Tripwire

REACHER FOLLOWED THE last two guests up the cement steps and out of the yard. One was a colonel and the other was a two-star general, both in immaculate dress uniform. It was what he had expected. A place with free food and drink, the soldiers will always be the last to leave. He didn’t know the colonel, but he thought he vaguely recognized the general. He thought the general recognized him, too, but neither of them pursued it. No desire on either part to get into long and complicated so-what-are-you-doing-now explanations.

The brass shook hands quite formally with Jodie and then they snapped to attention and saluted. Crisp parade-ground moves, gleaming boots smashing into the blacktop, eyes rigidly to the front, thousand-yard stares, all quite bizarre in the green stillness of a suburban driveway. They got into the last car left on the garage apron, one of the flat green sedans parked nearest to the house. First to arrive, last to leave. Peacetime, no Cold War, nothing to do all day. It was why Reacher had been happy when they cut him loose, and as he watched the green car turn and head out, he knew he was right to be happy.

Jodie stepped sideways to him and linked her arm through his again.

"So," she said quietly. "That’s that."

Then there was just building silence as the noise from the green car faded and died along the road.

"Where’s he buried?" Reacher asked.

"The town cemetery," she said. "He could have chosen Arlington, of course, but he didn’t want that. You want to go up there?"

He shook his head.

"No, I don’t do stuff like that. Makes no difference to him now, does it? He knew I’ll miss him, because I told him so, a long time ago."

She nodded. Held his arm.

"We need to talk about Costello," he said again.

"Why?" she asked. "He gave you the message, right?"

He shook his head.

"No, he found me, but I was wary. I said I wasn’t Jack Reacher."

She looked up at him, astonished. "But why?"

He shrugged.

"Habit, I guess. I don’t go around looking for involvement. I didn’t recognize the name Jacob, so I just ignored him. I was happy, living quiet down there."

She was still looking at him.

"I guess I should have used Garber," she said. "It was Dad’s business anyway, not mine. But I did it through the firm, and I never even thought about it. You’d have listened to him if he’d said Garber, right?"

"Of course," he said.

"And you needn’t have worried, because it was no kind of a big deal."

"Can we go inside?" he asked.

She was surprised again. "Why?"

"Because it was some kind of a very big deal."

THEY SAW HER lead him in through the front door. She pulled the screen and he held it while she turned the knob and opened up. Some kind of a big front door, dull brown wood. They went inside and the door closed behind them. Ten seconds later a dim light came on in a window, way off to the left. Some kind of a sitting room or den, they guessed, so shaded by the runaway plantings outside that it needed lights on even in the middle of the day. They crouched in their damp hollow and waited. Insects were drifting through the sunbeams all around them. They glanced at each other and listened hard. No sound.

They pushed through to the driveway. Ran crouched to the comer of the garage. Pressed up against the siding and slid around to the front. Across the front toward the house. They went into their jackets for the pistols. Held them pointed at the ground and went one at a time for the front porch. They regrouped and eased slowly over the old timbers. Ended up squatting on the floor, backs pressed against the house, one on either side of the front door, pistols out and ready. She’d gone in this way. She’d come back out. Just a matter of time.

"SOMEBODY KILLED HIM?" Jodie repeated.

"And his secretary, probably," Reacher said.

"I don’t believe it," she said. "Why?"

She had led him through a dark hallway to a small den in the far corner of the house. A tiny window and dark wood paneling and heavy brown leather furniture made it gloomy, so she switched on a desk lamp, which changed it into a cozy man’s space like the pre-war bars Reacher had seen in Europe. There were shelves of books, cheap editions bought by subscription decades ago, and curled faded photographs thumbtacked to the front edges of the shelves. There was a plain desk, the sort of place where an old underemployed man does his bills and taxes in imitation of how he used to work when he had a job.

"I don’t know why," Reacher said. "I don’t know anything. I don’t even know why you sent him looking for me."

