Tripwire Page 25

  “Downstairs,” he said. “All of you. Right now, OK?”

  Nobody moved. So Reacher counted out loud one, two, and on three he fired again. The same loud blast. The floorboards splintered at the first guy’s feet. One, two, and Reacher fired again. And again, one, two, and fire. Dust and wood splinters were bursting upward. The noise of the repeated shots was crushing. There was the strong stink of burned powder and hot steel wool inside the suppressor. The men moved all at once after the third bullet. They fought and crowded to the hatch. Crashed and tumbled through. Reacher dropped the door closed on them and dragged the counter over the top of it. Rutter was up on his hands and knees. Reacher kicked him over on his back and kept on kicking him until he had scrambled all the way backward and his head was jammed up hard against the displaced counter.

  Jodie had the faked photograph in her hand. She crouched and held it out to him. He blinked and focused on it. His mouth was working, just a ragged hole in his beard. Reacher ducked down and caught his left wrist. Dragged his hand up and took hold of the little finger.

  “Questions,” he said. “And I’ll break a finger every time you lie to me.”

  Rutter started struggling, using all his strength to twist up and away. Reacher hit him again, a solid blow to the gut, and he went back down.

  “You know who we are?”

  “No,” Rutter gasped.

  “Where was this picture taken?”

  “Secret camps,” Rutter gasped. “Vietnam.”

  Reacher broke his little finger. He just wrenched it sideways and snapped the knuckle. Sideways is easier than bending it all the way back. Rutter shrieked in pain. Reacher took hold of the next finger. There was a gold ring on it.

  “Where?”

  “Bronx Zoo,” Rutter gasped.

  “Who’s the boy?”

  “Just some kid.”

  “Who’s the man?”

  “Friend,” Rutter gasped.

  “How many times have you done it?”

  “Fifteen, maybe,” Rutter said.

  Reacher bent the ring finger sideways.

  “That’s the truth,” Rutter screamed. “No more than fifteen, I promise. And I never did anything to you. I don’t even know you.”

  “You know the Hobies?” Reacher asked. “Up in Brighton?”

  He saw Rutter searching through a mental list, dazed. Then he saw him remember. Then he saw him struggling to comprehend how those pathetic old suckers could possibly have brought all this down on his head.

  “You’re a disgusting piece of shit, right?”

  Rutter was rolling his head from side to side in panic.

  “Say it, Rutter,” Reacher yelled.

  “I’m a piece of shit,” Rutter whimpered.

  “Where’s your bank?”

  “My bank?” Rutter repeated blankly.

  “Your bank,” Reacher said.

  Rutter hesitated. Reacher put some weight back on the ring finger.

  “Ten blocks,” Rutter shrieked.

  “Title deed for your truck?”

  “In the drawer.”

  Reacher nodded to Jodie. She stood up and went around behind the counter. Rattled open the drawers and came out with a sheaf of paperwork. She flicked through and nodded. “Registered in his name. Cost forty thousand bucks.”

  Reacher switched his grip and caught Rutter by the neck. Bunched his shoulder and pushed hard until the web of his hand was forcing up under Rutter’s jaw.

  “I’ll buy your truck for a dollar,” he said. “Just shake your head if you’ve got a problem with that, OK?”

  Rutter was totally still. His eyes were popping under the force of Reacher’s grip on his throat.

  “And then I’ll drive you to your bank,” he said. “In my new truck. You’ll take out eighteen thousand dollars in cash and I’ll give it back to the Hobies.”

  “No,” Jodie called. “Nineteen-six-fifty. It was in a safe mutual. Call it six percent, for a year and a half compounded.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. He increased the pressure. “Nineteen-six-fifty for the Hobies, and nineteen-six-fifty for us.”

  Rutter’s eyes were searching Reacher’s face. Pleading. Not understanding.

  “You cheated them,” Reacher said. “You told them you’d find out what happened to their boy. You didn’t do that. So now we’ll have to do it for them. So we need expense money.”

  Rutter was turning blue in the face. His hands were clamped hard on Reacher’s wrist, desperately trying to ease the pressure.

