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 centre 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.
T have 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 co-pilot 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 honeymoon 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 also 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 timetable 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 meeting, right? So you can still make it.’
‘I need to get briefed in,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what it’s about.’
‘You’ll have a couple of hours. You’re a quick study.’
‘It’s crazy. Only gives us four hours in Hawaii.’
‘All we need. I’ll call ahead, set it up.’
‘We’ll be on a plane all night. I’ll be going to my meeting after a sleepless night on a damn plane.’
‘So we’ll go first class,’ he said. ‘Rutter’s paying, right? We can sleep in first class. The chairs look comfortable enough.’
She shrugged and sighed. ‘Crazy.’
‘Let me use your phone,’ he said.
She handed him the mobile from her bag and he called long-distance information and asked for the number. Dialled it and heard it ring six thousand miles away. It rang eight times and the voice he wanted to hear answered it.
‘This is Jack Reacher,’ he said. ‘You going to be in the office all day?’
The answer was slow and sleepy, because it was very early in the morning in Hawaii, but it was the answer he wanted to hear. He clicked the phone off and turned back to Jodie. She sighed at him again, but this time there was a smile mixed in with it. She stepped to the counter and used the gold card to buy two first-class tickets, Dallas-Fort Worth to Honolulu to New York. The guy at the counter made the seat assignment on the spot, slightly bewildered in front of people paying the price of a used sportscar to buy twenty hours on a plane and four on the ground on Oahu. He handed the wallets over and twenty minutes later Reacher was settling into an enormous leather-and-sheepskin chair with Jodie safely a yard away at his side.