REACHER COULDN’T GET close to the U.N. Building’s entrance because of security, but he saw Lauren Pauling waiting for him in the middle of the First Avenue sidewalk. Clearly she had the same problem. No pass, no clearance, no magic words. She had a printed scarf around her shoulders. She looked good. She was ten years older than him, but he liked what he saw. He started toward her and then she saw him and they met in the middle.

“I called in a favor,” she said. “We’re meeting with an army officer from the Pentagon who liaises with one of the U.N. committees.”

“On what subject?”

“Mercenaries,” Pauling said. “We’re supposed to be against them. We signed all kinds of treaties.”

“The Pentagon loves mercenaries. It employs them all the time.”

“But it likes them to go where it sends them. It doesn’t like them to fill their down time with unauthorized sideshows.”

“Is that where they lost Knight and Hobart? On a sideshow?”

“Somewhere in Africa,” Pauling said.

“Does this guy have the details?”

“Some of them. He’s reasonably senior, but he’s new. He’s not going to tell you his name, and you’re not allowed to ask. Deal?”

“Does he know my name?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“OK, that sounds fair.”

Then her cell phone chimed. She answered it and listened and looked around.

“He’s in the plaza,” she said. “He can see us but he doesn’t want to walk right up to us. We have to go to a coffee shop on Second. He’ll follow.”

The coffee shop was one of those mostly brown places that survive on equal parts counter trade, booth trade, and to-go coffee in cardboard cups with Greek decoration on them. Pauling led Reacher to a booth all the way in back and sat so she could watch the door. Reacher slid in next to her. He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. Long habit, even in a place with plenty of mirrors, which the coffee shop had. They were tinted bronze and made the narrow unit look wide. Made everyone look tan, like they were just back from the beach. Pauling waved to the waitress and mouthed coffee and held up three fingers. The waitress came over and dumped three heavy brown mugs on the table and filled them from a Bunn flask.

Reacher took a sip. Hot, strong, and generic.

He made the Pentagon guy before he was even in through the door. There was no doubt about what he was. Army, but not necessarily a fighting man. Maybe just a bureaucrat. Dull. Not old, not young, corn-colored buzz cut, cheap blue wool suit, white broadcloth button-down shirt, striped tie, good shoes polished to a mirror shine. A different kind of uniform. It was the kind of outfit a captain or a major would wear to his sister-in-law’s second wedding. Maybe this guy had bought it for that very purpose, long before a spell of résumé-building temporary detached duty in New York City appeared in his future.

The guy paused inside the door and looked around. Not looking for us, Reacher thought. Looking for anyone else who knows him. If he sees somebody, he’ll fake a phone call and turn around and leave. Doesn’t want any awkward questions later. He’s not so dumb after all.

Then he thought: Pauling’s not so dumb, either. She knows people who can get in trouble just by being seen with the wrong folks.

But the guy evidently saw nothing to worry about. He walked on back and slid in opposite Pauling and Reacher and after a brief glance at each of their faces he centered his gaze between their heads and kept his eyes on the mirror. Up close Reacher saw that he was wearing a black subdued-order crossed-pistols lapel pin and that he had mild scarring on one side of his face. Maybe grenade or IED shrapnel at maximum range. Maybe he had been a fighting man. Or maybe it was a childhood shotgun accident.

“I don’t have much for you,” the guy said. “Private-enterprise Americans fighting overseas are rightly considered to be very bad news, especially when they go fight in Africa. So this stuff is very compartmentalized and need-to-know and it was before my time, so I simply don’t know very much about it. So all I can give you is what you can probably guess anyway.”

“Where was it?” Reacher asked.

“I’m not even sure of that. Burkina Faso or Mali, I think. One of those small West African places. Frankly there are so many of them in trouble it’s hard to keep track. It was the usual deal. Civil war. A scared government, a bunch of rebels ready to come out of the jungle. An unreliable military. So the government pays through the nose and buys what protection it can on the international market.”

“Does one of those countries speak French?”

“As their official language? Both of them. Why?”

“I saw some of the money. In plastic wrap printed in French. Banque Centrale, Central Bank.”

“How much?”

“More than you or I would earn in two lifetimes.”

“U.S. dollars?”

Reacher nodded. “Lots of them.”

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Did it work this time?”

“No,” the guy said. “The story that did the rounds was that Edward Lane took the money and ran. Can’t blame him for running, I guess. They were hopelessly outnumbered and strategically weak.”

“But not everyone got out.”

The guy nodded. “It seemed that way. But getting information out of those places is like trying to get a radio signal from the dark side of the moon. It’s mostly silence and static. And when it isn’t, it’s faint and garbled. So usually we rely on the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. And eventually we got a solid report that two Americans had been captured. A year later we got names. It was Knight and Hobart. Recon Marines back in the day, mixed records.”

“It surprises me that they stayed alive.”

“The rebels won. They became the new government. They emptied the jails, because the jails were full of their buddies. But a government needs full jails, to keep the population scared. So the old good guys became the new bad guys. Anyone who had worked for the old regime was suddenly in big trouble. And a couple of Americans were like trophies. So they were kept alive. But they suffered very cruelly. The Doctors Without Borders report was horrific. Appalling. Mutilation for sport was a fact of life.”

“Details?”

“I guess there are lots of bad things a man can do with a knife.”

“You didn’t think about a rescue attempt?”

“You’re not listening,” the guy said. “The State Department can’t admit that there are bunches of renegade American mercenaries running wild in Africa. And like I told you, the rebels became the new government. They’re in charge now. We have to be nice to them. Because all those places have got stuff that we want. There’s oil, and diamonds, and uranium. Alcoa needs tin and bauxite and copper. Halliburton wants to get in there and make a buck. Corporations from Texas want to get in there and run those same damn jails.”

“Anything about what happened in the end?”

“It’s sketchy, but you can join the dots. One died in captivity, but the other one got out, according to the Red Cross. Some kind of humanitarian gesture that the Red Cross pushed for, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the coup. They let out a whole bunch. End of story. That’s all the news there is from Africa. One died and one got out, relatively recently. But then, if you do some detective work and jump to the INS, you find a lone individual entering the U.S. from Africa shortly afterward on Red Cross documentation. And then, if you jump to the Veterans Administration, there’s a report of someone just back from Africa getting the kind of remedial outpatient care that might be consistent with tropical diseases and some of the mutilations that DWB reported on.”

Reacher asked, “Which one got out?”