  “OK,” Reacher asked. “So that’s what we’re going to do. Just shake your head if you’ve got any kind of a problem with any part of it.”

  Rutter was dragging hard on Reacher’s wrist, but his head stayed still.

  “Think of it like a tax,” Reacher said. “A tax on cheating little pieces of shit.”

  He jerked his hand away and stood up. Fifteen minutes later, he was in Rutter’s bank. Rutter was nursing his left hand in his pocket and signing a check with his right. Five minutes after that, Reacher had $39,300 cash zipped into the sports bag. Fifteen minutes after that, he left Rutter in the alley behind his store, with two dollar bills stuffed in his mouth, one for the silencer, and one for the truck. Five minutes after that, he was following Jodie’s Taurus up to the Hertz return at LaGuardia. Fifteen minutes after that, they were in the new Lincoln together, heading back to Manhattan.

  11

  EVENING FALLS IN Hanoi a full twelve hours earlier than in New York, so the sun which was still high as Reacher and Jodie left the Bronx had already slipped behind the highlands of northern Laos, two hundred miles away to the west of Noi Bai Airport. The sky was glowing orange and the long shadows of late afternoon were replaced by the sudden dull gloom of tropical dusk. The smells of the city and the jungle were masked under the reek of kerosene, and the noises of car horns and nighttime insects were blown away by the steady whine of jet engines idling.

  A giant U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport was standing on the apron, a mile from the crowded passenger terminals, next to an unmarked hangar. The plane’s rear ramp was down, and its engines were running fast enough to power the interior lighting. Inside the unmarked hangar, too, lights were on. There were a hundred arc lights, slung high up under the corrugated metal roof, washing the cavernous space with their bright yellow glow.

  The hangar was as large as a stadium, but it held nothing except seven caskets. Each one of them was six and a half feet long, made from ribbed aluminum polished to a high shine and shaped roughly like a coffin, which is exactly what each one of them was. They were standing in a neat row, on trestles, each one draped with an American flag. The flags were newly laundered and crisply pressed, and the center stripe of each flag was precisely aligned with the center rib of each casket.

  There were nine men and two women in the hangar, standing next to the seven aluminum caskets. Six of the men were there as the honor guard. They were regular soldiers of the United States Army, newly showered, newly shaved, dressed in immaculate ceremonial uniforms, holding themselves at rigid attention, away from the other five people. Three of those were Vietnamese, two men and a woman, short, dark, impassive. They were dressed in uniform, too, but theirs were everyday uniforms, not ceremonial. Dark olive cloth, worn and creased, badged here and there with the unfamiliar insignia of their rank.

  The last two people were Americans, dressed in civilian clothes, but the sort of civilian clothes that indicate military status as clearly as any uniform. The woman was young, with a mid-length canvas skirt and a long-sleeved khaki blouse, with heavy brown shoes on her feet. The man was tall, silver-haired, maybe fifty-five years old, dressed in tropical khakis under a lightweight belted raincoat. He was carrying a battered brown leather briefcase in his hand, and there was a garment bag of similar vintage on the ground at his feet.

  The tall silver-haired man nodded to the honor guard, a tiny signal, almost imperceptible. The senior soldier spoke a muted command and the six men formed
up in two lines of three. They slow-marched forward, and right-turned, and slow-marched again until they were lined up precisely, three each side of the first casket. They paused a beat and stooped and lifted the casket to their shoulders in a single fluid movement. The senior man spoke again, and they slow-marched forward toward the hangar door, the casket supported exactly level on their linked arms, the only sounds the crunch of their boots on the concrete and the whine of the waiting engines.

