Tripwire

HOOK HOBIE WAS alone in his inner office, eighty-eight floors up, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, changing his mind. He was not an inflexible guy. He prided himself on that. He admired the way he could change and adapt and listen and learn. He felt it gave him his edge, made him distinctive.

He had gone to Vietnam more or less completely unaware of his capabilities. More or less completely unaware of everything, because he had been very young. And not just very young, but also straight out of a background that was repressed and conducted in a quiet suburban vacuum that held no scope for anything much in the way of experience.

Vietnam changed him. It could have broken him. It broke plenty of other guys. All around him, there were guys going to pieces. Not just the kids like him, but the older guys, too, the long-service professionals who had been in the Army for years. Vietnam fell on people like a weight, and some of them cracked, and some of them didn't.

He didn't. He just looked around, and changed and adapted. Listened and learned. Killing was easy. He was a guy who had never seen anything dead before apart from roadkill, the chipmunks and the rabbits and the occasional stinking skunk on the leafy lanes near his home. First day in-country in 'Nam he saw eight American corpses. It was a foot patrol neatly triangulated by mortar fire. Eight men, twenty-nine pieces, some of them large. A defining moment. His buddies were going quiet and throwing up and groaning in sheer abject miserable disbelief. He was unmoved.

He started out as a trader. Everybody wanted something. Everybody was moaning about what they didn't have. It was absurdly easy. All it took was a little listening. Here was a guy who smoked but didn't drink. There was a guy who loved beer but didn't smoke. Take the cigarettes from the one guy and exchange them for the other guy's beer. Broker the deal. Keep a small percentage back for yourself. It was so easy and so obvious he couldn't believe they weren't doing it for themselves. He didn't take it seriously, because he was sure it couldn't last. It wasn't going to take long for them all to catch on, and cut him out as middle-man.

But they never caught on. It was his first lesson. He could do things other people couldn't. He could spot things they couldn't. So he listened harder. What else did they want? Lots of things. Girls, food, penicillin, records, duty at base camp, but not latrine duty. Boots, bug repellent, side arms plated with chromium, dried ears from VC corpses for souvenirs. Marijuana, aspirin, heroin, clean needles, safe duty for the last hundred days of a tour. He listened and learned and searched and skimmed.

Then he made his big breakthrough. It was a conceptual leap he always looked back on with tremendous pride. It served as a pattern for the other giant strides he made later. It came as a response to a couple of problems he was facing. First problem was the sheer hard work everything was causing him. Finding specific physical things was sometimes tricky. Finding undiseased girls became very difficult, and finding virgins became impossible. Getting hold of a steady supply of drugs was risky. Other things were tedious. Fancy weapons, VC souvenirs, even decent boots all took time to obtain. Fresh new officers on rotation were screwing up his sweet-heart deals in the safe noncombat zones.

The second problem was competition. It was coming to his attention that he wasn't unique. Rare, but not unique. Other guys were getting in the game. A free market was developing. His deals were occasionally rejected. People walked away, claiming a better trade was available elsewhere. It shocked him.

Change and adapt. He thought it through. He spent an evening on his own, lying in his narrow cot in his hooch, thinking hard. He made the breakthrough. Why chase down specific physical things that were already hard to find, and could only get harder? Why trek on out to some medic and ask what he wanted in exchange for a boiled and stripped Charlie skull? Why then go out and barter for whatever damn thing it was and bring it back in and pick up the skull? Why deal in all that stuff? Why not just deal in the commonest and most freely available commodity in the whole of Vietnam?

American dollars. He became a moneylender. He smiled about it later, ruefully, when he was convalescing and had time to read. It was an absolutely classic progression. Primitive societies start out with barter, and then they progress to a cash economy. The American presence in Vietnam had started out as a primitive society. That was for damn sure. Primitive, improvised, disorganized, just crouching there on the muddy surface of that awful country. Then as time passed it became bigger, more settled, more mature. It grew up, and he was the first of his kind to grow up with it. The first, and for a very long time, the only. It was a source of huge pride to him. It proved he was better than the rest. Smarter, more imaginative, better able to change and adapt and prosper.

Cash money was the key to everything. Somebody wanted boots or heroin or a girl some lying gook swore was twelve and a virgin, he could go buy it with money borrowed from Hobie. He could gratify his desire today, and pay for it next week, plus a few percent in interest. Hobie could just sit there, like a fat lazy spider in the center of a web. No legwork. No hassle. He put a lot of thought into it. Realized early the psychological power of numbers. Little numbers like nine sounded small and friendly. Nine percent was his favorite rate. It sounded like nothing at all. Nine, just a little squiggle on a piece of paper. A single figure. Less than ten. Really nothing at all. That's how the other grunts looked at it. But 9 percent a week was 468 percent a year. Somebody let the debt slip for a week, and compound interest kicked in. That 468 ramped up to 1,000 percent pretty damn quickly. But nobody looked at that. Nobody except Hobie. They all saw the number nine, single figure, small and friendly.

