by Dan Ames
No, that had nothing to do with it.
The stakes were higher than that.
All that being said, she retrieved a fresh legal pad and a pen, and dove into the FBI’s history with Jack Reacher.
19
They were back on the road in the Mercedes-Benz motor home, but had only a short way to travel.
Their new destination was south of Atlanta, near Macon, Georgia.
It was far enough from Henry Lee’s home, but close enough for what they needed to do next.
The team leader sent the rest of the men off to their respective hotel rooms and he stayed in the motor coach.
His name was Torrance, although his men didn’t know that, and now, from a compartment next to the driver’s seat, he retrieved a satellite phone equipped with the latest and most sophisticated encryption hardware.
No one would be listening, even if they desperately tried.
He dialed the number from memory.
“It’s done,” he said.
The man on the other end of the line offered no compliments or complaints. He simply grunted.
“Sit tight,” he said and disconnected.
Torrance sat for a moment and looked at the phone. This had never happened before. Instructions were always given immediately.
He felt something rise inside and he knew what it was.
Dread.
When things changed, it was always for the worse. Torrance hadn’t smoked a cigarette in a year but suddenly, he felt the craving spring upon him like an ambushing animal.
Sit tight.
Torrance wasn’t sure, but he had a vague sense of why he felt the way he did. The man on the other end of the line had told him to wait.
As in, wait…
I’m on my way.
20
Tallon finished loading his gear into his SUV and went back to the house to arm the security system. It was a process that took a fair amount of time, mainly because the system itself was fairly complex and required several steps.
Once the exterior cameras had been activated, the motion sensors engaged and the entire system armed, Tallon pressed the exit button.
It gave him sixty seconds to leave the house. A loud beep sounded every few seconds to warn him time was running out. As it got closer to the sixty-second window, the pace of the beeping increased.
He made it outside with plenty of time to spare, and once he knew the system was fully engaged, he climbed into his SUV and pulled onto the road leading to town.
It was another beautifully dry day, something of which he never tired. There had been so many wet, soggy days in bitter cold that Tallon never complained if the sun was shining. It was why he’d chosen this home, in this location.
He ran through a checklist of what he needed and double-checked in his mind that he hadn’t forgotten anything. No weapons had been required for this trip, save a folding knife he would check with his luggage.
His buddy in Australia would provide all of the guns needed, as it was occasionally a pain to check a firearm. It was still legal, as long as the gun was in a hard case without ammunition.
The road was clear and Tallon found himself leaning forward in the driver’s seat, anxious to get moving. There was the familiar feeling of excitement at the start of a mission. A part of him had worried about becoming “domesticated” with Pauling moving in, but he knew that was a bunch of bullshit. If anything, he’d been training more with Pauling around, especially with the weapons. She was a crack shot and they’d had a lot of fun with competitive shooting.
Tallon glanced down at the speedometer and saw he was making good time. It would take him less than an hour to reach the airport.
There were distant clouds on the edge of the horizon, and as his gaze moved out beyond the hardscrabble desert floor, he wondered about the geography of his destination. Australia was home to many varying climates and he wasn’t entirely sure of what he would find when he was there.
That was part of the fun.
A certain level of surprise was enjoyable.
When there became too many unexpected discoveries, that was usually when the mission went sideways.
He was confident this wouldn’t be the case. He knew the man he would be working for very well, as they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder through some pretty vicious fighting.
No, Tallon didn’t have any doubts about what lay ahead.
It was going to be a good one, he knew.
He could feel it.
21
The key, as far as Pauling was concerned, was New York. Jack Reacher. Edward Giles. The brutal murder of an FBI agent on Long Island.
Since she couldn’t find any direct link between Giles and Reacher, Pauling decided to see Reacher’s links not only to the FBI, but more importantly, to New York.
Starting with herself.
It was how she’d met Reacher in the first place. Edward Lane had been a notorious mercenary who claimed his wife had been kidnapped. Lane had been a player in one of Pauling’s cases when she’d worked at the FBI and it was that connection that ultimately led her to Reacher.
Or, led Reacher to her.
In any event, she and Reacher had ultimately rescued Lane’s wife who turned out to be running away from her husband, not a mysterious kidnapper. The final resolution had turned out to be an epic gun battle in the UK.
Pauling was able to rule out her case, as she knew for a fact that Edward Giles had absolutely nothing to do with Edward Lane, or the case Pauling had handled. In fact, she remembered clearly that he’d been assigned as a liaison working with a different government agency at that time.
Pauling felt a vague sense of relief. By eliminating the Edward Lane case, she had effectively removed herself from the current picture. There would be no need for Arnie Steele to start digging around in her past and the Edward Lane case.
It was a fact: Giles’ murder had nothing to do with anything she’d been involved with alongside Jack Reacher.