  On the apron, they turned right and wheeled a wide, slow semicircle through the hot jet wash until they were lined up with the Starlifter’s ramp. They slow-marched forward, up the exact center of the ramp, feeling carefully with their feet for the metal ribs bolted there to help them, and on into the belly of the plane. The pilot was waiting for them. She was a U.S. Air Force captain, trim in a tropical-issue flight suit. Her crew was standing at attention with her, a copilot, a flight engineer, a navigator, a radio operator. Opposite them were the loadmaster and his crew, silent in green fatigues. They stood face-to-face in two still lines, and the honor guard filed slowly between them, all the way up to the forward loading bay. There they bent their knees and gently lowered the casket onto a shelf built along the fuselage wall. Four of the men stood back, heads bowed. The forward man and the rear man worked together to slide the casket into place. The loadmaster stepped forward and secured it with rubber straps. Then he stepped back and joined the honor guard and held a long silent salute.

  It took an hour to load all seven caskets. The people inside the hangar stood silent throughout, and then they followed the seventh casket onto the apron. They matched their walk to the honor guard’s slow pace, and waited at the bottom of the Starlifter’s ramp in the hot, noisy damp of the evening. The honor guard came out, duty done. The tall silver-haired American saluted them and shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and nodded to the American woman. No words were exchanged. He shouldered his garment bag and ran lightly up the ramp into the plane. A slow, powerful motor whirred and the ramp closed shut behind him. The engines ran up to speed and the giant plane came off its brakes and started to taxi. It wheeled a wide cumbersome left and disappeared behind the hangar. Its noise grew faint. Then it grew loud again in the distance and the watchers saw it come back along the runway, engines screaming, accelerating hard, lifting off. It yawed right, climbing fast, turning, dipping a wing, and then it was gone, just a triangle of winking lights tiny in the distance and a vague smudge of black kerosene smoke tracing its curved path into the night air.

  The honor guard dispersed in the sudden silence and the American woman shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and walked back to her car. The three Vietnamese officers walked in a different direction, back to theirs. It was a Japanese sedan, repainted a dull military green. The woman drove, and the two men sat in back. It was a short trip to the center of Hanoi. The woman parked in a chain-link compound behind a low concrete building painted the color of sand. The men got out without a word and went inside through an unmarked door. The woman locked the car and walked around the building to a different entrance. She went inside and up a short flight of stairs to her office. There was a bound ledger open on her desk. She recorded the safe dispatch of the cargo in neat handwriting and closed the ledger. She carried it to a file cabinet near her office door. She locked it inside, and glanced through the door, up and down the corridor. Then she returned to her desk and picked up her telephone and dialed a number eleven thousand miles away in New York City.

  MARILYN WOKE UP Sheryl and brought Chester around into some sort of consciousness before the thickset man came into the bathroom with the coffee. It was in mugs, and he was holding two in one hand and one in the other, unsure of where to leave them. He paused and stepped to the sink and lined them up on the narrow granite ledge under the mirror. Then he turned without speaking and walked back out. Pulled the door closed after him, firmly, but without slamming it.

  Marilyn handed out the mugs one at a time, because she was trembling and pretty sure she was going to spill them if she tried them two at a time. She squatted down and gave the first one to Sheryl, and helped her take the first sip. Then she went back for Chester’s. He took it from her blankly and looked at it like he didn’t know what it was. She took the third for herself and stood against the sink and drank it down, thirstily. It was good. The cream and the sugar tasted like energy.

  “Where are the stock certificates?” she whispered.

  Chester looked up at her, listlessly. “At my bank, in my box.”

  Marilyn nodded. Came face-to-face with the fact she didn’t know which was Chester’s bank. Or where it was. Or what stock certificates were for.

  “How many are there?”

  He shrugged. “A thousand, originally. I used three hundred for security against the loans. I had to give them up to the lender, temporarily.”

  “And now Hobie’s got those?”

  He nodded. “He bought the debt. They’ll messenger the security to him, today, maybe. They don’t need it anymore. And I pledged him another ninety. They’re still in the box. I guess I was due to deliver them soon.”

  “So how does the transfer actually happen?”

  He shrugged again, wearily, vaguely. “I sign the stock over to him, he takes the certificates and registers them with the Exchange, and when he’s got five hundred and one registered in his name, then he’s the majority owner.”

  “So where’s your bank?”