The first defaulter was a big guy, savage, ferocious, pretty much subnormal in the head. Hobie smiled. Forgave him his debt and wrote it off. Suggested that he might repay this generosity by getting alongside him and taking on the role of enforcer. There were no more defaulters after that. The exact method of deterrence was tricky to establish. A broken arm or leg just sent the guy way back behind the lines to the field hospital, where he was safe and surrounded by white nurses who would probably put out if he came up with some kind of heroic description about how he got the injury. A bad break might even get him invalided out of the service altogether and returned Stateside. No kind of deterrence in that. No kind of deterrence at all. So Hobie had his enforcer use punji spikes. They were a VC invention, a small sharp wooden spike like a meat skewer, coated with buffalo dung, which was poisonous. The VC concealed them in shallow holes, so GIs would step on them and get septic crippling wounds in the feet. Hobie's enforcer aimed to use them through the defaulter's testicles. The feeling amongst Hobie's clientele was the long-term medical consequences were not worth risking, even in exchange for escaping the debt and getting out of uniform.

By the time he got burned and lost his arm, Hobie was a seriously rich man. His next coup was to get the whole of his fortune home, undetected and complete. Not everybody could have done it. Not in the particular set of circumstances he found himself in. It was further proof of his greatness. As was his subsequent history. He arrived in New York after a circuitous journey, crippled and disfigured, and immediately felt at home. Manhattan was a jungle, no different from the jungles of Indochina. So there was no reason for him to start acting any different. No reason to change his line of business. And this time, he was starting out with a massive capital reserve. He wasn't starting out with nothing.

He loan-sharked for years. He built it up. He had the capital, and he had the image. The burn scars and the hook meant a lot, visually. He attracted a raft of helpers. He fed off whole identifiable waves and generations of immigrants and poor people. He fought off the Italians to stay in business. He paid off whole squads of cops and prosecutors to stay invisible.

Then he made his second great breakthrough. Similar to the first. It was a process of deep radical thought. A response to a problem. The problem was the sheer insane scale. He had millions on the street, but it was all nickel-and-dime. Thousands of separate deals, a hundred bucks here, a hundred fifty there, 9 or 10 percent a week, 500 or a 1,000 percent a year. Big paperwork, big hassles, running fast all the time just to keep up. Then he suddenly realized less could be more. It came to him in a flash. Five percent of some corporation's million bucks was worth more in a week than 500 percent of street-level shit. He got in a fever about it. He froze all new lending and turned the screws to get back everything he was owed. He bought suits and rented office space. Overnight, he became a corporate lender.

It was an act of pure genius. He had sniffed out that gray margin that lies just to the left of conventional commercial practice. He had found a huge constituency of borrowers who were just slipping off the edge of what the banks called acceptable. A huge constituency. A desperate constituency. Above all, a soft constituency. Soft targets. Civilized men in suits coming to him for a million bucks, posing much less of a risk than somebody in a dirty undershirt wanting a hundred in a filthy tenement block with a rabid dog behind the door. Soft targets, easy to intimidate. Unaccustomed to the harsh realities of life. He let his enforcers go, and sat back and watched as his clientele shrank down to a handful, his average loan increased a millionfold, his interest rates dropped back into the stratosphere, and his profits grew bigger than he could ever imagine. Less is more.

It was a wonderful new business to be in. There were occasional problems, of course. But they were manageable. He changed his deterrence tactic. These civilized new borrowers were vulnerable through their families. Wives, daughters, sons. Usually, the threat was enough. Occasionally, action had to be taken. Often, it was fun. Soft suburban wives and daughters could be amusing. An added bonus. A wonderful business. Achieved through a constant willingness to change and adapt. Deep down, he knew his talent for flexibility was his greatest strength. He had promised himself never ever to forget that fact. Which was why he was alone in his inner office, up there on the eighty-eighth floor, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, and changing his mind.

FIFTY MILES AWAY to the north, in Pound Ridge, Marilyn Stone was changing her mind, too. She was a smart woman. She knew Chester was in financial trouble. It couldn't be anything else. He wasn't having an affair. She knew that. There are signs husbands give out when they're having affairs, and Chester wasn't giving them out. There was nothing else he could be worried about. So it was financial trouble.

Her original intention had been to wait. Just to sit tight and wait until the day he finally needed to get it off his chest and told her all about it. She had planned to wait for that day and then step in. She could manage the situation from there on in, however far it went exactly, debt, insolvency, even bankruptcy. Women were good at managing situations. Better than men. She could take the practical steps, she could offer whatever consolation was needed, she could pick her way through the ruins without the ego-driven hopelessness Chester was going to be feeling.

But now she was changing her mind. She couldn't wait any longer. Chester was killing himself with worry. So she was going to have to go ahead and do something about it. No use talking to him. His instinct was to conceal problems. He didn't want to upset her. He would deny everything and the situation would keep on getting worse. So she had to go ahead and act alone. For his sake, as well as hers.

The obvious first step was to place the house with a realtor. Whatever the exact degree of trouble they were in, selling the house might be necessary. Whether it would be enough, she had no way of telling. It might solve the problem on its own, or it might not. But it was the obvious place to start.

A rich woman living in Pound Ridge like Marilyn has many contacts in the real estate business. One step down the status ladder, where the women are comfortable without being rich, a lot of them work for realtors. They keep it part-time and try to make it look like a hobby, like it was more connected with an enthusiasm for interior decoration than mere commerce. Marilyn could immediately list four good friends she could call. Her hand was resting on the phone as she tried to choose between them. In the end, she chose a woman called Sheryl, who she knew the least well of the four, but who she suspected was the most capable. She was taking this seriously, and her realtor needed to, as well. She dialed the number.

