Tripwire

CHESTER STONE WAITED in his own office suite more than an hour, and then he called downstairs and had the finance director contact the bank and check on the operating account. It showed a one-point-one-million-dollar credit, wired in fifty minutes ago from the Cayman office of a Bahamas-owned trust company.

"It’s there," the finance guy said. "You did the trick, chief."

Stone gripped the phone and wondered exactly what trick he had done.

"I’m coming down," he said. "I want to go over the figures."

"The figures are good," the finance guy said. "Don’t worry about it."

"I’m coming down anyway," Stone said.

He rode the elevator two floors down and joined the finance guy in his plush inner office. Entered the password and called up the secret spreadsheet. Then the finance guy took over and typed in the new balance available in the operating account. The software ran the calculation and came up exactly level, six weeks into the future.

"See?" the guy said. "Bingo."

"What about the interest payment?" Stone asked.

"Eleven grand a week, six weeks? Kind of steep, isn’t it?"

"Can we pay it?"

The guy nodded confidently. "Sure we can. We owe two suppliers seventy-three grand. We got it, ready to go. If we lose the invoices, get them to re-submit, we free that cash up for a spell."

He tapped the screen and indicated a provision against received invoices.

"Seventy-three grand, minus eleven a week for six weeks, gives us seven grand to spare. We should go out to dinner a couple of times."

"Run it again, OK?" Stone said. "Double-check."

The guy gave him a look, but he ran it again. He took out the one-point-one, ended up in the red, put it back in again, and ended up balanced. He canceled the provision against the invoices, subtracted eleven thousand every seven days, and ended the six-week period with an operating surplus of seven thousand dollars.

"Close," he said. "But the right side of close."

"How do we repay the principal?" Stone asked. "We need one-point-one million available at the end of the six weeks."

"No problem," the guy said. "I’ve got it all figured. We’ll have it in time."

"Show me, OK?"

"OK, see here?" He was tapping the screen on a different line, where payments due in from customers were listed. "These two wholesalers owe us exactly one-point-one-seven-three, which exactly matches the principal plus the lost invoices, and it’s due exactly six weeks from now."

"Will they pay on time?"

The guy shrugged. "Well, they always have."

Stone stared at the screen. His eyes moved up and down, left and right.

"Run it all again. Triple-check."

"Don’t sweat it, chief. It adds up."

"Just do it, OK?"

The guy nodded. It was Stone’s company, after all. He ran it again, the whole calculation, beginning to end, and it came out just the same. Hobie’s one-point-one disappeared as the blizzard of paychecks cleared, the two suppliers went hungry, the interest got paid, the payments came in from the wholesalers, Hobie got his one-point-one back, the suppliers got paid late, and the sheet ended up showing the same trivial seven-thousand-dollar surplus in their favor.

"Don’t sweat it," the guy said again. "It works out."

Stone was staring at the screen, wondering if that spare seven grand would buy Marilyn a trip to Europe. Probably not. Not a six-week trip, anyway. And it would alert her. It would worry her. She’d ask him why he was making her go. And he’d have to tell her. She was very smart. Smart enough to get it out of him, one way or another. And then she would refuse to go to Europe, and she would end up lying awake every night for six weeks, too.

THE SUITCASE WAS still there, lying on the front lawn. There was a bullet hole punched in one end. No exit hole. The bullet must have gone through the leather, through the sturdy plywood carcass, and burned to a stop against the packed paper inside. Reacher smiled and carried it back to join Jodie over at the garage.

They left the jeep on the blacktop apron and went in the same way they had come out. Closed up the roller door and walked through to the breezeway. Locked the inside door behind them with the green key and walked through to the kitchen. Locked that door behind them and stepped past Jodie’s abandoned garment bag in the hallway. Reacher carried the suitcase into the living room. More space and more light there than in the den.

