Tripwire by Lee Child

medium-sized man in an ill-fitting black suit. He was carrying a cheap briefcase upholstered with brown plastic stamped to make it look like crocodile skin. She squeezed into the elevator behind him. The car was full and people were calling their floor numbers to the woman nearest the buttons. The guy in the bad suit asked for eighty-eight. Jodie said nothing.

The car stopped at most floors in its zone and people jostled out. Progress was slow. It was dead-on two o’clock when the car arrived on eighty-eight. Jodie stepped out. The guy in the bad suit stepped out behind her. They were in a deserted corridor. Undistinguished closed doors led into office suites. Jodie went one way and the guy in the suit went the other, both of them looking at the plates fixed next to the doors. They met up again in front of an oak slab marked Cayman Corporate Trust. There was a wired-glass porthole set off-centre in it. Jodie glanced through it and the guy in the suit leaned past her and pulled it open.

‘We in the same meeting?’ Jodie asked, surprised.

She followed him inside to a brass-and-oak reception area. There were office smells. Hot chemicals from copying machines, stewed coffee somewhere. The guy in the suit turned back to her and nodded.

‘I guess we are,’ he said.

She stuck out her hand as she walked.

‘I’m Jodie Jacob,’ she said. ‘Spencer Gutman. For the creditor.’

The guy walked backward and juggled his plastic briefcase into his left hand and smiled and shook hands with her.

‘I’m David Forster,’ he said. ‘Forster and Abelstein.’

They were at the reception counter. She stopped and stared at him.

‘No, you’re not,’ she said blankly. ‘I know David very well.’

The guy looked suddenly tense. The lobby went silent. She turned the other way and saw the guy she had last seen clinging to the door handle of her Bravada as Reacher hauled away from the collision on Broadway. He was sitting there calmly behind the counter, looking straight back at her. His left hand moved and touched a button. In the silence she heard a click from the entrance door. Then his right hand moved. It went down empty and came back up with a gun the colour of dull metal. It had a wide barrel like a tube and a metal handgrip. The barrel was more than a foot long. The guy in the bad suit dropped his plastic case and jerked his hands in the air. Jodie stared at the weapon and thought but that’s a shotgun.

The guy holding it moved his left hand again and hit another button. The door to the inner office opened. The man who had crashed the Suburban into them was standing there framed in the doorway. He had another gun in his hand. Jodie recognized the type from movies she’d seen. It was an automatic pistol. On the cinema screen it fired loud bullets that smashed you six feet backward. The Suburban driver was holding it steady on a point to her left and the other guy’s right, like he was ready to jerk his wrist either

way.

The guy with the shotgun came out from behind the counter and pushed past Jodie. Went up behind the guy with the bad suit and rammed the shotgun barrel into the small of his back. There was a hard sound, metal on metal, muffled by cloth. The guy with the

shotgun put his hand up under the jacket and came out with a big chromium revolver. He held it up, like an exhibit.

‘Unusual accessory for a lawyer,’ the man in the doorway said.

‘He’s not a lawyer,’ his partner said. ‘The woman says she knows David Forster very well and this ain’t him.’

The man in the doorway nodded.

‘My name is Tony,’ he said. ‘Come inside, both of you, please.’

He stepped to one side and covered Jodie with the automatic pistol while his partner pushed the guy claiming to be Forster in through the open door. Then he beckoned with the gun and Jodie found herself walking towards him. He stepped close and pushed her through the door with a hand flat on her back. She stumbled once and regained her balance. Inside was a big office, spacious and square. Dim light from shaded windows. There was living-room furniture arranged in front of a desk. Three identical sofas, with lamp tables. A huge brass-and-glass coffee table filled the space between the sofas. There were two people sitting on the left-hand sofa. A man and a woman. The man wore an immaculate suit and tie. The woman wore a wrinkled silk party dress. The man looked up, blankly. The woman looked up in terror.

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