Tripwire (31 page)

The hangar was as large as a stadium, but it held nothing except seven caskets. Each one of them was six and a half feet long, made from ribbed aluminum polished to a high shine and shaped roughly like a coffin, which is exactly what each one of them was. They were standing in a neat row, on trestles, each one draped with an American flag. The flags were newly laundered and crisply pressed, and the center stripe of each flag was precisely aligned with the center rib of each casket.

There were nine men and two women in the hangar, standing next to the seven aluminum caskets. Six of the men were there as the honor guard. They were regular soldiers of the United States Army, newly showered, newly shaved, dressed in immaculate ceremonial uniforms, holding themselves at rigid attention, away from the other five people. Three of those were Vietnamese, two men and a woman, short, dark, impassive. They were dressed in uniform, too, but theirs were everyday uniforms, not ceremonial. Dark olive cloth, worn and creased, badged here and there with the unfamiliar insignia of their rank.

The last two people were Americans, dressed in civilian clothes, but the sort of civilian clothes that indicate military status as clearly as any uniform. The woman was young, with a mid-length canvas skirt and a long-sleeved khaki blouse, with heavy brown shoes on her feet. The man was tall, silver-haired, maybe fifty-five years old, dressed in tropical khakis under a lightweight belted raincoat. He was carrying a battered brown leather briefcase in his hand, and there was a garment bag of similar vintage on the ground at his feet.

The tall silver-haired man nodded to the honor guard, a tiny signal, almost imperceptible. The senior soldier spoke a muted command and the six men formed up in two lines of three. They slow-marched forward, and right-turned, and slow-marched again until they were lined up precisely, three each side of the first casket. They paused a beat and stooped and lifted the casket to their shoulders in a single fluid movement. The senior man spoke again, and they slow-marched forward toward the hangar door, the casket supported exactly level on their linked arms, the only sounds the crunch of their boots on the concrete and the whine of the waiting engines.

On the apron, they turned right and wheeled a wide, slow semicircle through the hot jet wash until they were lined up with the Starlifter’s ramp. They slow-marched forward, up the exact center of the ramp, feeling carefully with their feet for the metal ribs bolted there to help them, and on into the belly of the plane. The pilot was waiting for them. She was a U.S. Air Force captain, trim in a tropical-issue flight suit. Her crew was standing at attention with her, a copilot, a flight engineer, a navigator, a radio operator. Opposite them were the loadmaster and his crew, silent in green fatigues. They stood face-to-face in two still lines, and the honor guard filed slowly between them, all the way up to the forward loading bay. There they bent their knees and gently lowered the casket onto a shelf built along the fuselage wall. Four of the men stood back, heads bowed. The forward man and the rear man worked together to slide the casket into place. The loadmaster stepped forward and secured it with rubber straps. Then he stepped back and joined the honor guard and held a long silent salute.

It took an hour to load all seven caskets. The people inside the hangar stood silent throughout, and then they followed the seventh casket onto the apron. They matched their walk to the honor guard’s slow pace, and waited at the bottom of the Starlifter’s ramp in the hot, noisy damp of the evening. The honor guard came out, duty done. The tall silver-haired American saluted them and shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and nodded to the American woman. No words were exchanged. He shouldered his garment bag and ran lightly up the ramp into the plane. A slow, powerful motor whirred and the ramp closed shut behind him. The engines ran up to speed and the giant plane came off its brakes and started to taxi. It wheeled a wide cumbersome left and disappeared behind the hangar. Its noise grew faint. Then it grew loud again in the distance and the watchers saw it come back along the runway, engines screaming, accelerating hard, lifting off. It yawed right, climbing fast, turning, dipping a wing, and then it was gone, just a triangle of winking lights tiny in the distance and a vague smudge of black kerosene smoke tracing its curved path into the night air.

