by Lee Child
A ton of dynamite. A whole ton. A hell of a bang. There was nothing left at all. He guessed there were flattened grasses for a half-mile all around, but that was it. The terrible energy of the explosion had blasted outward and met absolutely nothing at all in its path. Nothing soft, nothing vulnerable. It had blasted outward and then weakened and slowed and died to a puff of breeze miles away and it had hurt nothing. Nothing at all. He stood in the silence and closed his eyes.
Then he heard footsteps behind him. It was Holly. He heard her good leg alternating with her bad leg. A long stride, then a shuffle. He opened his eyes and looked at the road. She walked around in front of him and stopped. Laid her head on his chest and put her arms around him. Squeezed him tight and held on. He raised his hand to her head and smoothed her hair behind her ear, like he had seen her do.
“All done,” she said.
“Get a problem, solve a problem,” he said. “That’s my rule.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I wish it was always that easy,” she said.
The way she said it, after the delay, it was like a long speech. Like a closely reasoned argument. He pretended not to know which problem she was talking about.
“Your father?” he said. “You’re way, way out of his shadow now.”
She shook her head against his chest.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Believe it,” he said. “That thing you did for me on the parade ground was the smartest, coolest, bravest thing I ever saw anybody do, man or woman, young or old. Better than anything I ever did. Better than anything your old man ever did. He’d give his front teeth for guts like that. So would I. You’re way out of anybody’s shadow now, Holly. Believe it.”
“I thought I was,” she said. “I felt like it. I really did. For a while. But then when I saw him again, I felt just the same as I always did. I called him Dad.”
“He is your dad,” Reacher said.
“I know,” she replied. “That’s the problem.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“So change your name,” he said. “That might do it.”
He could feel her holding her breath.
“Is that a proposal?” she asked.
“It’s a suggestion,” he said.
“You think Holly Reacher sounds good?” she asked.
His turn to stay quiet for a long time. His turn to catch his breath. And finally, his turn to talk about the real problem.
“It sounds wonderful,” he said. “But I guess Holly McGrath sounds better.”
She made no reply.
“He’s the lucky guy, right?” he said.
She nodded. A small motion of her head against his chest.
“So tell him,” he said.
She shrugged in his arms.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “He might have something similar to tell you.”
She looked up. He squinted down at her.
“You think so?” she asked.
“You’re nervous, he’s nervous,” Reacher said. “Somebody should say something. I’m not about to do it for either of you.”
She squeezed him harder. Then she stretched up and kissed him. Hard and long on the mouth.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?” he asked.
“For understanding,” she said.
He shrugged. It wasn’t the end of the world. Just felt like it.
“Coming?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
She left him on the shoulder of U.S. 93, right there in Idaho. He watched her all the way back to the Night Hawk. Watched her climb the short ladder. She paused and turned. Looked back at him. Then she ducked up and in. The door closed. The rotor thumped. He knew he would never see her again. His clothes tore at him and the dust swirled all around him as the helicopter took off. He waved it away. Watched it until it was lost to sight. Then he took a deep breath and looked left and right along the empty highway. Friday, the Fourth of July. Independence Day.
SATURDAY THE FIFTH and Sunday the sixth, Yorke County was sealed off and secret Army units were moving in and out around the clock. Air Artillery squads recovered the missile unit. They took it south in four Chinooks. Quartermasters went in and recovered all the ordnance they could find. They collected enough for a small war.
Medical corpsmen removed the bodies. They found the twenty men from the missile unit in the cave. They found the skeletons Reacher had crawled through. They found five mutilated bodies in another cave. Dressed like workmen. Like builders or carpenters. They took Fowler out of the command hut and Borken from the road in front of the courthouse. They brought Milosevic down from the mountain bowl and Brogan out of the small clearing west of the Bastion. They found Jackson’s rough grave in the forest and dug him up. They laid eighteen dead militiamen and one dead woman side by side on the rifle range and helicoptered them away.
One of Garber’s military investigators flew in alone and took the hard disk out of the financial computer and put it on a chopper for transport to Chicago. Engineers moved in and dynamited the mine entrances. Sappers moved into the Bastion and disabled the water supply and tore down the power lines. They set fire to the huts and watched as they burned. Late Sunday night, when the last of the smoke was rising, they marched back to their choppers and lifted away south.
Early Monday morning, Harland Webster was back in the off-white parlor inside the White House. Ruth Rosen was smiling at him and asking how his holiday weekend had been. He was smiling back at her and saying nothing. An hour later, the morning sun was rolling west to Chicago and three agents were arresting Brogan’s girlfriend. They grilled her for thirty minutes and advised her to get out of town, leaving behind anything he had ever bought her. Then the same agents took Milosevic’s brand-new Ford Explorer out of the Federal Building’s parking lot and drove it five miles south. They left it on a quiet street, doors unlocked, keys in. By the time it had been stolen, Holly Johnson was arriving at the knee clinic for an early appointment. An hour after that, she was back at her desk. Before lunch, the missing money from the bearer bond robbery was following a route of her own choosing out of the Caymans. Six o’clock Monday evening she was home and packing. She threw her bags into her car and drove north. Moved into McGrath’s house up in Evanston.
