by Lee Child
“What about Vic?” Jodie asked. “What did he do?”
DeWitt just shrugged again. “I have no idea. He was always busy, always up to something, but I don’t know what it was. Like I told you, I didn’t want to mix with the other flyers.”
“Was he different on the second tour?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt smiled briefly. “Everybody was different second time around.”
“In what way?” Jodie asked.
“Angrier,” DeWitt said. “Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and half-assed. Facilities you’d built would be all falling down, trenches you’d dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you’d cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You’d feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally speaking it was true. The whole ’Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the personnel just got worse and worse.”
“So you’d say Hobie got disillusioned?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt shrugged. “I really don’t remember much about his attitude. Maybe he coped OK. He had a strong sense of duty, as I recall.”
“What was his final mission about?”
The gray eyes suddenly went blank, like the shutters had just come down.
“I can’t remember.”
“He was shot down,” Reacher said. “Shot out of the air, right alongside you. You can’t recall what the mission was?”
“We lost eight thousand helicopters in ’Nam,” DeWitt said. “Eight thousand, Mr. Reacher, beginning to end. Seems to me I personally saw most of them go down. So how should I recall any particular one of them?”
“What was it about?” Reacher asked again.
“Why do you want to know?” DeWitt asked back.
“It would help me.”
“With what?”
Reacher shrugged. “With his folks, I guess. I want to be able to tell them he died doing something useful.”
DeWitt smiled. A bitter, sardonic smile, worn and softened at the edges by thirty years of regular use. “Well, my friend, you sure as hell can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because none of our missions were useful. They were all a waste of time. A waste of lives. We lost the war, didn’t we?”
“Was it a secret mission?”
There was a pause. Silence in the big office.
“Why should it be secret?” DeWitt asked back, neutrally.
“He only took on board three passengers. Seems like a special sort of a deal to me. No running jump required there.”
“I don’t remember,” DeWitt said again.
Reacher just looked at him, quietly. DeWitt stared back.
“How should I remember? I hear about something for the first time in thirty years and I’m supposed to remember every damn detail about it?”
“This isn’t the first time in thirty years. You were asked all about it a couple of months ago. In April of this year.”
DeWitt was silent.
“General Garber called the NPRC about Hobie,” Reacher said. “It’s inconceivable he didn’t call you afterward. Won’t you tell us what you told him?”
DeWitt smiled. “I told him I didn’t remember.”
There was silence again. Distant rotor blades, coming closer.
“On behalf of his folks, won’t you tell us?” Jodie asked softly. “They’re still grieving for him. They need to know about it.”
DeWitt shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt stood up slowly and walked to the window. He was a short man. He stood in the light of the sun and squinted left, across to where he could see the helicopter he could hear, coming in to land on the field.
“It’s classified information,” he said. “I’m not allowed to make any comment, and I’m not going to. Garber asked me, and I told him the same thing. No comment. But I hinted he should maybe look closer to home, and I’ll advise you to do the exact same thing, Mr. Reacher. Look closer to home.”
“Closer to home?”
DeWitt put his back to the window. “Did you see Kaplan’s jacket?”
“His copilot?”
DeWitt nodded. “Did you read his last-but-one mission?”
Reacher shook his head.
“You should have,” DeWitt said. “Sloppy work from somebody who was once an MP major. But don’t tell anybody I suggested it, because I’ll deny it, and they’ll believe me, not you.”
Reacher looked away. DeWitt walked back to his desk and sat down.
“Is it possible Victor Hobie is still alive?” Jodie asked him.
The distant helicopter shut off its engines. There was total silence.
“I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said.
“Have you been asked that question before?” Jodie said.
“I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said again.
“You saw the crash. Is it possible anybody survived it?”
“I saw an explosion under the jungle canopy, is all. He was way more than half-full with fuel. Draw your own conclusions, Ms. Garber.”
“Did he survive?”
“I have no comment on that.”
“Why is Kaplan officially dead and Hobie isn’t?”
“I have no comment on that.”
She nodded. Thought for a moment and regrouped exactly like the lawyer she was, boxed in by some recalcitrant witness. “Just theoretically, then. Suppose a young man with Victor Hobie’s personality and character and background survived such an incident, OK? Is it possible a man like that would never even have made contact with his own parents again afterward?”
DeWitt stood up again. He was clearly uncomfortable.
“I don’t know, Ms. Garber. I’m not a damn psychiatrist. And like I told you, I was careful not to get to know him too well. He seemed like a real dutiful guy, but he was cold. Overall, I guess I would rate it as very unlikely. But don’t forget, Vietnam changed people. It sure as hell changed me, for instance. I used to be a nice guy.”
