Tripwire

Chapter 11
EVENING FALLS IN Hanoi a full twelve hours earlier than in New York, so the sun which was still high as Reacher and Jodie left the Bronx had already slipped behind the highlands of northern Laos, two hundred miles away to the west of Noi Bai Airport. The sky was glowing orange and the long shadows of late afternoon were replaced by the sudden dull gloom of tropical dusk. The smells of the city and the jungle were masked under the reek of kerosene, and the noises of car horns and nighttime insects were blown away by the steady whine of jet engines idling.

A giant U. S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport was standing on the apron, a mile from the crowded passenger terminals, next to an unmarked hangar. The plane's rear ramp was down, and its engines were running fast enough to power the interior lighting. Inside the unmarked hangar, too, lights were on. There were a hundred arc lights, slung high up under the corrugated metal roof, washing the cavernous space with their bright yellow glow.

The hangar was as large as a stadium, but it held nothing except seven caskets. Each one of them was six and a half feet long, made from ribbed aluminum polished to a high shine and shaped roughly like a coffin, which is exactly what each one of them was. They were standing in a neat row, on trestles, each one draped with an American flag. The flags were newly laundered and crisply pressed, and the center stripe of each flag was precisely aligned with the center rib of each casket.

There were nine men and two women in the hangar, standing next to the seven aluminum caskets. Six of the men were there as the honor guard. They were regular soldiers of the United States Army, newly showered, newly shaved, dressed in immaculate ceremonial uniforms, holding themselves at rigid attention, away from the other five people. Three of those were Vietnamese, two men and a woman, short, dark, impassive. They were dressed in uniform, too, but theirs were everyday uniforms, not ceremonial. Dark olive cloth, worn and creased, badged here and there with the unfamiliar insignia of their rank.

The last two people were Americans, dressed in civilian clothes, but the sort of civilian clothes that indicate military status as clearly as any uniform. The woman was young, with a mid-length canvas skirt and a long-sleeved khaki blouse, with heavy brown shoes on her feet. The man was tall, silver-haired, maybe fifty-five years old, dressed in tropical khakis under a lightweight belted raincoat. He was carrying a battered brown leather briefcase in his hand, and there was a garment bag of similar vintage on the ground at his feet.

The tall silver-haired man nodded to the honor guard, a tiny signal, almost imperceptible. The senior soldier spoke a muted command and the six men formed up in two lines of three. They slow-marched forward, and right-turned, and slow-marched again until they were lined up precisely, three each side of the first casket. They paused a beat and stooped and lifted the casket to their shoulders in a single fluid movement. The senior man spoke again, and they slow-marched forward toward the hangar door, the casket supported exactly level on their linked arms, the only sounds the crunch of their boots on the concrete and the whine of the waiting engines.

On the apron, they turned right and wheeled a wide, slow semicircle through the hot jet wash until they were lined up with the Starlifter's ramp. They slow-marched forward, up the exact center of the ramp, feeling carefully with their feet for the metal ribs bolted there to help them, and on into the belly of the plane. The pilot was waiting for them. She was a U. S. Air Force captain, trim in a tropical-issue flight suit. Her crew was standing at attention with her, a copilot, a flight engineer, a navigator, a radio operator. Opposite them were the loadmaster and his crew, silent in green fatigues. They stood face-to-face in two still lines, and the honor guard filed slowly between them, all the way up to the forward loading bay. There they bent their knees and gently lowered the casket onto a shelf built along the fuselage wall. Four of the men stood back, heads bowed. The forward man and the rear man worked together to slide the casket into place. The loadmaster stepped forward and secured it with rubber straps. Then he stepped back and joined the honor guard and held a long silent salute.

It took an hour to load all seven caskets. The people inside the hangar stood silent throughout, and then they followed the seventh casket onto the apron. They matched their walk to the honor guard's slow pace, and waited at the bottom of the Starlifter's ramp in the hot, noisy damp of the evening. The honor guard came out, duty done. The tall silver-haired American saluted them and shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and nodded to the American woman. No words were exchanged. He shouldered his garment bag and ran lightly up the ramp into the plane. A slow, powerful motor whirred and the ramp closed shut behind him. The engines ran up to speed and the giant plane came off its brakes and started to taxi. It wheeled a wide cumbersome left and disappeared behind the hangar. Its noise grew faint. Then it grew loud again in the distance and the watchers saw it come back along the runway, engines screaming, accelerating hard, lifting off. It yawed right, climbing fast, turning, dipping a wing, and then it was gone, just a triangle of winking lights tiny in the distance and a vague smudge of black kerosene smoke tracing its curved path into the night air.

The honor guard dispersed in the sudden silence and the American woman shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and walked back to her car. The three Vietnamese officers walked in a different direction, back to theirs. It was a Japanese sedan, repainted a dull military green. The woman drove, and the two men sat in back. It was a short trip to the center of Hanoi. The woman parked in a chain-link compound behind a low concrete building painted the color of sand. The men got out without a word and went inside through an unmarked door. The woman locked the car and walked around the building to a different entrance. She went inside and up a short flight of stairs to her office. There was a bound ledger open on her desk. She recorded the safe dispatch of the cargo in neat handwriting and closed the ledger. She carried it to a file cabinet near her office door. She locked it inside, and glanced through the door, up and down the corridor. Then she returned to her desk and picked up her telephone and dialed a number eleven thousand miles away in New York City.

MARILYN WOKE UP Sheryl and brought Chester around into some sort of consciousness before the thickset man came into the bathroom with the coffee. It was in mugs, and he was holding two in one hand and one in the other, unsure of where to leave them. He paused and stepped to the sink and lined them up on the narrow granite ledge under the mirror. Then he turned without speaking and walked back out. Pulled the door closed after him, firmly, but without slamming it.

Marilyn handed out the mugs one at a time, because she was trembling and pretty sure she was going to spill them if she tried them two at a time. She squatted down and gave the first one to Sheryl, and helped her take the first sip. Then she went back for Chester's. He took it from her blankly and looked at it like he didn't know what it was. She took the third for herself and stood against the sink and drank it down, thirstily. It was good. The cream and the sugar tasted like energy.

