Lee Child - Tripwire

“Tough, Jodie. You’re not going back there alone.”

Checking out of the St. Louis honeymoon suite that morning had done something to him. The lizard part of his brain buried deep behind the frontal lobes had shrieked: The hon eymoon is over, pal. Your life is changing and the problems start now. He had ignored it. But now he was paying attention to it. For the first time in his life, he had a hostage to fortune. He had somebody to worry about. It was mostly a pleasure, but it was a burden.

“I have to go back, Reacher,” she said. “I can’t let them down.”

“Call them, tell them you can’t make it. Tell them you’re sick or something.”

“I can’t do that. My secretary knows I’m not sick, right? And I’ve got a career to think about. It’s important to me.”

“You’re not going back there alone,” he said again.

“Why do you need to go to Hawaii anyway?”

“Because that’s where the answer is,” he said.

He stepped away to a ticket counter and took a thick time-table from a small chrome rack. Stood in the cold fluorescence and opened it up to D for the Dallas-Fort Worth departures and ran his finger down the list of destinations as far as H for Honolulu. Then he flipped ahead to the Honolulu departures and checked the flights going back to New York. He double-checked, and then he smiled with relief.

“We can make it anyway, do both things. Look at this. There’s a twelve-fifteen out of here. Flight time minus the time change going west gets us to Honolulu at three o’clock. Then we get the seven o’clock back to New York, flight time plus the time change coming back east gets us into JFK at twelve noon tomorrow. Your guy said it was an afternoon meeting, right? So you can still make it.”

“I need to get briefed in,” she said. “I have no idea what it’s about.”

“You’ll have a couple of hours. You’re a quick study.”

“It’s crazy. Only gives us four hours in Hawaii.”

“All we need. I’ll call ahead, set it up.”

“We’ll be on a plane all night. I’ll be going to my meeting after a sleepless night on a damn plane.”

“So we’ll go first-class,” he said. “Rutter’s paying, right? We can sleep in first class. The chairs look comfortable enough.”

She shrugged and sighed. “Crazy.”

“Let me use your phone,” he said.

She handed him the mobile from her bag and he called long-distance information and asked for the number. Dialed it and heard it ring six thousand miles away. It rang eight times and the voice he wanted to hear answered it.

“This is Jack Reacher,” he said. “You going to be in the office all day?”

The answer was slow and sleepy, because it was very early in the morning in Hawaii, but it was the answer he wanted to hear. He clicked the phone off and turned back to Jodie. She sighed at him again, but this time there was a smile mixed in with it. She stepped to the counter and used the gold card to buy two first-class tickets, Dallas-Fort Worth to Honolulu to New York. The guy at the counter made the seat assignments on the spot, slightly bewildered in front of people spending the price of a used sportscar to buy twenty hours on a plane and four on the ground on Oahu. He handed the wallets over and twenty minutes later Reacher was settling into an enormous leather-and-sheepskin chair with Jodie safely a yard away at his side.

THERE WAS A routine to be followed in this situation. It had never before been employed, but it had been rehearsed often and thoroughly. The thickset man at the chest-high counter moved his hand casually sideways and used his index finger on one button and his middle finger on another. The first button locked the oak door out to the elevator lobby. There was an electromagnetic mechanism that clicked the steel tongue into place, silently and unobtrusively. Once it was activated, the door stayed locked until the mechanism was released again, no matter what anybody did with the latch or the key. The second button set a red light flashing in the intercom unit on Hobie’s desk. The red light was bright and the office was always dark, and it was impossible to miss it.

“Who?” the thickset guy said.

“Sheryl,” O’Hallinan repeated.

“I’m sorry,” the guy said. “There’s nobody called Sheryl working here. Currently we have a staff of three, and they’re all men.”

He moved his hand to the left and rested it on a button marked TALK, which activated the intercom.

“You operate a black Tahoe?” O’Hallinan asked him.

He nodded. “We have a black Tahoe on the corporate fleet.”

“What about a Suburban?”

“Yes, I think we have one of those, too. Is this about a traffic violation?”

“It’s about Sheryl being in the hospital,” O’Hallinan said.

“Who?” the guy asked again.

Sark came up behind O’Hallinan. “We need to speak with your boss.”

“OK,” the guy said. “I’ll see if that can be arranged. May I have your names?”

“Officers Sark and O’Hallinan, City of New York Police Department.”

Tony opened the inner office door, and stood there, inquiringly.

“May I help you, Officers?” he called.

In the rehearsals, the cops would turn away from the counter and look at Tony. Maybe take a couple of steps toward him. And that is exactly what happened. Sark and O’Hallinan turned their backs and walked toward the middle of the reception area. The thickset man at the counter leaned down and opened a cupboard. Unclipped the shotgun from its rack and held it low, out of sight.

“It’s about Sheryl,” O’Hallinan said again.

“Sheryl who?” Tony asked.

“The Sheryl in the hospital with the busted nose,” Sark said. “And the fractured cheekbones and the concussion. The Sheryl who got out of your Tahoe outside St. Vincent’s ER.”

“Oh, I see,” Tony said. “We didn’t get her name. She couldn’t speak a word, because of the injuries to her face.”

“So why was she in your car?” O’Hallinan asked.

“We were up at Grand Central, dropping a client there. We found her on the sidewalk, kind of lost. She was off the train from Mount Kisco, and just kind of wandering about. We offered her a ride to the hospital, which seemed to be what she needed. So we dropped her at St. Vincent’s, because it’s on the way back here.”

“Bellevue is nearer Grand Central,” O’Hallinan said.

“I don’t like the traffic over there,” Tony said neutrally. “St. Vincent’s was more convenient.”

“And you didn’t wonder about what had happened to her?” Sark asked. “How she came by the injuries?”

“Well, naturally we wondered,” Tony said. “We asked her about it, but she couldn’t speak, because of the injuries. That’s why we didn’t recognize the name.”

O’Hallinan stood there, unsure. Sark took a step forward.

“You found her on the sidewalk?”

Tony nodded. “Outside Grand Central.”

“She couldn’t speak?”

“Not a word.”

“So how do you know she was off the Kisco train?”

The only gray area in the rehearsals had been picking the exact moment to drop the defense and start the offense. It was a subjective issue. They had trusted that when it came, they would recognize it. And they did. The thickset man stood up and crunched a round into the shotgun’s chamber and leveled it across the counter.

“Freeze!” he screamed.

A nine-millimeter pistol appeared in Tony’s hand. Sark and O’Hallinan stared at it and glanced back at the shotgun and jerked their arms upward. Not a rueful little gesture like in the movies. They stretched them violently upward as if their lives depended on touching the acoustic tile directly above their heads. The guy with the shotgun came up from the rear and jammed the muzzle hard into Sark’s back and Tony stepped around behind O’Hallinan and did the same thing with his pistol. Then a third man came out from the darkness and paused in the office doorway.