Lee Child - Tripwire

“Ten-dollar tip in it for you,” he said.

The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy’s family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark, smiling children and a dark, smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.

“Twenty dollars,” he said. “If we get going right now, OK?”

“Twenty dollars?” the guy repeated, amazed.

“Thirty. For your kids. They look nice.”

The guy grinned in the mirror and touched his fingers to his lips and laid them gently on the shiny surface of the photograph. He swung the cab through the lane changes onto the perimeter track and came off again more or less immediately, eight hundred yards into the journey, outside a military gate which looked identical to the one fronting Fort Wolters. Jodie opened the door and stepped out into the heat and Reacher went into his pocket and came out with his roll of cash. Top bill was a fifty, and he peeled it off and pushed it through the little hinged door in the Plexiglas.

“Keep it.”

Then he pointed at the photograph. “That your house?”

The driver nodded.

“Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?”

The guy shook his head. “Tip-top condition.”

“The roof OK?”

“No problems at all.”

Reacher nodded. “Just checking.”

He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back toward the civilian terminal. There was a breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.

“Where are we going?”

“CIL-HI,” Reacher said. “It’s right inside here.”

He pronounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.

“Silly?” she repeated. “So what’s that?”

“C,I,L,H,I,” he said. “Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It’s the Department of the Army’s main facility.”

“For what?”

“I’ll show you for what,” he said.

Then he paused. “At least I hope I will.”

They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.

“We’re here to see Nash Newman,” he said.

The sergeant looked surprised and picked up a clipboard and peeled thin sheets of paper back. He slid a thick finger along a line and nodded. Picked up a phone and dialed a number. Four digits. An internal call. He announced the visitors and listened to the reply, and then he looked puzzled. He covered the phone with his palm and turned back to Jodie.

“How old are you, miss?” he asked.

“Thirty,” Jodie said, puzzled in turn.

“Thirty,” the MP repeated into the phone. Then he listened again and hung it up and wrote something on the clipboard. Turned back to the window.

“He’ll be right out, so come on through.”

They squeezed through the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the heavy counterweight on the end of the vehicle barrier and waited on the hot pavement six feet away from where they had started, but now it was military pavement, not Hawaii Department of Transportation pavement, and that made a lot of difference to the look on the sergeant’s face. The suspicion was all gone, replaced by frank curiosity about why the legendary Nash Newman was in such a big hurry to get these two civilians inside the base.

There was a low concrete building maybe sixty yards away with a plain personnel door set in the blank end wall. The door opened up and a silver-haired man stepped out. He turned back to close it and lock it and then set out at a fast walk toward the gatehouse. He was in the pants and the shirt of an Army tropical-issue uniform, with a white lab coat flapping open over them. There was enough metal punched through the collar of the shirt to indicate he was a high-ranking officer, and nothing in his distinguished bearing to contradict that impression. Reacher moved to meet him and Jodie followed. The silver-haired guy was maybe fifty-five, and up close he was tall, with a handsome patrician face and a natural athletic grace in his body that was just beginning to yield to the stiffness of age.

“General Newman,” Reacher said. “This is Jodie Garber.”

Newman glanced at Reacher and took Jodie’s hand, smiling.

“Pleased to meet you, General,” she said.

“We already met,” Newman said.

“We did?” she said, surprised.

“You wouldn’t recall it,” he said. “At least I’d be terribly surprised if you did. You were three years old at the time, I guess. In the Philippines. It was in your father’s backyard. I remember you brought me a glass of planter’s punch. It was a big glass, and a big yard, and you were a very little girl. You carried it in both hands, with your tongue sticking out, concentrating. I watched you all the way, with my heart in my mouth in case you dropped it.”

She smiled. “Well, you’re right, I’m afraid I don’t recall it. I was three? That’s an awful long time ago now.”

Newman nodded. “That’s why I checked how old you looked. I didn’t mean for the sergeant to come right out and ask you straight. I wanted his subjective impression, is all. It’s not the sort of thing one should ask a lady, is it? But I was wondering if you could really be Leon’s daughter, come to visit me.”

He squeezed her hand and let it go. Turned to Reacher and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Jack Reacher,” he said. “Damn, it’s good to see you again.”

Reacher caught Newman’s hand and shook it hard, sharing the pleasure.

“General Newman was my teacher,” he said to Jodie. “He did a spell at staff college about a million years ago. Advanced forensics, taught me everything I know.”

“He was a pretty good student,” Newman said to her. “Paid attention at least, which is more than most of them did.”

“So what is it you do, General?” she asked.

“Well, I do a little forensic anthropology,” Newman said.

“He’s the best in the world,” Reacher said.

Newman waved away the compliment. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Anthropology?” Jodie said. “But isn’t that studying remote tribes and things? How they live? Their rituals and beliefs and so on?”

“No, that’s cultural anthropology,” Newman said. “There are many different disciplines. Mine is forensic anthropology, which is a part of physical anthropology.”

“Studying human remains for clues,” Reacher said.

“A bone doctor,” Newman said. “That’s about what it amounts to.”

They were drifting down the sidewalk as they talked, getting nearer the plain door in the blank wall. It opened up and a younger man was standing there waiting for them in the entrance corridor. A nondescript guy, maybe thirty years old, in a lieutenant’s uniform under a white lab coat. Newman nodded toward him. “This is Lieutenant Simon. He runs the lab for me. Couldn’t manage without him.”

He introduced Reacher and Jodie and they shook hands all around. Simon was quiet and reserved. Reacher figured him for a typical lab guy, annoyed at the disruption to the measured routine of his work. Newman led them inside and down the corridor to his office, and Simon nodded silently to him and disappeared.