Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  “You were that pilot?” Reacher asked, on a hunch.

  DeWitt glanced over and nodded.

  “You were still there in ‘75?”

  DeWitt nodded again. “Five combat tours, then a spell on HQ duty. Overall, I guess I preferred the combat.”

  There was noise in the distance. The bass thumping of a powerful helicopter, coming closer. Reacher joined Jodie at the window. A Huey was in the air, drifting over the distant buildings from the direction of the field.

  “Your ride,” DeWitt said.

  “A helicopter?” Jodie said.

  DeWitt was smiling. “What did you expect? This is the helicopter school, after all. That’s why these boys are down here. It ain’t driver’s ed.”

  The rotor noise was building to a loud wop-wop-wop. Then it slowly blended to a higher-pitched whip-whip-whip as it came closer and the jet whine mixed in.

  “Bigger blade now,” DeWitt shouted. “Composite materials. Not metal anymore. I don’t know what old Vic would have made of it.”

  The Huey was sliding sideways and hovering over the parade ground in front of the building. The noise was shaking the windows. Then the helicopter was straightening and settling to the ground.

  “Nice meeting you,” DeWitt shouted.

  They shook his hand and headed out. The MP sergeant at the desk nodded to them through the noise and went back to his paperwork. They went down the stairs and outside into the blast of heat and dust and sound. The copilot was sliding the door for them. They ran bent-over across the short distance. Jodie was grinning and her hair was blowing everywhere. The copilot offered his hand and pulled her up inside. Reacher followed. They strapped themselves into the bench seat in back and the copilot slid the door closed and climbed through to the cabin. The familiar shudder of vibration started up as the craft hauled itself into the air. The floor tilted and swung and the buildings rotated in the windows, and then their roofs were visible, and then the outlying grassland, with the highways laid through it like gray pencil lines. The nose went down and the engine noise built to a roar as they swung on course and settled to a hundred-mile-an-hour cruise.

  THE STUFF SARK had read called it “power walking,” and the idea was to push yourself toward a speed of four miles an hour. That way your heartbeat was raised, which was the key to the aerobic benefit, but you avoided the impact damage to your shins and knees that you risked with proper jogging. It was a convincing proposition, and he believed in it. Doing it properly, six hundred yards at four miles an hour should have taken a fraction over five minutes, but it actually took nearer eight, because he was walking with O’Hallinan at his side. She was happy to walk, but she wanted to do it slowly. She was not an unfit woman, but she always said I’m built for comfort, not for speed. It was a compromise. He needed her cooperation to get to walk at all, so he never complained about her pace. He figured it was better than nothing. It had to be doing him some kind of good.

  “Which building?” he asked.

  “The south, I think,” she said.

  They walked around to the main entrance of the south tower and inside to the lobby. There were guys in security uniforms behind a counter, but they were tied up with a knot of foreign men in gray suits, so Sark and O’Hallinan stepped over to the building directory and consulted it direct. Cayman Corporate Trust was listed on the eighty-eighth floor. They walked to the express elevator and stepped inside without the security force being aware they had ever entered the building.

  The elevator floor pressed against their feet and sped them upward. It slowed and stopped at eighty-eight. The door slid back and a muted bell sounded and they stepped out into a plain corridor. The ceilings were low and the space was narrow. Cayman Corporate Trust had a modem oak door with a small window and a brass handle. Sark pulled the door and allowed O’Hallinan to go inside ahead of him. She was old enough to appreciate the courtesy.

  There was an oak-and-brass reception area with a thickset man in a dark suit behind a chest-high counter. Sark stood back in the center of the floor, his loaded belt emphasizing the width of his hips, making him seem large and commanding. O’Hallinan stepped up to the counter, planning her approach. She wanted to shake something loose, so she tried the sort of frontal attack she had seen detectives use.

  “We’ve come about Sheryl,” she said.

  “I NAVE TO go home, I guess,” Jodie said.

  “No, you’re coming to Hawaii, with me.”

  They were back inside the freezing terminal at Dallas-Fort Worth. The Huey had put down on a remote apron and the copilot had driven them over in a golf cart painted dull green. He had shown them an unmarked door that led them up a flight of stairs into the bustle of the public areas.

  “Hawaii? Reacher, I can’t go to Hawaii. I need to be back in New York.”

  “You can’t go back there alone. New York is where the danger is, remember? And I need to go to Hawaii. So you’ll have to come with me, simple as that.”

  “Reacher, I can’t,” she said again. “I have to be in a meeting tomorrow. You know that. You took the call, right?”

  “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 honeymoon 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.

