Tripwire by Lee Child

‘The zoo? Rutter doesn’t live near the zoo.’

‘Not the zoo, exactly. The Botanical Gardens. Something you need to see.’

She glanced sideways at him and then concentrated on driving. Traffic was heavy, just past the peak of rush hour, but it was moving. They followed the river north and then north-west to the George Washington Bridge and turned their backs on it and headed east into the Bronx. The expressway was slow, but the parkway north was faster, because it was leading out of town and New York was sucking people inward at that hour. Across the barrier, the southbound traffic was snarled.

‘OK, where to?’ she asked.

‘Go past Fordham University. Past the conservatory,

and park at the top.’

She nodded and made the lane changes. Fordham slid by on the left, and then the conservatory on the right. She used the museum entrance and found the lot just beyond it. It was mostly empty.

‘Now what?’

He took the leather-bound folder with him.

‘Just keep an open mind,’ he said.

The conservatory was a hundred yards ahead of them. He had read all about it in a free leaflet, the day before. It was named for somebody called Enid Haupt and had cost a fortune to build in 1902, and ten times as much to renovate ninety-five years later, which was money well spent because the result was magnificent. It was huge and ornate, the absolute definition of urban philanthropy expressed in iron and milky white glass.

It was hot and damp inside. Reacher led Jodie around to the place he was looking for. The exotic plants were massed in huge beds bounded by little walls and railings. There were benches set on the edges of the walkways. The milky glass filtered the sunlight to a bright overcast. There was a strong smell of heavy damp earth and pungent blooms.

‘What?’ she asked. She was partly amused, partly impatient. He found the bench he was looking for and stepped away from it, close to the low wall. He stepped half a pace left, then another, until he was sure.

‘Stand here,’ he said.

He took her shoulders from behind and moved her into the same position he had just occupied. Ducked his head to her level and checked.

‘Stand on tiptoes,’ he told her. ‘Look straight ahead.’

She made herself taller and stared ahead. Her back

was straight and her hair was spilled on her shoulders.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Well, plants and things.’

He nodded and opened the leather folder. Took out the glossy photograph of the grey emaciated Westerner, flinching away from his guard’s rifle. He held it out, arm’s length in front of her, just on the edge of her vision. She looked at it.

‘What?’ she asked again, half amused, half frustrated.

‘Compare,’ he said.

She kept her head still and flicked her eyes left and right between the photograph and the scene in front of her. Then she snatched the picture from him and held it herself, arm’s length in front of her. Her eyes widened and her face went pale.

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Shit, this picture was taken here? Right here? It was, wasn’t it? All these plants are exactly the same.’

He ducked down again and checked once more. She was holding the picture so the shapes of the plants corresponded exactly. A mass of some kind of palm on the left, fifteen feet high, fronds of fern to the right and behind in a tangled spray. The two figures would have been twenty feet into the dense flower bed, picked out by a telephoto lens that compressed the perspective and threw the nearer vegetation out of focus. Well to the rear was a jungle hardwood, which the camera had blurred with distance. It was actually growing in a different bed.

‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘Shit, I don’t believe it.’

The light was right, too. The milky glass way above them gave a pretty good impersonation of jungle overcast. Vietnam is a mostly cloudy place. The jagged mountains suck the clouds down, and most people

remember the fogs and the mists, like the ground itself is always steaming. Jodie stared between the photo and the reality in front of her, dodging fractionally left and right to get a perfect fit.

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