by Lee Child
“Big transient population here,” Reacher said to him. “People drift in and out, all the time.”
“I guess,” Costello said again.
“But I’ll keep my ears open,” Reacher said.
Costello nodded.
“I’d appreciate it,” he said, ambiguously.
“Who wants him?” Reacher asked.
“My client,” Costello said. “Lady called Mrs. Jacob.”
Reacher sipped water. The name meant nothing to him. Jacob? Never heard of such a person.
“OK, if I see him around, I’ll tell him, but don’t hold your breath. I don’t see too many people.”
“You working?”
Reacher nodded.
“I dig swimming pools,” he said.
Costello pondered, like he knew what swimming pools were, but like he had never considered how they got there.
“Backhoe operator?”
Reacher smiled and shook his head.
“Not down here,” he said. “We dig them by hand.”
“By hand?” Costello repeated. “What, like with shovels?”
“The lots are too small for machinery,” Reacher said. “Streets are too narrow, trees are too low. Get off Duval, and you’ll see for yourself.”
Costello nodded again. Suddenly looked very satisfied.
“Then you probably won’t know this Reacher guy,” he said. “According to Mrs. Jacob, he was an Army officer. So I checked, and she was right. He was a major. Medals and all. Military police bigshot, is what they said. Guy like that, you won’t find him digging swimming pools with a damn shovel.”
Reacher took a long pull on his water, to hide his expression.
“So what would you find him doing?”
“Down here?” Costello said. “I’m not sure. Hotel security? Running some kind of a business? Maybe he’s got a cruiser, charters it out.”
“Why would he be down here at all?”
Costello nodded, like he was agreeing with an opinion.
“Right,” he said. “Hell of a place. But he’s here, that’s for certain. He left the Army two years ago, put his money in the nearest bank to the Pentagon and disappeared. Bank account shows money wiring out all over the damn place, then for three months money wiring back in from here. So he drifted for a spell, then he settled down here, making some dough. I’ll find him.”
Reacher nodded.
“You still want me to ask around?”
Costello shook his head. Already planning his next move.
“Don’t you worry about it,” he said.
He eased his bulk up out of the chair and pulled a crumpled roll from his pants pocket. Dropped a five on the table and moved away.
“Nice meeting you,” he called, without looking back.
He walked out through the missing wall into the glare of the afternoon. Reacher drained the last of his water and watched him go. Ten after four in the afternoon.
AN HOUR LATER Reacher was drifting down Duval Street, thinking about new banking arrangements, choosing a place to eat an early dinner, and wondering why he had lied to Costello. His first conclusion was that he would cash up and use a roll of bills in his pants pocket. His second conclusion was that he would follow his Belgian friend’s advice and eat a big steak and ice cream with another two bottles of water. His third conclusion was that he had lied because there had been no reason not to.
There was no reason why a private investigator from New York should have been looking for him. He had never lived in New York. Or any big northern city. He had never really lived anywhere. That was the defining feature of his life. It made him what he was. He had been born the son of a serving Marine Corps officer, and he had been dragged all over the world from the very day his mother carried him out of the maternity ward of a Berlin infirmary. He had lived nowhere except in an endless blur of different military bases, most of them in distant and inhospitable parts of the globe. Then he had joined the Army himself, military police investigator, and lived and served in those same bases all over again until the peace dividend had closed his unit down and cut him loose. Then he had come home to the United States and drifted around like a cheap tourist until he had washed up on the extreme tip of the nation with his savings running out. He had taken a couple of days’ work digging holes in the ground, and the couple of days had stretched into a couple of weeks, and the weeks had stretched into months, and he was still there.
He had no living relatives anywhere capable of leaving him a fortune in a will. He owed no money. He had never stolen anything, never cheated anybody. Never fathered any children. He was on as few pieces of paper as it was possible for a human being to get. He was just about invisible. And he had never known anybody called Jacob, either Mrs. or Mr. Never. He was sure of that. So whatever Costello wanted, he wasn’t interested in it. Certainly not interested enough to come out from under and get involved with anything.
Because being invisible had become a habit. In the front part of his brain, he knew it was some kind of a complex, alienated response to his situation. Two years ago, everything had turned upside down. He had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody. From being a senior and valued member of a highly structured community to being just one of 270 million anonymous civilians. From being necessary and wanted to being one person too many. From being where someone told him to be every minute of every day to being confronted with three million square miles and maybe forty more years and no map and no schedule. The front part of his brain told him his response was understandable, but defensive, the response of a man who liked solitude but was worried by loneliness. It told him it was an extremist response, and he should take care with it.
But the lizard part of his brain buried behind the frontal lobes told him he liked it. He liked the anonymity. He liked his secrecy. It felt warm and comfortable and reassuring. He guarded it. He was friendly and gregarious on the surface, without ever saying much about himself. He liked to pay cash and travel by road. He was never on any passenger manifests or credit card carbons. He told nobody his name. In Key West, he had checked into a cheap motel under the name Harry S. Truman. Scanning back through the register, he had seen he wasn’t unique. Most of the forty-one presidents had stayed there, even ones nobody had heard of, like John Tyler and Franklin Pierce. He had found names did not mean much in the Keys. People just waved and smiled and said hello. They all assumed everybody had something to be private about. He was comfortable there. Too comfortable to be in any hurry to leave.
He strolled for an hour in the noisy warmth and then ducked off Duval toward a hidden courtyard restaurant where they knew him by sight and had his favorite brand of water and would give him a steak that hung off both sides of his plate at once.