"Where are the stock certificates?" she whispered.

Chester looked up at her, listlessly. "At my bank, in my box. "

Marilyn nodded. Came face-to-face with the fact she didn't know which was Chester's bank. Or where it was. Or what stock certificates were for.

"How many are there?"

He shrugged. "A thousand, originally. I used three hundred for security against the loans. I had to give them up to the lender, temporarily. "

"And now Hobie's got those?"

He nodded. "He bought the debt. They'll messenger the security to him, today, maybe. They don't need it anymore. And I pledged him another ninety. They're still in the box. I guess I was due to deliver them soon. "

"So how does the transfer actually happen?"

He shrugged again, wearily, vaguely. "I sign the stock over to him, he takes the certificates and registers them with the Exchange, and when he's got five hundred and one registered in his name, then he's the majority owner. "

"So where's your bank?"

Chester took his first sip of coffee. "About three blocks from here. About five minutes' walk. Then another five minutes to the Exchange. Call it ten minutes beginning to end, and we're penniless and homeless on the street. "

He set the mug on the floor and lapsed back into staring. Sheryl was listless. Not drinking her coffee. Her skin looked clammy. Maybe concussed, or something. Maybe still in shock. Marilyn didn't know. She had no experience. Her nose was awful. Black and swollen. The bruising was spreading under her eyes. Her lips were cracked and dry, from breathing through her mouth all night.

"Try some more coffee," she said. "It'll be good for you. " She squatted beside her and guided her hand up to her mouth. Tilted the mug. Sheryl took a sip. Some of the hot liquid ran down her chin. She took another sip. She glanced up at Marilyn, with something in her eyes. Marilyn didn't know what it was, but she smiled back anyway, bright with encouragement.

"We'll get you to the hospital," she whispered.

Sheryl closed her eyes and nodded, like she was suddenly filled with relief. Marilyn knelt beside her, holding her hand, staring at the door, wondering how she was going to deliver on that promise.

"ARE YOU GOING to keep this thing?" Jodie asked.

She was talking about the Lincoln Navigator. Reacher thought about it as he waited. They were jammed up on the approach to the Triborough.

"Maybe," he said.

It was more or less brand new. Very quiet and smooth. Black metallic outside, tan leather inside, four hundred miles on the clock, still reeking of new hide and new carpet and the strong plastic smell of a box-fresh vehicle. Huge seats, each one identical with the driver's chair, lots of fat consoles with drinks holders and little lids suggestive of secret storage spaces.

"I think it's gross," she said.

He smiled. "Compared to what? That tiny little thing you were driving?"

"That was much smaller than this. "

"You're much smaller than me. "

She was quiet for a beat.

"It was Rutter's," she said. "It's tainted. "

The traffic moved, and then stopped again halfway over the Harlem River. The buildings of midtown were faraway to his left, and hazy, like a vague promise.

"It's just a tool," he said. "Tools have no memory. "

"I hate him," she said. "I think more than I've ever hated anybody. "

He nodded.

"I know," he said. "The whole time we were in there I was thinking about the Hobies, up there in Brighton, alone in their little house, the look in their eyes. Sending your only boy off to war is a hell of a thing, and to be lied to and cheated afterward, Jodie, there's no excuse for that. Swap the chronology, it could have been my folks. And he did it fifteen times. I should have hurt him worse. "

"As long as he doesn't do it again," she said.

He shook his head. "The list of targets is shrinking. Not too many BNR families left now to fall for it. "

They made it off the bridge and headed south on Second Avenue. It was fast and clear ahead for sixty blocks.

"And it wasn't him coming after us," she said quietly. "He didn't know who we were. "

Reacher shook his head again. "No. How many fake photographs do you have to sell to make it worth trashing a Chevy Suburban? We need to analyze it right from the beginning, Jodie. Two full-time employees get sent to the Keys and up to Garrison, right? Two full-time salaries, plus weapons and airfare and all, and they're riding around in a Tahoe, then a third employee shows up with a Suburban he can afford to just dump on the street? That's a lot of money, and it's probably just the visible tip of some kind of an iceberg. It implies something worth maybe millions of dollars. Rutter was never making that kind of money, ripping off old folks for eighteen thousand bucks a pop. "

"So what the hell is this about?"

Reacher just shrugged and drove, and watched the mirror all the way.

HOBIE TOOK THE call from Hanoi at home. He listened to the Vietnamese woman's short report and hung up without speaking. Then he stood in the center of his living room and tilted his head to one side and narrowed his good eye like he was watching something physical happening in front of him. Like he was watching a baseball soaring out of the diamond, looping upward into the glare of the lights, an outfielder tracking back under it, the fence getting closer, the glove coming up, the ball soaring, the fence looming, the outfielder leaping. Will the ball clear the fence? Or not? Hobie couldn't tell.

He stepped across the living room and out to the terrace. The terrace faced west across the park, from thirty floors up. It was a view he hated, because all the trees reminded him of his childhood. But it enhanced the value of his property, which was the name of the game. He wasn't responsible for the way other people's tastes drove the market. He was just there to benefit from them. He turned and looked left, to where he could see his office building, all the way downtown. The Twin Towers looked shorter than they should, because of the curvature of the earth. He turned back inside and slid the door closed. Walked through the apartment and out to the elevator. Rode down all the way to the parking garage.

His car was not modified in any way to help him with his handicap. It was a late-model Cadillac sedan with the ignition and the selector on the right of the steering column. Using the key was awkward, because he had to lean across with his left hand and jab it in backward and twist. But after that, he never had much of a problem. He put it in drive by using the hook on the selector and drove out of the garage one-handed, using his left, the hook resting down in his lap.

He felt better once he was south of Fifty-ninth Street. The park disappeared and he was deep in the noisy canyons of midtown. The traffic comforted him. The Cadillac's air-conditioning relieved the itching under his scars. June was the worst time for that. Some particular combination of heat and humidity acted together to drive him crazy. But the Cadillac made it better. He wondered idly whether Stone's Mercedes would be as good. He thought not. He had never trusted the air on foreign cars. So he would turn it into cash. He knew a guy in Queens who would spring for it. But it was another chore on the list. A lot to do, and not much time to do it in. The outfielder was right there, under the ball, leaping, with the fence at his back.

