Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  He walked to the bathroom, and stood in front of the mirror. Pulled his cash roll from his pocket and assembled the price he had just been quoted from the smallest bills he had. Then he buttoned his shirt all the way up and smoothed his hair down with his palm. Walked back out and over to the Delta counter.

  The ticket price was the same as United’s. He knew it would be. It always is, somehow. He counted the money out, ones and tens and fives, and the counter girl took it all and straightened the bills and shuffled them into denominations.

  “Your name, sir?” she asked.

  “Truman,” Reacher said. “Like the president.”

  The girl looked blank. She was probably born overseas during Nixon’s final days. Maybe during Carter’s first year. Reacher didn’t care. He had been born overseas at the start of Kennedy’s term. He wasn’t about to say anything. Truman was ancient history to him, too. The girl typed the name into her console and the ticket printed out. She put it in a folder with a red-and-blue world on it, then she tore it straight back out.

  “I can check you in right now,” she said.

  Reacher nodded. The problem with paying cash for an airline ticket, especially at Miami International, is the war on drugs. If he had swaggered up to the desk and pulled his roll of hundreds, the girl would have been obliged to tread on a small secret button on the floor under her counter. Then she would have fiddled with her keyboard until the police came in, left and right. The police would have seen a big rough guy with a tan and a big wad of cash and figured him for a courier, straight off the bat. Their strategy is to chase the drugs, for sure, but to chase the money, too. They won’t let you put it in the bank, they won’t let you spend it without getting all concerned about it. They assume normal citizens use plastic cards for big purchases. Especially for travel. Especially at the airport desk twenty minutes before takeoff. And that assumption would lead to delay and hassle and paperwork, which were three things Reacher was always keen to avoid. So he had evolved a careful act. He made himself look like a guy who couldn’t even get a credit card if he wanted one, like a down-on-his-luck insolvent roughneck. Buttoning the shirt and carefully fingering the small bills were what did it. It gave him a shy, embarrassed look. It put the counter clerks on his side. They were all underpaid and struggling with their own maxed-out plastic. So they looked up and saw a guy just a little farther down the road than they were, and sympathy was their instinctive reaction, not suspicion.

  “Gate B6, sir,” the girl said. “I’ve given you a window.”

  “Thanks,” Reacher said.

  He walked to the gate and fifteen minutes later was accelerating down the runway with pretty much the same feeling as being back in Crystal’s Porsche, except he had a lot less legroom and the seat next to him was empty.

  CHESTER STONE GAVE it up at six o’clock. He shut off the alarm a half hour before it was due to sound and slid out of bed, quietly, so as not to wake Marilyn. He took his robe from the hook and padded out of the bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen. His stomach was too acid to contemplate breakfast, so he made do with coffee and headed for the shower in the guest suite where it didn’t matter if he made noise. He wanted to let Marilyn sleep, and he didn’t want her to know that he couldn’t. Every night she woke and made some comment about him lying there, but she never followed up on it, so he figured she didn’t remember it by the morning, or else she put it down to some kind of a dream. He was pretty sure she didn’t know anything. And he was happy to keep it that way, because it was bad enough dealing with the problems, without worrying about her worrying about them as well.

  He shaved and spent his shower time thinking about what to wear and how to act. Truth was he would be approaching this guy practically on his knees. A lender of last resort. His last hope, his last chance. Somebody who held the whole of his future in the palm of his hand. So how to approach such a guy? Not on his knees. That was not how the game of business is played. If you look like you really need a loan, you don’t get it. You only get it if you look like you don’t really need it. Like it’s a matter of very little consequence to you. Like it’s a fifty-fifty decision whether you even allow the guy to climb on board with you and share a little wedge of the big exciting profits just around the next comer. Like your biggest problem is deciding exactly whose loan offer you’re even going to consider.