The honor guard dispersed in the sudden silence and the American woman shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and walked back to her car. The three Vietnamese officers walked in a different direction, back to theirs. It was a Japanese sedan, repainted a dull military green. The woman drove, and the two men sat in back. It was a short trip to the center of Hanoi. The woman parked in a chain-link compound behind a low concrete building painted the color of sand. The men got out without a word and went inside through an unmarked door. The woman locked the car and walked around the building to a different entrance. She went inside and up a short flight of stairs to her office. There was a bound ledger open on her desk. She recorded the safe dispatch of the cargo in neat handwriting and closed the ledger. She carried it to a file cabinet near her office door. She locked it inside, and glanced through the door, up and down the corridor. Then she returned to her desk and picked up her telephone and dialed a number eleven thousand miles away in New York City.

MARILYN WOKE UP Sheryl and brought Chester around into some sort of consciousness before the thickset man came into the bathroom with the coffee. It was in mugs, and he was holding two in one hand and one in the other, unsure of where to leave them. He paused and stepped to the sink and lined them up on the narrow granite ledge under the mirror. Then he turned without speaking and walked back out. Pulled the door closed after him, firmly, but without slamming it.

Marilyn handed out the mugs one at a time, because she was trembling and pretty sure she was going to spill them if she tried them two at a time. She squatted down and gave the first one to Sheryl, and helped her take the first sip. Then she went back for Chester’s. He took it from her blankly and looked at it like he didn’t know what it was. She took the third for herself and stood against the sink and drank it down, thirstily. It was good. The cream and the sugar tasted like energy.

“Where are the stock certificates?” she whispered.

Chester looked up at her, listlessly. “At my bank, in my box.”

Marilyn nodded. Came face-to-face with the fact she didn’t know which was Chester’s bank. Or where it was. Or what stock certificates were for.

“How many are there?”

He shrugged. “A thousand, originally. I used three hundred for security against the loans. I had to give them up to the lender, temporarily.”

“And now Hobie’s got those?”

He nodded. “He bought the debt. They’ll messenger the security to him, today, maybe. They don’t need it anymore. And I pledged him another ninety. They’re still in the box. I guess I was due to deliver them soon.”

“So how does the transfer actually happen?”

He shrugged again, wearily, vaguely. “I sign the stock over to him, he takes the certificates and registers them with the Exchange, and when he’s got five hundred and one registered in his name, then he’s the majority owner.”

“So where’s your bank?”

Chester took his first sip of coffee. “About three blocks from here. About five minutes’ walk. Then another five minutes to the Exchange. Call it ten minutes beginning to end, and we’re penniless and homeless on the street.”

He set the mug on the floor and lapsed back into staring. Sheryl was listless. Not drinking her coffee. Her skin looked clammy. Maybe concussed, or something. Maybe still in shock. Marilyn didn’t know. She had no experience. Her nose was awful. Black and swollen. The bruising was spreading under her eyes. Her lips were cracked and dry, from breathing through her mouth all night.

“Try some more coffee,” she said. “It’ll be good for you.” She squatted beside her and guided her hand up to her mouth. Tilted the mug. Sheryl took a sip. Some of the hot liquid ran down her chin. She took another sip. She glanced up at Marilyn, with something in her eyes. Marilyn didn’t know what it was, but she smiled back anyway, bright with encouragement.

“We’ll get you to the hospital,” she whispered.

Sheryl closed her eyes and nodded, like she was suddenly filled with relief. Marilyn knelt beside her, holding her hand, staring at the door, wondering how she was going to deliver on that promise.

“ARE YOU GOING to keep this thing?“ Jodie asked.

She was talking about the Lincoln Navigator. Reacher thought about it as he waited. They were jammed up on the approach to the Triborough.

“Maybe,” he said.

It was more or less brand new. Very quiet and smooth. Black metallic outside, tan leather inside, four hundred miles on the clock, still reeking of new hide and new carpet and the strong plastic smell of a box-fresh vehicle. Huge seats, each one identical with the driver’s chair, lots of fat consoles with drinks holders and little lids suggestive of secret storage spaces.

“I think it’s gross,” she said.

He smiled. “Compared to what? That tiny little thing you were driving?”

“That was much smaller than this.”

“You’re much smaller than me.”

She was quiet for a beat.