  Chester took his first sip of coffee. “About three blocks from here. About five minutes’ walk. Then another five minutes to the Exchange. Call it ten minutes beginning to end, and we’re penniless and homeless on the street.”

  He set the mug on the floor and lapsed back into staring. Sheryl was listless. Not drinking her coffee. Her skin looked clammy. Maybe concussed, or something. Maybe still in shock. Marilyn didn’t know. She had no experience. Her nose was awful. Black and swollen. The bruising was spreading under her eyes. Her lips were cracked and dry, from breathing through her mouth all night.

  “Try some more coffee,” she said. “It’ll be good for you.” She squatted beside her and guided her hand up to her mouth. Tilted the mug. Sheryl took a sip. Some of the hot liquid ran down her chin. She took another sip. She glanced up at Marilyn, with something in her eyes. Marilyn didn’t know what it was, but she smiled back anyway, bright with encouragement.

  “We’ll get you to the hospital,” she whispered.

  Sheryl closed her eyes and nodded, like she was suddenly filled with relief. Marilyn knelt beside her, holding her hand, staring at the door, wondering how she was going to deliver on that promise.

  “ARE YOU GOING to keep this thing?“ Jodie asked.

  She was talking about the Lincoln Navigator. Reacher thought about it as he waited. They were jammed up on the approach to the Triborough.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  It was more or less brand new. Very quiet and smooth. Black metallic outside, tan leather inside, four hundred miles on the clock, still reeking of new hide and new carpet and the strong plastic smell of a box-fresh vehicle. Huge seats, each one identical with the driver’s chair, lots of fat consoles with drinks holders and little lids suggestive of secret storage spaces.

  “I think it’s gross,” she said.

  He smiled. “Compared to what? That tiny little thing you were driving?”

  “That was much smaller than this.”

  “You’re much smaller than me.”

  She was quiet for a beat.

  “It was Rutter’s,” she said. “It’s tainted.”

  The traffic moved, and then stopped again halfway over the Harlem River. The buildings of midtown were faraway to his left, and hazy, like a vague promise.

  “It’s just a tool,” he said. “Tools have no memory.”

  “I hate him,” she said. “I think more than I’ve ever hated anybody.”

  He nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “The whole time we were in there I was thinking
about the Hobies, up there in Brighton, alone in their little house, the look in their eyes. Sending your only boy off to war is a hell of a thing, and to be lied to and cheated afterward, Jodie, there’s no excuse for that. Swap the chronology, it could have been my folks. And he did it fifteen times. I should have hurt him worse.”

  “As long as he doesn’t do it again,” she said.

  He shook his head. “The list of targets is shrinking. Not too many BNR families left now to fall for it.”

  They made it off the bridge and headed south on Second Avenue. It was fast and clear ahead for sixty blocks.

  “And it wasn’t him coming after us,” she said quietly. “He didn’t know who we were.”

  Reacher shook his head again. “No. How many fake photographs do you have to sell to make it worth trashing a Chevy Suburban? We need to analyze it right from the beginning, Jodie. Two full-time employees get sent to the Keys and up to Garrison, right? Two full-time salaries, plus weapons and airfare and all, and they’re riding around in a Tahoe, then a third employee shows up with a Suburban he can afford to just dump on the street? That’s a lot of money, and it’s probably just the visible tip of some kind of an iceberg. It implies something worth maybe millions of dollars. Rutter was never making that kind of money, ripping off old folks for eighteen thousand bucks a pop.”

  “So what the hell is this about?”

  Reacher just shrugged and drove, and watched the mirror all the way.

  HOBIE TOOK THE call from Hanoi at home. He listened to the Vietnamese woman’s short report and hung up without speaking. Then he stood in the center of his living room and tilted his head to one side and narrowed his good eye like he was watching something physical happening in front of him. Like he was watching a baseball soaring out of the diamond, looping upward into the glare of the lights, an outfielder tracking back under it, the fence getting closer, the glove coming up, the ball soaring, the fence looming, the outfielder leaping. Will the ball clear the fence? Or not? Hobie couldn’t tell.