He parked in the underground garage, in the slot previously occupied by the Suburban. He reached across and pulled the key and locked the Cadillac. Rode upstairs in the express elevator. Tony was at the reception counter.

"Hanoi called again," Hobie told him. "It's in the air. "

Tony looked away.

"What?" Hobie asked him.

"So we should just abandon this Stone thing. "

"It'll take them a few days, right?"

"A few days might not be enough," Tony said. "There are complications. The woman says she's talked it over with him, and they'll do the deal, but there are complications we don't know about. "

"What complications?"

Tony shook his head. "She wouldn't tell me. She wants to tell you, direct. "

Hobie stared at the office door. "She's kidding, right? She damn well better be kidding. I can't afford any kind of complications now. I just presold the sites, three separate deals. I gave my word. The machinery is in motion. What complications?"

"She wouldn't tell me," Tony said again.

Hobie's face was itching. There was no air-conditioning in the garage. The short walk to the elevator had upset his skin. He pressed the hook to his forehead, looking for some relief from the metal. But the hook was warm, too.

"What about Mrs. Jacob?" he asked.

"She was home all night," Tony said. "With this Reacher guy. I checked. They were laughing about something this morning. I heard them from the corridor. Then they drove somewhere, north on the FDR Drive. Maybe going back to Garrison. "

"I don't need her in Garrison. I need her right here. And him. "

Tony was silent.

"Bring Mrs. Stone to me," Hobie said.

He walked into to his office and across to his desk. Tony went the opposite way, toward the bathroom. He came out a moment later, pushing Marilyn in front of him. She looked tired. The silk sheath looked ludicrously out of context, like she was a partygoer caught out by a blizzard and stranded in town the morning after.

Hobie pointed to the sofa.

"Sit down, Marilyn," he said.

She remained standing. The sofa was too low. Too low to sit on in a short dress, and too low to achieve the psychological advantage she was going to need. But to stand in front of his desk was wrong, too. Too supplicant. She walked around to the wall of windows. Eased the slats apart and gazed out at the morning. Then she turned and propped herself against the ledge. Made him rotate his chair to face her.

"What are these complications?" he asked.

She looked at him and took a deep breath.

"We'll get to that," she said. "First we get Sheryl to the hospital. "

There was silence. No sound at all, except the rumbling and booming of the populated building. Faraway to the west, a siren sounded faintly. Maybe all the way over in Jersey City.

"What are these complications?" he asked again. He used the same exact voice, the same exact intonation. Like he was prepared to overlook her mistake.

"The hospital first. "

The silence continued. Hobie turned back to Tony.

"Get Stone out of the bathroom," he said.

Stone stumbled out, in his underwear, with Tony's knuckles in his back, all the way to the desk. He hit his shins on the coffee table and gasped in pain.

"What are these complications?" Hobie asked him.

He just glanced wildly left and right, like he was too scared and disoriented to speak. Hobie waited. Then he nodded.

"Break his leg," he said. He turned to look at Marilyn. There was silence. No sound, except Stone's ragged breathing and the faint boom of the building. Hobie stared on at Marilyn. She stared back at him.

"Go ahead," she said quietly. "Break his damn leg. Why should I care? He's made me penniless. He's ruined my life. Break both his damn legs if you feel like it. But it won't get you what you want any quicker. Because there are complications, and the sooner we get to them, the better it is for you. And we won't get to them until Sheryl is in the hospital. "

She leaned back on the window ledge, palms down, arms locked from the shoulder. She hoped it made her look relaxed and casual, but she was doing it to keep herself from falling on the floor.

"The hospital first," she said again. She was concentrating so hard on her voice, it sounded like somebody else's. She was pleased with it. It sounded OK. A low, firm voice, steady and quiet in the silent office.

"Then we deal," she said. "Your choice. "

The outfielder was leaping, glove high, and the ball was dropping. The glove was higher than the fence. The trajectory of the ball was too close to call. Hobie tapped his hook on the desk. The sound was loud. Stone was staring at him. Hobie ignored him and glanced up at Tony.

"Take the bitch to the hospital," he said sourly.

"Chester goes with them," Marilyn said. "For verification. He needs to see her go inside to the ER, alone. I stay here, as surety. "

Hobie stopped tapping. Looked at her and smiled. "Don't you trust me?"

"No, I don't trust you. We don't do it this way, you'll just take Sheryl out of here and lock her up someplace else. "

Hobie was still smiling. "Farthest thing from my thoughts. I was going to have Tony shoot her and dump her in the sea. "

There was silence again. Marilyn was shaking inside.

"You sure you want to do this?" Hobie asked her. "She says one word to the hospital people, she gets you killed, you know that, right?"

Marilyn nodded. "She won't say anything to anybody. Not knowing you've still got me here. "

"You better pray she doesn't. "

"She won't. This isn't about us. It's about her. She needs to get help. "

She stared at him, leaning back, feeling faint. She was searching his face for a sign of compassion. Some acceptance of his responsibility. He stared back at her. There was no compassion in his face. Nothing there at all, except annoyance. She swallowed and took a deep breath.

"And she needs a skirt. She can't go out without one. It'll look suspicious. The hospital will get the police involved. Neither of us wants that. So Tony needs to go out and buy her a new skirt: '

"Lend her your dress," Hobie said. "Take it off and give it to her. "

There was a long silence.

"It wouldn't fit her," Marilyn said.

"That's not the reason, is it?"

She made no reply. Silence. Hobie shrugged.

"OK," he said.

She swallowed again. "And shoes. "

"What?"

"She needs shoes," Marilyn said. "She can't go without shoes. "

"Jesus," Hobie said. "What the hell next?"

"Next, we deal. Soon as Chester is back here and tells me he saw her walk in alone and unharmed, then we deal. "

Hobie traced the curve of his hook with the fingers of his left hand.

