Tripwire

He used the fire stairs to get back to the lobby and went out the glass doors to the street. Walked the two blocks north and ducked into the coffee shop and found her alone at a chrome table, reading Victor Hobie’s letters, an espresso untouched at her elbow.

“You going to drink that?” he asked.

She stacked the jungle photograph on top of the letters.

“This has big implications,” she said.

He took that for a no, and pulled the cup over and swallowed the coffee in one mouthful. It had cooled slightly and was wonderfully strong.

“Let’s go,” she said. She let him carry her case and took his arm for the two-block walk. He gave back her keys at the street door and they went in through the lobby together and up in the elevator in silence. She unlocked the apartment door and went inside ahead of him.

“So it’s government people after us,” she said.

He made no reply. Just shrugged off his new jacket and dropped it on the sofa under the Mondrian copy.

“Has to be,” she said.

He walked to the windows and cracked the blinds. Shafts of daylight poured in and the white room glowed.

“We’re close to the secret of these camps,” she said. “So the government is trying to silence us. CIA or somebody.”

He walked through to the kitchen. Pulled the refrigerator door and took out a bottle of water.

“We’re in serious danger,” she said. “You don’t seem very worried about it ”

He shrugged and took a swallow of water. It was too cold. He preferred it room temperature.

“Life’s too short for worrying,” he said.

“Dad was worrying. It was making his heart worse.”

He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“So why aren’t you taking it seriously? Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe it,” he said. “I believe everything they told me.”

“And the photograph proves it, right? The place obviously exists.”

“I know it exists,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

She stared at him. “You’ve been there? When? How?”

“Not long ago,” he said. “I got just about as close as this Rutter guy got.”

“Christ, Reacher,” she said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to buy a gun.”

“No, we should go to the cops. Or the newspapers, maybe. The government can’t do this.”

“You wait for me here, OK?”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to buy a gun. Then I’ll buy us some pizza. I’ll bring it back.”

“You can’t buy a gun, not in New York City, for God’s sake. There are laws. You need ID and permits and things and you’ve got to wait five days anyway.”

“I can buy a gun anywhere,” he said. “Especially New York City. What do you want on the pizza?”

“Have you got enough money?”

“For the pizza?”

“For the gun,” she said.

“The gun will cost me less than the pizza,” he said. “Lock the door behind me, OK? And don’t open it unless you see it’s me in the spy hole.”

He left her standing in the center of the kitchen. He used the fire stairs to the lobby and stood in the bustle on the sidewalk long enough to get himself lined up with the geography. There was a pizza parlor on the block to the south. He ducked inside and ordered a large pie, half anchovies and capers, half hot pepperoni, to go in thirty minutes. Then he dodged traffic on Broadway and struck out east. He’d been in New York enough times to know what people say is true. Everything happens fast in New York. Things change fast. Fast in terms of chronology, and fast in terms of geography. One neighborhood shifts into another within a couple of blocks. Sometimes, the front of a building is a middle-class paradise, and around the back bums are sleeping in the alley. He knew a fast ten-minute walk was going to take him worlds away from Jodie’s expensive apartment block.

He found what he was looking for in the shadows under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a messy tangle of streets crouching there, and a giant housing project sprawling to the north and east. Some ragged cluttered stores, and a basketball court with chains under the hoops instead of nets. The air was hot and damp and filled with fumes and noise. He turned a comer and stood leaning on the chain-link with the basketball noises behind him, watching two worlds collide. There was a rapid traffic flow of vehicles driving and people walking fast, and an equal quantity of cars stopped and idling and people standing around in bunches. The moving cars tacked around the stopped ones, honking and swerving, and the walking people pushed and complained and dodged into the gutter to pass the knots of loiterers. Sometimes a car would stop short and a boy would dart forward to the driver’s window. There would be a short conversation and money would change hands like a conjuring trick and the boy would dart back to a doorway and disappear. He would reappear a moment later and hustle back to the car. The driver would glance left and right and accept a small package and force back into the traffic in a burble of exhaust and a blast of horns. Then the boy would return to the sidewalk and wait.

Sometimes the trade was on foot, but the system was always the same. The boys were the cut-outs. They carried the money in and the packages out, and they were too young to go to trial. Reacher was watching them use three doorways in particular, spaced out along the block frontage. The center of the three was doing the busiest trade. About two-to-one, in terms of commercial volume. It was the eleventh building, counting up from the south corner. He pushed off the fence and turned east. There was a vacant lot ahead which gave him a glimpse of the river. The bridge soared over his head. He turned north and came up behind the buildings in a narrow alley. Sca

There was nobody else around. The boy was on his own. Reacher stepped into the alley. The way to do it is to walk fast and focus on something way beyond your target. Make the guy feel like he’s got nothing to do with anything. Reacher made a show of checking his watch and glancing far ahead into the distance. He hustled along, almost ru

He let him fall off the trunk lid unaided, to see how far away he’d put him. A conscious person will always break his fall. This kid didn’t. He hit the alley floor with a dusty thump. Reacher rolled him over and checked his pockets. There was a gun in there, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he was going to bear home in triumph. It was a Chinese.22, some imitation of a Soviet imitation of something that was probably useless to start with. He pitched it out of reach under the car.

He knew the back door of the tenement would be unlocked, because that’s the point of a back door when you’re doing a roaring trade about 150 yards south of Police Plaza. They come in the front, you need to be able to get out the back without fumbling for the key. He inched it open with his toe and stood gazing into the gloom. There was an i