OFFICER SARK WAS forty-four years old, but he looked older. His physique was damaged by a poor childhood and ignorant neglect through most of his adult years. His skin was dull and pale, and he had lost his hair early. It left him looking sallow and sunken and old before his time. But the truth was he had woken up to it and was fighting it. He had read stuff the NYPD’s medical people were putting about concerning diet and exercise. He had eliminated most of the fats from his daily intake, and he had started sunbathing a little, just enough to take the pallor off his skin without provoking the risk of melanomas. He walked whenever he could. Going home, he would get off the subway a stop short and hike the rest of the way, fast enough to get his breath going and his heartbeat raised, like the stuff he’d read said he should. And during the workday, he would persuade O’Hallinan to park the prowl car somewhere that would give them a short walk to wherever it was they were headed.
O’Hallinan had no interest in aerobic exercise, but she was an amiable woman and happy enough to cooperate with him, especially during the summer months, when the sun was shining. So she put the car against the curb in the shadow of Trinity Church and they approached the World Trade Center on foot from the south. It gave them a brisk six-hundred-yard walk in the sun, which made Sark happy, but it left the car exactly equidistant from a quarter of a million separate postal addresses, and with nothing on paper in the squad room it left nobody with any clue about which one of them they were heading for.
YOU WANT A ride back to the airport?” DeWitt asked.
Reacher interpreted the offer as a dismissal mixed in with a gesture designed to soften the stonewall performance the guy had been putting up. He nodded. The Army Chevrolet would ge
t them there faster than a taxi, because it was already waiting right outside with the motor running.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Hey, my pleasure,” DeWitt said back.
He dialed a number from his desk and spoke like he was issuing an order.
“Wait right here,” he said. “Three minutes.”
Jodie stood up and smoothed her dress down. Walked to the windows and gazed out. Reacher stepped the other way and looked at the mementoes on the wall. One of the photographs was a glossy reprint of a famous newspaper picture. A helicopter was lifting off from inside the embassy compound in Saigon, with a crowd of people underneath it, arms raised like they were trying to force it to come back down for them.
“You were that pilot?” Reacher asked, on a hunch.
DeWitt glanced over and nodded.
“You were still there in ‘75?”
DeWitt nodded again. “Five combat tours, then a spell on HQ duty. Overall, I guess I preferred the combat.”
There was noise in the distance. The bass thumping of a powerful helicopter, coming closer. Reacher joined Jodie at the window. A Huey was in the air, drifting over the distant buildings from the direction of the field.
“Your ride,” DeWitt said.
“A helicopter?” Jodie said.
DeWitt was smiling. “What did you expect? This is the helicopter school, after all. That’s why these boys are down here. It ain’t driver’s ed.”
The rotor noise was building to a loud wop-wop-wop. Then it slowly blended to a higher-pitched whip-whip-whip as it came closer and the jet whine mixed in.
“Bigger blade now,” DeWitt shouted. “Composite materials. Not metal anymore. I don’t know what old Vic would have made of it.”
The Huey was sliding sideways and hovering over the parade ground in front of the building. The noise was shaking the windows. Then the helicopter was straightening and settling to the ground.
“Nice meeting you,” DeWitt shouted.
They shook his hand and headed out. The MP sergeant at the desk nodded to them through the noise and went back to his paperwork. They went down the stairs and outside into the blast of heat and dust and sound. The copilot was sliding the door for them. They ran bent-over across the short distance. Jodie was grinning and her hair was blowing everywhere. The copilot offered his hand and pulled her up inside. Reacher followed. They strapped themselves into the bench seat in back and the copilot slid the door closed and climbed through to the cabin. The familiar shudder of vibration started up as the craft hauled itself into the air. The floor tilted and swung and the buildings rotated in the windows, and then their roofs were visible, and then the outlying grassland, with the highways laid through it like gray pencil lines. The nose went down and the engine noise built to a roar as they swung on course and settled to a hundred-mile-an-hour cruise.
THE STUFF SARK had read called it “power walking,” and the idea was to push yourself toward a speed of four miles an hour. That way your heartbeat was raised, which was the key to the aerobic benefit, but you avoided the impact damage to your shins and knees that you risked with proper jogging. It was a convincing proposition, and he believed in it. Doing it properly, six hundred yards at four miles an hour should have taken a fraction over five minutes, but it actually took nearer eight, because he was walking with O’Hallinan at his side. She was happy to walk, but she wanted to do it slowly. She was not an unfit woman, but she always said I’m built for comfort, not for speed. It was a compromise. He needed her cooperation to get to walk at all, so he never complained about her pace. He figured it was better than nothing. It had to be doing him some kind of good.
“Which building?” he asked.
“The south, I think,” she said.
They walked around to the main entrance of the south tower and inside to the lobby. There were guys in security uniforms behind a counter, but they were tied up with a knot of foreign men in gray suits, so Sark and O’Hallinan stepped over to the building directory and consulted it direct. Cayman Corporate Trust was listed on the eighty-eighth floor. They walked to the express elevator and stepped inside without the security force being aware they had ever entered the building.
