CHAPTER SEVEN

Thursday, January 13

8:50 a.m.

New York City

General Mack Parnell, recently retired, stood at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Gloved hands rested in the pockets of his cashmere top coat. Scalpel-sharp air slashed his lungs with every inhale. He’d become accustomed to desert climates while deployed halfway around the world for the past decade. He’d avoided biting cold for a long time, and he didn’t much like it. He planned to stay only as long as necessary. A few days, tops.

He tilted his head up for a better look at one of the most exclusive addresses in New York City. The Dakota Apartments building loomed like the living legend it was. High gables, deep roofs, and more dormers, spandrels, balustrades and the like than any castle he’d ever seen.

While the Dakota had a long and distinguished history, people in Parnell’s generation could only think of the place as the infamous site of resident John Lennon’s murder. He wondered why Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, had chosen to continue living here. What did she feel every day when she crossed the sidewalk where her husband was gunned down?

Parnell shook his head. Women were odd creatures. So emotional. Maybe she felt closer to her dead husband here, or some such nonsense. Parnell was a pragmatist. His career had forced him to relocate many times, and he hated the disruption. He’d have stayed because he didn’t want to go. Simple as that.

He shrugged. Maybe Yoko felt the same. She had to be in her mid-eighties by now. No one wanted to move everything they owned at that age.

Which didn’t explain why his former business partner, the missing Colonel, had chosen this place. He knew the history, but he’d said the Dakota offered precisely the kind of privilege and discretion he needed. His activities would never be questioned here, he said. No meddling by management or prying neighbors to worry about. Certainly, no one would dare to interfere with his business.

The money he’d spent to buy the Dakota apartment, the Colonel had said, bought privacy and freedom. Only recently had Parnell learned what the Colonel meant.

The building was a co-op, not a condo. It was owned by a corporation. The corporation was listed on the property tax rolls. The Colonel, like the other residents, held shares in the corporation. Parnell shook his head. The whole system was convoluted and a little crazy. But it meant that the corporation and the people who lived here had more control over their neighbors and their privacy.

Lennon’s murder had been the sum total of Parnell’s knowledge about the Dakota sixteen months ago. He’d cared little about the Colonel’s accommodations until he disappeared. Even then, Parnell was only interested in the money.

Strictly speaking, the money wasn’t Parnell’s. But he had a better claim to it than anyone else. If it hadn’t been for him, the Colonel would have had no money to stash in this mausoleum in the first place. Damn straight.

But Parnell couldn’t simply stuff nine million dollars in his pockets and walk out with it, either. Nobody had pockets that big. The cash had been delivered originally in bales of one million dollars each. One hundred-dollar bills. A hundred hundreds to a pack. A hundred packs per bale. Each bale weighed about as much as a loaded carry-on suitcase.

Parnell was in good shape for a man his age. But he couldn’t carry nine loaded suitcases at once. Making nine trips, or even half that many, carrying the cash out was too awkward. Someone would notice. Which would lead to explanations. Which Parnell preferred to avoid.

He’d needed a plan. Army generals were good at plans, and he’d been planning this offensive for months.

The good news about a building like the Dakota was its historical significance. Historic buildings are not particularly private, and much was known and publicly available about this one.

Before he left the army, Parnell had pored over the city’s online property records databases until he’d learned everything possible about the Colonel’s fifth-floor apartment. He shook his head, still astonished at the price tag, for starters.

Ten years ago, the Colonel had paid twenty-four million dollars in cash to buy the place. Sure, that could have been a good way to launder the money. Except he didn’t sell the place and get his freshly-cleaned cash out. Parnell’s lip curled when he thought about it. What a fool.

Not only that, but the apartment had sucked up even more money every month like a powerful vacuum sucks air. Monthly fees were more than twenty grand a month. A month. Thousands in annual property taxes were included. Parking fees. Decorating expenses. The list of costs never ended.

