Make Me

Westwood said he had been in the bookstore before. A signing, for an anthology he was in. Science journalism. An award-winning piece. The store was a cool place, in every way, from its refrigerated temperature to its customers. Westwood wandered one way, and Chang another. Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t.

Chang came back, and then Westwood, and they wandered back to the bar and got ready to wait. Being early gave them a choice of tables, and they took a four-top near a window. Reacher got coffee, and the others got sodas.

Westwood said, “This won’t be good news, I’m afraid. Even if the guy bites. The Deep Web is not an attractive place, overall. So they tell me. Not that I spend time there myself. But you might not like what you see.”

Reacher said, “It’s a free country. And Michael was McCann’s son, not mine. I don’t care what he was into.”

A clock on the wall ticked up to a Cyrillic twelve, the top of the hour, and vodka went down in price by half. Happy hour. The first new person through the door was a young woman in her twenties, flushed, unmistakably new at something, but good at it.

The second person through the door was the guy from Palo Alto.

Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, “The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I’m still not going public.”

Westwood said, “Neither are we. Not until long afterward, in the newspaper. By which time there will be so much to bury you won’t even be close to the top of the list. You have my word. You won’t be public. All we need is to search. In private. For a missing individual and his possible destination.”

“Search where?”

“Chat rooms, mostly. Maybe commercial web sites.”

“I don’t want to become a public resource.”

“I’m happy not to pay you.”

“Then I would be doing it for friendship, which makes the obligation worse.”

Reacher said, “Can you do it? If you wanted to?”

The guy said, “I’ve been doing it since it was called the undernet. And the invisible web. It got harder, but I got better.”

“The destination might be hard to crack.”

“Cracking is easy. It’s finding that’s hard.”

“So what would get you to give us an hour of your time? Apart from getting paid?”

“Do you have a motive, apart from getting paid? Does anyone, really?”

“As a matter of fact I’m not getting paid.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because some guy thinks he’s pretty damn smart.”

“But you’re smarter? And you have to prove it?”

“I don’t have to prove it. I want to prove it. Now and then. Out of respect. For the people who really are smart. Standards should mean something.”

“You’re trying to steer me to the same conclusion. A battle of egos. Me against them, as coders. Good try. You know me well, even though we’ve only just met. But I’ve gone beyond. I’m happy there. I’m better than them. I know that. I’m secure in that knowledge. I no longer feel the desire to show it. Not even now and then. Not even out of respect. Not that I don’t respect the way you feel. The old me would have agreed with you.”

“What would the new me agree with?”

“Tell me about the missing individual. Is he interesting?”

“Thirty-five-year-old male, crippled by what the doctors call anhedonia, and his aunt calls his happiness meter stuck on zero. Otherwise normal IQ. Functional some of the time.”

“Lived alone?”

Reacher nodded. “In sheltered housing.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“Sudden new friend prior to disappearance?”

“Yes.”

The guy said, “Thirty-two seconds.”

“For what?”

“I’ll find him in the Deep Web inside thirty-two seconds. I know where to look.”

“When can you do it?”

“Tell me about the aunt.”

“She married up. A doctor. She has a beautiful daughter. But she still loves her nephew. And seems to understand him.”

“I like her image of the happiness meter.”

“We agreed mine is four to nine.”

“I’ve gone beyond. I hit ten now. All the time.”

“That’s the molly talking.”

“The what?”

“I read it in the paper.”

“I haven’t taken molly for two years.”

“Something else now?”