Tripwire by Lee Child Page A

should go.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You think Dad would care?”
    He saw Garber in his old creased khaki and his battered hat. He was the worst-dressed officer in the U.S. Army, all thirteen years Reacher had served under him. He smiled, briefly.
    “I guess he wouldn’t mind,” he said.
    She walked him onto the lawn. There were maybe six people out of the hundred he recognized. A couple of the guys in uniform were familiar. A handful in suits were men he’d worked with here and there in another lifetime. He shook hands with dozens of people and tried to listen to the names, but they went in one ear and out the other. Then the quiet chatter and the eating and the drinking started up again, the crowd closed around him, and the sensation of his untidy arrival was smoothed over and forgotten. Jodie still had hold of his arm. Her hand was cool on his skin.
    “I’m looking for somebody,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, really.”
    “I know,” she said. “Mrs. Jacob, right?”
    He nodded.
    “Is she here?” he asked.
    “I’m Mrs. Jacob,” she said.
    THE TWO GUYS in the black Tahoe backed it out of the line of cars, out from under the power lines so the car phone would work without interference. The driver dialed a number and the ring tone filled the quiet vehicle. Then the call was answered sixty miles south and eighty-eight floors up.
    “Problems, boss,” the driver said. “There’s some sort of a wake going on here, a funeral or something. Must be a hundred people milling around. We got no chance of grabbing this Mrs. Jacob. We can’t even tell which one she is. There are dozens of women here, she could be any one of them.”
    The speaker relayed a grunt from Hobie. “And?”
    “The guy from the bar down in the Keys? He just showed up here in a damn taxi. Got here about ten minutes after we did, strolled right in.”
    The speaker crackled. No discernible reply.
    “So what do we do?” the driver asked.
    “Stick with it,” Hobie’s voice said. “Maybe hide the vehicle and lay up someplace. Wait until everybody leaves. It’s her house, as far as I can tell. Maybe the family home or a weekend place. So everybody else will leave, and she’ll be the one who stays. Don’t you come back here without her, OK?”
    “What about the big guy?”
    “If he leaves, let him go. If he doesn’t, waste him. But bring me this Jacob woman.”
    “YOU’RE MRS. JACOB?“ Reacher asked.
    Jodie Garber nodded.
    “Am, was,” she said. “I’m divorced, but I keep the name for work.”
    “Who was he?”
    She shrugged.
    “A lawyer, like me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
    “How long?”
    “Three years, beginning to end. We met at law school, got married when we got jobs. I stayed on Wall Street, but he went to a firm in D.C., couple of years ago. The marriage didn’t go with him, just kind of petered out. The papers came through last fall. I could hardly remember who he was. Just a name, Alan Jacob.”
    Reacher stood in the sunny yard and looked at her. He realized he was upset that she had been married. She had been a skinny kid, but totally gorgeous at fifteen, self-confident and innocent and a little shy about it all at the same time. He had watched the battle between her shyness and her curiosity as she sat and worked up the courage to talk to him about death and life and good and evil. Then she would fidget and tuck her bony knees up under her and work the conversation around to love and sex and men and women. Then she would blush and disappear. He would be left alone, icy inside, captivated by her and angry at himself for it. Days later he would see her somewhere around the base, still blushing furiously. And now fifteen years later she was a grown woman, college and law school, married and divorced, beautiful and composed and elegant, standing there in her dead father’s yard with her arm linked through his.
    “Are you married?” she asked him.
    He shook his head.