The Searcher Read Online Free PDF

briefcase to be searched. Hammer went to shake his hand.
    â€œMy apologies.”
    For the second time, Rapp surprised him by smiling.
    â€œAll the best people get raided from time to time, Mr. Hammer. Let me know if you need help with your strategy.”
    Hammer saw him into the elevator and watched the doors close.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    W ebster’s old office, still unfilled, was designated the hub (their jargon), an irony that may or may not have escaped Sander. Hammer felt it keenly enough as he watched officer after officer tramping across the floor with arms full of folders, papers, binders, taking them to be bagged and numbered as evidence. All those secrets. All that work.
    Without Ben, none of this would be happening. Without his obsessions, his crusading, his perpetual fucking moral crisis, this would just be an ordinary day, with reports to be written and clients to see and money to be made. If Hammer had only acted sooner, on instinct rather than evidence, this less than ordinary day wouldn’t be happening. Know someone for ten years and you get used to their nonsense. Your defenses drop. And your standards. If Ben had pulled that shit in his first week he would’ve been out, straightaway, without so much as a discussion.
    Each time Hammer was asked a question—where the servers were kept, what the archiving procedures were, dozens of pointed, dreary questions—his frustration grew. Who were these people, anyway, to be going through his things? Over this nonsense, this fad of an offense. How had they earned the right? No one had died. If there was a problem here he should be investigating it himself. This was his territory. His jurisdiction.
    But not his world. The world was hysterical about small things these days, and heedless of the big ones. That was a change he had seen. It was like a man careering toward a cliff edge straightening his tie. So much energy consumed in the pursuit of empty rectitude.
    For a start, he would be forced to defend himself. Better than most he knew how tedious that would be—the countless statements, the endless meetings with solicitors and barristers, the narrowing of one’s life to a tiny set of disputed facts. Then he’d have to explain himself. Tomorrow or the next day news would leak and there’d be headlines reporting that the great detective had come unstuck, and sometime after that it would emerge that every e-mail to and from every client, on every imaginable sensitive subject, was now with the police. To each of those clients he would have to give an explanation, and some of them would leave, and he would watch them taking their problems and their confidences elsewhere. That was OK. Fuck ’em. He’d find out who his friends were.
    Seven floors below, the world was doing what it always did, oblivious. Through the trees he could see groups of office workers eating their lunch on the grass of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, while his own staff stayed inside, unable to leave. Traffic sat clogged on Fleet Street. It was a clear blue day, a late echo of summer. He entertained the childish notion of rappelling down the building and simply running away. Buying a dodgy passport. Spending his fortune somewhere remote where nothing ever happened.
    But that was not his way. He had fought to create this company and he would fight to save it.
    Sander, it seemed, would cause him as much pain as she could. He’d met her type before, and thought he recognized that particular brand of zeal. There would be no reasoning with her. In her mind, every private investigator was the same: a stalker, a phone tapper, a rummager in other people’s rubbish. An unnecessary form of lowlife that lived in the dark spaces left unlit by the shining light of the law. He hated that crap. He’d heard it eversince he came to London, when everyone he met was surprised not to find him trailing spouses in a grimy trench coat and a worn