He opened the case and lifted the concertina files out onto the floor. The bullet fell out with them and bounced on the rug. It was a standard nine-millimeter Parabellum, full copper jacket. Slightly flattened on the nose from the impact with the old plywood, but otherwise unmarked. The paper had slowed it to a complete stop in the space of about eighteen inches. He could see the hole punched all the way through half the files. He weighed the bullet in his palm, and then he saw Jodie at the door, watching him. He tossed the bullet to her. She caught it, one-handed.

"Souvenir," he said.

She juggled it like it was hot and dropped it in the fireplace. Joined him on the rug, kneeling hip to hip beside him in front of the mass of paper. He caught her perfume, something he did not recognize, but something subtle and intensely feminine. The sweatshirt was too big on her, large and shapeless, but somehow it emphasized her figure. The sleeves finished halfway down the backs of her hands, almost at her fingers. Her Levi’s were cinched in tight around her tiny waist with a belt, and her legs left them slightly empty. She looked fragile, but he could remember the strength in her arms. Thin, but wiry. She bent to look at the files, and her hair fell forward, and he caught the same soft smell he recalled from fifteen years previously.

"What are we looking for?" she asked.

He shrugged. "We’ll know when we find it, I guess."

They looked hard, but they found nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing current, nothing significant. Just a mass of household paper, looking suddenly old and pathetic as it charted its way through a domestic life that was now over. The most recent item was the will, on its own in a separate slot, sealed into an envelope with neat writing on it. Neat, but slightly slow and shaky, the writing of a man just back from the hospital after his first heart attack. Jodie took it out to the hallway and slipped it into the pocket of her garment bag.

"Any unpaid bills?" she called.

There was a slot marked PENDING. It was empty.

"Can’t see any," he called back. "There’ll be a few coming in, I guess, right? Do they come in monthly?"

She gave him a look from the doorway and smiled.

"Yes, they do," she said. "Monthly, every month."

There was a slot marked MEDICAL. It was overstuffed with receipted bills from the hospital and the clinic and sheaves of efficient correspondence from the insurance provider. Reacher leafed through it all.

"Christ, is that what this stuff costs?"

Jodie came back and bent to look.

"Sure it is," she said. "Have you got insurance?"

He looked at her, blankly.

"I think maybe the VA gives it to me, at least for a period."

"You should check it out," she said. "Make sure."

He shrugged. "I feel OK."

"So did Dad," she said. "For sixty-three and a half straight years."

She knelt beside him again, and he saw her eyes cloud over. He laid his hand on her arm, gently.

"Hell of a day, right?" he said.

She nodded and blinked. Then she came up with a small, wry smile.

"Unbelievable," she said. "I bury the old man, I get shot at by a couple of murderers, I break the law by failing to report so many felonies I can’t even count them, and then I get talked into hooking up with some wild man aiming to run some kind of a vigilante deal. You know what Dad would have said to me?"

"What?"

She pursed her lips and lowered her voice into a close imitation of Garber’s good-natured growl. "All in a day’s work, girl, all in a day’s work. That’s what he would have said to me."

Reacher grinned back at her and squeezed her arm again. Then he leafed through the medical junk and picked out a letterhead.

"Let’s go find this clinic," he said.

THERE WAS A lot of debate going on inside the Tahoe about whether they should go back at all. Failure was not a popular word in Hobie’s vocabulary. It might be better just to take off and disappear. Just get the hell out. It was an attractive prospect. But they were pretty sure Hobie would find them. Maybe not soon, but he would find them. And that was not an attractive prospect.

So they turned their attention to damage limitation. It was clear what they had to do. They made the necessary stops and wasted a plausible amount of time in a diner just off the southbound side of Route 9. By the time they had battled the traffic back down to the southern tip of Manhattan, they had their whole story straight.

"It was a no-brainer," the first guy said. "We waited for hours, which is why we’re so late back. Problem was there was a whole bunch of soldiers there, kind of ceremonial, but they had rifles all over the place."

"How many?" Hobie asked.

"Soldiers?" the second guy said. "At least a dozen. Maybe fifteen. They were all milling around, so it was hard to count them exactly. Some kind of honor guard."