Tripwire

called out I’ll have Joe and Reacher. All the kids did the same thing. The teachers, too. They called him Reacher, even in kindergarten. And somehow it traveled with him. Like any Army kid, he changed elementary schools dozens of times. First day in some new place somewhere, maybe even on a new continent, some new teacher would be yelling come here, Reacher!
    But he got used to it fast and had no problem living his whole life behind a one-word name. He was Reacher, always had been, always would be, to everybody. The first girl he ever dated was a tall brunette who sidled shyly up to him and asked what’s your name? Reacher, he replied. The loves of his life had all called him that. Mmm, Reacher, I love you, they had whispered in his ear. All of them. Jodie herself had done the exact same thing. He had appeared at the top of the concrete steps in Leon’s yard and she had looked up at him and said hello, Reacher. After fifteen long years, she still knew exactly what he was called.
    But she hadn’t called him Reacher on the mobile. He had clicked the button and said hello and she had said Hi, Jack. It went off in his ear like a siren. Then she had asked where are you? and she had sounded so tense about it he panicked and his mind started racing and for a second he missed exactly what she meant. His given name, just a lucky chance. Hi, Jack meant hijack. It took him a second to catch on. She was in trouble. Big trouble, but she was still Leon’s daughter, smart enough to think hard and warn him with two little syllables at the start of a desperate phone call.
    Hijack. An alert. A combat warning. He blinked once and crushed down the fear and went to work. First thing he did was lie to her. Combat is about time and space and opposing forces. Like a huge four-dimensional diagram. First step is misinform the enemy. Let him think your diagram is a completely different shape. You assume all communications are penetrated, and then you use them to spread lies and deceit. You buy yourself an advantage.
    He wasn’t in St. Louis. Why should he be? Why fly himself all the way down there when there were telephones in the world and he had already built a working relationship with Conrad? He called him from the Greenwich Avenue sidewalk and told him what he needed and Conrad called back just three minutes later because the file in question was right there in the A section nearest the harassed runner’s desk. He listened with the pedestrians swirling around him and Conrad read the file aloud and twelve minutes later he clicked the phone off with all the information he was ever going to need.
    Then he hustled the Lincoln south on Seventh and dumped it in a garage a block north of the Twin Towers. He hurried down and crossed the plaza and he was already inside the south tower’s lobby when Jodie called. Just eighty-eight floors below her. He was talking to the security guy at the desk, which was the voice she heard in the background. His face went blank with panic and he clicked the phone off and took the express elevator to eighty-nine. He stepped out and breathed hard and forced himself to calm down. Stay calm and plan. His guess was eighty-nine would be laid out the same as eighty-eight. It was quiet and empty. Corridors ran around the elevator cores, narrow, lit by bulbs in the ceiling. There were doors opening into the individual office suites. They had rectangular wired-glass portholes set off-center at a short person’s eye level. Each suite door had a metal plate listing the name of the occupant and a buzzer to press for entry.
    He found the fire stairs and ran down one level. The stairwell was utilitarian. No finesse in the decor. Just plain, dusty concrete with metal handrails. Behind every fire door was an extinguisher. Above the extinguisher was a bright red cabinet with a red-painted ax clipped into place behind glass. On the wall next to the cabinet was a giant stencil in red, marking the floor number.
    He came out into the eighty-eighth-floor corridor. It was equally quiet. Identical narrow width, identical lighting, same layout, same doors. He ran the wrong way and came around to CCT last. It had a light oak door, with a brass plate next to it, and a brass push button for the buzzer. He pulled the door, gently. It was locked tight. He stooped and looked in through the wired-glass porthole. He saw a reception area. Bright lights. Brass-and-oak decor. A counter to his right. Another door, straight ahead. That door