THE STEAK CAME with an egg and fries and a complicated mix of some sort of warm-weather vegetables, and the ice cream came with hot chocolate sauce and nuts.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Teaser chapter
New York Times bestselling author
Praise for TRIPWIRE
“When you put a good villain together with a great hero like Jack Reacher . . . the result is a thriller good to the last drop. [Child] does a great job of balancing good and evil, and certainly Hobie ranks up there with some of the most memorable villains.”—Orlando Sentinel
“Page for page, there’s probably more fisticuffs in a Lee Child thriller than anywhere else.”—Chicago Tribune
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br /> “Lee Child can write. His first novel, Killing Floor, won the Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First Mystery. It’s no wonder.” —Arizona Daily Star
“[Reacher] is a character who deserves to be around for a long time.”—Green Bay Press-Gazette
“Complex . . . Throughout this cross-country cat-and-mouse tale, the author’s spare style reveals telling details: layers of intrigue, poignant moments, hideous crimes, and ingenious solutions.” —BookPage
“A beaut . . . Reacher is a complex, contemplative brute. He’s spellbinding whether kicking in doors or just kicking around a thought in his brain.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A solid thriller that brings to mind the knight-errant adventures of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. Edgy, exciting reading.” —Booklist
“Suspense fiction doesn’t get much better than this.”
—Library Journal
“Lee Child continues his meteoric rise and mastery of suspense with Tripwire. . . a tightly-drawn and swift thriller.”
—Michael Connelly
Praise for LEE CHILD
“Reacher is a wonderfully epic hero: tough, taciturn, yet vulnerable.”—People
“Great style and careful plotting . . . The violence is brutal. . . depicted with the kind of detail that builds dread and suspense.”—The New York Times
“The author pens nightmarish images as casually as an ordinary writer would dot an ‘i’ or cross a ‘t’ ”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Child] must be channeling Dashiell Hammett . . . Reacher handles the maze of clues and the criminal unfortunates with a flair that would make Sam Spade proud.”
—Playboy
“Reacher is as tough as he is resourceful.”
—The Denver Post
“Child . . . gives us one of the truly memorable tough-guy heroes in recent fiction: Jack Reacher.”
—Jeffery Deaver, author of The Bone Collector
“I love the larger-than-life hero Jack Reacher. I grew up a fan of John Wayne’s and Clint Eastwood’s movies, and it’s great to see a man of their stature back in business.”
—Nevada Barr
“Jack Reacher has presence and dimension—a man you definitely want on your side. Child has a sure touch and a strong voice. Definitely a talent to watch.”
—Lynn S. Hightower
Praise for Lee Child’s JACK REACHER NOVELS
KILLING FLOOR
A People Magazine “Page-Turner” An Anthony Award winner
“It’ll blow you away.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“From its jolting opening scene to its fiery final confrontation, Killing Floor is irresistible.”—People
DIE TRYING
“Tough, elegant, and thoughtful.”—Robert B. Parker
“A riveting thriller. It’s a winner.”—Greg Iles
RUNNING BLIND
“Swift and brutal.”—The New York Times
“Spectacular . . . muscular, energetic prose and pell-mell pacing.”—The Seattle Times
WITHOUT FAIL
“If Without Fail doesn’t hook you on Lee Child, I give up.”
—The New York Times
“Child’s plot is ingenious, his characters are first-rate, and his writing is fine indeed. This is a superior series.”
—The Washington Post Book World
ECHO BURNING
“Child is a vigorous storyteller, gradually building the suspense to almost unbearable levels.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“As sweltering as the El Paso sun. Bottom line: jalapenohot suspense.”—People
Titles by Lee Child
WITHOUT FAIL
ECHO BURNING
RUNNING BLIND
TRIPWIRE
DIE TRYING
KILLING FLOOR
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
TRIPWIRE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Copyright © 1999 by Lee Child.
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For my daughter, Ruth.
Once the world’s greatest kid,
now a woman I’m proud
to call my friend.
Prologue
HOOK HOBIE OWED the whole of his life to a secret nearly thirty years old. His liberty, his status, his money, everything. And like any cautious guy in his particular situation, he was ready to do what was necessary to protect his secret. Because he had a lot to lose. The whole of his life.
The protection he relied on for nearly thirty years was based on just two things. The same two things anybody uses to protect against any danger. The same way a nation protects itself against an enemy missile, the same way an apartment dweller protects himself against a burglar, the same way a boxer guards against a knockout blow. Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat, and then you react.
Stage one was the early-warning system. It had changed over the years, as other circumstances had changed. Now it was well rehearsed and simplified. It was made up of two layers, like two concentric tripwires. The first tripwire was eleven thousand miles from home. It was an early, early warning. A wake-up call. It would tell him they were getting close. The second tripwire was five thousand miles nearer, but still six thousand miles from home. A call from the second location would tell him they were about to get very close. It would tell him stage one was over, and stage two was about to begin.
Stage two was the response. He was very clear on what the response had to be. He had spent nearly thirty years thinking about it, but there was only ever one viable answer. The response would be to run
. To disappear. He was a realistic guy. The whole of his life, he had been proud of his courage and his cunning, and his toughness and his fortitude. He had always done what was necessary, without a second thought. But he knew when he heard the warning sounds from those distant tripwires, he had to get out. Because no man could survive what was coming after him. No man. Not even a man as ruthless as he was.
The danger had ebbed and flowed like a tide for years. He had spent long periods certain it was about to wash over him at any time. And then long periods certain it would never reach him at all. Sometimes, the deadening sensation of time made him feel safe, because thirty years is an eternity. But other times it felt like the blink of an eye. Sometimes he waited for the first call on an hourly basis. Planning, sweating, but always knowing he could be forced to run at any moment.
He had played it through his head a million times. The way he expected it, the first call would come in maybe a month before the second call. He would use that month to prepare. He would tie up the loose ends, close things down, cash in, transfer assets, settle scores. Then when the second call came in, he would take off. Immediately. No hesitation. Just get the hell out, and stay the hell out.
