Jack the Reaper, page 2
These three no longer served. He held no real power to coerce them. Only greed and dysfunctional personalities glued them to their seats.
“We had a sleeper in our unit, sir. A traitor. The enemy was Major Jack Reacher. Former U.S. Army military police, retired.” Larry cleared his throat. “He disabled the three of us by force and, uh, made it clear that we should let him face the others alone, sir.”
Moe looked up and found his voice. “The odds were five to one against Reacher, and our guys were heavily armed. We couldn’t get out there, but we expected our guys to prevail.”
“It’s embarrassing to admit this, General. Five to one odds. Our side lost.” Curly glanced at Parnell and shrugged before lowering his gaze again. “We were all three hospitalized and when we were released and went looking for them, we found nothing. No bodies, no vehicles, no weapons. Nothing at all.”
“And Reacher. You found him and took care of him.” Parnell’s fierce frown would have been more than adequate warning to anyone who had seen him explode.
But these three had never witnessed the fireworks. Not yet.
Curly shook his head. “Reacher just disappeared into thin air, sir.”
Moe spoke up again. “We had some pretty serious injuries, and they took a while to heal. We’re good to go now. We’re ready for combat.”
Parnell studied them briefly beneath hooded eyes. Cowards. Inept. Disloyal.
They deserved to die.
No qualms about that decision.
None at all.
CHAPTER TWO
“I see. That’s that, then.” Parnell nodded as if he agreed with their choices. Only one important question left to be asked. “Contract payments were made to the Colonel. He held my share of revenues. Where is my money?”
Larry’s eyes widened. The three glanced sideways at each other. Larry licked his lips as if his mouth had dried up. “We, uh, got paid in cash. No paper trail that way. The Colonel kept the cash locked in a room in his New York City apartment. At the Dakota.”
Parnell’s breath caught painfully in his chest. His nostrils flared of their own accord. “Who is living in his apartment now?”
Curly said, “We don’t know. Sir.”
Moe seemed to sense Nitro Mack was close to the last of his patience. He jumped in with what he probably figured would get the heat turned in the right direction. “Reacher knew the money was there. We didn’t know the combination to the safe, but Reacher did. The money should be there. But if it isn’t, he probably took it.”
Parnell narrowed his eyes and felt his nostrils flare. He put the kind of edge in his tone that every army grunt was conditioned to fear. “This Reacher seems like a convenient scapegoat to me, gentlemen. He shows up out of nowhere, destroys your CO and your entire team, and steals my money. Then he disappears. You expect me to believe a story like that?”
Curly was the one who stepped up this time. “General, we need to work. If we’d split that nine million dollars between us, why would we be sitting here in this hellhole begging for table scraps?”
Parnell had dressed down many a soldier. He knew when he was being lied to.
Thing was, this preposterous story came across his bullshit meter and registered as true.
Unbelievable, sure.
But true.
Just one thing didn’t ring solid. “Where did your CO keep the rest of the money?”
Larry arched his eyebrows. “Like we said, the money was in the apartment’s safe. All nine million dollars of it.”
Parnell concealed his surprise by cocking his head as if he was thinking things through. So, nine million was stashed in the apartment, but what about the rest?
These idiots had no idea.
“What about Scavo?”
Larry’s eyebrows raised. “Nick Scavo? He, uh, hasn’t been with our company since that revolution in Africa, sir. We figure he was killed. We lost three men there.”
“Any chance he was helping Reacher in this last mission?” Parnell knew the answer to the question already.
These three had no clue where Scavo was, or whether he made it out of Africa.
Parnell tuned out Larry’s feeble excuses and sipped the warm beer.
He glanced around the crowded bar. The noise level had jumped up a dozen decibels since these jokers walked in.
No one seemed to notice the four men talking quietly in the back corner.
He returned his attention to his wannabe business partners. “Okay. Here’s how this is going to go. You’ll do the job I hired you for here. When you’re done, you’ll get paid in cash. Half of what you receive is mine. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, nodding as if they meant it, which was not likely.
“One final thing.” Parnell’s frosty blue eyes pierced like lasers under the deep frown that creased his brow. “What does this Jack Reacher look like?”
The three glanced at each other. Larry cleared his throat and spoke for the crew. “Uh, well, sir, he, uh, looks a lot like you. Tall. Big. Dark blond hair. Blue eyes. Like that.”
Parnell tilted his chin up and locked gazes with them one at a time. “I’m going to check your story. If I find out you’ve lied to me, none of us will be happy. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” they said again in unison. “No problem, sir.”
Parnell nodded. “Get to work. I’ll be in touch.”
They scrambled to their feet and snapped a smart salute. Old habits die hard.
Parnell nodded again. The three turned away.
He watched as they wound through the crowd to the front and exited into the sun-washed desert.
After they cleared the threshold, Parnell rose and hurried toward the men’s room.
At the end of the narrow hallway, he ducked out through the back door and stepped into the blinding sunlight.
He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses.