Tuesday morning, there were three separate stories on the National Militia Internet. Refugees from an isolated valley in Montana had drifted south and west to new settlements with reports of a recent world government maneuver. Foreign troops had wiped out a band of militia heroes. The foreign battalion had been led by a French mercenary. He had succeeded only because he had used classified SDI technology, including satellites and lasers and microchips. Journalists picked up on the story and called the Hoover Building. Late Tuesday evening, in a prepared statement, an FBI spokesperson denied all knowledge of any such events.
Early Wednesday morning, after five hitched rides and four buses through seven states, Reacher was finally in Wisconsin. It was where he had aimed to be exactly a week before. He liked it there. It struck him as a fine place to be in July. He stayed until Friday afternoon.
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Lee Child’s novel
Tripwire
Available in paperback from Jove Books
Prologue
HOOK HOBIE OWED the whole of his life to a secret nearly thirty years old. His liberty, his status, his money, everything. And like any cautious guy in his particular situation, he was ready to do what was necessary to protect his secret. Because he had a lot to lose. The whole of his life.
The protection he relied on for nearly thirty years was based on just two things. The same two things anybody uses to protect against any danger. The same way a nation protects itself against an enemy missile, the same way an apartment dweller protects himself against a burglar, the same way a boxer guards against a k
nockout blow. Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat, and then you react.
Stage one was the early-warning system. It had changed over the years, as other circumstances had changed. Now it was well rehearsed and simplified. It was made up of two layers, like two concentric trip wires. The first trip wire was eleven thousand miles from home. It was an early early warning. A wake-up call. It would tell him they were getting close. The second trip wire was five thousand miles nearer, but still six thousand miles from home. A call from the second location would tell him they were about to get very close. It would tell him stage one was over, and stage two was about to begin.
Stage two was the response. He was very clear on what the response had to be. He had spent nearly thirty years thinking about it, but there was only ever one viable answer. The response would be to run. To disappear. He was a realistic guy. The whole of his life, he had been proud of his courage and his cunning, and his toughness and his fortitude. He had always done what was necessary, without a second thought. But he knew when he heard the warning sounds from those distant trip wires he had to get out. Because no man could survive what was coming after him. No man. Not even a man as ruthless as he was.
The danger had ebbed and flowed like a tide for years. He had spent long periods certain it was about to wash over him at any time. And then long periods certain that it would never reach him at all. Sometimes, the deadening sensation of time made him feel safe, because thirty years is an eternity. But other times it felt like the blink of an eye. Sometimes he waited for the first call on an hourly basis. Planning, sweating, but always knowing he could be forced to run at any moment.
He had played it through his head a million times. The way he expected it, the first call would come in maybe a month before the second call. He would use that month to prepare. He would tie up loose ends, close things down, cash in, transfer assets, settle scores. Then when the second call came in, he would take off. Immediately. No hesitation. Just get the hell out, and stay the hell out.
But the way it happened, the two calls came in on the same day. The second call came first. The nearer trip wire was breached an hour before the farther one. And Hook Hobie didn’t run. He abandoned thirty years of careful planning and stayed to fight it out.
1
JACK REACHER SAW the guy step through the door. Actually, there was no door. The guy just stepped in through the part of the front wall that wasn’t there. The bar opened straight out onto the sidewalk. There were tables and chairs out there under a dried-up old vine that gave some kind of nominal shade. It was an inside-outside room, passing through a wall that wasn’t there. Reacher guessed there must be some kind of an iron grille they could padlock across the opening when the bar closed. If it closed. Certainly Reacher had never seen it closed, and he was keeping some pretty radical hours.
The guy stood a yard inside the dark room and waited, blinking, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the hot whiteness of the Key West sun. It was June, dead-on four o’clock in the afternoon, the southernmost part of the United States. Way farther south than most of the Bahamas. A hot white sun and a fierce temperature. Reacher sat at his table in back and sipped water from a plastic bottle and waited.
The guy was looking around. The bar was a low room built from old boards dried to a dark color. They looked like they had come from old broken-up sailing ships. Random pieces of nautical junk were nailed to them. They were old brass things and green glass globes. Stretches of old nets. Fishing equipment, Reacher guessed, although he had never caught a fish in his life. Or sailed a boat. Overlaying everything were ten thousand business cards, tacked up over every spare square inch, including the ceiling. Some of them were new, some of them were old and curled, representing ventures that had folded decades ago.