  A white shirt, for sure, and a quiet tie. But which suit? The Italians were maybe too flashy. Not the Armani. He had to look like a serious man. Rich enough to buy a dozen Armanis, for sure, but somehow too serious to consider doing that. Too serious and too preoccupied with weighty affairs to spend time shopping on Madison Avenue. He decided heritage was the feature to promote. An unbroken three-generation heritage of business success, maybe reflected in a dynastic approach to dressing. Like his grandfather had taken his father to his tailor and introduced him, then his father had taken him in turn. Then he thought about his Brooks Brothers suit. Old, but nice, a quiet check, vented, slightly warm for June. Would Brooks Brothers be a clever double bluff? Like saying, I’m so rich and successful it really doesn’t matter to me what I wear? Or would he look like a loser?

  He pulled it off the rack and held it against his body. Classic, but dowdy. He looked like a loser. He put it back. Tried the gray Savile Row from London. Perfect. It made him look like a gentleman of substance. Wise, tasteful, infinitely trustworthy. He selected a tie with just a hint of pattern and a pair of solid black shoes. Put it all on and twisted left and right in front of the mirror. Couldn’t be better. Looking like that, he might almost trust himself. He finished his coffee, dabbed his lips, and slipped through to the garage. Fired up the Benz and was on an uncongested Merritt Parkway by six forty-five.

  REACHER SPENT FIFTY minutes on the ground in Atlanta, then took off again and swung east and north toward New York. The sun was up out over the Atlantic and was coming in through the right-hand windows with the freezing brightness of high-altitude dawn. He was drinking coffee. The stewardess had offered him water, but he’d taken the coffee instead. It was thick and strong, and he was drinking it black. He was using it to fuel his brain. Trying to figure who the hell Mrs. Jacob could be. And why she had paid Costello to scour the country for him.

  They stacked up over LaGuardia. Reacher loved that. Low lazy circles over Manhattan in the bright morning sun. Like a million movies, without the soundtrack. The plane rocking and tilting. The tall buildings sliding by under them, tinted gold by the sun. The Twin Towers. The Empire State Building. The Chrysler, his favorite. Citicorp. Then they were looping around and diving for the north shore of Queens, and landing. The buildings of Midtown across the river raked past the tiny windows as they turned to taxi in to the terminal.

  HIS APPOINTMENT WAS for nine o’clock. He hated that. Not because of the time. Nine o’clock was halfway through the morning for most of the Manhattan business community. The hour was not upsetting him. It was the fact that he had an appointment at all. It was a very long time indeed since Chester Stone had made an appointment to see anybody. In fact he couldn’t accurately recall ever making an appointment to see anybody. Maybe his grandfather had, in the very early days. Since then it had always worked the other way around. All three Chester Stones, be it first, second, or third, had secretaries who graciously tried to fit supplicants into a busy schedule. Many times people had waited days for a provisional window, and then hours in an anteroom. But now it was different. And it was burning him up.

  He was early, because he was anxious. He had spent forty minutes in his office reviewing his options. He had none. Whichever way he cut it, he was one-point-one million dollars and six weeks short of success. And that was choking him, too. Because it wasn’t a spectacular crash and burn. Not a total disaster. It was a measured and realistic response to the market that was almost all the way there, but not quite. Like a heroic drive off the tee that lands an inch short of the green. Very, very close, but not close enough.

  Nine o’clock in the morning, the Wo
rld Trade Center on its own is the sixth largest city in New York State. Bigger than Albany. Only sixteen acres of land, but a daytime population of 130,000 people. Chester Stone felt like most of them were swirling around him as he stood in the plaza. His grandfather would have been standing in the Hudson River. Chester himself had watched from his own office window as the landfill inched out into the water and the giant towers had risen from the dry riverbed. He checked his watch and went inside. Took an elevator to the eighty-eighth floor and stepped out into a quiet deserted corridor. The ceiling was low and the space was narrow. There were locked doors leading into offices. They had small rectangular wired-glass portholes set off center. He found the right door and glanced through the glass and pressed the buzzer. The lock clicked back and he went inside to a reception area. It looked like a normal office suite. Surprisingly ordinary. There was a brass-and-oak counter, an attempt at opulence, and a male receptionist sitting behind it. Chester paused and straightened his back and stepped over toward him.