"Marilyn," Sheryl answered. "How nice to talk to you. Can I help?"

Marilyn took a deep breath.

"We might be selling the house," she said.

"And you've come to me? Marilyn, thank you. But why on earth are you guys thinking of selling? It's so lovely where you are. Are you moving out of state?"

Marilyn took another deep breath. "I think Chester's going broke. I don't really want to talk about it, but I figure we need to start making contingency plans."

There was no pause. No hesitation, no embarrassment.

"I think you're very wise," Sheryl said. "Most people hang on way too long, then they have to sell in a hurry, and they lose out."

"Most people? This happens a lot?"

"Are you kidding? We see this all the time. Better to face it early and pick up the true value. You're doing the right thing, believe me. But then women usually do, Marilyn, because we can handle this stuff better than men, can't we?"

Marilyn breathed out and smiled into the phone. Felt like she was doing exactly the right thing, and like this was exactly the right person to be doing it with.

"I'll list it right away," Sheryl said. "I suggest an asking price a dollar short of two million, and a target of one-point-nine. That's achievable, and it should spark something pretty quickly."

"How quickly?"

"Today's market?" Sheryl said. "With your location? Six weeks? Yes, I think we can pretty much guarantee an offer inside six weeks."

DR. MCBANNERMAN WAS still pretty uptight about confidentiality issues, so although she gave up old Mr. and Mrs. Hobie's address, she wouldn't accompany it with a phone number. Jodie saw no legal logic in that, but it seemed to keep the doctor happy, so she didn't bother arguing about it. She just shook hands and hustled back through the waiting area and outside to the car, with Reacher following behind her.

"Bizarre," she said to him. "Did you see those people? In reception?"

"Exactly," Reacher replied. "Old people, half-dead."

"That's what Dad looked like, toward the end. Just like that, I'm afraid. And I guess this old Mr. Hobie won't look any different. So what were they up to together that people are getting killed over it?"

They got into the Bravada together and she leaned over from the passenger seat and unhooked her car phone. Reacher started the motor to run the air. She dialed information. The Hobies lived north of Garrison, up past Brighton, the next town on the railroad. She wrote their number in pencil on a scrap of paper from her pocketbook and then dialed it immediately. It rang for a long time, and then a woman's voice answered.

"Yes?" the voice said, hesitantly.

"Mrs. Hobie?" Jodie asked.

"Yes?" the voice said again, wavering. Jodie pictured her, an old, infirm woman, gray, thin, probably wearing a flowery housecoat, gripping an ancient receiver in an old dark house smelling of stale food and furniture wax.

"Mrs. Hobie, I'm Jodie Garber, Leon Garber's daughter."

"Yes?" the woman said again.

"He died, I'm afraid, five days ago."

"Yes, I know," the old woman said. She sounded sad about it. "Dr. McBannerman's receptionist told us at yesterday's appointment. I was very sorry to hear about it. He was a good man. He was very nice to us. He was helping us. And he told us about you. You're a lawyer. I'm very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you," Jodie said. "But can you tell me about whatever it was he was helping you with?"

"Well, it doesn't matter now, does it?"

"Doesn't it? Why not?"

"Well, because your father died," the woman said. "You see, I'm afraid he was really our last hope."

The way she said it, it sounded like she meant it. Her voice was low. There was a resigned fall at the end of the sentence, a sort of tragic cadence, like she'd given up on something long cherished and anticipated. Jodie pictured her, a bony hand holding the phone up to her face. a wet tear on a thin pale cheek.

"Maybe he wasn't," she said. "Maybe I could help you."

There was a silence on the line. Just a faint hiss.

"Well, I don't think so," the woman said. "I'm not sure it's the kind of thing a lawyer would normally deal with, you see."

"What kind of thing is it?"

"I don't think it matters now," the woman said again.

"Can't you give me some idea?"

"No, I think it's all over now," the woman said, like her old heart was breaking.

Then there was silence again. Jodie glanced out through the windshield at McBannerman's office. "But how was my father able to help you? Was it something he especially knew about? Was it because he was in the Army? Is that what it was? Something connected with the Army?"

"Well, yes, it was. That's why I'm afraid you wouldn't be able to help us, as a lawyer. We've tried lawyers, you see. We need somebody connected with the Army, I think. But thank you very much for offering. It was very generous of you."

"There's somebody else here," Jodie said. "He's with me, right now. He used to work with my father, in the Army. He'd be willing to help you out, if he can."

There was silence on the line again. Just the same faint hiss, and breathing. Like the old woman was thinking. Like she needed time to adjust to some new considerations.

"His name is Major Reacher," Jodie said into the silence. "Maybe my father mentioned him? They served together for a long time. My father sent for him, when he realized he wouldn't be able to carry on any longer."

"He sent for him?" the woman repeated.

"Yes, I think he thought he would be able to come and take over for him, you know, keep on with helping you out."

"Was this new person in the military police, too?"

"Yes, he was. Is that important?"