"You're a smart woman," he said.

I know I am, Marilyn thought. That's the first of your complications.

REACHER PLACED THE sports bag on the white sofa underneath the Mondrian copy. He unzipped it and turned it over and spilled out the bricks of fifties. Thirty-nine thousand, three hundred dollars in cash. He split it in half by tossing the bricks alternately left and right to opposite ends of the sofa. He finished up with two very impressive stacks.

"Four trips to the bank," Jodie said. "Under ten thousand dollars, the reporting rules don't apply, and we don't want to be answering any questions about where we got this from, right? We'll put it in my account and cut the Hobies a cashier's check for nineteen-six-fifty. Our half, we'll access through my gold card, OK?"

Reacher nodded. "We need airfare to St. Louis, Missouri, plus a hotel. Nineteen grand in the bank, we can stay in decent places and go business class. "

"It's the only way to fly," she said. She put her arms around his waist and stretched up on tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back, hard.

"This is fun, isn't it?" she said.

"For us, maybe," he said. "Not for the Hobies. "

They made three trips together to three separate banks and wound up at a fourth, where she made the final deposit and bought a cashier's check made out to Mr. T. and Mrs. M. Hobie in the sum of $19,650. The bank guy put it in a creamy envelope and she zipped it into her pocketbook. Then they walked back to Broadway together, holding hands, so she could pack for the trip. She put the bank envelope in her bureau and he got on the phone and established that United from JFK was the best bet for St. Louis, that time of day.

"Cab?" she asked.

He shook his head. "We'll drive. "

The big V-8 made a hell of a sound in the basement garage. He blipped the throttle a couple of times and grinned. The torque rocked the heavy vehicle, side to side on its springs.

"The price of their toys," Jodie said.

He looked at her.

"You never heard that?" she said. "Difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys?"

He blipped the motor and grinned again. "Price on this was a dollar. "

"And you just blipped away two dollars in gas," she said.

He shoved it in drive and took off up the ramp. Worked around east to the Midtown Tunnel and took 495 to the Van Wyck and down into the sprawl of JFK.

"Park in short-term," she said. "We can afford it now, right?"

He had to leave the Steyr and the silencer behind. No easy way to get through the airport security hoops with big metal weapons in your pocket. He hid them under the driver's seat. They left the Lincoln in the lot right opposite the United building and five minutes later were at the counter buying two business-class one-ways to St. Louis. The expensive tickets entitled them to wait in a special lounge, where a uniformed steward served them good coffee in china cups with saucers, and where they could read The Wall Street Journal without paying for it. Then Reacher carried Jodie's bag down the jetway into the plane. The business-class seats were two-on-a-side, the first half-dozen rows. Wide, comfortable seats. Reacher smiled.

"I never did this before," he said.

He slid into the window seat. He had room to stretch out a little. Jodie was lost in her seat. There was room enough for three of her, side by side. The attendant brought them juice before the plane even taxied. Minutes later they were in the air, wheeling west across the southern tip of Manhattan.

TONY CAME BACK into the office with a shiny red Talbot's bag and a brown Bally carrier hanging by their rope handles from his clenched fist. Marilyn carried them into the bathroom and five minutes later Sheryl came out. The new skirt was the right size, but the wrong color. She was smoothing it down over her hips with vague movements of her hands. The new shoes didn't match the skirt and they were too big. Her face looked awful. Her eyes were blank and acquiescent, like Marilyn had told her they should be.

"What are you going to tell the doctors?" Hobie called to her.

Sheryl looked away and concentrated on Marilyn's script. "I walked into a door," she said.

Her voice was low and nasal. Dull, like she was still in shock.

"Are you going to call the cops?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm not going to do that. "

Hobie nodded. "What would happen if you did?"

"I don't know," she replied. Blank and dull.

"Your friend Marilyn would die, in terrible pain. You understand that?"

He raised the hook and let her focus on it from across the room. Then he came out from behind the desk. Walked around and stood directly behind Marilyn. Used his left hand to lift her hair aside. His hand brushed her skin. She stiffened. He touched her cheek with the curve of the hook. Sheryl nodded, vaguely.

"Yes, I understand that," she said.

I HAD TO be done quickly, because although Sheryl was now in her new skirt and shoes, Chester was still in his boxers and undershirt. Tony made them both wait in reception until the freight elevator arrived, and then he hustled them along the corridor and inside. He stepped out in the garage and scanned ahead. Hustled them over to the Tahoe and pushed Chester into the backseat and Sheryl into the front. He fired it up and locked the doors. Took off up the ramp and out to the street.

He could recall offhand maybe two dozen hospitals in Manhattan, and as far as he knew most of them had emergency rooms. His instinct was to drive all the way north, maybe up to Mount Sinai on 100th Street, because he felt it would be safer to put some distance between themselves and wherever Sheryl was going to be. But they were tight for time. To drive all the way uptown and back was going to take an hour, maybe more. An hour they couldn't spare. So he decided on St. Vincent's on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Bellevue, over on Twenty-seventh and First, was better geographically, but Bellevue was usually swarming with cops, for one reason or another. That was his experience. They practically lived there. So St. Vincent's it would be. And he knew St. Vincent's had a big, wide area facing the ER entrance, where Greenwich Avenue sliced across Seventh. He remembered the layout from when they had gone out to capture Costello's secretary. A big, wide area, almost like a plaza. They could watch her all the way inside, without having to stop too close.

The drive took eight minutes. He eased into the curb on the west side of Seventh and clicked the button to unlock the doors.

"Out," he said.

She opened the door and slid down to the sidewalk. Stood there, uncertain. Then she moved away to the crosswalk, without looking back. Tony leaned over and slammed the door behind her. Turned in his seat toward Stone.

"So watch her," he said.