  “Chester Stone,” he said firmly. “I’ve got a nine o’clock with Mr. Hobie.”

  The male receptionist was the first surprise. He had expected a woman. The second surprise was that he was shown straight in. He was not kept waiting. He had expected to sit for a spell, out there in reception in an uncomfortable chair. That’s how he would have done it. If some desperate person was coming to him for a last-ditch loan, he’d have let him sweat for twenty minutes. Surely that was an elementary psychological move?

  The inner office was very large. Walls had been removed. It was dark. One wall was all windows, but they were covered with vertical blinds, open no more than narrow slits. There was a big desk. Facing it were three sofas completing a square. There were lamp tables at each end of each sofa. A huge square coffee table in the middle, brass and glass, standing on a rug. The whole thing looked like a living room display in a store window.

  There was a man behind the desk. Stone started the long walk in toward him. He dodged between the sofas and crabbed around the coffee table. Approached the desk. Stuck out his right hand.

  “Mr. Hobie?” he said. “I’m Chester Stone.”

  The man behind the desk was burned. He had scar tissue all the way down one side of his face. It was scaly, like a reptile’s skin. Stone stared away from it in horror, but he was still seeing it in the comer of his eye. It was textured like an overcooked chicken’s foot, but it was unnaturally pink. There was no hair growing where it ran up over the scalp. Then there were crude tufts, shading into proper hair on the other side. The hair was gray. The scars were hard and lumpy, but the skin on the unburned side was soft and lined. The guy was maybe fifty or fifty-five. He was sitting there, his chair pushed in close to the desk, his hands down in his lap. Stone was standing there, forcing himself not to look away, his right hand stuck out over the desk.

  It was a very awkward moment. There is nothing more awkward than standing there ready to shake hands while the gesture is ignored. Foolish to keep standing there like that, but somehow worse to pull your hand back. So he kept it extended, waiting. Then the man moved. He used his left hand to push back from the desk. Brought his right hand up to meet Stone’s. But it wasn’t a hand. It was a glittering metal hook. It started way up under his cuff. Not an artificial hand, not a clever prosthetic device, just a simple hook, the shape of a capital letter J, forged from shiny stainless steel and polished like a sculpture. Stone nearly went to grasp it anyway, but then he pulled back and froze. The man smiled a brief generous smile with the mobile half of his face. Like it meant nothing to him at all.

  “They call me Hook Hobie,” he said.

  He sat there with his face rigid and the hook held up like an object for examination. Stone swallowed and tried to recover his composure. Wondered if he should offer his left hand instead. He knew some people did that. His great-uncle had had a stroke. The last ten years of his life, he always shook left-handed.

  “Take a seat,” Hook Hobie said.

  Stone nodded gratefully and backed away. Sat on the end of the sofa. It put him sideways on, but he was happy just to be doing something. Hobie looked at him and laid his arm on the desktop. The hook hit the wood with a quiet metallic sound.

  “You want to borrow money,” he said.

  The burned side of his face did not move at all. It was thick and hard like a crocodile’s back. Stone felt his stomach going acid and he looked straight down at the coffee table. Then he nodded and ran his palms over the knees of his trousers. Nodded again, and tried to remember his script.

  “I need to bridge a gap,” he said. “Six weeks, one-point-one million.”

  “Bank?” Hobie asked.

  Stone stared at the floor. The tabletop was glass, and there was a patterned rug under it. He shrugged wisely, as if he were including a hundred fine points of arcane business strategy in a single gesture, communicating with a man he wouldn’t dream of insulting by suggesting he was in any way ignorant of any of them.

  “I prefer not to,” he said. “We have an existing loan package, of course, but I beat them down to a hell of a favorable rate based on the premise that it was all fixed-amount, fixed-term stuff, with no rolling component. You’ll appreciate that I don’t want to upset those arrangements for such a trivial amount.”