"I'm really not sure," the woman said.

She went quiet again. She was breathing close to the phone.

"Can he come here to our house?" she asked suddenly.

"We'll both come," Jodie said. "Would you like us to come right away?"

There was silence again. Breathing, thinking.

"My husband's just had his medication," the woman said. "He's sleeping now. He's very sick, you know."

Jodie nodded in the car. Opened and closed her spare hand in frustration.

"Mrs. Hobie, can't you tell us what this is about?"

Silence. Breathing, thinking.

"I should let my husband tell you. I think he can explain it better than me. It's a long story, and I sometimes get confused."

"OK, when will he wake up?" Jodie asked. "Should we come by a little later?"

There was another pause.

"He usually sleeps right through, after his medication," the old woman said. "It's a blessing, really, I think. Can your father's friend come first thing in the morning?"

HOBIE USED THE tip of his hook to press the intercom buzzer on his desk. Leaned forward and called through to his receptionist. He used the guy's name, which was an unusual intimacy for Hobie, generally caused by stress.

"Tony?" he said. "We need to talk."

Tony came in from his brass-and-oak reception counter in the lobby and threaded his way around the coffee table to the sofa.

"It was Garber who went to Hawaii," he said.

"You sure?" Hobie asked him.

Tony nodded. "On American, White Plains to Chicago, Chicago to Honolulu, April fifteenth. Returned the next day, April sixteenth, same route. Paid by Amex. It's all in their computer."

"But what did he do there?" Hobie said, more or less to himself.

"We don't know," Tony muttered. "But we can guess, can't we?"

There was an ominous silence in the office. Tony watched the unburned side of Hobie's face, waiting for a response.

"I heard from Hanoi," Hobie said, into the silence.

"Christ, when?"

"Ten minutes ago."

"Jesus, Hanoi?" Tony said. "Shit, shit, shit."

"Thirty years," Hobie said. "And now it's happened."

Tony stood up and walked around behind the desk. Used

his fingers to push two slats of the window blind apart. A bar of afternoon sunlight fell across the room.

"So you should get out now. Now it's way, way too dangerous."

Hobie said nothing. He clasped his hook in the fingers of his left hand.

"You promised," Tony said urgently. "Step one, step two. And they've happened. Both steps have happened now, for God's sake."

"It'll still take them some time," Hobie said. "Won't it? Right now, they still don't know anything."

Tony shook his head. "Garber was no fool. He knew something. If he went to Hawaii, there was a good reason for it."

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 planned all along."

"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. Running is smart, I agree with you, but running too early, earlier than you really need to, that's cowardice. And I'm not a coward, Tony, you know that, right?"

"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 McBannerman's long, low office, engine idling, air roaring to combat, the sun beating down on the Bravada's dark green paint. The vents were angled all over the place, and he was catching Jodie's subtle perfume mixed in with the freon blast. Right at that moment, he was a happy guy, living an old fantasy. Many times in the past he'd speculated about how it would feel to be within touching distance of her when she was all grown up. It was something he had never expected to experience. He had assumed he would lose track of her and never see her again. He had assumed his feelings would just die away, over time. But there he was, sitting right next to her, breathing in her fragrance, taking sideways glances at her long legs sprawling down into the foot well. He had always assumed she would grow up pretty spectacular. Now he was feeling a little guilty for underestimating how beautiful she would become. His fantasies had not done her justice.

"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?"

She nodded. "Thirteen blocks. I usually walk."

"Not tomorrow," he said. "I'll drive you."

She looked surprised. "You will?"

"Damn right I will," he said. "Thirteen blocks on foot? Forget about it, Jodie. You'll be safe enough at home, but they could grab you on the street. What about your office? Is it secure?"

She nodded again. "Nobody gets in, not without an appointment and ID."

"OK," he said. "So I'll be in your apartment all night, and I'll drive you door-to-door in the morning. Then I'll come back up here and see these Hobie people, and you can stay right there in the office until I come get you out again, OK?"

She was silent. He tracked back and reviewed what he'd said.

"I mean, you got a spare room, right?"

"Sure," she said. "There's a spare room."

"So is that OK?"

She nodded, quietly.

"So what now?" he asked her. She turned sideways on her seat. The blast of air from the center vents caught her hair and blew it over her face. She smoothed it back behind her ear and her eyes flicked him up and down. Then she smiled.

"We should go shopping," she said.

"Shopping? What for? What do you need?"

"Not what I need," she said. "What you need."

He looked at her, worried. "What do I need?"

"Clothes," she said. "You can't go visiting with those old folks looking like a cross between a beach bum and the wild man of Borneo, can you?"

Then she leaned sideways and touched the mark on his shirt with her fingertip.

"And we should find a pharmacy. You need something to put on that burn."

"WHAT THE HELL are you doing?" the finance director screamed.

He was in Chester Stone's office doorway, two floors above his own, gripping the frame with both hands, panting with exertion and fury. He hadn't waited for the elevator. He had raced up the fire stairs. Stone was staring at him, blankly.

"You idiot," he screamed. "I told you not to do this."

"Do what?" Stone said back.

"Put stock in the market," the finance guy yelled. "I told you not to do that."

"I didn't," Stone said. "There's no stock in the market."