  “I’m Hook Hobie,” he said.

  They stared at him. Said nothing. Their gazes started on his disfigured face and traveled slowly down to the empty sleeve.

  “Which of you is which?” Hobie asked.

  No reply. They were staring at the hook. He raised it and let it catch the light.

  “Which of you is O’Hallinan?”

  O’Hallinan ducked her head in acknowledgment. Hobie turned.

  “So you’re Sark.”

  Sark nodded. Just a fractional inclination of his head.

  “Undo your belts,” Hobie said. “One at a time. And be quick.”

  Sark went first. He was quick. He dropped his hands and wrestled with his buckle. The heavy belt thumped to the floor at his feet. He stretched up again for the ceiling.

  “Now you,” Hobie said to O’Hallinan.

  She did the same thing. The heavy belt with the revolver and the radio and the handcuffs and the nightstick thumped on the carpet. She stretched her hands back up, as far as they would go. Hobie used the hook. He leaned down and swept the point through both buckles and swung the belts up in the air, posing like a fisherman at the end of a successful day on the riverbank. He reached around and used his good hand to pull the two sets of handcuffs out of their worn leather cups.

  “Turn around.”

  They turned and faced the guns head-on.

  “Hands behind you.”

  It is possible for a one-armed man to put handcuffs on a victim, if the victim stands still, wrists together. Sark and O’Hallinan stood very still indeed. Hobie clicked one wrist at a time, and then tightened all four cuffs against their ratchets until he heard gasps of pain from both of them. Then he swung the belts high enough not to drag on the floor and walked back inside the office.

  “Come in,” he called.

  He walked around behind the desk and laid the belts on it like items for close examination. He sat heavily in his chair and waited while Tony lined up the prisoners in front of him. He left them in silence while he emptied their belts. He unstrapped their revolvers and dropped them in a drawer. Took out their radios and fiddled with the volume controls until they were hissing and crackling loudly. He squared them together at the end of the desktop with their antennas pointed toward the wall of windows. He inclined his head for a moment and listened to the squelch of radio atmospherics. Then he turned back and pulled both nightsticks out of the loops on the belts. He placed one on the desk and hefted the other in his left hand and examined it closely. It was the modern kind, with a handle, and a telescopic section below. He peered at it, interested.

  “How does this work, exactly?”

  Neither Sark or O’Hallinan replied. Hobie played with the stick for a second, and then he glanced at the thickset guy, who jabbed the shotgun forward and hit Sark in the kidney.

  “I asked you a question,” Hobie said to him.

  “You swing it
,” he muttered. “Swing it, and sort of flick it.”

  He needed space, so he stood up. Swung the stick and flicked it like he was cracking a whip. The telescopic section snapped out and locked into place. He grinned with the unburned half of his face. Collapsed the mechanism and tried again. Grinned again. He took to pacing big circles around the desk, swinging the stick and cracking it open. He did it vertically, and then horizontally. He used more and more force. He spun tight circles, flashing the stick. He whipped it backhanded and the mechanism sprang open and he whirled around and smashed it into O’Hallinan’s face.

  “I like this thing,” he said.

  She was swaying backward, but Tony jabbed her upright with his pistol. Her knees gave way and she fell forward in a heap, pressed up against the front of the desk, arms cuffed tight behind her, bleeding from the mouth and nose.

  “What did Sheryl tell you?” Hobie asked.

  Sark was staring down at O’Hallinan.

  “She said she walked into a door,” he muttered.

  “So why the hell are you bothering me? Why are you here?”

  Sark moved his gaze upward. Looked Hobie full in the face.

  “Because we didn’t believe her. It was clear somebody beat on her. We followed up on the Tahoe plate, and it looks like it led us to the right place.”

  The office went silent. Nothing except the hiss and the squelch from the police radios on the end of the desk. Hobie nodded.

  “Exactly the right place,” he said. “There was no door involved.”

  Sark nodded back. He was a reasonably courageous man. The Domestic Violence Unit was no kind of safe refuge for cowards. By definition it involved dealing with men who had the capacity for brutal violence. And Sark was as good at dealing with them as anybody.

  “This is a big mistake,” he said quietly.

  “In what way?” Hobie asked, interested.

  “This is about what you did to Sheryl, is all. It doesn’t have to be about anything else. You really shouldn’t mix anything else in with it. It’s a big step up to violence against police officers. It might be possible to work something out about the Sheryl issue. Maybe there was provocation there, you know, some mitigating circumstance. But you keep on messing with us, then we can’t work anything out. Because you’re just digging yourself into bigger trouble.”