Within seconds, he’d located his vehicle and sped away from the bar, raising a plume of dust behind him.
He had covered about half of a mile of the rough dirt road when the bomb exploded and shook the very ground underneath him.
He clamped both hands onto the steering wheel to avoid being thrown out of his seat, but he kept the accelerator pressed to the floor.
He glanced back to see vehicle parts and body parts still settling after the blast.
Exactly as he’d planned. The vehicle the three stooges arrived in had blasted to unidentifiable bits nicely and right on time.
He smirked with satisfaction.
Witnesses he’d paid would say the cause of the blast was a landmine beneath the vehicle.
Landmines were common enough.
Not a bad guess.
The explosion rocked everything within a two-mile radius. Too much damage for a landmine, but no one would bother to sort out the actual cause.
Life was cheap in Iraq.
The three stooges were not part of any authorized work force. No one would care why or how they’d died.
Hell, it was likely no one would even notice for a good long time.
Parnell glanced over his shoulder for a last look.
Mission partially accomplished.
He smiled again and then began to whistle an old tune from his teenaged years. Another one bites the dust.
Now all he had to do was find Reacher and recover his money.
Parnell figured Scavo was involved in all of this somehow. He would find Scavo, too.
All of which would need to be handled carefully. If he acted too soon, he’d attract the wrong kind of attention.
An army general’s life was not his own. Privacy was impossible as long as he remained on active duty. Which was fine. Working his side deals within his current fish-bowl job was second nature to him now.
He’d be tied up here in Iraq for another few months, more or less.
Plenty of time to locate Reacher and Scavo, the last two members of the Colonel’s crew.
Accumulate the resources he needed.
Plenty of time to make a solid plan.
He grinned. Hell, the first thing on the list was obvious.
Find that nine million, maybe still stashed at the Dakota. The Colonel certainly wouldn’t need it.
CHAPTER THREE
Four months later
Thursday, January 13
3:00 a.m.
Detroit, Michigan
FBI Special Agent Kim Otto’s size five shoes pounded the treadmill as she ran, mouthing the words breathlessly with each footfall.
Jack Reacher was dead.
Had to be.
Everybody said so.
Time to move on.
Long past time.
Let it go.
He’s dead.
It’s over.
Move on.
Get a life.
That last one made her smile ruefully. A life. What was that? She hadn’t had a real life since her divorce. The Bureau was her life. And that’s the way she liked it.
She’d covered ten miles already, but fatigue eluded her. She couldn’t sleep until she was exhausted enough to erase the visions that plagued her dreams, and she wasn’t quite there yet.
She faced the magnificent moonlit view of the Detroit River and the twinkling lights of Windsor to the South, but she noticed nothing.
Instead, she relived the explosion that killed Reacher and very nearly killed her team.
She’d visualized the events thousands of times. She knew he was dead. Knew it the same way she knew the basic laws of physics.
Yet, Reacher felt like unfinished business.
How could that be?
Only one more time, she promised herself again.
She re-experienced all of it.
Gooseflesh raised on her whole body as it had with the cold, sharp wind off the frigid Atlantic six weeks ago. The salty air stung her nostrils.
Her heart pounded hard with terror and exertion as she ran from the bomb.
She saw the magnificent old house on Maine’s Rocky Pointe explode into millions of pieces.
The vision replayed in her head.
Again, and again, and again.
Her shoe tread caught on the edge of the treadmill belt, jerking her attention to the present. She stumbled and lifted her foot and worked to stay upright.
When she’d regained her balance, she cocked her head and considered the provable facts objectively once more, arguing the evidence.
“Reacher could have escaped after he set that bomb and before it detonated,” she had said to her partner when they argued during the post mortem.
Reacher had plenty of experience with C-4. He knew precisely how it functioned. He understood how much time he had to take cover.
Reacher was a guy who lived comfortably with violence. He accepted that he might lose his life at any moment.
But he wasn’t suicidal.
Not even remotely.
He’d constructed the bomb. He would have built in enough time to run upstairs from the basement, down the back hallway, and out through the kitchen door to safety.
She believed these facts deep in her bones.
On the treadmill, she gasped with each quick inhale. Her heart pounded against her chest from exertion and exhaustion.
She struggled to stay focused. Sweat soaked her headband and glistened on her body as she argued the same hard evidence she’d covered every day since the explosion.
More likely that Reacher was inside when the C-4 detonated. That’s what everyone said.
No evidence to the contrary had been located after six weeks of diligent searching by every qualified tech on the east coast and beyond.
The former owner of that house had tried to kill Reacher nine years before. Reacher won.
But this time, Reacher was nine years older. Nine years weaker. Nine years slower.
New owners of the house this time, too. Tougher ones.
Reacher had lost that last battle.
He must have.
Reacher must be dead.
He must be.
But was he?
She struggled for every ragged breath, but she didn’t stop running, and her mind was mired in Reacher’s horrific death like a car spinning four tires in the mud.