  Hobie moved his right arm. The hook dragged over the wood.

  “Bullshit, Mr. Stone,” he said quietly.

  Stone made no reply. He was listening to the hook.

  “Were you in the service?” Hobie asked him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Were you drafted? Vietnam?”

  Stone swallowed. The burns, and the hook.

  “I missed out,” he said. “Deferred, for college. I was very keen to go, of course, but the war was over by the time I graduated.”

  Hobie nodded, slowly.

  “I went,” he said. “And one of the things I learned over there was the value of intelligence gathering. It’s a lesson I apply in my business.”

  There was silence in the dark office. Stone nodded. Moved his head and stared at the edge of the desk. Changed the script.

  “OK,” he said. “Can’t blame me for trying to put a brave face on it, right?”

  “You’re in relatively deep shit,” Hobie said. “You’re actually paying your bank top points, and they’ll say no to any further funds. But you’re doing a reasonably good job of digging yourself out from under. You’re nearly out of the woods.”

  “Nearly,” Stone agreed. “Six weeks and one-point-one million away, is all.”

  “I specialize,” Hobie said. “Everybody specializes. My arena is cases exactly like yours. Fundamentally sound enterprises, with temporary and limited exposure problems. Problems that can’t be solved by the banks, because they specialize, too, in other arenas, such as being dumb and unimaginative as shit.”

  He moved the hook again, scraping it across the oak.

  “My charges are reasonable,” he said. “I’m not a loan shark. We’re not talking about hundreds-of-percent interest here. I could see my way to advancing you one-point-one, say six percent to cover the six weeks.”

  Stone ran his palms over his thighs again. Six percent for six weeks? Equivalent to an annual rate of what? Nearly 52 percent. Borrow one-point-one million now, pay it all back plus sixty-six thousand dollars in interest six weeks from now. Eleven thousand dollars a week. Not quite a loan shark’s terms. Not too far away, either. But at least the guy was saying yes.

  “What about security?” Stone asked.

  “I’ll take an equity position,” Hobie said.

  Stone forced himself to raise his head and look at him. He figured this was some kind of a test. He swallowed hard. Figured he was so close, honesty was the best policy.

  “The stock’s worth nothing,” he said quietly.

  Hobie nodded his terrible head, like he was pleased with the reply.

  “Right now it isn’t,” he said. “But it will be worth something soon, right?”


  “Only after your exposure is terminated,” Stone said. “Catch-22, right? The stock only goes back up after I repay you. When I’m out of the woods.”

  “So I’ll benefit then,” Hobie said. “I’m not talking about a temporary transfer. I’ m going to take an equity position, and I’m going to keep it.”

  “Keep it?” Stone said. He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. Fifty-two percent interest and a gift of stock?

  “I always do,” Hobie said. “It’s a sentimental thing. I like to have a little part of all the businesses I help. Most people are glad to make the arrangement.”

  Stone swallowed. Looked away. Examined his options. Shrugged.

  “Sure,” he said. “I guess that’s OK.”

  Hobie reached to his left and rolled open a drawer. Pulled out a printed form. Slid it across to the front of the desk.

  “I prepared this,” he said.

  Stone crouched forward off the sofa and picked it up. It was a loan agreement, one-point-one million, six weeks, 6 percent, and a standard stock-transfer protocol. For a chunk that was worth a million dollars not long ago, and might be again, very soon. He blinked.

  “Can’t do it any other way,” Hobie said. “Like I told you, I specialize. I know this comer of the market. You won’t get better anyplace else. Fact is, you won’t get a damn thing anyplace else.”

  Hobie was six feet away behind the desk, but Stone felt he was right next to him on the sofa with his awful face jammed in his and the glittering hook ripping through his guts. He nodded, just a faint silent movement of his head, and went into his coat for his fat Mont Blanc fountain pen. Stretched forward and signed in both places against the cold hard glass of the coffee table. Hobie watched him, and nodded in turn.