Tripwire (2 page)

He had no living relatives anywhere capable of leaving him a fortune in a will. He owed no money. He had never stolen anything, never cheated anybody. Never fathered any children. He was on as few pieces of paper as it was possible for a human being to get. He was just about invisible. And he had never known anybody called Jacob. Never. He was sure of that. So whatever Costello wanted, he wasn’t interested in it. Certainly not interested enough to come out from under and get involved with anything.

Because being invisible had become a habit. In the front part of his brain, he knew it was some kind of a complex, alienated response to his situation. Two years ago, everything had turned upside down. He had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody. From being a senior and valued member of a highly structured community to being just one of 270 million anonymous civilians. From being necessary and wanted to being one person too many. From being where someone told him to be every minute of every day to being confronted with three million square miles and maybe forty more years and no map and no schedule. The front part of his brain told him his response was understandable, but defensive, the response of a man who liked solitude but was worried by loneliness. It told him it was an extremist response, and he should take care with it.

But the lizard part of his brain buried behind the frontal lobes told him he liked it. He liked the anonymity. He liked his secrecy. It felt warm and comfortable and reassuring. He guarded it. He was friendly and gregarious on the surface, without ever saying much about himself. He liked to pay cash and travel by road. He was never on any passenger manifests or credit card carbons. He told nobody his name. In Key West, he had checked into a cheap motel under the name Harry S. Truman. Scanning back through the register, he had seen he wasn’t unique. Most of the forty-one presidents had stayed there, even ones nobody had heard of, like John Tyler and Franklin Pierce. He had found names did not mean much in the Keys. People just waved and smiled and said hello. They all assumed everybody had something to be private about. He was comfortable there. Too comfortable to be in any hurry to leave.

He strolled for an hour in the noisy warmth and then ducked off Duval toward a hidden courtyard restaurant where they knew him by sight and had his favorite brand of water and would give him a steak that hung off both sides of the plate at once.

THE STEAK CAME with an egg and fries and a complicated mix of some sort of warm-weather vegetables, and the ice cream came with hot chocolate sauce and nuts. He drank another quart of water and followed it with two cups of strong black coffee. Pushed back from the table and sat there, satisfied.

“OK now?” the waitress smiled.

Reacher grinned back at her and nodded.

“It hit the spot,” he said.

“And it looks good on you.”

“It feels good on me.”

It was true. His next birthday was going to be his thirty-ninth, but he felt better than ever. He had always been fit and strong, but the last three months had brought him to a new peak. He was six feet five tall, and he had weighed 220 when he left the Army. A month after joining the swimming pool gang, the work and the heat had burned him down to 210. Then the next two months, he had built back all the way to about 250, all of it pure, hard muscle. His workload was prodigious. He figured to shift about four tons of earth and rock and sand every day. He had developed a technique of digging and scooping and twisting and throwing the dirt with his shovel so that every part of his body was working out all day long. The result was spectacular. He was burned a deep brown by the sun and he was in the best shape of his life. Like a condom crammed with walnuts, is what some girl had said. He figured he needed to eat about ten thousand calories a day just to stay level, as well as the two gallons of water he needed to drink.

“So you working tonight?” the waitress asked.

Reacher laughed. He was earning money for doing a fitness regime most people would pay a fortune for at any shiny city gymnasium, and now he was headed for his evening job, which was something else he got paid for that most men would gladly do for free. He was the bouncer in the nude bar Costello had mentioned. On Duval. He sat in there all night with no shirt on, looking tough, drinking free drinks and making sure the naked women didn’t get hassled. Then somebody gave him fifty bucks for it.

“It’s a chore,” he said. “But somebody’s got to do it, I guess.”

The girl laughed with him, and he paid his check and headed back to the street.

FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES to the north, just below Wall Street in New York City, the chief executive officer took the elevator down two floors to the finance director’s suite. The two men went into the inner office together and sat side by side behind the desk. It was the kind of expensive office and expensive desk that get specified and paid for when times are good and then sit there like a sullen reproach when times turn bad. It was a high-floor office, dark rosewood all over the place, cream linen window blinds, brass accents, a huge slab of a desk, an Italian table light, a big computer that had cost more than it needed to. The computer was glowing and waiting for a password. The CEO typed it in and hit ENTER and the screen redrew into a spreadsheet. It was the only spreadsheet that told the truth about the company. That was why it was protected by a password.

“Are we going to make it?” the CEO asked.

That day had been D-Day. D stood for downsizing. Their human resources manager out at the manufacturing plant on Long Island had been busy since eight o’clock that morning. His secretary had rustled up a long line of chairs in the corridor outside his office, and the chairs had been filled with a long line of people. The people had waited most of the day, shuffling up one place every five minutes, then shuffling off the end of the line into the human resources manager’s office for a five-minute interview that terminated their livelihoods, thank you and good-bye.

“Are we going to make it?” the CEO asked again.

The finance director was copying large numbers onto a sheet of paper. He subtracted one from another and looked at a calendar. He shrugged.

“In theory, yes,” he said. “In practice, no.”

“No?” the CEO repeated.

“It’s the time factor,” the finance director said. “We did the right thing out at the plant, no doubt about that. Eighty percent of the people gone, saves us ninety-one percent of the payroll, because we only kept the cheap ones. But we paid them all up to the end of next month. So the cash-flow enhancement doesn’t hit us for six weeks. And in fact right now the cash flow gets much worse, because the little bastards are all out there cashing a six-week paycheck.”

The CEO sighed and nodded.

“So how much do we need?”

The finance director used the mouse and expanded a window.

“One-point-one million dollars,” he said. “For six weeks.”

“Bank?”

“Forget it,” the finance director said. “I’m over there every day kissing ass just to keep what we already owe them. I ask for more, they’ll laugh in my face.”

“Worse things could happen to you,” the CEO said.

“That’s not the point,” the finance director said. “The point is they get a sniff we’re still not healthy, they’ll call those loans. In a heartbeat.”

The CEO drummed his fingers on the rosewood and shrugged.

“I’ll sell some stock,” he said.

The finance director shook his head.

“You can’t,” he said, patiently. “You put stock in the market, the price will go through the floor. Our existing borrowing is secured on stock, and if it gets any more worthless, they’ll close us down tomorrow.”

“Shit,” the CEO said. “We’re six weeks away. I’m not going to lose all this for six lousy weeks. Not for a lousy million bucks. It’s a trivial amount.”

“A trivial amount we haven’t got.”

“Got to be somewhere we can get it.”

The finance director made no reply to that. But he was sitting there like he had something more to say.

“What?” the CEO asked him.

“I heard some talk,” he said. “Guys I know, gossiping. There’s maybe somewhere we can go. For six weeks, it might be worth it. There’s an outfit I heard about. A lender-of-last-resort type of thing.”

“On the level?”

“Apparently,” the finance director said. “Looks very respectable. Big office over in the World Trade Center. He specializes in cases like this.”

The CEO glared at the screen.

“Cases like what?”

“Like this,” the finance director repeated. “Where you’re almost home and dry, but the banks are too tight-assed to see it.”

The CEO nodded and gazed around the office. It was a beautiful place. And his own office was two floors higher, on a comer, and even more beautiful.

“OK,” he said. “Do it.”

“I can’t do it,” the finance director said. “This guy won’t deal below CEO level. You’ll have to do it.”

IT STARTED OUT a quiet night in the nude bar. A midweek evening in June, way too late for the snowbirds and the spring breakers, too early for the summer vacationers who came down to roast. Not more than maybe forty people in all night, two girls behind the bar, three girls out there dancing. Reacher was watching a woman called Crystal. He assumed that was not her real name, but he had never asked. She was the best. She earned a lot more than Reacher had ever earned as a major in the military police. She spent a percentage of her income running an old black Porsche. Reacher sometimes heard it in the early afternoons, rumbling and blatting around the blocks where he was working.