"Dad wanted you," she said. "He never really told me why. I was busy, I had a trial, complex thing, lasted months. I was preoccupied. All I know is, after he got sick he was going to the cardiologist, right? He met somebody there and got involved with something. He was worried about it. Seemed to me he felt he was under some kind of a big obligation. Then later when he got worse, he knew he would have to drop it, and he started saying he should find you and let you take a look at it, because you were a person who could maybe do something about it. He was getting all agitated, which was really not a good idea, so I said I’d get Costello to locate you. We use him all the time at the firm, and it felt like the least I should do."

It made some kind of sense, but Reacher’s first thought was why me? He could see Garber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. But a guy like Garber could get help anywhere. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were full of investigators. And if it was something too arcane or too personal for a city investigator, then all he had to do was pick up the phone and a dozen of his friends from the military police would come running. Two dozen. A hundred. All of them willing and anxious to repay his many kindnesses and favors that stretched right back through their whole careers. So Reacher was sitting there asking himself why me in particular?

"Who was the person he met at the cardiologist?"

She shrugged, unhappily.

"I don’t know. I was preoccupied. We never really went into it."

"Did Costello come up here? Discuss it directly with him?"

She nodded. "I called him and told him we’d pay him through the firm, but he was to come here and get the details. He called me back a day or two later, said he’d discussed it with Dad, and it all boiled down to finding you. He wanted me to retain him officially, on paper, because it could get expensive. So naturally I did that, because I didn’t want Dad worrying about the cost or anything."

"Which is why he told me his client was Mrs. Jacob," Reacher said. "Not Leon Garber. Which is why I ignored him. Which is how I got him killed."

She shook her head and looked at him sharply, like he was some kind of a new associate who had just done a piece of sloppy drafting. It took him by surprise. He was still thinking of her as a fifteen-year-old girl, not a thirty-year-old lawyer who spent her time getting preoccupied with long and complex trials.

"Non sequitur," she said. "It’s clear what happened, right? Dad told Costello the story, Costello tried some kind of a shortcut before he went looking for you, whereby he turned over the wrong stone and got somebody alerted. That somebody killed him to find out who was looking, and why. Makes no difference if you’d played ball right away. They’d still have gotten to Costello to ask him exactly who put him on the trail. So it’s me who got him killed, ultimately."

Reacher shook his head. "It was Leon. Through you."

She shook her head in turn. "It was the person at the cardiology clinic. Him, through Dad, through me."

"I need to find that person," he said.

"Does it matter now?"

"I think it does," he said. "If Leon was worried about something, then I’m worried about it, too. That’s how it worked for us."

Jodie nodded quietly. Stood up quickly and stepped over to the bookshelves. Pincered her fingernails and levered the thumbtack out of one of the photographs. Looked hard at it and then passed it across to him.

"Remember that?" she asked.

The photograph must have been fifteen years old, the colors fading to pale pastels the way old Kodak does with age and sunlight. It had the harsh bright sky of Manila above a dirt yard. Leon Garber was on the left, about fifty, dressed in creased olive fatigues. Reacher himself was on the right, twenty-four years old, a lieutenant, a foot taller than Garber, smiling with all the blazing vigor of youth. Between the two of them was Jodie, fifteen, in a sundress, one bare arm around her father’s shoulders, the other around Reacher’s waist. She was squinting in the sun, smiling, leaning toward Reacher like she was hugging his waist with all the strength in her skinny brown frame.

"Remember? He’d just bought the Nikon in the PX? With the self-timer? Borrowed a tripod and couldn’t wait to try it out?"

Reacher nodded. He remembered. He remembered the smell of her hair that day, in the hot Pacific sun. Clean, young hair. He remembered the feel of her body against his. He remembered the feel of her long, thin arm around his waist. He remembered screaming at himself hold on, pal, she’s only fifteen and she’s your CO’s daughter.

"He called that his family picture," she said. "Always did."

He nodded again. "That’s why. That’s how it worked for us."

She gazed at the photograph for a long moment, something in her face.