The next reference to Reacher came in the files of agent Theresa Lee, a woman Pauling knew only superficially. She scanned the case – a woman’s suicide that eventually involved references to the Afghanistan war. Pauling cross-referenced Giles’ cases at that time and found he was investigating a racketeering case involving disputes over illegal operations in New York’s harbor.
Another half-hour of fruitless searching saw no connection between Giles and Theresa Lee’s case involving Reacher.
Pauling continued on for several hours, but other than minor references to cases in DC and out West, she found no other evidence with implications for the current situation.
As far as she could tell, Jack Reacher not only had never worked with Edward Giles, he’d had very little involvement with the New York office.
In other words, she was back to square one.
22
The FBI team had moved from the big conference room to a smaller one next to Steele’s office. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t need the space as he wanted to have instant control over any developments. From his vantage point, he could see everyone coming in and out of the conference room and he could join them within seconds.
Some might label him a control freak, but Steele knew how to get the job done.
He’d had his assistant decorate one side of the room’s walls with everything Giles had worked on.
On the opposite wall, he’d posted everything the FBI had on Jack Reacher.
Giles’ wall was full.
Reacher’s was sketchy at best.
Steele was not happy. He’d given himself the Reacher angle, figuring that’s where the pay dirt would be, but so far, the well had come up dry.
He had only invited himself, Sullivan and Wyman to the current meeting.
“Sully, tell me what you have,” Steele said.
Sullivan scratched at his red goatee, a tell, in Steele’s opinion. Sullivan always did that when he either had no news or bad news.
“We’ve been over everything. A
s far as any bad guys Giles put away, they’re all either still in prison or dead.”
“Even if they’re in prison, they could still order a hit,” Steele pointed out.
“True, but we went through all the prison records, including the mail, visitors, messages, and there’s nothing.”
“It’d be a powerful act of revenge to murder an FBI agent on the eve of their retirement,” Steele pointed out. “Someone who really hated him.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like there was a public announcement that Giles was retiring,” Sullivan countered. “Hell, half the office wasn’t even aware of it. How the hell would some lousy bastard out on Rikers Island know?”
Steele didn’t have an answer.
“We’re going to keep chasing down leads, but we’ve already gone back a dozen years and now we’re really getting into the old stuff,” Sullivan said, his voice signaling his disappointment. “The further back we go, the less likely it seems someone would still be holding such a powerful grudge.”
Steele turned to Wyman.
“My net was cast pretty wide and we’ve got some possible leads, but none of them have to do with Giles,” she said.
“Tell me about the leads you do have,” Steele said.
“Do you remember Spark Plug Rostini?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he got out last week.”
The image of a short, stocky Sicilian man entered Steele’s mind. David Rostini, nicknamed Spark Plug, had been sent away for twenty years for armed robbery and conspiracy.
“Any connection to Giles?”
“No,” Wyman answered. “But he did return to Long Island. However, he developed pretty severe diabetes and he’s been writing children’s books.”
“You’re kidding me,” Sullivan said. “See Jane kill Jack?”
“What else?” Steele interrupted.
“The usual terrorist chatter Homeland Security is chasing down. A Russian mobster was killed yesterday in Brooklyn but the local cops think it was a pretty clear case of road rage. Nothing to do with their actual organized crime activities.”
Steele’s assistant brought in a tray of coffee in paper cups and placed it on the center of the table.
“That’s it?” Steele asked Wyman.
She nodded.
“Okay, well we’ve got nothing so far with Reacher,” Steele said. His teeth were gritted and the words came out like machine gun bullets. “We’ve ruled out the Edward Lane thing, and the Theresa Lee case. He’s popped up here and there on some other things, but as far as New York and Giles, nothing so far.”
Sullivan reached out and plucked one of the coffee cups from the tray.
“This is bullshit,” he said. “Somewhere out there is the guy who murdered Giles and his wife, and we can’t let him get away with it.”
“We keep chasing down leads,” Wyman said. “It’s all we can do.”
“And widen the scope,” Steele said.
“How?” Sullivan replied.
The muscles along Steele’s jaw twitched.
“Let me handle that.”
23
The affluent neighborhood whose key attribute of quiet serenity had attracted Henry Lee, was now anything but.
Multiple police cars ringed Lee’s home, along with an ambulance and the recent addition of a crime scene van.
Yellow tape had been placed all around the house, and inside, the medical examiner was surveying the horrific scene in Henry Lee’s home office.
The dead man was still nailed to the wall. Dried rivers of blood leaked from the body to the floor.
“Holy shit,” one of the local cops said.
“Wait until the news jackals get a load of this,” one of the other officers said.
“Let’s keep that from happening as long as we can,” the medical examiner said as he watched his crime scene photographer snap a close-up of the two words written on the wall in the dead man’s blood.