No question about it, the Dakota co-op had made a sizeable dent in the Colonel’s share of the revenue Parnell had funneled to him before he disappeared. Which was a stupid thing to do with the cash. The Colonel was a lot of things, but obviously, he was no financial genius.

Parnell could liquidate the apartment without fanfare to one of the many names on the Dakota’s waiting list. Sell it fast and cheap on the private market and pocket the difference. A feasible plan.

But the problem was that the Colonel no longer owned the place. He’d screwed up. He didn’t pay the monthly fees in advance before he bugged out last year. After those fees remained unpaid for a full year, ownership had transferred to the co-op’s board.

Now, the board would have to sign off before Parnell could resell the place. Maybe the board would sign off, or maybe not. The process promised to be time-consuming and convoluted. Which meant, effectively, that Parnell couldn’t do it.

Hard to believe the Colonel had been so stupid. In fact, Parnell hadn’t believed it at first. He’d seen a small item in the Times about the foreclosure while he was in Iraq, searching online. A follow-up paragraph was published a couple of days later, but it had been withdrawn.

Parnell chased down the situation, which took a lot more effort than it should have. In the end, he’d had no choice but to call in a few favors from his contacts inside the three-letter agencies to locate the withdrawn paragraph. Eventually, they found it.

He grinned. Everything that was ever stored on the internet was still sitting around out there somewhere if a man was diligent enough. Lots of men were that diligent, believe it or not. Which was only one of the reasons Parnell kept his own personal online activities to a bare minimum. The last thing he needed was to be traced like that.

The smaller item in the Times mentioned, oh so casually, that in a locked closet inside the apartment the co-op board had found more than nine million dollars in cash.

Only a couple of sentences. A narrow column inch. Quickly deleted and all but destroyed. A less determined man would never have found it.

The words pleased him every time he thought about them. More than nine million dollars in cash. Nine million. Dollars. Cash. He smiled broadly until the cold air touched his teeth, sending a shooting pain straight between his eyes. He clamped his mouth shut.

The good news was that the nine million was found inside the apartment a full year after the Colonel disappeared. Knowing the money was in place for that first twelve months was reassuring. Parnell felt closer to success.

Twelve months after Reacher would have returned from London, according to those three idiots. He might not have believed them if he hadn’t confirmed the absence of travel records bringing Reacher back to New York.

Parnell was a student of human nature. If Reacher had wanted the money, it stood to reason that he would have returned immediately and grabbed it right away. Before anyone noticed the Colonel was gone.

Certainly, long before anyone else had a chance to find it.

Waiting an entire year made no sense at all.

Anything could happen in a full year.

Parnell nodded. He was sure. Reacher had not come back here.

In fact, everything he’d been able to turn up about Reacher suggested he had disappeared, too. Maybe the three stooges had been wrong, after all. Perhaps Reacher and the Colonel’s team had killed each other.

That answer made more sense than any other he’d dreamed up so far.

Except for one slightly troubling thing.

Someone else was looking for Reacher, too. Someone big, according to Parnell’s extensive search. Someone even Parnell’s vast web of contacts had failed to identify.

Parnell had chased whatever leads he could find on that score, but he’d come up completely empty. Whoever was hunting Reacher had enough juice to keep himself so deep under the radar that even Parnell couldn’t find out.

He shrugged. Quick or dead, Reacher was still missing. As long as Reacher and whoever hunted him stayed out of the way for a few more days, Parnell would be long gone. The good news was the Colonel’s money was most likely still in that closet right now. Which was all Parnell cared about.

Well, that and his forty-two-million-dollar retirement fund.

Nine million was a nice bonus, though. It was really Parnell’s money, after all. He was the one who’d risked his career and lifetime imprisonment in Leavenworth to acquire it. No one had a greater right to that money than he did.

Curiously, since they’d foreclosed on the apartment, the board had made no attempt to resell the place. He wondered why. Not that it mattered. Parnell wasn’t planning to live there.

He planned to ask the co-op board president as soon as he could introduce the question casually. Thinking of the board president, he glanced at his watch. Time to meet with Simon Peck.