The Man Who Strikes Fear

by Dan Ames

  It was a premium contract, that was for sure. Especially as the potential for armed conflict was fairly low. Ordinarily, a job with this kind of money always meant live fire and active hostiles would be involved.

  It was the kind of job he would have previously accepted on the spot.

  But now, it was different.

  Because of Pauling.

  Tallon closed the document from Caldwell and opened the autopsy report Pauling had shown him.

  He was certainly no stranger to torture and murder, but the crime scene images of the FBI agent and his wife back in New York gave Tallon pause.

  They were spectacularly brutal.

  A viciousness rarely seen in civilian circles. Overseas? In terrorist camps and on the front lines with groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, this kind of thing was fairly ordinary.

  Tallon wondered about Pauling and if she would get involved in the investigation. He hoped not. These were some really horrible people, and she had been out of the FBI game for quite awhile now.

  Listen to yourself, he laughed. Worrying about Pauling. He knew she was more than capable of handling herself in any kind of situation.

  Being in love with her had momentarily clouded his thinking.

  Tallon closed the autopsy report and opened up his email.

  First, he sent a note to Pauling briefly explaining the job offer and his decision.

  And then he sent a note to Caldwell informing him he was accepting the gig.

  14

  They met for drinks at a bar a short cab ride from Pauling’s apartment.

  Wyman showed up with that weary expression Pauling knew so well. A day at the Bureau could drain a person mentally, physically and emotionally. There had been long days after which Pauling would get home, look in the mirror, and see the same kind of bone-deep fatigue Wyman was displaying right now.

  Not to mention when an agent was killed in the line of duty, there was a sense of survivor guilt. And anger. Plenty of anger.

  “What are you drinking?” Pauling asked as she caught the eye of the bartender. She had already ordered a dirty martini and started a tab.

  “Grey Goose martini with a blue cheese olive,” Wyman told the bartender who placed Pauling’s drink in front of her.

  Limelight was a retro kind of bar, with mostly craft cocktails and a limited bar menu. It primarily served office drones who preferred to wait for rush hour to end before heading home rather than fighting traffic or other riders on the subway or on commuter trains.

  Right now, the bar was fairly full. Mostly well-dressed professionals, probably a lot of brokers from Wall Street.

  Pauling had chosen a quiet high-top table opposite the entrance. It was the best spot in the bar to be able to have an actual conversation, as opposed to yelling at each other.

  “Long day?” she asked Wyman.

  “Very.”

  “Here’s to Giles,” Pauling said. They clinked glasses and each took a long drink.

  Wyman let out a long sigh.

  Pauling held up her hand. “Look, you don’t need to tell me anything. I know how the Bureau is, and Steele in particular. So if you want to keep whatever you’re doing under wraps, that’s find with me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Wyman said. “What the hell else are we going to talk about? Football?“

  “The new concussion protocol?” Pauling asked.

  They both laughed.

  “Yeah, I’m in charge of Option C,” Wyman said, her voice somewhat bitter. In terms of FBI vernacular, Option C would be one of the less important, or less likely to be productive, avenues of investigation.

  In other words, it was usually the angle that would almost certainly lead to nothing, but that simply had to be eliminated. And it was usually assigned to the least senior agent.

  “And Steele assigned himself Option A,” Pauling said.

  “Of course. I’m responsible for any unusual occurrences not related to Giles. New prison releases, bail jumpers, new threats against the Bureau, etc.”

  “Well, it’s always possible,” Pauling said. “Look at the bright side – at least you’re doing something for Giles. I’m not.”

  “Yeah, I just wish I was working on Giles’ cases. That’s where we’re going to find the bad guys. There’s no way it was an anonymous hit on a generic FBI agent. They went after Giles and his wife for a reason. A very specific reason.”

  “Agreed.”

  “It’s just a little odd, though,” Wyman ventured. “Giles was about to retire. He had been winding things down for quite some time. The last few cases of his had been fairly mundane. Insider training. White-collar espionage. Wire fraud. All with pretty low stakes.”

  “Nothing white-collar or low stakes about what they did to him.”

  “That’s what’s odd.”

  A group of men in nearly identical suits entered the bar. Pauling pegged them as attorneys.

  “Could be tangential,” Pauling pointed out. “Maybe it wasn’t the bad guys he convicted, but their victims. Maybe they didn’t feel the FBI did a good enough job punishing the people who screwed them over.”

  “Yeah, could be,” Wyman said. Her strong jaw was nearly clenched and Pauling wanted to tell her to relax, but she didn’t. That’s how it was working at the Bureau. High stakes. High pressure.

  There were rumors about Wyman’s sexual orientation. She was single. Not married. And never talked about dating. Pauling suspected she was gay, but never asked. It was none of her business.

  Pauling missed this part of her work at the Bureau. The spitballing. The testing out of theories. Teamwork. Even though politics sometimes interfered at the office, most of the time it was set aside for the greater good.

