to it, like the investigative reporter he guessed she was, with a rapid-fire chain of fast connections and assumptions and wild-ass guesses, all of which ended up pretty much where he would have wanted to anyway. She said, “Wait, the only person who could have known anything about this was the guy who drove me to the airport afterward, who was the local help I hired, who was ex-military, a fairly senior rank, which I know for sure because obviously I checked him out, so it must have been him who reported it, presumably to a friend or an associate with a particular interest, possibly in the Pentagon, which is probably where you come from. Some secret three-letter agency no one has ever heard of.”
Reacher said, “Ma’am, I would very much prefer not to confirm or deny.”
“Whatever,” she said. Then she took a breath and her voice changed a little. She said, “I appreciate the call. Thank you. Your protocol works well.”
“Feel better?”
“You said you had a story for me. Is that it? The Albanians are gone?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Something different. Involving you.”
“I won’t go public. I dropped the story. Not what a fearless reporter is supposed to do.”
“This is the other side of the coin,” Reacher said. “This is where the fearless reporter breaks the case wide open. Because of the research you did. You came here for a reason. Which wasn’t the Albanians. You gave the impression you were much more interested in the Ukrainians. It would help us to know the basis for that interest.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What did you think the Ukrainians were doing?”
“I understood the question. What I didn’t understand was why you were asking it. You’re a secret three-letter agency. Surely you know why you’re there. Or is this what you do now? You outsource the actual investigative part of the investigation to newspapers?”
Reacher took a breath, and launched the third part of his script. He said, “Clearly you derived information from somewhere. As did we, of course. But your somewhere was not the same place as our somewhere. I can pretty much guarantee that. Therefore if we make you the star of the show, we keep ourselves in the shadows. We throw suspicion in the wrong direction. We protect our sources. They live to fight another day. Which might be important. But the rules of engagement require that we hear a credible accusation from a credible person before we can proceed. We can’t just make it up. It’s subject to review.”
“Are you recording this?”
“I would need your permission.”
“You would admit I broke the case?”
“I think we would be obliged to spin it that way. Best all around. No one would look at our guys. Plus we don’t care anyway. I don’t want to go on TV.”
“I’m a journalist,” Buckley said. “No one would call me credible.”
“These are just boxes to check. We would take a tarot card reader.”
“It started with a rumor I heard from a friend of a friend. The story was, whatever was claimed politically, the intelligence professionals had in fact traced the fake news on the internet all the way back to the Russian government in Moscow, and they had also gotten pretty good at blocking it, except suddenly they had a sudden setback. The rumor was somehow the Russians had gotten inside. They were operating inside the United States, and the blocking didn’t work anymore.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
“But I got to thinking. Obviously there was nothing coming out of their embassy, because we would have known. We’re all over that place, electronically. And they didn’t move the whole project here, because it’s not just us they’re messing with. They’re hacking the world. So obviously they outsourced the American part of the project to someone who was already here. Like a straightforward business deal. Like a franchise. But who? The Russian mob in the U.S. isn’t good enough, and anyway, no way would the Russian government want to be in business with them. I tried to figure it out. I had some information. The geeks at the paper follow this stuff. They have league tables, like the NFL. All those old Soviet states are pretty good at technology. Estonia, for instance. And Ukraine, they figured. But Moscow and Kiev can’t talk. They’re at permanent loggerheads. But Moscow can talk to the Ukrainian mob in the U.S. Same people, same talent, but a different place. And it would be perfect cover. It’s a very unlikely link. And the geeks said the Ukrainians were just about good enough to do it, in a technology sense. So I figured that was what had happened. An annual contract, between the Russian government and Ukrainian organized crime in America, probably worth at least tens of millions of dollars. I have no proof, but I bet I’m right. Call it a journalist’s guess.”