Tripwire

called.
    Reacher nodded vaguely and they all moved toward the plain door in the cinder-block wall. Lieutenant Simon was waiting on the other side of it with the offer of a ride around the perimeter road to the passenger terminals.

15
    FIRST-CLASS OR NOT, the flight back was miserable. It was the same plane, going east to New York along the second leg of a giant triangle. It was cleaned and perfumed and checked and refueled, and it had a new crew on board. Reacher and Jodie were in the same seats they had left four hours earlier. Reacher took the window again, but it felt different. It was still two and a half times as wide as normal, still sumptuously upholstered in leather and sheepskin, but he took no pleasure in sitting in it again.
    The lights were dimmed, to represent night. They had taken off into an outrageous tropical sunset boiling away beyond the islands, and then they had turned away to fly toward darkness. The engines settled to a muted hiss. The flight attendants were quiet and unobtrusive. There was only one other passenger in the cabin. He was sitting two rows ahead, across the aisle. He was a tall, spare man, dressed in a seersucker short-sleeve shirt printed with pale stripes. His right forearm was laid gently on the arm of the chair, and his hand hung down, limp and relaxed. His eyes were closed.
    “How tall is he?” Jodie whispered.
    Reacher leaned over and glanced ahead. “Maybe six one.”
    “Same as Victor Hobie,” she said. “Remember the file?”
    Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes. up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.
    “About half and half, right?” Jodie said.
    “A little more than half,” Reacher said. “The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived.”
    The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.
    “He survived,” Jodie said. “He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden.”
    Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.
    “I would have bet my life he isn’t,” he said.
    He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.
    “Why does it bother you so much?” she asked, in the quiet.
    He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.
    “Lots of reasons,” he said.
    “Like what?”
    He shrugged. “Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong.”
    She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. “Being wrong isn’t the end of the world.”
    He shook his head. “Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the Series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up.”
    “So what are you saying?”
    “I’m saying judgments like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right.”
    “But you had nothing to go on.”
    “Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that bums me up, because where does it leave me now?”
    “In what sense?”
    “I’ve got to tell the Hobies,” he said. “It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshiped that boy. They worshiped the military, the patriotism of it