Tripwire

"He deserted," Newman said.

"It doesn’t add up," Reacher said.

"War changes people," Newman said.

"Not that much," Reacher said back.

Newman stepped closer and lowered his voice again.

"He killed an orderly," he whispered. "The guy spotted him on the way out and tried to stop him. It’s all in the file. Hobie said ‘I’m not going back,’ and hit the guy in the head with a bottle. Broke his skull. They put the guy in Hobie’s bed and he didn’t survive the trip back to Saigon. That’s what the secrecy is all about, Reacher. They didn’t just let him get away with deserting. They let him get away with murder."

There was total silence in the lab. The air hissed and the loamy smell of the old bones drifted. Reacher laid his hand on the shiny lip of Bamford’s casket, just to keep himself standing upright.

"I don’t believe it," he said.

"You should," Newman said back. "Because it’s true."

"I can’t tell his folks that," Reacher said. "I just can’t. It would kill them."

"Hell of a secret," Jodie said. "They let him get away with murder?"

"Politics," Newman said. "The politics over there stunk to high heaven. Still do, as a matter of fact."

"Maybe he died later," Reacher said. "Maybe he got away into the jungle and died there later. He was still very sick, right?"

"How would that help you?" Newman asked.

"I could tell his folks he was dead, you know, gloss over the exact details."

"You’re clutching at straws," Newman said.

"We have to go," Jodie said. "We need to make the plane."

"Would you run his medical records?" Reacher asked. "If I got hold of them from his family? Would you do that for me?"

There was a pause.

"I’ve already got them," Newman said. "Leon brought them with him. The family released them to him."

"So will you run them?" Reacher asked.

"You’re clutching at straws," Newman said again.

Reacher turned around and pointed at the hundred cardboard boxes stacked in the alcove at the end of the room. "He could be already here, Nash."

"He’s in New York," Jodie said. "Don’t you see that?"

"No, I want him to be dead," Reacher said. "I can’t go back to his folks and tell them their boy is a deserter and a murderer and has been running around all this time without contacting them. I need him to be dead."

"But he isn’t," Newman said.

"But he could be, right?" Reacher said. "He could have died later. Back in the jungle, someplace else, maybe faraway, on the run? Disease, malnutrition? Maybe his skeleton was found already. Will you run his records? As a favor to me?"

"Reacher, we need to go now," Jodie said.

"Will you run them?" Reacher asked again.

"I can’t," Newman said. "Christ, this whole thing is classified, don’t you understand that? I shouldn’t have told you anything at all. And I can’t add another name to the MIA lists now. The Department of the Army wouldn’t stand for it. We’re supposed to be reducing the numbers here, not adding to them."

"Can’t you do it unofficially? Privately? You can do that, right? You run this place, Nash. Please? For me?"

Newman shook his head. "You’re clutching at straws, is all."

"Please, Nash," Reacher said.

There was silence. Then Newman sighed.

"OK, damn it," he said. "For you, I’ll do it, I guess."

"When?" Reacher asked.

Newman shrugged. "First thing tomorrow morning, OK?"

"Call me as soon as you’ve done it?"

"Sure, but you’re wasting your time. Number?"

"Use the mobile," Jodie said.

She recited the number. Newman wrote it on the cuff of his lab coat.

"Thanks, Nash," Reacher said. "I really appreciate this."

"Waste of time," Newman said again.

"We need to go," Jodie called.

Reacher nodded vaguely and they all moved toward the plain door in the cinder-block wall. Lieutenant Simon was waiting on the other side of it with the offer of a ride around the perimeter road to the passenger terminals.

Chapter 15

FIRST-CLASS OR NOT, the flight back was miserable. It was the same plane, going east to New York along the second leg of a giant triangle. It was cleaned and perfumed and checked and refueled, and it had a new crew on board. Reacher and Jodie were in the same seats they had left four hours earlier. Reacher took the window again, but it felt different. It was still two and a half times as wide as normal, still sumptuously upholstered in leather and sheepskin, but he took no pleasure in sitting in it again.

The lights were dimmed, to represent night. They had taken off into an outrageous tropical sunset boiling away beyond the islands, and then they had turned away to fly toward darkness. The engines settled to a muted hiss. The flight attendants were quiet and unobtrusive. There was only one other passenger in the cabin. He was sitting two rows ahead, across the aisle. He was a tall, spare man, dressed in a seersucker short-sleeve shirt printed with pale stripes. His right forearm was laid gently on the arm of the chair, and his hand hung down, limp and relaxed. His eyes were closed.

"How tall is he?" Jodie whispered.

Reacher leaned over and glanced ahead. "Maybe six one."

"Same as Victor Hobie," she said. "Remember the file?"

Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes. up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.

"About half and half, right?" Jodie said.

"A little more than half," Reacher said. "The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived."

The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.

"He survived," Jodie said. "He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden."

Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.

"I would have bet my life he isn’t," he said.

He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.

"Why does it bother you so much?" she asked, in the quiet.

He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.

"Lots of reasons," he said.

"Like what?"

He shrugged. "Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong."

She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. "Being wrong isn’t the end of the world."

He shook his head. "Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the Series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up."

"So what are you saying?"

"I’m saying judgments like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right."

"But you had nothing to go on."

"Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that bums me up, because where does it leave me now?"

"In what sense?"

"I’ve got to tell the Hobies," he said. "It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshiped that boy. They worshiped the military, the patriotism of it all, serving your country, the whole damn thing. Now I’ve got to walk in there and tell them their boy is a murderer and a deserter. And a cruel son who left them twisting in the wind for thirty long years. I’ll be walking in there and killing them stone dead, Jodie. I should call ahead for an ambulance."

He lapsed into silence and turned back to the black porthole.

"And?" she said.

He turned back to face her. "And the future. What am I going to do? I’ve got a house, I need a job. What kind of a job? I can’t put myself about as an investigator anymore, not if I’ve started getting things completely ass-backward all of a sudden. The timing is wonderful, right? My professional capabilities have turned to mush right at the exact time I need to find work. I should go back to the Keys and dig pools the rest of my life."

"You’re being too hard on yourself. It was a feeling, was all. A gut feeling that turned out wrong."