Tripwire

“Nuts to that,” Reacher said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

The doctor nodded. “Well, see how you feel in an hour.”

He stepped close and stretched up to a valve on the bottom of one of the IV bags. Clicked it a notch and tapped a tube with his finger. Watched carefully and nodded and walked back out of the room. He passed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short gray hair. Reacher watched him and thought a buck gets ten this is the Pentagon guy.

“Reacher, this is General Mead,” Jodie said.

“Department of the Army,” Reacher said.

The guy in the jacket looked at him, surprised. “Have we met?”

Reacher shook his head. “No, but I knew one of you would be sniffing around, soon as I was up and running.”

Mead smiled. “We’ve been practically camped out here. To put it bluntly, we’d like you to keep quiet about the Carl Allen situation.”

“Not a chance,” Reacher said.

Mead smiled again and waited. He was enough of an Army bureaucrat to know the steps. Leon used to say something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.

“The Hobies,” Reacher said. “Fly them down to D.C. first class, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy’s name on the Wall and make sure there’s a shitload of brass in full-dress uniform saluting like crazy the whole time they’re doing it. Then I’ll keep quiet.”

Mead nodded.

“It’ll be done,” he said. He got up unbidden and went back outside. Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed.

“Tell me about the police,” Reacher said. “Have I got questions to answer?”

She shook her head.

“Allen was a cop killer,” she said. “You stick around NYPD territory and you’ll never get another ticket in your life. It was self-defense, everybody’s cool.”

“What about my gun? It was stolen.”

“No, it was Allen’s gun. You wrestled it away from him. Roomful of witnesses saw you do it.”

He nodded slowly. Saw the spray of blood and brains all over again as he shot him. A pretty good shot, he thought. Dark room, stress, a nail in his head, a.38 slug in his chest, bull’s-eye. Pretty damn close to the perfect shot. Then he saw the hook again, up at Jodie’s face, hard steel against the honey of her skin.

“You OK?” he asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You sure? No bad dreams?”

“No bad dreams. I’m a big girl now.”

He nodded again. Recalled their first night together. A big girl. Seemed like a million years ago.

“But are you OK?” she asked him back.

“The doctor thinks so. He called me Neanderthal man.”

“No, seriously.”

“How do I look?”

“I’ll show you,” she said.

She ducked away to the bathroom and came back with the mirror from the wall. It was a round thing, framed in plastic. She propped it on his legs and he steadied it with his right hand and looked. He still had a fearsome tan. Blue eyes. White teeth. His head had been shaved. The hair had grown back an eighth of an inch. On the left of his face was a peppering of scars. The nail hole in his forehead was lost among the debris of a long and violent life. He could make it out because it was redder and newer than the rest, but it was no bigger than the mark a half-inch away where his brother, Joe, had caught him with a shard of glass in some long-forgotten childhood dispute over nothing, in the same exact year Hobie’s Huey went down. He tilted the mirror and saw broad strapping over his chest, snowy white against the tan. He figured he had lost maybe thirty pounds. Back to 220, his normal weight. He handed the mirror back to Jodie and tried to sit up. He was suddenly dizzy.

“I want to get out of here,” he said.

“You sure?” she asked.

He nodded. He was sure, but he felt very sleepy. He put his head back on the pillow, just temporarily. He was warm and the pillow was soft. His head weighed a ton and his neck muscles were powerless to move it. The room was darkening. He swiveled his eyes upward and saw the IV bags hanging in the far distance above him. He saw the valve the doctor had adjusted. He had clicked it. He remembered the plastic sound. There was writing on the IV bag. The writing was upside down. He focused on it. Concentrated hard. The writing was green. It read Morphine.

“Shit,” he whispered, and the room spun away into total darkness.

WHEN HE OPENED his eyes again, the sun had moved backward. It was earlier in the day. Morning, not afternoon. Jodie was sitting in her chair by the window, reading. The same book. She was a half-inch farther through it. Her dress was blue, not yellow.

“It’s tomorrow,” he said.

She closed the book and stood up. Stepped over and bent and kissed his lips. He kissed her back and clamped his teeth and pulled the IV needles out of his arm and dropped them over the side of the bed. They started a steady drip onto the floor. He hauled himself upright against the pillows and smoothed a hand over his bristly scalp.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He sat still in the bed and concentrated on a slow survey up his body, starting with his toes and ending with the top of his head.

“Fine,” he said.

“There are people here to see you,” she said. “They heard you’d come around.”

He nodded and stretched. He could feel the chest wound. It was on the left. There was weakness there. He reached up with his left hand to the IV stand. It was a vertical stainless steel bar with a spiral curl at the top where the bags slipped on. He put his hand over the curl and squeezed hard. He felt bruising in his elbow where the needles had been and sensitivity in his chest where the bullet had been, but the steel spiral still flattened from round to oval. He smiled.

“OK, send them in,” he said.

He knew who they were before they got inside. He could tell by the sound. The wheels on the oxygen cart squeaked. The old lady stood aside and let her husband enter first. She was wearing a brand-new dress. He was in the same old blue serge suit. He wheeled the cart past her and paused. He kept hold of the handle with his left hand and drew his right up into a trembling salute. He held it for a long moment and Reacher replied with the same. He threw his best parade-ground move and held it steady, meaning every second of it. Then he snapped it down and the old guy wheeled the cart slowly toward him with his wife fussing behind.

They were changed people. Still old, still feeble, but serene. Knowing your son is dead is better than not knowing, he guessed. He tracked back to Newman’s windowless lab in Hawaii and recalled Allen’s casket with Victor Hobie’s skeleton in it. Victor Hobie’s old bones. He remembered them pretty well. They were distinctive. The smooth arch of the brow, the high round cranium. The even white teeth. The long, clean limbs. It was a noble skeleton.

“He was a hero, you know.”

The old man nodded.

“He did his duty.”

“Much more than that,” Reacher replied. “I read his record. I talked with General DeWitt. He was a brave flyer who did more than his duty. He saved a lot of lives with his courage. If he’d lived, he’d have three stars now. He’d be General Victor Truman Hobie, with a big command somewhere, or a big job in the Pentagon.”

It was what they needed to hear, but it was still true. The old woman put her thin pale hand over her husband’s and they sat in silence, eyes moist and focused eleven thousand miles away. They were telling themselves stories of what might have been. The past stretched away straight and uncomplicated and now it was neatly amputated by a noble combat death, leaving only honest dreams ahead of it. They were recounting those dreams for the first time, because now they were legitimate. Those dreams were fortifying them just like the