Tripwire

shrugged helplessly and put her hand on her breastbone, like it was tender.
    “You OK?” he asked her.
    “You hit me kind of hard,” she said.
    I could rub it better, he thought.
    “Who were those guys?” she asked.
    “The two who killed Costello,” he said.
    She nodded. Then she sighed. Her blue eyes glanced left and right.
    “So where are we going?”
    He relaxed. Then he smiled. “Where’s the last place they’ll look for us?”
    She shrugged. Took her hand off her chest and used it to smooth her hair.
    “Manhattan?” she said.
    “The house,” he said. “They saw us run, they won’t expect us to double back.”
    “You’re crazy, you know that?”
    “We need the suitcase. Leon might have made notes.”
    She shook her head, dazed.
    “And we need to close the place up again. We can’t leave the garage open. It’ll end up full of raccoons. Whole families of the bastards.”
    Then he held up his hand. Put his finger to his lips. There was the sound of a motor starting up. Maybe a big V-8, maybe two hundred yards away. There was the rattle of big tires on a distant stony driveway. The burble of acceleration. Then a black shape flashed across their view. A big black jeep, aluminum wheels. A Yukon or a Tahoe, depending on whether it said GMC on the back, or Chevrolet. Two guys in it, dark suits, one of them driving and the other slumped back in his seat. Reacher stuck his head all the way out of the window and listened to the sound as it died to silence in the direction of town.
    CHESTER STONE WAITED in his own office suite more than an hour, and then he called downstairs and had the finance director contact the bank and check on the operating account. It showed a one-point-one-million-dollar credit, wired in fifty minutes ago from the Cayman office of a Bahamas-owned trust company.
    “It’s there,” the finance guy said. “You did the trick, chief.”
    Stone gripped the phone and wondered exactly what trick he had done.
    “I’m coming down,” he said. “I want to go over the figures.”
    “The figures are good,” the finance guy said. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “I’m coming down anyway,” Stone said.
    He rode the elevator two floors down and joined the finance guy in his plush inner office. Entered the password and called up the secret spreadsheet. Then the finance guy took over and typed in the new balance available in the operating account. The software ran the calculation and came up exactly level, six weeks into the future.
    “See?” the guy said. “Bingo.”
    “What about the interest payment?” Stone asked.
    “Eleven grand a week, six weeks? Kind of steep, isn’t it?”
    “Can we pay it?”
    The guy nodded confidently. “Sure we can. We owe two suppliers seventy-three grand. We got it, ready to go. If we lose the invoices, get them to re-submit, we free that cash up for a spell.”
    He tapped the screen and indicated a provision against received invoices.
    “Seventy-three grand, minus eleven a week for six weeks, gives us seven grand to spare. We should go out to dinner a couple of times.”
    “Run it again, OK?” Stone said. “Double-check.”
    The guy gave him a look, but he ran it again. He took out the one-point-one, ended up in the red, put it back in again, and ended up balanced. He canceled the provision against the invoices, subtracted eleven thousand every seven days, and ended the six-week period with an operating surplus of seven thousand dollars.
    “Close,” he said. “But the right side of close.”
    “How do we repay the principal?” Stone asked. “We need one-point-one million available at the end of the six weeks.”
    “No problem,” the guy said. “I’ve got it all figured. We’ll have it in time.”
    “Show me, OK?”
    “OK, see here?” He was tapping the screen on a different line, where payments due in from customers were listed. “These two wholesalers owe us exactly one-point-one-seven-three, which exactly matches the principal plus the lost invoices, and it’s due exactly six weeks from now.”
    “Will they pay on time?”
    The guy shrugged. “Well, they always have.”
    Stone stared at the screen. His eyes moved up and down, left and right.
    “Run it all again. Triple-check.”
    “Don’t sweat it, chief. It adds up.”
    “Just do it, OK?”
    The guy nodded. It was Stone’s company, after all. He ran it again, the whole calculation, beginning to end, and it came out just the same. Hobie’s one-point-one disappeared