‘Ten-dollar tip in it for you,’ he said.
The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy’s family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark smiling children and a dark smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.
‘Twenty dollars,’ he said. ‘If we get going right now, OK?’
‘Twenty dollars?’ the guy repeated, amazed.
‘Thirty. For your kids. They look nice.’
The guy grinned in the mirror and touched his fingers to his lips and laid them gently on the shiny surface of the photograph. He swung the cab through
the lane changes on to the perimeter track and came off again more or less immediately, eight hundred yards into the journey, outside a military gate which looked identical to the one fronting Fort ‘Wolters. Jodie opened the door and stepped out into the heat and Reacher went into his pocket and came out with his roll of cash. Top bill was a fifty, and he peeled it off and pushed it through the little hinged door in the Plexiglas.
‘Keep it.’
Then he pointed at the photograph. ‘That your house?’
The driver nodded.
‘Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?’
The guy shook his head. ‘Tip-top condition.’
‘The roof OK?’
‘No problems at all.’
Reacher nodded. ‘Just checking.’
He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back towards the civilian terminal. There was a faint breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.
‘Where are we going?’
‘CIL-HI,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s right inside here.’
He pronounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.
‘Silly?’ she repeated. ‘So what’s that?’
‘C, I, L, H, I,’ he said. ‘Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It’s the Department of the Army’s main facility.’
‘For what?’
‘I’ll show you for what,’ he said.
Then he paused. ‘At least I hope I will.’
They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.
‘We’re here to see Nash Newman,’ he said.
The sergeant looked surprised and picked up a clipboard and peeled thin sheets of paper back. He slid a thick finger along a line and nodded. Picked up a phone and dialled a number. Four digits. An internal call. He announced the visitors and listened to the reply, and then he looked puzzled. He covered the phone with his palm and turned back to Jodie.
‘How old are you, miss?’ he asked.
‘Thirty,’ Jodie said, puzzled in turn.
‘Thirty,’ the MP repeated into the phone. Then he listened again and hung it up and wrote something on the clipboard. Turned back to the window.
‘He’ll be right out, so come on through.’
They squeezed through the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the heavy counterweight on the end of the vehicle barrier and waited on the hot pavement six feet away from where they had started, but now it was military pavement, not Hawaii Department of Transportation pavement, and that made a lot of difference to the look on the sergeant’s face. The suspicion was all gone, replaced by frank curiosity about why the legendary Nash Newman was in such a big hurry to get these two civilians inside the base.
There was a low concrete building maybe sixty yards away with a plain personnel door set in the blank end wall. The door opened up and a silver-haired man stepped out. He turned back to close it and