Lee Child - Tripwire

He shrugged. “Maybe early one morning? When the place was still closed? Maybe they know somebody who works here. Maybe they did it while the place was closed for the renovations.”

She was staring at the picture, close up to her eyes. “Wait a damn minute. You can see that bench. You can see the corner of that bench over there.”

She showed him what she meant, with her fingernail placed precisely on the glossy surface of the photograph. There was a tiny square blur, white. It was the comer of an iron bench, off to the right, behind the main scene. The telephoto lens had been framed tight, but not quite tight enough.

“I didn’t spot that,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”

She turned around to face him. “No, I’m getting good and mad, Reacher. This guy Rutter took eighteen thousand dollars for a faked photograph.”

“Worse than that. He gave them false hope.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to pay him a visit,” he said.

They were back at the Taurus sixteen minutes after leaving it. Jodie threaded back toward the parkway, drumming her fingers on the wheel and talking fast. “But you told me you believed it. I said the photo proved the place existed, and you agreed it did. You said you’d been there, not long ago, got about as close as Rutter had.”

“All true,” Reacher said. “I believed the Botanical Gardens existed. I’d just come back from there. And I got as close as Rutter did. I was standing right next to the little wall where he must have taken the picture from.”

“Jesus, Reacher, what is this? A game?”

He shrugged. “Yesterday I didn’t know what it was. I mean in terms of how much I needed to share with you.”

She nodded and smiled through her exasperation. She was remembering the difference between yesterday and today. “But how the hell did he expect to get away with it? The greenhouse in the New York Botanical Gardens, for God’s sake?”

He stretched in his seat. Eased his arms all the way forward to the windshield.

“Psychology,” he said. “It’s the basis of any scam, right? You tell people what they want to hear. Those old folks, they wanted to hear their boy was still alive. So he tells them their boy probably is. So they invest a lot of hope and money, they’re waiting on pins three whole months, he gives them a photo, and basically they’re going to see whatever they want to see. And he was smart. He asked them for the exact name and unit, he wanted existing pictures of the boy, so he could pick out a middle-aged guy roughly the right size and shape for the photo, and he fed them back the right name and the right unit. Psychology. They see what they want to see. He could have had a guy in a gorilla suit in the picture and they’d have believed it was representative of the local wildlife.”

“So how did you spot it?”

“Same way,” he said. “Same psychology, but in reverse. I wanted to disbelieve it, because I knew it couldn’t be true. So I was looking for something that seemed wrong. It was the fatigues the guy was wearing that did it for me. You notice that? Old worn-out U.S. Army fatigues? This guy went down thirty years ago. There is absolutely no way a set of fatigues would last thirty years in the jungle. They’d have rotted off in six weeks.”

“But why there? What made you look in the Botanical Gardens?”

He spread his fingers against the windshield glass, pushing to ease the tension in his shoulders. “Where else would he find vegetation like that? Hawaii, maybe, but why spend the airfare for three people when it’s available free right on his doorstep?”

“And the Vietnamese boy?”

“Probably a college kid,” he said. “Probably right here at Fordham. Maybe Columbia. Maybe he wasn’t Vietnamese at all. Could have been a waiter from a Chinese restaurant. Rutter probably paid him twenty bucks for the photo. He’s probably got four friends playing the American captives. A big white guy, a small white guy, a big black guy, a small black guy, all the bases covered. All of them bums, so they look thin and haggard. Probably paid them in bourbon. Probably took all the pictures at the same time, uses them as appropriate. He could have sold that exact same picture a dozen times over. Anyone whose missing boy was tall and white, they get a copy. Then he swears them all to secrecy with this government-conspiracy shit, so nobody will ever compare notes afterward.”

“He’s disgusting,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s for damn sure. BNR families are still a big, vulnerable market, I guess, and he’s feeding off it like a maggot.”

“BNR?” she asked.

“Body not recovered,” he said. “That’s what they are. KIA/ BNR. Killed in action, body not recovered.”

“Killed? You don’t believe there are still any prisoners?”

He shook his head.

“There are no prisoners, Jodie,” he said. “Not anymore. That’s all bullshit ”

“You sure?”

“Totally certain.”

“How can you be certain?”

“I just know,” he said. “Like I know the sky is blue and the grass is green and you’ve got a great ass.”

She smiled as she drove. “I’m a lawyer, Reacher. That kind of proof just doesn’t do it for me.”

“Historical facts,” he said. “The story about holding hostages to get American aid is all baloney, for a start. They were planning to come running south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail as soon as we were out of there, which was right against the Paris Accords, so they knew they were never going to get any aid no matter what they did. So they let all the prisoners go in ‘73, a bit slowly, I know, but they let them go. When we left in ‘75, they scooped up about a hundred stragglers, and then they handed them all straight back to us, which doesn’t jibe with any kind of a hostage strategy. Plus they were desperate for us to de-mine their harbors, so they didn’t play silly games.”

“They were slow about returning remains,” she said. “You know, our boys killed in plane crashes or battles. They played silly games about that.”

He nodded. “They didn’t really understand. It was important to us. We wanted two thousand bodies back. They couldn’t understand why. They’d been at war more than forty years, Japanese, French, the U.S., China. They probably lost a million people missing in action. Our two thousand was a drop in the bucket. Plus they were Communists. They didn’t share the value we put on individuals. It’s a psychological thing again. But it doesn’t mean they kept secret prisoners in secret camps.”

“Not a very conclusive argument,” she said dryly.

He nodded again. “Leon’s the conclusive argument. Your old man, and people just like him. I know those people. Brave, honorable people, Jodie. They fought there, and then they rose to power and prominence later. The Pentagon is stuffed full of assholes, I know that as well as anybody, but there were always enough people like Leon around to keep them honest. You answer me a question: If Leon had known there were still prisoners kept back in ‘Nam, what would he have done?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Something, obviously.”

“You bet your ass something,” he said. “Leon would have torn the White House apart brick by brick, until all those boys were safely back home. But he didn’t. And that’s not because he didn’t know. Leon knew everything there was to know. There’s no way they could have kept a thing like that a secret from all the Leons, not all the time. A big conspiracy lasting six administrations? A conspiracy people like Leon couldn’t sniff out? Forget about it. The Leons of this world never reacted, so it was never happening. That’s conclusive proof, as far as I’m concerned, Jodie.”