Tripwire (49 page)

He stared at the laptops and the comb-bound folders and winced inside. How was he going to cross the border of the distant country without getting issued with all this stuff? The suits and the ties and the black plastic battery-driven devices? The lizard-skin cases and the memorandums from the main office? He shuddered and found himself paralyzed against the bulkhead, panicking, not breathing, completely unable to move. He recalled a day not more than a year ago, stepping out of a truck at a crossroads near a town he had never heard of in a state he had never been. He had waved the driver away and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and started walking, with a million miles behind him and a million miles ahead of him. The sun was shining and the dust was kicking up off his feet as he walked and he had smiled with the joy of being alone with absolutely no idea where he was headed.

But he also recalled a day nine months after that. Realizing he was running out of money, thinking hard. The cheapest motels still required some small amount of dollars. The cheapest diners, likewise. He had taken the job in the Keys, intending to work a couple of weeks. Then he had taken the evening job, too, and he was still working both of them when Costello came calling three whole months later. So the reality was that drifting was already over.
He was already a working
man. No point in denying it. Now it was just a question of where and how much and for who. He smiled.
Like
prostitution, he thought. No going back. He relaxed a little and pushed off the bulkhead and padded back through to first class.

The guy with the striped shirt and the arms the same length as Victor Hobie’s was awake and watching him. He nodded a greeting. Reacher nodded back and headed for the bathroom. Jodie was awake when he got back to his seat. She was sitting up straight, combing her hair with her fingers.

“Hi, Reacher,” she said.

“Hey, Jodie,” he said back.

He bent and kissed her on the lips. Stepped over her feet and sat down.

“Feel OK?” he asked.

She ducked her head in a figure eight to put her hair behind her shoulders.

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Better than I thought I would. Where did you go?”

“I took a walk,” he said. “I went back to see how the other half lives.”

“No, you were thinking. I noticed that about you fifteen years ago. You always go walking when you have something to think about.”

“I do?” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “I noticed it. I used to watch every detail about you. I was in love with you, remember?”

“What else do I do?”

“You clench your left hand when you’re angry or tense. You keep your right hand loose, probably from weapons training. When you’re bored, you play music in your head. I could see it in your fingers, like you’re playing along on a piano or something. The tip of your nose moves a little bit when you talk.”

“It does?”

“Sure it does,” she said. “What were you thinking about?”

He shrugged.

“This and that,” he said.

“The house, right?” she said. “It’s bothering you, isn’t it? And me. Me and the house, tying you down, like that guy in the book, Gulliver? You know that book?”

He smiled. “He’s a guy gets captured by tiny little people when he’s asleep. They peg him down flat with hundreds of tiny little ropes.”

“You feel that way?”

He paused a beat. “Not about you.”

But the pause had been a fraction of a second too long. She nodded.

“It’s different than being alone, right?” she said. “I know, I was married. Somebody else to take into account all the time? Somebody to worry about?”

He smiled. “I’ll get used to it.”

She smiled back. “And there’s the house, right?”

He shrugged. “Feels weird.”

“Well, that’s between you and Leon,” she said. “I want you to know I’m not putting demands on you, either way. About anything. It’s your life, and your house. You should do exactly what you want, no pressure.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“So you going to look for Hobie?”

He shrugged again. “Maybe. But it’s a hell of a task.”

“Bound to be angles,” she said. “Medical records and things? He must have a prosthesis. And if he’s burned, too, there’ll be records of that. And you wouldn’t miss him in the street, would you? A one-armed man, all burned up?”

He nodded. “Or I could just wait for him to find me. I could just hang out in Garrison until he sends his boys back.”

Then he turned to the window and stared out at his pale reflection against the darkness and realized
I’m just accepting he’s alive. I’m just accepting I was wrong.
He turned back to Jodie.

“Will you give me the mobile? Can you manage without it today? In case Nash finds something and calls me? I want to hear right away, if he does.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she nodded. Leaned down and unzipped her carry-on. Took out the phone and handed it to him.