"There damn well is," the guy said. "A great big slice, sitting there doing absolutely nothing at all. You got people shying away from it like it's radioactive or something."

"What?"

The finance guy breathed in. Stared at his employer. Saw a small, crumpled man in a ridiculous British suit sitting at a desk that alone was now worth a hundred times the corporation's entire net assets.

"You asshole, I told you not to do this. Why not just take a page in The Wall Street Journal and say, 'Hey people, my company's worth exactly less than jack shit'?"

"What are you talking about?" Stone asked.

"I've got the banks on the phone," the guy said. "They're watching the ticker. Stone stock popped up an hour ago, and the price is unwinding faster than the damn computers can track it. It's unsalable. You've sent them a message, for God's sake. You've told them you're insolvent. You've told them you owe them sixteen million dollars against security that isn't worth sixteen damn cents."

"I didn't put stock in the market," Stone said again.

The finance guy nodded sarcastically.

"So who the hell did? The tooth fairy?"

"Hobie," Stone said. "Has to be. Jesus, why?"

"Hobie?" the guy repeated.

Stone nodded.

"Hobie?" the guy said again, incredulous. "Shit, you gave him stock?"

"I had to," Stone said. "No other way."

"Shit," the guy said again, panting. "You see what he's doing here?"

Stone looked blank, and then he nodded, scared. "What can we do?"

The finance director dropped his hands off the doorframe and turned his back. "Forget we. There's no we here anymore. I'm resigning. I'm out of here. You can fix it yourself."

"But you recommended the guy," Stone yelled.

"I didn't recommend giving him stock, you asshole," the guy yelled back. "What are you? A moron? If I recommended you visit the aquarium to see the piranha fish, would you stick your damn finger in the tank?"

"You've got to help me," Stone said.

The guy just shook his head. "You're on your own. I'm resigning. Right now my recommendation is you go down to what was my office and get started. There's a line of phones on what was my desk, all ringing. My recommendation is you start with whichever one is ringing the loudest."

"Wait up," Stone yelled. "I need your help here."

"Against Hobie?" the guy yelled back. "Dream on, pal."

Then he was gone. He just turned and strode out through the secretarial pen and disappeared. Stone came out from behind his desk and stood in the doorway and watched him go. The suite was silent. His secretary had left. Earlier than she should have. He walked out into the corridor. The sales department on the right was deserted. The marketing suite on the left was empty. The photocopiers were silent. He called the elevator and the mechanism sounded very loud in the hush. He rode down two floors, alone. The finance director's suite was empty. Drawers were standing open. Personal belongings had been taken away. He wandered through to the inner office. The Italian desk light was glowing. The computer was turned off. The phones were off their hooks, lying on the rosewood desktop. He picked one of them up.

"Hello?" he said into it. "This is Chester Stone."

He repeated it twice into the electronic silence. Then a woman came on and asked him to hold. There were clicks and buzzes. A moment of soothing music.

"Mr. Stone?" a new voice said. "This is the Insolvency Unit."

Stone closed his eyes and gripped the phone.

"Please hold for the director," the voice said.

There was more music. Fierce baroque violins, scraping away, relentlessly.

"Mr. Stone?" a deep voice said. "This is the director."

"Hello," Stone said. It was all he could think of to say.

"We're taking steps," the voice said. "I'm sure you understand our position."

"OK," Stone said. He was thinking what steps? Lawsuits? Prison?

"We should be out of the woods, start of business tomorrow," the voice said.

"Out of the woods? How?"

"We're selling the debt, obviously."

"Selling it?" Stone repeated. "I don't understand."

"We don't want it anymore," the voice said. "I'm sure you can understand that. It's moved itself way outside of the parameters that we feel happy with. So we're selling it. That's what people do, right? They got something they don't want anymore, they sell it, best price they can get."

"Who are you selling it to?" Stone asked, dazed.

"A trust company in the Caymans. They made an offer."

"So where does that leave us?"

"Us?" the voice repeated, puzzled. "It leaves us nowhere. Your obligation to us is terminated. There is no us. Our relationship is over. My only advice is that you never try to resurrect it. We would tend to regard that as insult added to injury."

"So who do I owe now?"

"The trust company in the Caymans," the voice said patiently. "I'm sure whoever's behind it will be contacting you very soon, with their repayment proposals."

JODIE DROVE. REACHER got out and walked around the hood and got back in on the passenger side. She slid over the center console and buzzed the seat forward. Cruised south through the sunny Croton reservoirs, down toward the city of White Plains. Reacher was twisting around, scanning behind them. No pursuers. Nothing suspicious. Just a perfect lazy June afternoon in the suburbs. He had to touch the blister through his shirt to remind himself that anything had happened at all.

She headed for a big mall. It was a serious building the size of a stadium, crowding proudly against office towers its own height, standing inside a knot of busy roads. She drifted left and right across the traffic lanes and followed a curved ramp underground to the parking garage. It was dark down there, dusty oil-stained concrete, but there was a brass-and-glass doorway in the distance, leading directly into a store and blazing with white light like a promise. Jodie found a slot fifty yards from it. She eased in and went away to do something with a machine. Came back and laid a small ticket on the dash, where it could be read through the windshield.

"OK," she said. "Where to first?"