  “Who knows, maybe Steele will uncover something Giles was working on that will throw the investigation into a whole new light,” Pauling offered, trying to be positive.

  “Oh, Steele’s not working on that. That’s Option B.”

  “What exactly is Option A then?”

  Wyman hesitated and Pauling knew despite their friendship, the woman for the first time was wondering how much she should share.

  “There was a detail not included in the autopsy and the crime scene reports. Withheld from everyone except for the core team.”

  Pauling nodded. The Bureau, and law enforcement in general, did it all the time. It was usually done to rule out phony call-ins who claimed credit. And, to sometimes make the killers think they were one step ahead. Or, in some cases the detail was too gruesome to be made public.

  Pauling wondered in the case of Giles if it was one or all of the above.

  “You don’t have to–” Pauling said.

  “Two words, written on the living room wall in blood,” Wyman said.

  She paused and looked into Pauling’s eyes.

  “For Reacher.”

  15

  The team leader stood in Henry Lee’s office, studied the dead man nailed to the wall. He’d been stripped, tortured, and his body desecrated in ways that were only limited by the dark imaginations of his men.

  Blood was everywhere, which was the point.

  The rest of the men had gathered their weapons and tools, and were now waiting in the generic rental car which they would use to transport their tools back to the motor home.

  The murder had gone just as planned. Henry Lee had screamed like the others, although it had been muffled by the duct tape across his mouth. The team leader had understood what the dying man was asking.

  What do you want?

  I’ll give you anything!

  The idiot had no way of knowing they didn’t want anything. At least, nothing that Henry Lee could provide voluntarily.

  Now, before he left, he knew he had one job left to do.

  Still wearing the latex surgeon’s gloves, he dipped one finger into Henry’s Lee rapidly drying blood and wrote two words on the wall.

  For Reacher.

  16

  Pauling had done something slightly out of
the ordinary and ordered a second martini. She couldn’t help herself; Wyman’s description of what had been written on the wall of the Giles crime scene had shaken her to the core.

  For Reacher.

  What the hell did that mean?

  Jack Reacher?

  “What’s wrong?” Wyman asked.

  Pauling quickly recovered. “I’ve been out of the game too long,” she lied. “I still can’t believe this happened.”

  She had no intention of telling Wyman about her history with Jack Reacher. At least, not yet.

  They stayed at the bar and talked at length about the Bureau, stories involving Giles, and Pauling shared a few Arnie Steele tales, as well. But the truth was, Pauling couldn’t concentrate. All she could think about was how and why Reacher’s name had been dragged into the crime scene of her former colleague.

  By the time they finished their drinks, Pauling still wasn’t closer to an answer.

  She paid for the drinks at the bar and then they each hailed a cab.

  Pauling gave Wyman a quick hug, which seemed to surprise the other woman. Wyman promised to keep her up to speed as best she could. Pauling told her not to jeopardize her standing at the office.

  Back at home, Pauling grabbed a bottled water from the fridge and drank half of it in one long pull.

  For Reacher, as in, revenge?

  Someone had killed Edward Giles in revenge for something Reacher had done? Well, Pauling had to admit that there were probably a lot of people who wouldn’t mind getting revenge on Reacher. He was a one-man wrecking crew and had probably put dozens of bad guys in hospitals. But what did that have to do with Giles? Or the New York FBI?

  Pauling wandered into the living room and thought about the time she’d spent here with Reacher. How they’d made love in the bedroom multiple times.

  Were they crossing paths again?

  For Reacher.

  The only conclusion Pauling could come up with was that maybe there’d been a case that involved both Reacher and Giles.

  If so, that would be Steele’s job to find out. He’d assigned himself Option A and any link between Reacher and Giles would be the top priority, in Pauling’s estimation.

  It must have been the same conclusion Steele reached, too, otherwise he wouldn’t have assigned it to himself.

  Pauling weighed her options.

  Obviously, Wyman hadn’t known about Pauling’s connection to Reacher. Did that mean Steele didn’t either? He’d known about her recent trip out West. Was it possible the FBI didn’t know?

  The case she’d worked on with Reacher had been at a time when she’d already left the Bureau.

  If they did know, well, that didn’t matter. They could contact her or not.

  If they didn’t know, though, was it her obligation to volunteer the information? And what information did she have exactly?

  She didn’t know where the hell Reacher was.

  No one did.

  Half the time, Reacher didn’t know where he was going.

  So, Pauling couldn’t help them in that regard.

  Plus, she hadn’t seen him in years. Other than the case they’d worked on which by now was very old news, she had no other information.

  Thinking objectively, Pauling couldn’t come up with a good reason to volunteer her history with Reacher, except for the fact that it would possibly get her involved with the investigation of Giles’ murder.

  But even that was iffy.

  Steele would most likely get whatever information he could from her and then toss her to the side. Pauling couldn’t blame him, she probably would do the same thing in his situation.

  She glanced across her living room toward the short hallway that led to her home office.