Stone was already watching her. He saw the traffic stop and the walk light change. He saw her step forward with the crowd, dazed. She walked slower than the others, shuffling in her big shoes. Her hand was up at her face, masking it. She reached the opposite sidewalk well after the walk light changed back to DON'T. An impatient truck pulled right and eased around her. She walked on toward the hospital entrance. Across the wide sidewalk. Then she was in the ambulance circle. A pair of double doors ahead of her. Scarred, floppy plastic doors. A trio of nurses standing next to them, on their cigarette break, smoking. She walked past the nurses, straight to the doors, slowly. She pushed at them, tentatively, both hands. They opened. She stepped inside. The doors fell shut behind her.

"OK, you see that?"

Stone nodded. "Yes, I saw it. She's inside. "

Tony checked his mirror and fought his way out into the traffic stream. By the time he was a hundred yards south, Sheryl was waiting in the triage line, going over and over in her head what Marilyn had told her to do.

IT WAS A short and cheap cab ride from the St. Louis Airport to the National Personnel Records Center building, and familiar territory for Reacher. Most of his Stateside tours of duty had involved at least one trip through the archives, searching backward in time for one thing or another. But this time, it was going to be different. He would be going in as a civilian. Not the same thing as going in dressed in a major's uniform. Not the same thing at all. He was clear on that.

Public access is controlled by the counter staff in the lobby. The whole archive is technically part of the public record, but the staff take a lot of trouble to keep that fact well obscured. In the past Reacher had agreed with that tactic, no hesitation. Military records can be very frank, and they need to be read and interpreted in strict context. He'd always been very happy they were kept away from the public. But now he was the public, and he was wondering how it was going to play. There were millions of files piled up in dozens of huge storerooms, and it would be very easy to wait days or weeks before anything got found, even with the staff running around like crazy and looking exactly like they were doing their absolute best. He had seen it happen before, from the inside, many times. It was a very plausible act. He had watched it, with a wry smile on his face.

So they paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. They walked inside and saw the big sign: One File at a Time. They lined up in front of the clerk and waited. She was a heavy woman, middle-aged, dressed in a master sergeant's uniform, busy with the sort of work designed to achieve nothing at all except to make people wait until it was done. After a long moment she pushed two blank forms across the counter and pointed to where a pencil was tied down to a desk with a piece of string.

The forms were access requests. Jodie filled in her last name as Jacob and requested all and any information on Major Jack-none-Reacher, U. S. Army Criminal Investigation Division. Reacher took the pencil from her and asked for all and any information on Lieutenant General Leon Jerome Garber. He slid both forms back to the master sergeant, who glanced at them and dropped them in her out-tray. She rang a bell at her elbow and went back to work. The idea was some private would hear the bell, come pick up the forms, and start the patient search for the files.

"Who's working supervisor today?" Reacher asked.

It was a direct question. The sergeant looked for a way to avoid answering it, but she couldn't find one.

"Major Theodore Conrad," she said, reluctantly.

Reacher nodded. Conrad? Not a name he recalled.

"Would you tell him we'd like to meet with him, just briefly? And would you have those files delivered to his office?"

The way he said it was exactly halfway between a pleasant, polite request and an unspoken command. It was a tone of voice he had always found very useful with master sergeants. The woman picked up the phone and made the call.

"He'll have you shown upstairs," she said, like in her opinion she was amazed Conrad was doing them such a massive favor.

"No need," Reacher said. "I know where it is. I've been there before. "

He showed Jodie the way, up the stairs from the lobby to a spacious office on the second floor. Major Theodore Conrad was waiting at the door. Hot-weather uniform, his name on an acetate plate above his breast pocket. He looked like a friendly guy, but maybe slightly soured by his posting. He was about forty-five, and to still be a major on the second floor of the NPRC at forty-five meant he was going nowhere in a hurry. He paused, because a private was racing along the hallway toward him with two thick files in his hand. Reacher smiled to himself. They were getting the A-grade service. When this place wanted to be quick, it could be real quick. Conrad took the files and dismissed the runner.

"So what can I do for you folks?" he asked. His accent was slow and muddy, like the Mississippi where it originated, but it was hospitable enough.

"Well, we need your best help, Major," Reacher said. "And we're hoping if you read those files, maybe you'll feel willing to give it up. "

Conrad glanced at the files in his hand and stood aside and ushered them into his office. It was a quiet, paneled space. He showed them to a matched pair of leather armchairs and stepped around his desk. Sat down and squared the files on his blotter, one on top of the other. Opened the first, which was Leon's, and started skimming.

It took him ten minutes to see what he needed. Reacher and Jodie sat and gazed out of the window. The city baked under a white sun. Conrad finished with the files and studied the names on the request forms. Then he glanced up.

"Two very fine records," he said. "Very, very impressive. And I get the point. You're obviously Jack-none-Reacher himself, and I'm guessing Mrs. Jodie Jacob here is the Jodie Garber referred to in the file as the general's daughter. Am I right?"

Jodie nodded and smiled.

"I thought so," Conrad said. "And you think being family, so to speak, will buy you better and faster access to the archive?"

Reacher shook his head solemnly.

"It never crossed our minds," he said. "We know all access requests are treated with absolute equality. "

Conrad smiled, and then he laughed out loud.

"You kept a straight face," he said. "Very, very good. You play much poker? You damn well should, you know. So how can I help you folks?"

"We need what you've got on a Victor Truman Hobie," Reacher said.

"Vietnam?"

"You familiar with him?" Reacher asked, surprised.

Conrad looked blank. "Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn't he? Which makes him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf. "

Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.

"We'll work in here," Conrad said. "My pleasure. "

He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, bypassing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.

"That was quick," Jodie said.

"Actually it was a little slow," Conrad said back. "Think about it from the private's point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army's normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me. "

Victor Hobie's file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.

"Requests by telephone," he said. "General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?"

"That's what we hope to find out," Reacher said.

A combat soldier has a thick file, especially a combat soldier who did his fighting thirty years ago. Three decades is long enough for every report and every note to end up in exactly the right place. Victor Hobie's paperwork was a compressed mass about two inches deep. The old furred jacket was molded tight around it. It reminded Reacher of Costello's black leather wallet, which he'd seen in the Keys bar. He hitched his chair closer to Jodie's and closer to the front edge of Conrad's desk. Conrad laid the file down and reversed it on the shiny wood and opened it up, like he was displaying a rare treasure to interested connoisseurs.