“It was Rutter’s,” she said. “It’s tainted.”

The traffic moved, and then stopped again halfway over the Harlem River. The buildings of midtown were faraway to his left, and hazy, like a vague promise.

“It’s just a tool,” he said. “Tools have no memory.”

“I hate him,” she said. “I think more than I’ve ever hated anybody.”

He nodded.

“I know,” he said. “The whole time we were in there I was thinking about the Hobies, up there in Brighton, alone in their little house, the look in their eyes. Sending your only boy off to war is a hell of a thing, and to be lied to and cheated afterward, Jodie, there’s no excuse for that. Swap the chronology, it could have been my folks. And he did it fifteen times. I should have hurt him worse.”

“As long as he doesn’t do it again,” she said.

He shook his head. “The list of targets is shrinking. Not too many BNR families left now to fall for it.”

They made it off the bridge and headed south on Second Avenue. It was fast and clear ahead for sixty blocks.

“And it wasn’t him coming after us,” she said quietly. “He didn’t know who we were.”

Reacher shook his head again. “No. How many fake photographs do you have to sell to make it worth trashing a Chevy Suburban? We need to analyze it right from the beginning, Jodie. Two full-time employees get sent to the Keys and up to Garrison, right? Two full-time salaries, plus weapons and airfare and all, and they’re riding around in a Tahoe, then a third employee shows up with a Suburban he can afford to just dump on the street? That’s a lot of money, and it’s probably just the visible tip of some kind of an iceberg. It implies something worth maybe millions of dollars. Rutter was never making that kind of money, ripping off old folks for eighteen thousand bucks a pop.”

“So what the hell is this about?”

Reacher just shrugged and drove, and watched the mirror all the way.

HOBIE TOOK THE call from Hanoi at home. He listened to the Vietnamese woman’s short report and hung up without speaking. Then he stood in the center of his living room and tilted his head to one side and narrowed his good eye like he was watching something physical happening in front of him. Like he was watching a baseball soaring out of the diamond, looping upward into the glare of the lights, an outfielder tracking back under it, the fence getting closer, the glove coming up, the ball soaring, the fence looming, the outfielder leaping. Will the ball clear the fence? Or not? Hobie couldn’t tell.

He stepped across the living room and out to the terrace. The terrace faced west across the park, from thirty floors up. It was a view he hated, because all the trees reminded him of his childhood. But it enhanced the value of his property, which was the name of the game. He wasn’t responsible for the way other people’s tastes drove the market. He was just there to benefit from them. He turned and looked left, to where he could see his office building, all the way downtown. The Twin Towers looked shorter than they should, because of the curvature of the earth. He turned back inside and slid the door closed. Walked through the apartment and out to the elevator. Rode down all the way to the parking garage.

His car was not modified in any way to help him with his handicap. It was a late-model Cadillac sedan with the ignition and the selector on the right of the steering column. Using the key was awkward, because he had to lean across with his left hand and jab it in backward and twist. But after that, he never had much of a problem. He put it in drive by using the hook on the selector and drove out of the garage one-handed, using his left, the hook resting down in his lap.

He felt better once he was south of Fifty-ninth Street. The park disappeared and he was deep in the noisy canyons of midtown. The traffic comforted him. The Cadillac’s air-conditioning relieved the itching under his scars. June was the worst time for that. Some particular combination of heat and humidity acted together to drive him crazy. But the Cadillac made it better. He wondered idly whether Stone’s Mercedes would be as good. He thought not. He had never trusted the air on foreign cars. So he would turn it into cash. He knew a guy in Queens who would spring for it. But it was another chore on the list. A lot to do, and not much time to do it in. The outfielder was right there, under the ball, leaping, with the fence at his back.

He parked in the underground garage, in the slot previously occupied by the Suburban. He reached across and pulled the key and locked the Cadillac. Rode upstairs in the express elevator. Tony was at the reception counter.

“Hanoi called again,” Hobie told him. “It’s in the air.”

Tony looked away.

“What?” Hobie asked him.

“So we should just abandon this Stone thing.”

“It’ll take them a few days, right?”