Reacher shrugged. This was not his area of expertise. He had bought plenty of clothes in the last two years, because he had developed a habit of buying new stuff instead of washing the old stuff. It was a defensive habit. It defended him against carrying any kind of a big valise, and it defended him against having to learn the exact techniques of laundering. He knew about laundromats and dry cleaners, but he was vaguely worried about being alone in a laundromat and finding himself unsure of the correct procedures. And giving stuff to a dry cleaner implied a commitment to be back in the same physical location at some future time, which was a commitment he was reluctant to make. The most straightforward practice was to buy new and junk the old. So he had bought clothes, but exactly where he had bought them was hard for him to pin down. Generally he just saw clothes in a store window, went in and bought them, and came out again without really being sure of the identity of the establishment he had visited.

"There was a place I went in Chicago," he said. "I think it was a chain store, short little name. Hole? Gap? Something like that. They had the right sizes."

Jodie laughed. Linked her arm through his.

"The Gap," she said. "There's one right in here."

The brass-and-glass doorway led straight into a department store. The air was cold and stank of soap and perfume. They passed through the cosmetics into an area with tables piled high with summer clothes in pastel cottons. Then out into the main thoroughfare of the mall. It was oval like a racetrack, ringed with small stores, the whole arrangement repeated on two more levels above them. The walks were carpeted and music was playing and people were swarming everywhere.

"I think the Gap's upstairs," Jodie said.

Reacher smelled coffee. One of the units opposite was done out as a coffee bar, like a street place in Italy. The inside walls were painted like outside walls, and the ceiling was flat black, so it would disappear like the sky. An inside place looking like an outside place, in an inside mall that was trying to look like an outside shopping street, except it had carpets.

"You want to get coffee?" he asked.

Jodie smiled and shook her head. "First we shop, then we get coffee."

She led him toward an escalator. He smiled. He knew how she was feeling. He had felt the same, fifteen years before. She had come with him, nervous and tentative, on a routine visit to the glass house in Manila. Familiar territory to him, just routine, really nothing at all. But new and strange to her. He had felt busy and happy, and somehow educational. It had been fun being with her, showing her around. Now she was feeling the same thing. All this mall stuff was nothing to her. She had come home to America a long time ago and learned its details. Now he was the stranger in her territory.

"What about this place?" she called to him.

It wasn't the Gap. It was some one-off store, heavily designed with weathered shingles and timbers rescued from some old barn. The clothes were made from heavy cottons and dyed in subdued colors, and they were artfully displayed in the beds of old farm carts with iron-banded wheels.

He shrugged. "Looks OK to me."

She took his hand. Her palm felt cool and slim against his. She led him inside and put her hair behind her ears and bent and started looking through the displays. She did it the way he'd seen other women do it. She used little flicks of her wrist to put together assemblages of different items. A pair of pants, still folded, laid over the bottom half of a shirt. A jacket laid sideways over both of them, with the shirt peeping out at the top, and the pants showing at the bottom. Half-closed eyes, pursed lips. A shake of the head. A different shirt. A nod. Real shopping.

"What do you think?" she asked.

She had put together a pair of pants, khaki, but a little darker than most chinos. A shirt in a quiet check, greens and browns. A thin jacket in dark brown which seemed to match the rest pretty well. He nodded.

"Looks OK to me," he said again.

The prices were handwritten on small tickets attached to the garments with string. He flicked one over with his fingernail.

"Christ," he said. "Forget about it."

"It's worth it," she said. "Quality's good."

"I can't afford it, Jodie."

The shirt on its own was twice what he had ever paid for a whole outfit. To dress in that stuff was going to cost him what he had earned in a day, digging pools. Ten hours, four tons of sand and rock and earth.

"I'll buy them for you."

He stood there with the shirt in his hands, uncertain.

"Remember the necklace?" she asked.

He nodded. He remembered. She had developed a passion for a particular necklace in a Manila jeweler's. It was a plain gold thing, like a rope, vaguely Egyptian. Not really expensive, but out of her league. Leon was into some self-discipline thing with her and wouldn't spring for it. So Reacher had bought it for her. Not for her birthday or anything, just because he liked her and she liked it.

"I was so happy," she said. "I thought I was going to burst. I've still got it, I still wear it. So let me pay you back, OK?"

He thought about it. Nodded.

"OK," he said.

She could afford it. She was a lawyer. Probably made a fortune. And it was a fair trade, looking at it in proportion, cost-versus-income, fifteen years of inflation.

"OK," he said again. "Thanks, Jodie."

"You need socks and things, right?"

They picked out a pair of khaki socks and a pair of white boxers. She went to a till and used a gold card. He took the stuff into a changing cubicle and tore off the price tickets and put everything on. He transferred his cash from his pants pocket and left the old clothes in the trash can. The new stuff felt stiff, but it looked pretty good in the mirror, against his tan. He came back out.

"Nice," Jodie said. "Pharmacy next."

"Then coffee," he said.

He bought a razor and a can of foam and a toothbrush and toothpaste. And a small tube of burn ointment. Paid for it all himself and carried it in a brown paper bag. The walk to the pharmacy had taken them near a food court. He could see a rib place that smelled good.

"Let's have dinner," he said. "Not just coffee. My treat."

