Lee Child - Tripwire

The other parked cars were harmless. There was a UPS truck two places ahead, and a couple of livery vehicles with drivers standing next to them, scanning for their passengers. Innocent bustle, at the weary end of a busy day. Reacher settled back in his seat to wait, his eyes flicking left and right, ahead and behind, always returning to the revolving door.

She came out before seven, which was sooner than he expected. He saw her through the glass, in the lobby. He saw her hair, and her dress, and the flash of her legs as she skipped sideways to the exit. He wondered for a second if she had just been waiting up on her high floor. The timing was plausible. She could have seen the car from her window, gone straight to the elevator. She pushed the door and spilled out onto the plaza. He got out of the car and moved around the hood to the sidewalk and stood waiting. She was carrying the pilot’s case. She skipped through a shaft of sun and her hair lit up like a halo. Ten yards from him, she smiled.

“Hello, Reacher,” she called.

“Hello, Jodie,” he said.

She knew something. He could see it in her face. She had big news for him, but she was smiling like she was going to tease him with it.

“What?” he asked.

She smiled again and shook her head. “You first, OK?”

They sat in the car and he ran through everything the old couple had told him. Her smile faded and she turned somber. Then he gave her the leather-bound folder and left her to scan through it while he fought the traffic in a narrow counterclockwise square that left them facing south on Broadway, two blocks from her place. He pulled in at the curb outside an espresso bar. She was reading the reconnaissance report from Rutter and studying the photograph of the emaciated gray man and the Asian soldier.

“Incredible,” she said, quietly.

“Give me your keys,” he said back. “Get a coffee and I’ll walk up for you when I know your building’s OK.”

She made no objection. The photograph had shaken her up. She just went into her bag for her keys and got out of the car and skipped straight across the sidewalk and into the coffee shop. He watched her inside and then eased south down the street. He turned directly into her garage. It was a different car, and he figured if anybody was waiting down there they would hesitate long enough to give him all the advantage he would need. But the garage was quiet. Just the same group of parked vehicles, looking like they hadn’t moved all day. He put the Taurus in her slot and went up the metal stairs to the lobby. Nobody there. Nobody in the elevator, nobody in the fourth-floor hallway. Her door was undamaged. He opened it up and stepped inside. Quiet, still air. Nobody there.

He used the fire stairs to get back to the lobby and went out the glass doors to the street. Walked the two blocks north and ducked into the coffee shop and found her alone at a chrome table, reading Victor Hobie’s letters, an espresso untouched at her elbow.

“You going to drink that?” he asked.

She stacked the jungle photograph on top of the letters.

“This has big implications,” she said.

He took that for a no, and pulled the cup over and swallowed the coffee in one mouthful. It had cooled slightly and was wonderfully strong.

“Let’s go,” she said. She let him carry her case and took his arm for the two-block walk. He gave back her keys at the street door and they went in through the lobby together and up in the elevator in silence. She unlocked the apartment door and went inside ahead of him.

“So it’s government people after us,” she said.

He made no reply. Just shrugged off his new jacket and dropped it on the sofa under the Mondrian copy.

“Has to be,” she said.

He walked to the windows and cracked the blinds. Shafts of daylight poured in and the white room glowed.

“We’re close to the secret of these camps,” she said. “So the government is trying to silence us. CIA or somebody.”

He walked through to the kitchen. Pulled the refrigerator door and took out a bottle of water.

“We’re in serious danger,” she said. “You don’t seem very worried about it ”

He shrugged and took a swallow of water. It was too cold. He preferred it room temperature.

“Life’s too short for worrying,” he said.

“Dad was worrying. It was making his heart worse.”

He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“So why aren’t you taking it seriously? Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe it,” he said. “I believe everything they told me.”

“And the photograph proves it, right? The place obviously exists.”

“I know it exists,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

She stared at him. “You’ve been there? When? How?”

“Not long ago,” he said. “I got just about as close as this Rutter guy got.”

“Christ, Reacher,” she said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to buy a gun.”

“No, we should go to the cops. Or the newspapers, maybe. The government can’t do this.”

“You wait for me here, OK?”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to buy a gun. Then I’ll buy us some pizza. I’ll bring it back.”

“You can’t buy a gun, not in New York City, for God’s sake. There are laws. You need ID and permits and things and you’ve got to wait five days anyway.”

“I can buy a gun anywhere,” he said. “Especially New York City. What do you want on the pizza?”

“Have you got enough money?”

“For the pizza?”

“For the gun,” she said.

“The gun will cost me less than the pizza,” he said. “Lock the door behind me, OK? And don’t open it unless you see it’s me in the spy hole.”

He left her standing in the center of the kitchen. He used the fire stairs to the lobby and stood in the bustle on the sidewalk long enough to get himself lined up with the geography. There was a pizza parlor on the block to the south. He ducked inside and ordered a large pie, half anchovies and capers, half hot pepperoni, to go in thirty minutes. Then he dodged traffic on Broadway and struck out east. He’d been in New York enough times to know what people say is true. Everything happens fast in New York. Things change fast. Fast in terms of chronology, and fast in terms of geography. One neighborhood shifts into another within a couple of blocks. Sometimes, the front of a building is a middle-class paradise, and around the back bums are sleeping in the alley. He knew a fast ten-minute walk was going to take him worlds away from Jodie’s expensive apartment block.

He found what he was looking for in the shadows under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a messy tangle of streets crouching there, and a giant housing project sprawling to the north and east. Some ragged cluttered stores, and a basketball court with chains under the hoops instead of nets. The air was hot and damp and filled with fumes and noise. He turned a comer and stood leaning on the chain-link with the basketball noises behind him, watching two worlds collide. There was a rapid traffic flow of vehicles driving and people walking fast, and an equal quantity of cars stopped and idling and people standing around in bunches. The moving cars tacked around the stopped ones, honking and swerving, and the walking people pushed and complained and dodged into the gutter to pass the knots of loiterers. Sometimes a car would stop short and a boy would dart forward to the driver’s window. There would be a short conversation and money would change hands like a conjuring trick and the boy would dart back to a doorway and disappear. He would reappear a moment later and hustle back to the car. The driver would glance left and right and accept a small package and force back into the traffic in a burble of exhaust and a blast of horns. Then the boy would return to the sidewalk and wait.