The elevator floor pressed against their feet and sped them upward. It slowed and stopped at eighty-eight. The door slid back and a muted bell sounded and they stepped out into a plain corridor. The ceilings were low and the space was narrow. Cayman Corporate Trust had a modern oak door with a small window and a brass handle. Sark pulled the door and allowed O’Hallinan to go inside ahead of him. She was old enough to appreciate the courtesy.
There was an oak-and-brass reception area with a thickset man in a dark suit behind a chest-high counter. Sark stood back in the center of the floor, his loaded belt emphasizing the width of his hips, making him seem large and commanding. O’Hallinan stepped up to the counter, planning her approach. She wanted to shake something loose, so she tried the sort of frontal attack she had seen detectives use.
“We’ve come about Sheryl,” she said.
“I NAVE TO go home, I guess,” Jodie said.
“No, you’re coming to Hawaii, with me.”
They were back inside the freezing terminal at Dallas-Fort Worth. The Huey had put down on a remote apron and the copilot had driven them over in a golf cart painted dull green. He had shown them an unmarked door that led them up a flight of stairs into the bustle of the public areas.
“Hawaii? Reacher, I can’t go to Hawaii. I need to be back in New York.”
“You can’t go back there alone. New York is where the danger is, remember? And I need to go to Hawaii. So you’ll have to come with me, simple as that.”
“Reacher, I can’t,” she said again. “I have to be in a meeting tomorrow. You know that. You took the call, right?”
“Tough, Jodie. You’re not going back there alone.”
Checking out of the St. Louis honeymoon suite that morning had done something to him. The lizard part of his brain buried deep behind the frontal lobes had shrieked: The honeymoon is over, pal. Your life is changing and the problems start now. He had ignored it. But now he was paying attention to it. For the first time in his life, he had a hostage to fortune. He had somebody to worry about. It was mostly a pleasure, but it was a burden.
“I have to go back, Reacher,” she said. “I can’t let them down.”
“Call them, tell them you can’t make it. Tell them you’re sick or something.”
“I can’t do that. My secretary knows I’m not sick, right? And I’ve got a career to think about. It’s important to me.”
“You’re not going back there alone,” he said again.
“Why do you need to go to Hawaii anyway?”
“Because that’s where the answer is,” he said.
He stepped away to a ticket counter and took a thick time-table from a small chrome rack. Stood in the cold fluorescence and opened it up to D for the Dallas-Fort Worth departures and ran his finger down the list of destinations as far as H for Honolulu. Then he flipped ahead to the Honolulu departures and checked the flights going back to New York. He double-checked, and then he smiled with relief.
“We can make it anyway, do both things. Look at this. There’s a twelve-fifteen out of here. Flight time minus the time change going west gets us to Honolulu at three o’clock. Then we get the seven o’clock back to New York, flight time plus the time change coming back east gets us into JFK at twelve noon tomorrow. Your guy said it was an afternoon meeting, right? So you can still make it.”
“I need to get briefed in,” she said. “I have no idea what it’s about.”
“You’ll have a couple of hours. You’re a quick study.”
“It’s crazy. Only gives us four hours in Hawaii.”
“All we need. I’ll call ahead, set it up.”
“We’ll be on a plane all night. I’ll be going to my meeting after a sleepless night on a damn plane.”
“So we’ll go first-class,” he said. “Rutter’s
paying, right? We can sleep in first class. The chairs look comfortable enough.”
She shrugged and sighed. “Crazy.”
“Let me use your phone,” he said.
She handed him the mobile from her bag and he called long-distance information and asked for the number. Dialed it and heard it ring six thousand miles away. It rang eight times and the voice he wanted to hear answered it.
“This is Jack Reacher,” he said. “You going to be in the office all day?”
The answer was slow and sleepy, because it was very early in the morning in Hawaii, but it was the answer he wanted to hear. He clicked the phone off and turned back to Jodie. She sighed at him again, but this time there was a smile mixed in with it. She stepped to the counter and used the gold card to buy two first-class tickets, Dallas-Fort Worth to Honolulu to New York. The guy at the counter made the seat assignments on the spot, slightly bewildered in front of people spending the price of a used sportscar to buy twenty hours on a plane and four on the ground on Oahu. He handed the wallets over and twenty minutes later Reacher was settling into an enormous leather-and-sheepskin chair with Jodie safely a yard away at his side.
THERE WAS A routine to be followed in this situation. It had never before been employed, but it had been rehearsed often and thoroughly. The thickset man at the chest-high counter moved his hand casually sideways and used his index finger on one button and his middle finger on another. The first button locked the oak door out to the elevator lobby. There was an electromagnetic mechanism that clicked the steel tongue into place, silently and unobtrusively. Once it was activated, the door stayed locked until the mechanism was released again, no matter what anybody did with the latch or the key. The second button set a red light flashing in the intercom unit on Hobie’s desk. The red light was bright and the office was always dark, and it was impossible to miss it.
“Who?” the thickset guy said.
“Sheryl,” O’Hallinan repeated.
“I’m sorry,” the guy said. “There’s nobody called Sheryl working here. Currently we have a staff of three, and they’re all men.”