The guy stepped farther into the gloom and headed for the bar. He was old. Maybe sixty, medium height, bulky. A doctor would have called him overweight, but Reacher just saw a fit man some way down the wrong side of the hill. A man yielding gracefully to the passage of time without getting all stirred up about it. He was dressed like a northern city guy on a short-notice trip to somewhere hot. Light gray pants, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, a thin crumpled beige jacket, a white shirt with the collar spread wide open, blue-white skin showing at his throat, dark socks, city shoes. New York or Chicago, Reacher guessed, maybe Boston, spent most of his summertime in air-conditioned buildings or cars, had these pants and this jacket stashed away in the back of his closet ever since he bought them twenty years ago, brought them out and used them occasionally as appropriate.
The guy reached the bar and went into his jacket and pulled a wallet. It was a small overloaded old item in fine black leather. The sort of wallet which molds itself tight around the stuff crammed inside. Reacher saw the guy open it with a practiced flick and show it to the bartender and ask a quiet question. The bartender glanced away like he’d been insulted. The guy put the wallet away and smoothed his wisps of gray hair into the sweat on his scalp. He muttered something else and the bartender came up with a beer from a chest of ice. The old guy held the cold bottle against his face for a moment and then took a long pull. Belched discreetly behind his hand and smiled like a small disappointment had been assuaged.
Reacher matched his pull with a long drink of water. The fittest guy he had ever known was a Belgian soldier who swore the key to fitness was to do whatever the hell you liked as long as you drank five liters of mineral water every day. Reacher figured five liters was about a gallon, and since the Belgian was a small whippy guy half his size, he should make it two gallons a day. Ten full-size bottles. Since arriving in the heat of the Keys, he had followed that regimen. It was working for him. He had never felt better. Every day at four o’clock he sat at this dark table and drank three bottles of still water, room temperature. Now he was as addicted to the water as he once had been to coffee.
The old guy was side-on to the bar, busy with his beer. Scanning the room. Reacher was the only person in it, apart from the bartender. The old guy pushed off with his hip and stepped over. Waved his beer in a vague gesture that said may I? Reacher nodded to the opposite chair and broke the plastic seal on his third bottle. The guy sat heavily. He overwhelmed the chair. He was the sort of guy who keeps keys and money and handkerchiefs in his pants pockets so that the natural width of his hips is way exaggerated.
“Are you Jack Reacher?” he asked across the table.
Not Chicago or Boston. New York, for sure. The voice sounded exactly like a guy Reacher had known, spent the first twenty years of his life never more than a hundred yards from Fulton Street.
“Jack Reacher?” the old guy asked again.
Up close, he had small, wise eyes under an overhanging brow. Reacher drank and glanced across at him through the clear water in his bottle.
“Are you Jack Reacher?” the old guy asked for the third time.
Reacher set his bottle on the table and shook his head.
“No,” he lied.
The old guy’s shoulders slumped a fraction in disappointment. He shot his cuff and checked his watch. Moved his bulk forward on the chair like he was about to get up, but then he sat back, like suddenly there was time to spare.
“Five after four,” he said.
Reacher nodded. The guy waved his empty beer bottle at the bartender who ducked around with a fresh one.
“Heat,” he said. “Gets to me.”
Reacher nodded again and sipped his water.
“You know a Jack Reacher around here?” the guy asked.
Reacher shrugged.
“You got a description?” he asked back.
The guy was into a long pull on the second bottle. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and used the gesture to hide a second discreet belch.
“Not really,” he said. “Big guy, is all I know. That’s why I asked you.”
Reacher nodded.
“There are lots of big guys here,” he said. “Lots of b
ig guys everywhere.”
“But you don’t know the name?”
“Should I?” Reacher asked. “And who wants to know?”
The guy grinned and nodded, like an apology for a lapse in manners.
“Costello,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
Reacher nodded back, and raised his bottle a fraction in response.
“Skip tracer?” he asked.
“Private detective,” Costello said.
“Looking for a guy called Reacher?” Reacher asked. “What’s he done?”
Costello shrugged. “Nothing, far as I know. I just got asked to find him.”
“And you figure he’s down here?”
“Last week he was,” Costello said. “He’s got a bank account in Virginia and he’s been wiring money to it.”
“From down here in Key West?”
Costello nodded.
“Every week,” he said. “For three months.”
“So?”
“So he’s working down here,” Costello said. “Has been, for three months. You’d think somebody would know him.”
“But nobody does,” Reacher said.
Costello shook his head “I asked all up and down Duval, which seems to be where the action is in this town. Nearest I got was a titty bar upstairs someplace, girl in there said there was a big guy been here exactly three months, drinks water every day at four o’clock in here.”
He lapsed into silence, looking hard at Reacher, like he was issuing a direct challenge. Reacher sipped water and shrugged back at him.
“Coincidence,” he said.
Costello nodded.
“I guess,” he said quietly.
He raised the beer bottle to his lips and drank, keeping his wise old eyes focused tight on Reacher’s face.