MARILYN'S INSTRUCTIONS HAD been precise, and Sheryl followed them to the letter. The first step was get treatment. She went to the desk and then waited on a hard plastic chair in the triage bay. The St. Vincent's ER was less busy than it sometimes is and she was seen within ten minutes by a woman doctor young enough to be her daughter.

"How did this happen?" the doctor asked.

"I walked into a door," Sheryl said.

The doctor led her to a curtained area and sat her down on the examination table. Started checking the reflex responses in her limbs.

"A door? You absolutely sure about that?"

Sheryl nodded. Stuck to her story. Marilyn was counting on her to do that.

"It was half-open. I turned around, just didn't see it. "

The doctor said nothing and shone a light into Sheryl's left eye, then her right.

"Any blurring of your vision?"

Sheryl nodded. "A little. "

"Headache?"

"Like you wouldn't believe. "

The doctor paused and studied the admission form.

"OK, we need X rays of the facial bones, obviously, but I also want a full skull film and a CAT scan. We need to see what exactly happened in there. Your insurance is good, so I'm going to get a surgeon to take a look at you right away, because if you're going to need reconstructive work it's a lot better to start on that sooner rather than later, OK? So you need to get into a gown and lie down. Then I'll put you on a painkiller to help with the headache. "

Sheryl heard Marilyn insist make the call before the painkiller, or you'll fuzz out and forget.

"I need to get to a phone," she said, worried.

"We can call your husband, if you want," the doctor said, neutrally.

"No, I'm not married. It's a lawyer. I need to call somebody's lawyer. "

The doctor looked at her and shrugged.

"OK, down the hall. But be quick. "

Sheryl walked to the bank of phones opposite the triage bay. She called the operator and asked for collect, like Marilyn had told her to. Repeated the number she'd memorized. The phone was answered on the second ring.

"Forster and Abelstein," a bright voice said. "How may we help you?"

"I'm calling on behalf of Mr. Chester Stone," Sheryl said. "I need to speak with his attorney. "

"That would be Mr. Forster himself," the bright voice said. "Please hold. "

While Sheryl was listening to the hold music, the doctor was twenty feet away, at the main desk, also making a call. Her call featured no music. Her call was to the NYPD's Domestic Violence Unit.

"This is St. Vincent's," she was saying. "I've got another one for you. This one says she walked into a damn door. Won't even admit she's married, much less he's beating on her. You can come on down and talk to her anytime you want. "

THE FIRST ITEM in the file was Victor Hobie's original application to join the Army. It was brown at the edges and crisp with age, handwritten in the same neat left-handed schoolboy script they had seen in the letters home to Brighton. It listed a summary of his education, his desire to fly helicopters, and not very much else. On the face of it, not an obvious rising star. But around that time for every one boy stepping up to volunteer, there were two dozen others buying one-way tickets on the Greyhound to Canada, so the Army recruiters had grabbed Hobie with both hands and sent him straight to the doctor.

He had been given a flight medical, which was a tougher examination than standard, especially concerning eyesight and balance. He had passed A-1. Six feet one inch, 170 pounds, twenty-twenty vision, good lung capacity, free of infectious diseases. The medical was dated early in the spring, and Reacher could picture the boy, pale from the New York winter, standing in his boxers on a bare wooden floor with a tape measure tight around his chest.

Next item in the file showed he was given travel vouchers and ordered to report to Fort Dix in two weeks' time. The following batch of paperwork originated from down there. It started with the form he signed on his arrival, irrevocably committing himself to loyal service in the United States Army. Fort Dix was twelve weeks of basic training. There were six proficiency assessments. He scored well above average in all of them. No comments were recorded.

Then there was a requisition for travel vouchers to Fort Polk, and a copy of his orders to report there for a month of advanced infantry training. There were notes about his progress with weapons. He was rated good, which meant something at Polk. At Dix, you were rated good if you could recognize a rifle at ten paces. At Polk, such a rating spoke of excellent hand-to-eye coordination, steady muscle control, calm temperament. Reacher was no expert on flying, but he guessed the instructors would have been fairly sanguine about eventually letting this guy loose with a helicopter.

There were more travel vouchers, this time to Fort Wolters in Texas, where the U. S. Army Primary Helicopter School was located. There was a note attached from the Polk CO indicating Hobie had turned down a week's leave in favor of heading straight there. It was just a bald statement, but it carried an approving resonance, even after all those years. Here was a guy who was just about itching to get going.

The paperwork thickened up at Wolters. It was a five-month stay, and it was serious stuff, like college. First came a month of preflight training, with heavy academic concentration on physics and aeronautics and navigation, taught in classrooms. It was necessary to pass to progress. Hobie had creamed it. The math talent his father had hoped to turn toward accountancy ran riot through those textbook subjects. He passed out of preflight top of his class. The only negative was a short note about his attitude. Some officer was criticizing him for trading favors for coaching. Hobie was helping some strugglers through the complex equations and in return they were shining his boots and cleaning his kit. Reacher shrugged to himself. The officer was clearly an asshole. Hobie was training to be a helicopter pilot, not a damn saint.

The next four months at Wolters were airborne for primary flight training, initially on H-23 Hillers. Hobie's first instructor was a guy called Lanark. His training notes were written in a wild scrawl, very anecdotal, very un-military. Sometimes very funny. He claimed learning to fly a helicopter was like learning to ride a bike as a kid. You screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and then all of a sudden it came right and you never again forgot how to do it. In Lanark's opinion, Hobie had maybe taken longer than he ought to master it, but thereafter his progress moved from excellent to outstanding. He signed him off the Hiller and onto the H-19 Sikorsky, which was like moving up to a ten-speed English racer. He performed better on the Sikorsky than he had on the Hiller. He was a natural, and he got better the more complicated the machines became.

He finished Wolters overall second in his class, rated outstanding, just behind an ace called A. A. DeWitt. More travel vouchers had them heading out together, over to Fort Rucker in Alabama, for another four months in advanced flight training.