"OK," she said, and linked her arm through his again.

The dinner for two cost him the price of the new shirt, which he thought was not outrageous. They had dessert and coffee, and then some of the smaller stores were closing up for the day.

"OK, home," he said. "And we play it real cautious from here."

They walked through the department store, through the displays in reverse, first the pastel summer cottons and then the fierce smell of the cosmetics. He stopped her inside the brass-and-glass doors and scanned ahead out in the garage, where the air was warm and damp. A million-to-one possibility, but worth taking into account. Nobody there, just people hustling back to their cars with bulging bags. They walked together to the Bravada and she slid into the driver's seat. He got in beside her.

"Which way would you normally go?"

"From here? FDR Drive, I guess."

"OK," he said. "Head out for LaGuardia, and we'll come in down through Brooklyn. Over the Brooklyn Bridge."

She looked at him. "You sure? You want to do the tourist thing, there are better places to go than the Bronx and Brooklyn."

"First rule," he said. "Predictability is unsafe. If you've got a route you'd normally take, today we take a different one."

"You serious?"

"You bet your ass. I used to do VIP protection for a living."

"I'm a VIP now?"

"You bet your ass," he said again.

AN HOUR LATER it was dark, which is the best condition for using the Brooklyn Bridge. Reacher felt like a tourist as they swooped around the ramp and up over the hump of the span and lower Manhattan was suddenly there in front of them with a billion bright lights everywhere. One of the world's great sights, he thought, and he had inspected most of the competition.

"Go a few blocks north," he said. "We'll come in from a distance. They'll be expecting us to come straight home."

She swung wide to the right and headed north on Lafayette. Hung a tight left and another and came back traveling south on Broadway. The light at Leonard was red. Reacher scanned ahead in the neon wash.

"Three blocks," Jodie said.

"Where do you park?"

"Garage under the building."

"OK, turn off a block short," he said. "I'll check it out. Come around again and pick me up. If I'm not waiting on the sidewalk, go to the cops."

She made the right on Thomas. Stopped and let him out. He slapped lightly on the roof and she took off again. He walked around the comer and found her building. It was a big square place, renovated lobby with heavy glass doors, big lock, a vertical row of fifteen buzzers with names printed behind little plastic windows. Apartment twelve had Jacob/ Garber, like there were two people living there. There were people on the street, some of them loitering in knots, some of them walking, but none of them interesting. The parking garage entrance was farther on down the sidewalk. It was an abrupt slope into darkness. He walked down. It was quiet and badly lit. There were two rows of eight spaces, fifteen altogether because the ramp up to the street was where the sixteenth would be. Eleven cars parked up. He checked the full length of the place. Nobody hiding out. He came back up the ramp and ran back to Thomas. Dodged the traffic and crossed the street and waited. She was coming south through the light toward him. She saw him and pulled over and he got back in alongside her.

"All clear," he said.

She made it back out into the traffic and then pulled right and bumped down the ramp. Her headlights bounced and swung. She stopped in the center aisle and backed into her space. Killed the motor and the lights.

"How do we get upstairs?" he asked.

She pointed. "Door to the lobby."

There was a flight of metal steps up to a big industrial door, which had a steel sheet riveted over it. The door had a big lock, same as on the glass doors to the street. They got out and locked the car. He carried her garment bag. They walked to the steps and up to the door. She worked the lock and he swung it open. The lobby was empty. A single elevator opposite them.

"I'm on four," she said.

He pressed five.

"We'll come down the stairs from above," he said. "Just in case."

They used the fire stairs and came back down to four. He had her wait on the landing and peered out. A deserted hallway. Tall and narrow. Apartment ten to the left, eleven to the right, and twelve straight ahead.

"Let's go," he said.

Her door was black and thick. Spy hole at eye level, two locks. She used the keys and they went inside. She locked up again and dropped an old hinged bar into place, right across the whole doorway. Reacher pressed it down in its brackets. It was iron, and as long as it was there, nobody else was going to get in. He put her garment bag against a wall. She flicked switches and the lights came on. She waited by the door while Reacher walked ahead. Hallway, living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, closets. Big rooms, very high. Nobody in them. He came back to the living room and shrugged off his new jacket and threw it on a chair and turned back to her and relaxed.

But she wasn't relaxed. He could see that. She was looking directly away from him, more tense than she'd been all day. She was just standing there with her sweatshirt cuffs way down over her hands, in the doorway to her living room, fidgeting. He had no idea what was wrong with her.

"You OK?" he asked.

She ducked her head forward and back in a figure eight to drop her hair behind her shoulders.

"I guess I'll take a shower," she said. "You know, hit the sack."

"Hell of a day, right?"

"Unbelievable."

She crabbed right around him on her way through the room, keeping her distance. She gave him a sort of shy wave, just her fingers peeping out from the sweatshirt sleeve.

"What time tomorrow?" he asked.

"Seven-thirty will do it," she said.

"OK," he said. "Good night, Jodie."

She nodded and disappeared down the inner hallway. He heard her bedroom door open and close. He stared after her for a long moment, surprised. Then he sat on the sofa and took off his shoes. Too restless to sleep right away. He padded around in his new socks, looking at the apartment.