“Good luck,” she said.

He nodded and put the phone in his pocket.

“I never used to need luck,” he said.

NASH NEWMAN DID not wait until nine o’clock in the morning to start the search. He was a meticulous man, attentive to tiny detail as much in his ethics as in his professional speciality. This was an unofficial search, undertaken out of compassion for a troubled friend, so it couldn’t be done on company time. A private matter had to be settled privately.

So he got out of bed at six, watching the faint red glow of tropical dawn starting beyond the mountains. He made coffee and dressed. By six-thirty he was in his office. He figured he would give it two hours. Then he would have breakfast in the mess and start his proper work on time at nine.

He rolled open a desk drawer and lifted out Victor Hobie’s medical records. Leon Garber had assembled them after patient inquiries in doctors’ and dentists’ offices in Putnam County. He had bundled them into an old military police folder and secured it shut with an old canvas strap. The strap had been red, but age had faded it to dusty pink. There was a fiddly metal buckle.

He undid the buckle. Opened the folder. The top sheet was a release signed by both the Hobie parents in April. Underneath it was ancient history. He had scanned thousands of files similar to this one, and he could effortlessly place the boys they referred to in terms of their age, their geographic location, their parents’ income, their ability at sports, all the numerous factors that affect a medical history. Age and location worked together. A new dental treatment might start out in California and sweep the country like a fashion, so the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Des Moines had to have been born five years later than the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Los Angleles. Their parents’ income dictated whether they got it at all. The high school football stars had treatment for torn shoulders, the softball players had cracked wrists, the swimmers had chronic ear infections.

Victor Truman Hobie had very little at all. Newman read between the lines and pictured a healthy boy, properly fed, conscientiously cared for by dutiful parents. His health had been good. There had been colds and flu, and a bout of bronchitis at the age of eight. No accidents. No broken bones. Dental treatment had been very thorough. The boy had grown up through the era of aggressive dentistry. In Newman’s experience, it was absolutely typical of any he had seen from the New York metropolitan area in the fifties and early sixties. Dentistry through that era consisted of a war on cavities. Cavities had to be hunted down. They were hunted with powerful X rays, and when they were found they were enlarged with the drill and filled with amalgam. The result was a lot of trips to the dentist’s office, which no doubt had been miserable for the young Victor Hobie, but from Newman’s point of view the process had left him with a thick sheaf of films of the boy’s mouth. They were good enough and clear enough and numerous enough to be potentially definitive.

He stacked the films and carried them out into the corridor. Unlocked the plain door in the cinder-block wall and walked past the aluminum caskets to the alcove at the far end. There was a computer terminal on a wide shelf, out of sight around a corner. He booted it up and clicked on the search menu. The screen scrolled down and revealed a detailed questionnaire.

Filling out the questionnaire was a matter of simple logic. He clicked on ALL BONES and entered NO CHILDHOOD BREAKS, POTENTIAL ADULT BREAKS. The kid didn’t break his leg playing football in high school, but he might have broken it later in a training accident. Service medical records were sometimes lost. He spent a lot of time on the dental section of the questionnaire. He entered a full description of each tooth as last recorded. He marked the filled cavities, and against each good tooth he entered POTENTIAL CAVITY. It was the only way to prevent mistakes. Simple logic. A good tooth can go bad later and need treatment, but a filled cavity can’t ever disappear. He stared at the X rays and against SPACING he entered EVEN, and against SIZE he entered EVEN again. The rest of the questionnaire he left blank. Some diseases show up in the skeleton, but not colds and flu and bronchitis.

He reviewed his work and at seven o’clock exactly he hit SEARCH. The hard disk whirred and chattered in the morning silence and the software started its patient journey through the database.

THEY LANDED TIN minutes ahead of schedule, just before the peak of noon, East Coast time. They came in low over the glittering waters of Jamaica Bay and put down facing east before turning back and taxiing slowly to the terminal. Jodie reset her watch and was on her feet before the plane stopped moving, which was a transgression they don’t chide you for in first class.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m real tight for time.”