"Have I heard of this guy DeWitt?" Reacher asked. "The name rings a bell. "

Conrad was following progress upside down.

"Could be General DeWitt," he said. "He runs the Helicopter School back at Wolters now. That would be logical, right? I'll check it out. "

He called direct to the storeroom and ordered up Major General A. A. DeWitt. Checked his watch as the phone went back down. "Should be faster, because the D section is nearer his desk than the H section. Unless the damn master sergeant interferes with him again. "

Reacher smiled briefly and rejoined Jodie thirty years in the past. Fort Rucker was the real thing, with brand-new front-line assault helicopters replacing the trainers. Bell UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed Hueys. Big, fierce machines, gas turbine engines, the unforgettable wop-wop-wop sound of a rotor blade forty-eight feet long and twenty-one inches wide. Young Victor Hobie had hurled one around the Alabama skies for seventeen long weeks, and then he passed out with credits and distinctions at the parade his father had photographed.

"Three minutes forty seconds," Conrad whispered.

The runner was on his way in with the DeWitt jacket. Conrad leaned forward and took it from him. The guy saluted and went back out.

"I can't let you see this," Conrad said. "The general's still a serving officer, right? But I'll tell you if it's the same DeWitt. "

He opened the file at the beginning and Reacher saw flashes of the same paper as in Hobie's. Conrad skimmed and nodded. "Same DeWitt. He survived the jungle and stayed on board afterward. Total helicopter nut. My guess is he'll serve out his time down at Wolters. "

Reacher nodded. Glanced out of the window. The sun was falling away into afternoon.

"You guys want some coffee?" Conrad asked.

"Great," Jodie said. Reacher nodded again.

Conrad picked up the phone and called the storeroom.

"Coffee," he said. "That's not a file. It's a request for refreshment. Three cups, best china, OK?"

The runner brought it in on a silver tray, by which time Reacher was up at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, with Victor Hobie and his new pal A. A. DeWitt reporting to the 3rd Transportation Company of the First Cavalry Division. The two boys were there two weeks, long enough for the Army to add air-mobile to their unit designation, and then to change it completely to Company B, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. At the end of the two weeks, the renamed company sailed away from the Alabama coast, part of a seventeen-ship convoy on a thirty-one-day sea voyage to Long Mai Bay, twenty miles south of Qui Nhon and eleven thousand miles away in Vietnam.

Thirty-one days at sea is a whole month, and the company brass invented make-work to keep boredom at bay. Hobie's file indicated he signed up for maintenance, which meant endlessly rinsing and greasing the disassembled Hueys to beat the salt air down in the ship's hold. The note was approving, and Hobie stepped onto the Indochina beach a first lieutenant, after leaving the States a Second, and thirteen months after joining the Army as an officer candidate. Merited promotions for a worthy recruit. One of the good kids. Reacher recalled Ed Steven's words, in the hot sunshine outside the hardware store: very serious, very earnest, but not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.

"Cream?" Conrad asked.

Reacher shook his head, in time with Jodie.

"Just black," they said, together.

Conrad poured and Reacher kept on reading. There were two variants of Hueys in use at that time: one was a gunship, and the other was a transport chopper nicknamed a slick. Company B was assigned to fly slicks, servicing First Cavalry's battlefield transport needs. The slick was a transport hack, but it was not unarmed. It was a standard Huey, with the side doors stripped off and a heavy machine gun hung on a bungee cord in each open doorway. There were a pilot and a copilot, two gunners, and a crew chief acting as an all-purpose engineer and mechanic. The slick could lift as many grunts as could pack themselves into the boxy space between the two gunners' backs, or a ton of ammunition, or any combination.

There was on-the-job training to reflect the fact that Vietnam was very different from Alabama. There was no formal grading attached to it, but Hobie and DeWitt were the first new pilots assigned to the jungle. Then the requirement was to fly five combat missions as a copilot, and if you handled that, you took the pilot's seat and got your own copilot. Then the serious business started, and it was reflected in the file. The whole second half of the jacket was stuffed with mission reports on flimsy onion-skin paper. The language was dry and matter-of-fact. They were not written by Hobie himself. They were the work of the company dispatch clerk.

It was very episodic fighting. The war was boiling all around him unabated, but Hobie spent a long time on the ground, because of the weather. For days at a time, the fogs and mists of Vietnam made it suicidal to fly a helicopter low-level into the jungle valleys. Then the weather would suddenly clear and the reports would clump together all under the same date: three, five, sometimes seven missions a day, against furious enemy opposition, inserting, recovering, supplying and resupplying the ground troops. Then the mists would roll back in, and the Hueys would wait inert once more in their laagers. Reacher pictured Hobie, lying in his hooch for days on end, frustrated or relieved, bored or tense, then bursting back into terrifying action for frantic exhausting hours of combat.

The reports were separated into two halves by paperwork documenting the end of the first tour, the routine award of the medal, the long furlough back in New York, the start of the second tour. Then more combat reports. Same exact work, same exact pattern. There were fewer reports from the second tour. The very last sheet in the file recorded Lieutenant Victor Hobie's 991st career combat mission. Not routine First Cavalry business. It was a special assignment. He took off from Pleiku, heading east for an improvised landing zone near the An Khe Pass. His orders were to fly in as one of two slicks and exfiltrate the personnel waiting on the landing zone. DeWitt was flying backup. Hobie got there first. He landed in the center of the tiny landing zone, under heavy machine-gun fire from the jungle. He was seen to take on board just three men. He took off again almost immediately. His Huey was taking hits to the airframe from the machine guns. His own gunners were returning fire blind through the jungle canopy. DeWitt was circling as Hobie was heading out. He saw Hobie's Huey take a sustained burst of heavy machine-gun fire through the engines. His formal report as recorded by the dispatch clerk said he saw the Huey's rotor stop and flames appear in the fuel tank area. The helicopter crashed through the jungle canopy four miles west of the landing zone, at a low angle and at a speed estimated by DeWitt to be in excess of eighty miles an hour. DeWitt reported a green flash visible through the foliage, which was normally indicative of a fueltank explosion on the forest floor. A search-and-rescue operation was mounted and aborted because of weather. No fragments of wreckage were observed. Because the area four miles west of the pass was considered inaccessible virgin jungle, it was procedure to assume there were no NVA troops on foot in the immediate vicinity. Therefore there had been no risk of immediate capture by the enemy. Therefore the eight men in the Huey were listed as missing in action.

