Tripwire

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 modem 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 hon eymoon 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