For twenty-six days in November, she’d chased Reacher’s scent around the country and across the oceans like an old bloodhound.
But she wasn’t that old, and her sense of smell wasn’t that keen. Maybe that’s why she’d failed. She’d never found him.
Even so, she’d noticed his scent, heard his voice, dodged bullets meant to kill him. She’d caught glimpses of him a few times, she was sure. She’d noticed his scent after he’d left the room.
No more than that.
She drew ragged breaths and wiped the sweat from her eyes with her forearm and bumped up the incline on the treadmill with her fist.
And now Reacher was dead. He must be. No alternative theories she’d conjured up over the past six weeks had panned out.
The final conclusion was the most likely answer.
The man who seemed to have survived longer than Count Dracula had finally lived his last. She didn’t know much about vampires, but she recalled that even the undead could be killed with the right weapon.
What was she to do now? Return to busting drug dealers and traffickers and wannabe airplane terrorists carrying explosives in their underwear?
She felt the bile rise in her throat.
Once, her FBI job had been challenging enough. Perhaps it would be so again. Or maybe it was time to move on.
But where would she go?
Should she actually try to get a life?
CHAPTER FOUR
She kept her head high, covered another mile, heard herself panting, and still she ran.
She felt caged. At loose ends. All sixes and sevens, as the Brits put it. No longer master of her days and nights.
Face it.
She grimaced.
Okay.
Truth was, she was no longer matching wits with the most worthy adversary she’d ever hunted. The hunt for Reacher was dangerous. Deadly. But also exhilarating, in a frightening way.
Like a drug addict, she craved the adrenaline.
The real problem was, her life had returned to normal.
She’d come home to her Detroit apartment and her desk at the FBI Detroit Field Office. Her world had continued as if the Boss had never called that cold November morning at four a.m. and tasked her with the most dangerous assignment of her career. A baffling subject, no data or background on him anywhere. FBI resources off limits. An assignment she was forbidden to discuss with anyone.
Except Gaspar. She could talk to him. She’d left him a message earlier. Another one.
She kept running. What else was she to do?
Four miles later, her cell phone rang. Distracted by the phone, she stumbled on the treadmill again. She grabbed the side rails and struggled to right herself.
Her legs were as weak as the flimsy rice noodles her mother made for special family dinners. She could barely stand. Enough.
She pushed her weight up, placing her feet onto the stationary treads on either side of the belt. She palmed the big red off button before she stepped onto the floor, still hanging on to one side rail.
Her legs quivered with fatigue and collapsed. She landed on her ass on the floor.
She picked up the phone with a shaking hand, thumbed the talk button, and managed to squeak out a breathless, “Otto.”
When he heard the greeting, FBI Special Agent Carlos Gaspar chuckled. “What’re you chasing now, Suzie Wong?”
She bristled, but she had no breath to argue. They’d separated at Boston Logan Airport the day after the old house exploded. It was the last time she’d seen him.
He said, “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. What’s up?”
Otto glanced around the gym. It was deserted at three in the morning. Most people slept at night. She remembered those days, when she kept somewhat normal hours, the same as everyone else.
Her breath was slowly coming back. “How’s the baby?”
“You called me at this hour to ask me that?” Gaspar’s fifth child, his only son, had been born three days after the explosion that killed Reacher. Mother and child were fine. Whenever she’d asked, he said he was glad to be home and sounded like he meant it. He’d returned to work in the Miami Field Office and never looked back.
Otto had respected his decision. Mostly because she could find no reason not to.
“I knew you’d be awake,” she replied.
A while ago, she’d discovered that Gaspar rarely slept, because of his injury. He didn’t deny the accusation. He never wanted to talk about his damaged body or the constant pain it caused him, and she respected that decision, too. As long as he did the job, the rest was none of her business. She liked boundaries. She had her own secrets to protect, just as he did.
“The baby’s fine. Everyone here is fine. Thanks for checking in.” He paused a couple of moments before he asked, “Reacher still keeping you awake nights?”
She said nothing.
He sighed, and she heard the exasperation all the way from Miami. “Look, Sunshine, it’s over. We filled in a few blanks on Reacher’s Special Personnel Task Force Background Check. That’s all we can do. The candidate died. It happens.”
“It doesn’t bother you that the file remains incomplete?”
“Not really. So, Reacher’s file will always be too thin. Like many other files stowed in the U.S. Government’s cavernous inventory and forgotten. So what?”
“And the top-secret assignment Reacher was being considered for? Such a big deal that we absolutely had to find out every last thing about him, no matter what and nearly died trying? You’re not curious about that?”
“Whatever that job was, it’ll go to a different candidate if Uncle Sam still needs it done.” He breathed deeply through his nose a couple of times while she waited. “Look, we’ve been over this. Whatever Reacher did or didn’t do during all those years after he left the Army doesn’t really matter now, does it?”
She hung her head and closed her eyes, worn down, in body and spirit. It was hard to argue with the cold facts. But she didn’t have it in her to give up. She never had. She never would.