"But why?" Jodie asked. "DeWitt saw the thing blow up. Why list them as missing? They were obviously all killed, right?"

Major Conrad shrugged.

"I guess so," he said. "But nobody knew it for sure. DeWitt saw a flash through the leaves, is all. Could theoretically have been an NVA ammo dump, hit by a lucky shot from the machine as it went down. Could have been anything. They only ever said killed in action when they knew for damn sure. When somebody literally eyeballed it happening. Fighter planes went down alone two hundred miles out in the ocean, the pilot was listed as missing, not killed, because perhaps he could have swum away somewhere. To list them as killed, someone had to see it happen. I could show you a file ten times thicker than this one, packed with orders defining and redefining exactly how to describe casualties. "

"Why?" Jodie asked again. "Because they were afraid of the press?"

Conrad shook his head. "No, I'm talking about internal stuff here. Anytime they were afraid of the press, they just told lies. This all was for two reasons. First, they didn't want to get it wrong for the next of kin. Believe me, weird things happened. It was a totally alien environment. People survived things you wouldn't expect them to survive. People turned up later. They found people. There was a massive search-and-recovery deal running, all the time. People got taken prisoner, and Charlie never issued prisoner lists, not until years later. And you couldn't tell folks their boy was killed, only to have him turn up alive later on. So they were anxious to keep on saying missing, just as long as they could. "

Then he paused for a long moment.

"Second reason is yes, they were afraid. But not of the press. They were afraid of themselves. They were afraid of telling themselves they were getting beat, and beat bad. "

Reacher was scanning the final mission report, picking out the copilot's name. He was a second lieutenant named F. G. Kaplan. He had been Hobie's regular partner throughout most of the second tour.

"Can I see this guy's jacket?" he asked.

"K section?" Conrad said. "Be about four minutes. "

They sat in silence with the cold coffee until the runner brought F. G. Kaplan's life story to the office. It was a thick, old file, similar size and vintage as Hobie's. There was the same printed grid on the front cover, recording access requests. The only note less than twenty years old showed a telephone inquiry had been made last April by Leon Garber. Reacher turned the file facedown and opened it up from the back. Started with the second-to-last sheet of paper. It was identical to the last sheet in Hobie's jacket. The same mission report, with the same eyewitness account from DeWitt, written up by the same clerk in the same handwriting.

But the final sheet in Kaplan's file was dated exactly two years later than the final mission report. It was a formal determination made after due consideration of the circumstances by the Department of the Army that F. G. Kaplan had been killed in action four miles west of the An Khe Pass when the helicopter he was copiloting was brought down by enemy ground-to-air fire. No body had been recovered, but the death was to be considered as actual for purposes of memorializing and payment of pensions. Reacher squared the sheet of paper on the desk.

"So why doesn't Victor Hobie have one of these?"

Conrad shook his head. "I don't know. "

"I want to go to Texas," Reacher said.

NOI BAI AIRPORT outside Hanoi and Hickam Field outside Honolulu share exactly the same latitude, so the U. S. Air Force Starlifter flew neither north nor south. It just followed a pure west-east flight path across the Pacific, holding comfortably between the Tropic of Cancer and the Twentieth Parallel. Six thousand miles, six hundred miles an hour, ten hours' flight time, but it was on approach seven hours before it took off, at three o'clock in the afternoon of the day before. The Air Force captain made the usual announcement as they crossed the date line and the tall silver-haired American in the rear of the cockpit wound his watch back and added another bonus day to his life.

Hickam Field is Hawaii's main military air facility, but it shares runway space and air-traffic control with Honolulu International, so the Starlifter had to turn a wide, weary circle above the sea, waiting for a JAL 747 from Tokyo to get down. Then it turned in and flattened and came down behind it, tires shrieking, engines screaming with reverse thrust. The pilot was not concerned with the niceties of civilian flying, so she jammed the brakes on hard and stopped short enough to get off the runway on the first taxiway. There was a standing request from the airport to keep the military planes away from the tourists. Especially the Japanese tourists. This pilot was from Connecticut and had no real interest in Hawaii's staple industry or Oriental sensitivities, but the first taxiway gave her a shorter run to the military compound, which is why she always aimed to take it.

The Starlifter taxied slowly, as was appropriate, and stopped fifty yards from a long, low cement building near the wire. The pilot shut down her engines and sat in silence. Ground crew in full uniform marched slowly toward the belly of the plane, dragging a fat cable behind them. They latched it into a port under the nose and the plane's systems kicked in again under the airfield's own power. That way, the ceremony could be conducted in silence.

The honor guard at Hickam that day was the usual eight men in the usual mosaic of four different full-dress uniforms, two from the United States Army, two from the United States Navy, two from the United States Marine Corps, and two from the United States Air Force. The eight slow-marched forward and waited in silent formation. The pilot hit the switch and the rear ramp came whining down. It settled against the hot blacktop of American territory and the guard slow-marched up its exact center into the belly of the plane. They passed between the twin lines of silent aircrew and moved forward. The loadmaster removed the rubber straps and the guard lifted the first casket off the shelves and onto their shoulders. They slow-marched back with it through the darkened fuselage and down the ramp and out into the blazing afternoon, the shined aluminum winking and the flag glowing bright in the sun against the blue Pacific and the green highlands of Oahu. They right-wheeled on the apron and slow-marched the fifty yards to the long, low cement building. They went inside and bent their knees and laid the casket down. They stood in silence, hands folded behind them, heads bowed, and then they about-turned and slow-marched back toward the plane.

It took an hour to unload all seven of the caskets. Only when the task was complete did the tall silver-haired American leave his seat. He used the pilot's stairway, and paused at the top to stretch his weary limbs in the sun.