Tripwire

Hobie used the muscle in his left arm to guide the hook up to his face. He ran the smooth, cold steel over the scar tissue there. Time to time, pressure from the hard curve could relieve the itching.

“What about this Reacher guy?” he asked. “Any progress on that?”

Tony squinted out through the gap in the blind, eighty-eight floors up.

“I called St. Louis,” he said. “He was a military policeman, too, served with Garber the best part of thirteen years. They’d had another inquiry on the same subject, ten days ago. I’m guessing that was Costello.”

“So why?” Hobie asked. “The Garber family pays Costello to chase down some old Army buddy? Why? What the hell for?”

“No idea,” Tony said. “The guy’s a drifter. He was digging swimming pools down where Costello was.”

Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard.

“A military cop,” he said to himself. “Who’s now a drifter.”

“You should get out,” Tony said again.

“I don’t like the military police,” Hobie said.

“I know you don’t.”

“So what’s the interfering bastard doing here?”

“You should get out,” Tony said for the third time.

Hobie nodded.

“I’m a flexible guy,” he said. “You know that.”

Tony let the blind fall back into place. The room went dark. “I’m not asking you to be flexible. I’m asking you to stick to what you pla

“I changed the plan. I want the Stone score.”

Tony came back around the desk and took his place on the sofa. “Too risky to stick around for it. Both calls are in now. Vietnam and Hawaii, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know that,” Hobie said. “So I changed the plan again.”

“Back to what it was?”

Hobie shrugged and shook his head. “A combination. We get out, for sure, but only after I nail Stone.”

Tony sighed and laid his hands palm-up on the upholstery. “Six weeks is way, way too long. Garber already went to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. He was some kind of a hotshot general. And obviously he knew stuff, or why would he go out there?”

Hobie was nodding. His head was moving in and out of a thin shaft of light that picked up the crude gray tufts of his hair. “He knew stuff, I accept that. But he took sick and died. The stuff he knew died with him. Otherwise why would his daughter resort to some half-assed private dick and some unemployed drifter?”

“So what are you saying?”

Hobie slipped his hook below the level of the desktop and cupped his chin with his good hand. He let the fingers spread upward, over the scars. It was a pose he used subconsciously, when he was aiming to look accommodating and unthreatening.

“I can’t give up on the Stone score,” he said. “You can see that, right? It’s just sitting there, begging to be eaten up. I give up on that, I couldn’t live with myself the whole rest of my life. It would be cowardice. Ru

“So what are you saying?” Tony asked again.

“We do both things together, but accelerated. Because I agree with you, six weeks is way too long. We need to get out before six weeks. But we aren’t going without the Stone score, so we speed things up.”

“OK, how?”

“I put the stock in the market today,” Hobie said. “It’ll hit the floor ninety minutes before the closing bell. That should be long enough to get the message through to the banks. Tomorrow morning, Stone will be coming here all steamed up. I won’t be here tomorrow, so you’ll tell him what we want, and what we’ll do if we don’t get it. We’ll have the whole nine yards within a couple of days, tops. I’ll presell the Long Island assets so we don’t hit any delay out there. Meanwhile, you’ll close things down here.”

“OK, how?” Tony asked again.

Hobie looked around the dim office, all four corners.

“We’ll just walk away from this place. Wastes six months of lease, but what the hell. Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem. One of them is wasting the other tonight, and you’ll work with him until he gets hold of this Mrs. Jacob for me, whereupon you’ll waste her and him together. Sell the boat, sell the vehicles, and we’re out of here, no loose ends. Call it a week. Just a week. I think we can give ourselves a week, right?”

Tony nodded. Leaned forward, relieved at the prospect of action.

“What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.”

Hobie shrugged in his chair. “I’ve got a separate plan for him.”

“We won’t find him,” Tony said. “Not just the two of us. Not within a week. We don’t have the time to go out searching around for him.”

“We don’t need to.”

Tony stared at him. “We do, boss. He’s a loose end, right?”

Hobie shook his head. Then he dropped his hand away from his face and came out from under the desktop with his hook. “I’ll do this the efficient way. No reason to waste my energy finding him. I’ll let him find me. And he will. I know what military cops are like.”

“And then what?”

Hobie smiled.

“Then he leads a long and happy life,” he said. “Thirty more years at least.”

“SO WHAT NOW?” Reacher asked.

They were still in the lot outside McBa

“It’s a problem,” she said. “I can’t go up there tomorrow. I can’t take more time out. We’re very busy right now, and I’ve got to keep on billing the hours.”

Fifteen years. Was that a long time or a short time? Does it change a person? It felt like a short time to him. He didn’t feel radically different from the person he had been fifteen years before. He was the same person, thinking the same way, capable of the same things. He had acquired a thick gloss of experience during those years, he was older, more burnished, but he was the same person. He felt she had to be different. Had to be, surely. Her fifteen years had been a greater leap, through bigger transitions. High school, college, law school, marriage, divorce, the partnership track, hours to bill. So now he felt he was in uncharted waters, unsure of how to relate to her, because he was dealing with three separate things, all competing in his head: the reality of her as kid, fifteen years ago, and then the way he had imagined she would turn out, and then the way she really had turned out. He knew all about two of those things, but not the third. He knew the kid. He knew the adult he’d invented inside his head. But he didn’t know the reality, and it was making him unsure, because suddenly he wanted to avoid making any stupid mistakes with her.

“You’ll have to go by yourself,” she said. “Is that OK?”

“Sure,” he said. “But that’s not the issue here. You need to take care.”

She nodded. Pulled her hands up inside her sleeves, and hugged herself. He didn’t know why.

“I’ll be OK, I guess,” she said.

“Where’s your office?”

“Wall Street and lower Broadway.”

“That’s where you live, right? Lower Broadway?”