The bar was a long, narrow upstairs room with a runway and a small circular stage with a shiny chrome pole. Snaking around the runway and the stage was a line of chairs. There were mirrors everywhere, and where there weren’t, the walls were painted flat black. The whole place pulsed and pounded to loud music coming out of a half dozen speakers serious enough to drown out the roar of the air-conditioning.

Reacher was at the bar, back-to, a third of the way into the room. Near enough the door to be seen straight away, far enough into the room that people wouldn’t forget he was there. The woman called Crystal had finished her third spot and was hauling a harmless guy backstage for a twenty-buck private show when Reacher saw two men emerge at the top of the stairs. Strangers, from the north. Maybe thirty years old, bulky, pale. Menacing. Northern tough guys, in thousand-dollar suits and shined shoes. Down here in some kind of a big hurry, still dressed for their city office. They were standing at the desk, arguing about the three-buck cover charge. The girl at the desk glanced anxiously at Reacher. He slid off his stool. Walked over.

“Problem, guys?” he asked.

He had used what he called his college-kid walk. He had noticed that college boys walk with a curious tensed-up, limping motion. Especially on the beach, in their shorts. As if they were so tremendously muscle-bound they couldn’t quite make their limbs operate in the normal way. He thought it made 130-pound teenagers look pretty comical. But he had learned it made a 250-pound six-foot-five guy look pretty scary. The college-kid walk was a tool of his new trade. A tool that worked. Certainly the two guys in their thousand-dollar suits looked reasonably impressed by it.

“Problem?” he asked again.

That one word was usually enough. Most guys backed off at that point. But these two didn’t. Up close, he felt something coming off them. Some kind of a blend of menace and confidence. Some arrogance in there, maybe. A suggestion they normally got their own way. But they were far from home. Far enough south of their own turf to act a little circumspect.

“No problem, Tarzan,” the left-hand guy said.

Reacher smiled. He had been called a lot of things, but that was a new one.

“Three bucks to come in,” he said. “Or it’s free to go back downstairs.”

“We just want to speak with somebody,” the right-hand guy said.

Accents, from both of them. From somewhere in New York. Reacher shrugged.

“We don’t do too much speaking in here,” he said. “Music’s too loud.”

“What’s your name?” the left-hand guy asked.

Reacher smiled again.

“Tarzan,” he said.

“We’re looking for a guy called Reacher,” the guy said back. “Jack Reacher. You know him?”

Reacher shook his head.

“Never heard of him,” he said.

“So we need to talk to the girls,” the guy said. “We were told they might know him.”

Reacher shook his head again.

“They don’t,” he said.

The right-hand guy was looking past Reacher’s shoulder into the long, narrow room. He was glancing at the girls behind the bar. He was figuring Reacher for the only security on duty.

“OK, Tarzan, step aside,” he said. “We’re coming in now.”

“Can you read?” Reacher asked him. “Big words and all?”

He pointed up at a sign hanging above the desk. Big Day-Glo letters on a black background. It read Management Reserves the Right to Refuse Admission.

“I’m management,” Reacher said. “I’m refusing you admission.”

The guy glanced between the sign and Reacher’s face.

“You want a translation?” Reacher asked him. “Words of one syllable? It means I’m the boss and you can’t come in.”

“Save it, Tarzan,” the guy said.

Reacher let him get level, shoulder to shoulder on his way past. Then he raised his left hand and caught the guy’s elbow. He straightened the joint with his palm and dug his fingers into the soft nerves at the bottom of the guy’s tricep. It’s like getting a continuous pounding on the funny bone. The guy was jumping around like he was getting flooded with electricity.

“Downstairs,” Reacher said softly.

The other guy was busy calculating the odds. Reacher saw him doing it and figured full and fair disclosure was called for. He held his right hand up, eye level, to confirm it was free and ready for activity. It was a huge hand, brown, callused from the shovel handle, and the guy got the message. He shrugged and started down the stairs. Reacher straight-armed his pal after him.

“We’ll see you again,” the guy said.