  In a previous case years ago she’d helped an IT specialist get out from under a white-collar theft charge by proving he’d been framed. As part of her payment, he’d figured out a way for Pauling to maintain her access to the FBI’s internal databases. Not technically illegal, it was simply that her log in and password credentials were updated thanks to her profile being hidden on the Bureau’s server and listed as active.

  She ducked back into the kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and went into her home office. Pauling turned on the lights and started her computer.

  There was little chance she would find something the team at headquarters had overlooked, but that wasn’t her goal.

  Pauling wanted to find out how Reacher was involved.

  And if she needed to warn him.

  17

  While Henry Lee had been a virtuoso with numbers, spreadsheets and mathematical calculations, he hadn’t been very good with a broom and a mop.

  Which is why he’d employed the services of one Jasmine Karnos, a woman from Bulgaria who’d been recommended by one of his neighbors.

  Lee had figured she was probably in the country illegally, but when she cleaned his house, it was spotless and smelled like the lobby of an expensive hotel.

  He’d overpaid her and promised the pay would remain the same as long as she cleaned it the exact same way every time.

  It was an easy thing to agree to.

  Now, Jasmine parked her ten-year-old Toyota Corolla in Lee’s driveway, gathered her cleaning supplies, and let herself into the house with the spare key Lee had provided.

  Immediately, she noticed a smell.

  It was unusual and not one she had experienced before. Immediately, she thought of her cleaning supplies and what she would have to do to make sure the odor was gone.

  Henry Lee had been very clear; he’d loved the way the house smelled when she was done and she was to make sure it consistently stayed that way.

  That smell, though, she thought. What the heck was it?

  “Hello?” Jasmine called out. She was a stocky woman with dark hair and a face that rarely smiled. Henry Lee usually stayed home and she simply cleaned around him. She did ask him to leave his office, to get him away from his computers while she cleaned. It seemed like he spent nearly all of his time in that office, and it always required the most cleaning. Jasmine guessed he ordered in his meals because his kitchen appliances looked like they were never used.

  “Hello?” she called out again.

  But there was no answer.

  Jasmine set down her buckets, broom, and mop, and went back to the storage closet near the kitchen to retrieve the vacuum. It was top-of-the-line and she often wished her other clients would splurge on cleaning equipment like Henry Lee.

  She was about to fire up the vacuum when she thought she should investigate the source of the smell.

  It led to the hallway, and down toward the office.

  Maybe Lee had ordered in some super stinky takeout food and left it sitting for a day or two.

  “Mr. Lee?” she said, stepping around the corner into his office.

  She looked at the wall, where her naked employer had been nailed in place. There was dried blood running down from his hands and feet, and Jasmine thought of Jesus Christ and the crucifixion before she screamed and ran from the room.

  18

  Pauling saw the message from Tallon, letting her know he was heading to Australia for a very lucrative job. She checked her watch but decided to call him in the morning. For now, she tapped out a quick congratulations and told him that it worked out well; that she would be spending at least a couple of weeks in New York to see what happened with the FBI case.

  For the moment, she decided not to tell him about the Reacher message written on the wall of the crime scene. She didn’t know what it meant, so until she did, she would keep it to herself.

  With that done, she logged into the FBI’s database and began searching through all of the cases Giles had been assigned to.

  As the file list populated her screen, Pauling let out a long, frustrated breath.

  There were hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand. Every case he’d ever been involved with, even tangentially, was included. The number was a surprise to her, but then when she thought o
f how many minor items had come across her desk back then, it started to make sense. But making sense was one thing, figuring out how to actually glean anything from all of this information was another.

  She had to narrow them down.

  The obvious method for doing that was to cross reference Jack Reacher.

  It only took her a few keystrokes and she had the answer.

  0 results.

  Great.

  Edward Giles and Jack Reacher had never even remotely worked on a case together. At least, officially. It would have required some degree of official involvement to merit being entered into a report and thus into the database.

  That criteria had clearly not been met.

  So why had Giles been murdered “for Reacher”?

  Pauling drummed her fingers on the desktop and considered the implications. There simply wasn’t time to dig through every one of Giles’ cases, even if she separated the violent from the non-violent, which was a sketchy approach to begin with. The non-violent cases could be just as much a possibility as the others. There had been plenty of innocuous investigations that had suddenly exploded in a frenzy of violence.

  Cases were like people; you never really could tell which one was going to go off the deep end.

  Pauling sighed.

  The other way to do it would be to search the FBI database for all cases involving Reacher.

  He’d often been in New York, Pauling thought. And, a little guilty, she had to admit she’d searched him before and knew that he’d been romantically linked with an attorney in the city, the daughter of an Army general.

  It was definitely another best way forward.

  She thought about it objectively and knew it was the right decision, but her conscience questioned if her past experience with Reacher had pushed her in that direction.

  As in, a chance to get re-involved with him.

  Pauling immediately thought of Tallon and pushed the past away.