Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  “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.”

  “No, that’s faith,” she said.

  “Whatever, it’s good enough for me.”

  She watched the traffic ahead, and thought about it. Then she nodded, because in the end, faith in her father was good enough for her, too.

  “So Victor Hobie’s dead?”

  Reacher nodded. “Has to be. Killed in action, body not recovered.”

  She drove on, slowly. They were heading south, and the traffic was bad.

  “OK, no prisoners, no camps,” she said. “No government conspiracy. So they weren’t government people who were shooting at us and crashing their cars into us.”

  “I never thought it was,” he said. “Most government people I met were a lot more efficient than that. I was a government person, in a manner of speaking. You think I’d miss two days in a row?”

  She slewed the car right and jammed to a stop on the shoulder. Turned in her seat to face him, blue eyes wide.

  “So it must be Rutter,” she said. “Who else can it be? He’s running a lucrative scam, right? And he’s prepared to protect it. He thinks we’re going to expose it. So he’s been looking for us. And now we’re planning to walk right into his arms.”

  Reacher smiled.

  “Hey, life’s full of dangers,” he said.

  MARILYN REALIZED SHE must have fallen asleep, because she woke up stiff and cold with noises coming through the door at her. The bathroom had no window, and she had no idea what time it was. Morning, she guessed, because she felt like she had been asleep for some time. On her left, Chester was staring into space, his gaze fixed a thousand miles beyond the fixtures under the sink. He was inert. She turned and looked straight at him, and got no response at all. On her right, Sheryl was curled on the floor. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. Her nose had turned black and shiny and was swollen. Marilyn stared at her and swallowed. Turned again and pressed her ear to the door. Listened hard.

  There were two men out there. The sound of two deep voices, talking low. She could hear elevators in the distance. A very faint traffic rumble, with occasional sirens vanishing into stillness. Aircraft noise, like a big jet from JFK was wheeling away west across the harbor. She eased herself off the floor.

  Her shoes had come off during the night. She found them scuffed under her pile of towels. She slipped them on and walked quietly to the sink. Chester was staring straight through her. She checked herself in the mirror. Not too bad, she thought. The last time she had spent the night on a bathroom floor was after a sorority party more than twenty years before, and she looked no worse now than she had then. She combed her hair with her fingers and patted water on her eyes. Then she crept back to the door and listened again.

  Two men, but she was pretty sure Hobie wasn’t one of them. There was some equality in the tenor of the voices. It was back-and-forth conversation, not orders and obedience. She slid the pile of towels backward with her foot and took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Two men stopped talking and turned to stare at her. The one called Tony was sitting sideways on the sofa in front of the desk. Another she had not seen before was squatted next to him on the coffee table. He was a thickset man in a dark suit, not tal
l, but heavy. The desk was not occupied. No sign of Hobie. The window blinds were closed to a crack, but she could see bright sun outside. It was later than she thought. She glanced back to the sofa and saw Tony smiling at her.

  “Sleep well?” he asked.

  She made no reply. Just kept a neutral look fixed on her face until Tony’s smile died away. Score one, she thought.

  “I talked things over with my husband,” she lied.

  Tony looked at her, expectantly, waiting for her to speak again. She let him wait. Score two, she thought.

  “We agree to the transfer,” she said. “But it’s going to be complicated. It’s going to take some time. There are factors I don’t think you appreciate. We’ll do it, but we’re going to expect some minimum cooperation from you along the way.”

  Tony nodded. “Like what?”

  “I’ll discuss that with Hobie,” she said. “Not with you.”

  There was silence in the office. Just faint noises from the world outside. She concentrated on her breathing. In and out, in and out.

  “OK,” Tony said.

  Score three, she thought.

  “We want coffee,” she said. “Three cups, cream and sugar.”

  More silence. Then Tony nodded and the thickset man stood up. He looked away and walked out of the office toward the kitchen. Score four, she thought.

  THE RETURN ADDRESS on Rutter’s letter corresponded to a dingy storefront some blocks south of any hope of urban renewal. It was a clapboard building sandwiched between crumbling four-story brick structures that may have been factories or warehouses before they were abandoned decades ago. Rutter’s place had a filthy window on the left and an entrance in the center and a roll-up door standing open on the right revealing a narrow garage area. There was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator squeezed into the space. Reacher recognized the model from advertisements he’d seen. It was a giant four-wheel-drive Ford, with a thick gloss of luxury added in order to justify its elevation to the Lincoln division. This one was metallic black, and it was probably worth more than the real estate wrapped around it.

  Jodie drove right past the building, not fast, not slow, just plausible city-street speed over the potholed road. Reacher craned his head around, getting a feel for the place. Jodie made a left and came back around the block. Reacher glimpsed a service alley running behind the row, with rusted fire escapes hanging above piles of garbage.

  “So how do we do this?” Jodie asked him.

  “We walk right in,” he said. “First thing we do is we watch his reaction. If he knows who we are, we’ll play it one way. If he doesn’t, we’ll play it another.”

  She parked two spaces south of the storefront, in the shadow of a blackened brick warehouse. She locked the car and they walked north together. From the sidewalk they could make out what was behind the dirty window. There was a lame display of Army-surplus equipment, dusty old camouflage jackets and water canteens and boots. There were field radios and MRE rations and infantry helmets. Some of the stuff was already obsolete before Reacher graduated from West Point.

  The door was stiff and it worked a bell when it opened. It was a crude mechanical system whereby the moving door flicked a spring that flicked the bell and made the sound. The store was deserted. There was a counter on the right with a door behind it to the garage. There was a display of clothing on a circular chrome rack and more random junk piled high on a single shelf. There was a rear door out to the alley, locked shut and alarmed. In a line next to the rear door were five padded vinyl chairs. Scattered all around the chairs were cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. The lighting was dim, but the dust of years was visible everywhere.