The photographer lowered his camera and looked at the medical examiner.
“What the hell is a Reacher?” he asked.
24
Pauling’s eyes snapped open.
She glanced at the clock next to her bed.
Just past three in the morning.
She felt disoriented, dazed slightly from a dream about Jack Reacher and a vague memory of running through a maze of train tracks running alongside a river with the skyline of New York in the background. In the dream, Pauling had been chasing someone. But the person was much faster and was getting away, opening up more and more distance between them.
The person was a man. Very tall. Athletic, but very slim.
Who was he?
Pauling closed her eyes. This used to happen quite often when she worked at the Bureau, as her mind endlessly chewed over a case or a problem for which she couldn’t find a solution. Sometimes, she wondered if her brain was working so hard as she slept that it forced her body to wake up.
Now what?
Pauling vacillated between getting up and making some coffee, or rolling over and trying to get back to sleep.
In the end, she split the difference and remained in bed, her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
What was she missing? Why had her subconscious put her near a set of railroad tracks chasing a tall man?
Who was he?
She retreated to her last thoughts before she finally fell asleep last night. They had revolved around the Giles case, naturally. The link between Reacher and Giles. There wasn’t one.
It was easy to understand the running in her dream; she was chasing down leads, confused by a lack of direction and any clear signals.
Maybe the man she was chasing was Giles’ killer. But how would she know that? Why had her subconscious made him so tall and thin? Where had that come from?
The one thing she knew was that the running man wasn’t Reacher.
Reacher wasn’t quite that tall, and he certainly wasn’t skinny. Jack Reacher was 6’ 5” and somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 pounds. Massive shoulders, long arms, and a deep chest. The kind of guy who strikes fear in the hearts of weaker men.
No, the running man wasn’t Reacher.
This man was a little taller, and a lot thinner. Maybe from a distance he would look like Reacher. Or like he was related to him– Pauling sat bolt upright in bed.
Her eyes were wide and they stared into the darkness of the bedroom as her mind raced.
A relative.
Another Reacher.
She thought back to her time with Jack Reacher and remembered that he told her he had a brother.
A brother named Joe.
Joe Reacher.
25
Tallon had arrived in Pensacola, Florida, via a commercial flight, and taken a taxi to a private airport not far from the Navy base. The instructions for his travel had been sent via email and now, he looked around the small airport.
The tarmac was nearly empty.
He scanned the nearby open-air gates and saw only a single mechanic in coveralls slowly walking toward a twin-engine plane with a commercial logo on the side. Tallon had assumed someone from the operation would meet him, but if not, he would figure out which plane he was supposed to board.
The flight here had been bumpy and he’d been unable to sleep. The cab driver had been a bad one, accelerating and then slamming on the brakes. It was a monotonous back-and-forth that had made Tallon want to kick the driver out of the taxi and take over driving himself.
He had his gear by his side, and he’d been told that a military aircraft would take him from Pensacola to another military base in the Caribbean, and from there, to Australia.
But now, Tallon was confused. He’d never seen an airport, even a small private one like this, so empty.
He finally spotted the plane he was supposed to board, as he’d been given the tail number and description.
Tallon walked toward it, saw the rear door was open and stowed his gear next to it.
A man appeared at the
top of the portable stairs leading to the fuselage door. He was dressed in khakis and a white shirt with a pair of pilot’s wings over the breast pocket.
He smiled and waved at Tallon.
“All aboard,” he called out.
Tallon glanced around him and shrugged his shoulders. He climbed the steps and saw that the cockpit door was now closed.
The rest of the plane was empty.
Was he going to be the only passenger?
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d traveled solo on a flight. Many times he’d had to catch a cargo plane and been the only human cargo. Plus, this mission might be fairly secretive and by limiting the number of people involved, the better. So maybe he was the only guy from the U.S. who was going to take part.
He settled into the first seat on the aisle but decided not to buckle up. He didn’t have a whole lot of confidence the flight was going to happen any time soon, and it was rare that someone would spend the money to fly one person anywhere, let alone somewhere into the Caribbean.
He settled into his seat and waited.
26
Torrance loaded the men into the motor home and drove them southeast from Macon, Georgia, into a stretch of the Piedmont national forest. It was government land, he believed, or most of it was. There was virtually no traffic and no sign of human habitation.
The terrain was rugged with steep inclines and declines and thick vegetation.
He had his hands full winding the big vehicle along a series of twisty roads until he reached an intersection. To the right was a dirt road that almost looked like a service trail.
He double-checked his instructions.
Yes, this was the turn.
He carefully maneuvered the big Benz onto the narrow path and then drove slowly forward. The sound of small stones bouncing off the bottom of the vehicle was a steady stream of percussion as they rolled forward. Occasionally, a rogue branch would scrape the side of the motor coach, like fingernails along a blackboard.