It wasn't really a loft, as such. It was an old building with very high ceilings, was all. The shell was original. It had probably been industrial. The outside walls were sandblasted brick, and the inner walls were smooth, clean plaster. The windows were huge. Probably put there to illuminate the sewing machine operation or whatever was there a hundred years ago.

The parts of the walls that were brick were a warm natural brick color, but everything else was white, except for the floor, which was pale maple strips. The decor was cool and neutral, like a gallery. There was no sign that more than one person had ever lived there. No sign of two tastes competing. The whole place was very unified. White sofas, white chairs, bookshelves built in simple cubic sections, painted with the same white paint that had been used on the walls. Big steam pipes and ugly radiators, all painted white. The only definite color in the living room was a life-size Mondrian copy on the wall above the largest sofa. It was a proper copy, done by hand in oil on canvas, with the proper colors. Not garish reds and blues and yellows, but the correct dulled tones, with authentic little cracks and crazings in the white, which was nearer a gray. He stood and looked at it for long time, totally astonished. Piet Mondrian was his favorite painter of all time, and this exact picture was his favorite work of all time. The title was Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. Mondrian had painted the original in 1930 and Reacher had seen it in Zurich, Switzerland.

There was a tall cabinet opposite the smallest sofa, painted the same white as everything else. There was a small TV in it, a video, a cable box, a CD player with a pair of large headphones plugged into the jack. A small stack of CDs, mostly fifties jazz, stuff he liked without really being crazy about.

The windows gave out over lower Broadway. There was a constant wash of traffic hum, neon blaze from up and down the street, an occasional siren wailing and booping and blasting loud as it came out through the gaps between blocks. He tilted the blind with a clear plastic wand and looked down at the sidewalk. There were still the same knots of people hanging around. Nothing to make him nervous. He tilted the blind back and closed it up tight.

The kitchen was huge and tall. All the cupboards were wood, painted white, and the appliances were industrial sizes in stainless steel, like pizza ovens. He had lived in places smaller than the refrigerator. He pulled it open and saw a dozen bottles of his favorite water, the same stuff he had grown to love in the Keys. He took the seal off one of them and carried it into the guest bedroom.

The bedroom was white, like everything else. The furniture was wood, which had started out with a different finish, but which was now white like the walls. He put the water on the night table and used the bathroom. White tiles, white sink, white tub, all old enamel and tiling. He closed the blinds and stripped and folded his new clothes onto the closet shelf. Threw back the cover and slid into bed and fell to thinking.

Illusion and reality. What was nine years, anyway? A lot, he guessed, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four, but what was it now? He was thirty-eight, and she was either twenty-nine or thirty, he wasn't exactly sure which. Where was the problem with that? Why wasn't he doing something? Maybe it wasn't the age thing. Maybe it was Leon. She was his daughter, and always would be. It gave him the guilty illusion she was somewhere between his kid sister and his niece. That obviously gave him a very inhibiting feeling, but it was just an illusion, right? She was the relative of an old friend, was all. An old friend who was now dead. So why the hell did he feel so bad about looking at her and seeing himself peeling off her sweatshirt and undoing the belt from around her waist? Why wasn't he just doing it? Why the hell was he in the guest room instead of on the other side of the wall in bed with her? Like he'd ached to be through countless forgotten nights in the past, some of them shameful, some of them wistful?

Because presumably her realities were rooted in the same kind of illusions. For kid sister and niece, call it big brother and uncle. Favorite uncle, for sure, because he knew she liked him. There was a lot of affection there. But that just made it worse. Affection for favorite uncles was a specific type of affection. Favorite uncles were there for specific types of things. Family things, like shopping and spoiling, one way or the other. Favorite uncles were not there to put the moves on you. That would come out of the blue like some kind of a shattering betrayal. Horrifying, unwelcome, incestuous, psychologically damaging.

She was on the other side of the wall. But there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing. It was never going to happen. He knew it was going to drive him crazy, so he forced his mind away from her and started thinking about other things. Things that were realities for sure, not just illusions. The two guys, whoever they were. They would have her address by now. There were a dozen ways of discovering where a person lives. They could be outside the building right at that moment. He scanned through the apartment building in his head. The lobby door, locked. The door from the parking garage, locked. The door to the apartment, locked and barred. The windows, all closed up, the blinds all drawn. So tonight, they were safe. But tomorrow morning was going to be dangerous. Maybe very dangerous. He concentrated on fixing the two guys in his mind as he fell asleep. Their vehicle, their suits, their build, their faces.

BUT AT THAT exact moment, only one of the two guys had a face. They had sailed together ten miles south of where Reacher lay, out into the black waters of lower New York Harbor. They had worked together to unzip the rubber body bag and lower the secretary's cold corpse down into the oily Atlantic swell. One guy had turned to the other with some cheap joke on his lips and was shot full in the face with a silenced Beretta. Then again, and again. The slow fall of his body put the three bullets all in different places. His face was all one big fatal wound, black in the darkness. His arm was levered up across the mahogany rail and his right hand was severed at the wrist with a stolen restaurant cleaver. Five blows were required. It was messy and brutal work. The hand went into a plastic bag and the body slipped into the water without a sound, less than twenty yards from the spot where the secretary was already sinking.