  Reacher walked ahead of Jodie. The floor creaked under him. Two paces inside, he could see a trapdoor open beyond the counter. It was a sturdy door, made from old pine boards, hinged with brass and rubbed to a greasy shine where generations of hands had folded it back. Floor joists were visible inside the hole, and a narrow staircase built from the same old wood was leading down toward hot electric light. He could hear feet scraping on a cement cellar floor below him.

  “I’ll be right there, whoever the hell you are,” a voice called up from the hole.

  It was a man’s voice, middle-aged, suspended somewhere between surprise and bad temper. The voice of a man not expecting callers. Jodie looked at Reacher and Reacher closed his hand around the butt of the Steyr in his pocket.

  A man’s head appeared at floor level, then his shoulders, then his torso, as he came on up the ladder. He was a bulky figure and had difficulty climbing out of the hole. He was dressed in faded olive fatigues. He had greasy gray hair, a ragged gray beard, a fleshy face, small eyes. He came out on hands and knees and stood up.

  “Help you?” he said.

  Then another head and shoulders appeared behind him. And another. And another. And another. Four men stamped up the ladder from the cellar. Each one straightened and paused and looked hard at Reacher and Jodie and then stepped away to the line of chairs. They were big men, fleshy, tattooed, dressed in similar old fatigues. They sat with big arms crossed against big stomachs.

  “Help you?” the first guy said again.

  “Are you Rutter?” Reacher asked.

  The guy nodded. There was no recognition in his eyes. Reacher glanced at the line of men on their chairs. They represented a complication he had not anticipated.

  “What do you want?” Rutter asked.

  Reacher changed his plan. Took a guess about the true nature of the store’s transactions and what was stacked up down in the cellar.

  “I want a silencer,” he said. “For a Steyr GB.”

  Rutter smiled, real amusement in the set of his jaw and the light in his eyes.

  “Against the law for me to sell you one, against the law for you to own one.”

  The singsong way he said it was an outright confession that he had them and sold them. There was a patronizing undercurrent in the tone that said I’ve got something you want, and that makes me better than you. There was no caution in his voice. No suspicion that Reacher was a cop trying to set him up. Nobody ever thought Reacher was a cop. He was too big and too rough. He didn’t have the precinct pallor or the urban furtiveness people subconsciously associate with cops. Rutter was not worried about him. He was worried about Jodie. He didn’t know what she was. He had spoken to Reacher but looked at her. She was looking back at him, steadily.

  “Against whose law?” she asked dismissively.

  Rutter scratched at his beard. “Makes them expensive.”

  “Compared to what?” she asked.

  Reacher smiled to himself. Rutter wasn’t sure about her, and with two answers, just six words, she had him adrift, thinking she could be anything from a Manhattan socialite worried about a kidnap threat against her kids, to a billionaire’s wife intending to inherit early, to a Rotary wife aiming to survive a messy love triangle. She was looking at him like she was a woman used to getting her own way without opposition from anybody. Certainly not from the law, and certainly not from some squalid little Bronx trader.

  “Steyr GB?” Rutter asked. “You want the proper Austrian piece?”

  Reacher nodded, like he was the guy who dealt with the trivial details. Rutter clicked his fingers and one of the heavy men peeled off from the line of chairs and dropped down the hole. He came back up a long moment later with a black cylinder wrapped in paper that gun oil had turned transparent.

  “Two thousand bucks,” Rutter said.

  Reacher nodded. The price was almost fair. The pistol was no longer manufactured, but he figured it probably last retailed around eight or nine hundred bucks. Final factory price for the suppressor was probably more than two hundred. Two grand for illegal supply ten years later and four thousand miles from the factory gate was almost reasonable.

  “Let me see it,” he said.

  Rutter wiped the tube on his pants. Handed it over. Reacher came out with the gun and clicked the tube in place. Not like in the movies. You don�
�t hold it up to your eyes and screw it on, slowly and thoughtfully and lovingly. You use light, fast pressure and a half-turn and it clicks on like a lens fits a camera.

  It improved the weapon. Improved its balance. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, a handgun gets fired high because the recoil flips the muzzle upward. The weight of the silencer was going to counteract that likelihood. And a silencer works by dispersing the blast of gas relatively slowly, which weakens the recoil in the first place.

  “Does it work real good?” Reacher asked.

  “Sure it does,” Rutter said. “It’s the genuine factory piece.”

  The guy who had brought it upstairs was back on his chair. Four guys, five chairs. The way to take out a gang is to hit the leader first. It’s a universal truth. Reacher had learned it at the age of four. Figure out who the leader is, and put him down first, and put him down hard. This situation was going to be different. Rutter was the leader, but he had to stay in one piece for the time being, because Reacher had other plans for him.

  “Two thousand bucks,” Rutter said again.

  “Field test,” Reacher said.

  There is no safety catch on a Steyr GB. The first pull needs a pressure of fourteen pounds on the trigger, which is judged to be enough to avoid an accidental discharge if the gun is dropped, because fourteen pounds is a very deliberate pull. So there is no separate safety mechanism. Reacher flicked his hand left and pulled the fourteen pounds. The gun fired and the empty chair blew apart. The sound was loud. Not like in the movies. It’s not a little cough. Not a polite little spit. It’s like taking the Manhattan phone book and raising it way over your head and smashing it facedown on a desk with all your strength. Not a quiet sound. But quieter than it could be.

  The four guys were frozen with shock. Shredded vinyl and dirty horsehair stuffing were floating in the air. Rutter was staring, motionless. Reacher hit him hard, left-handed in the stomach, and kicked his feet away and dumped him on the floor. Then he lined up the Steyr on the guy next to the shattered chair.