They were lined up by the door before it opened. Reacher carried her bag out into the jetway and she hurried ahead of him all the way through the terminal and outside. The Lincoln Navigator was still there in the short-term lot, big and black and obvious, and it cost fifty-eight of Rutter’s dollars to drive it out.

“Do I have time for a shower?” she asked herself.

Reacher put his comment into hustling faster than he should along the Van Wyck. The Long Island Expressway was moving freely west to the tunnel. They were in Manhattan within twenty minutes of touching down and heading south on Broadway near her place within thirty.

“I’m still going to check it out,” he told her. “Shower or no shower.”

She nodded. Being back in the city had brought back the worry.

“OK, but be quick.”

He limited it to stopping on the street outside her door and making a visual check of the lobby. Nobody there. They dumped the car and went up to five and down the fire stairs to four. The building was quiet and deserted. The apartment was empty and undisturbed. The Mondrian copy glowed in the bright daylight. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then you can drive me to the office, OK?”

“How will you get to the meeting?”

“We have a driver,” she said. “He’ll take me.”

She ran through the living room to the bedroom, shedding clothes as she went.

“You need to eat?” Reacher called after her.

“No time,” she called back.

She spent five minutes in the shower and five minutes in the closet. She came out with a charcoal dress and a matching jacket.

“Find my briefcase, OK?” she yelled.

She combed her hair and used a hair dryer on it. Limited her makeup to a touch of eyeliner and lipstick. Checked herself in the mirror and ran back to the living room. He had her briefcase waiting for her. He carried it down to the car.

“Take my keys,” she said. “Then you can get back in. I’ll call you from the office and you can come pick me up.”

It took seven minutes to get opposite the little plaza outside her building. She slid out of the car at five minutes to one.

“Good luck,” Reacher called after her. “Give them hell.”

She waved to him and skipped across to the revolving door. The security guys saw her coming and nodded her through to the elevator bank. She was upstairs in her office before one o’clock. Her secretary followed her inside with a thin file in his hand.

“There you go,” he said, ceremoniously.

She opened it up and flipped through eight sheets of paper.

“Hell is this?” she said.

“They were thrilled about it at the partners’ meeting,” the guy said.

She went back through the pages in reverse order. “I don’t see why. I never heard of either of these corporations and the amount is trivial.”

“That’s not the point, though, is it?” the guy said.

She looked at him. “So what is the point?”

“It’s the creditor who hired you,” he said. “Not the guy who owes all the money. It’s a preemptive move, isn’t it? Because word is getting around. The creditor knows if you get alongside the guy who owes him money, you can cause him a big problem. So he hired you first, to keep that from happening. It means you’re famous. That’s what the partners are thrilled about. You’re a big star now, Mrs. Jacob.”

16

REACHER DROVE SLOWLY back to lower Broadway. He bumped the big car down the ramp to the garage. Parked it in Jodie’s slot and locked it. He didn’t go upstairs to the apartment. He walked back up the ramp to the street and headed north in the sun to the espresso bar. He had the counter guy put four shots in a cardboard cup and sat at the chromium table Jodie had used when he was checking the apartment the night he had gotten back from Brighton. He had walked back up Broadway and found her sitting there, staring at Rutter’s faked photograph. He sat down in the same chair she had used and blew on the espresso foam and smelled the aroma and took the first sip.

What to tell the old folks? The only humane thing to do would be to go up there and tell them nothing at all. Just tell them he had drawn a blank. Just leave it completely vague. It would be a kindness. Just go up there, hold their hands, break the news of Rutter’s deception, refund their money, and then describe a long and fruitless search backward through history that ended up absolutely nowhere. Then plead with them to accept he must be long dead, and beg them to understand nobody would ever be able to tell them where or when or how. Then disappear and leave them to live out the short balance of their lives with whatever dignity they could find in being just two out of the tens of millions of parents who gave up their children to the night and the fog swirling through a ghastly century.