Tripwire

The guy shrugged and walked out of the office, swinging the keys. The door closed behind him and they heard the second thump of the lobby door a moment later. Then there was elevator whine and the office fell silent again. Hobie glanced at the stacks of dollar bills on the desk and headed back to the bathroom. Marilyn and Chester were kept side by side on the sofa, cold, sick, and hungry. The light coming in through the chinks in the blinds faded away to the yellow dullness of evening, and the silence from the bathroom continued until a point Marilyn guessed was around eight o’clock in the evening. Then it was shattered by screaming.

I HE PLANE CHASED the sun west but lost time all the way and arrived on Oahu three hours in arrears, in the middle of the afternoon. The first-class cabin was emptied ahead of business class and coach, which meant Reacher and Jodie were the first people outside the terminal and into the taxi line. The temperature and the humidity out there were similar to Texas, but the damp had a saline quality to it because of the Pacific close by. And the light was calmer. The jagged green mountains and the blue of the sea bathed the island with the jeweled glow of the tropics. Jodie put her dark glasses on again and gazed beyond the airport fences with the mild curiosity of somebody who had passed through Hawaii a dozen times in her father’s service days without ever really stopping there. Reacher did the same. He had used it as a Pacific stepping-stone more times than he could count, but he had never served in Hawaii.

The taxi waiting at the head of the line was a replica of the one they’d used at Dallas-Fort Worth, a clean Caprice with the air roaring full blast and the driver’s compartment decorated halfway between a religious shrine and a living room. They disappointed the guy by asking him for the shortest ride available on Oahu, which was the half-mile hop around the perimeter road to the Hickam Air Force Base entrance. The guy glanced backward at the line of cars behind him, and Reacher saw him thinking about the better fares the other drivers would get.

“Ten-dollar tip in it for you,” he said.

The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy’s family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark, smiling children and a dark, smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.

“Twenty dollars,” he said. “If we get going right now, OK?”

“Twenty dollars?” the guy repeated, amazed.

“Thirty. For your kids. They look nice.”

The guy gri

“Keep it.”

Then he pointed at the photograph. “That your house?”

The driver nodded.

“Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?”

The guy shook his head. “Tip-top condition.”

“The roof OK?”

“No problems at all.”

Reacher nodded. “Just checking.”

He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back toward the civilian terminal. There was a breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.

“Where are we going?”

“CIL-HI,” Reacher said. “It’s right inside here.”

He pronounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.

“Silly?” she repeated. “So what’s that?”

“C,I,L,H,I,” he said. “Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It’s the Department of the Army’s main facility.”

“For what?”

“I’ll show you for what,” he said.

Then he paused. “At least I hope I will.”

They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.

“We’re here to see Nash Newman,” he said.

The sergeant looked surprised and picked up a clipboard and peeled thin sheets of paper back. He slid a thick finger along a line and nodded. Picked up a phone and dialed a number. Four digits. An internal call. He a

“How old are you, miss?” he asked.

“Thirty,” Jodie said, puzzled in turn.

“Thirty,” the MP repeated into the phone. Then he listened again and hung it up and wrote something on the clipboard. Turned back to the window.

“He’ll be right out, so come on through.”

They squeezed through the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the heavy counterweight on the end of the vehicle barrier and waited on the hot pavement six feet away from where they had started, but now it was military pavement, not Hawaii Department of Transportation pavement, and that made a lot of difference to the look on the sergeant’s face. The suspicion was all gone, replaced by frank curiosity about why the legendary Nash Newman was in such a big hurry to get these two civilians inside the base.

There was a low concrete building maybe sixty yards away with a plain perso

“General Newman,” Reacher said. “This is Jodie Garber.”

Newman glanced at Reacher and took Jodie’s hand, smiling.

“Pleased to meet you, General,” she said.

“We already met,” Newman said.

“We did?” she said, surprised.

“You wouldn’t recall it,” he said. “At least I’d be terribly surprised if you did. You were three years old at the time, I guess. In the Philippines. It was in your father’s backyard. I remember you brought me a glass of planter’s punch. It was a big glass, and a big yard, and you were a very little girl. You carried it in both hands, with your tongue sticking out, concentrating. I watched you all the way, with my heart in my mouth in case you dropped it.”

She smiled. “Well, you’re right, I’m afraid I don’t recall it. I was three? That’s an awful long time ago now.”

Newman nodded. “That’s why I checked how old you looked. I didn’t mean for the sergeant to come right out and ask you straight. I wanted his subjective impression, is all. It’s not the sort of thing one should ask a lady, is it? But I was wondering if you could really be Leon’s daughter, come to visit me.”