by Scott Blade
“Right. Do you know about his scar?”
“Which one? I know about all of them.”
“The worst one, I guess.”
“Bombing. Beirut.”
“That’d be the one. I was there that day. A suicide bomber blew up near a base and your old man got hit.”
“Some guy’s jaw. I know this part of the story.”
“Right. I know the details.”
“What details? You know how I can find him?”
“Not exactly. But I know all of the details about that day. It was related to a CIA operation, very classified for the time. I know everything from the bombing, your dad’s involvement, all the way down to the name of the guy whose jawbone blew right into your dad’s abdomen.”
Reacher stayed quiet and stared into the guy’s face.
Shepard asked, “How do you think I got this scar?”
Reacher stayed quiet.
“I got struck clear across the face by shrapnel. The blast erupted and shards of bone and metal whipped all around the place. I got hit. Took a piece of my nose and left me with one good eye,” he said.
Reacher said, “And here you are, small world.”
“You got that right. I’ve been in the spy game for decades. You’d be surprised how many coincidences you come across until finally you realize that they aren’t coincidences. They’re all a part of God’s plan. Do you believe in God?”
Reacher stayed quiet.
“Well, if you ever join the agency and you live long enough, then you will. I promise.”
Reacher said, “So what do you want from me?”
“I want to make a deal with you.”
“I’m listening.”
“You help me out and I’ll tell you all that I know about your dad. I might even be able to help you find him.”
“I’m listening,” Reacher said again.
Maggie came back over to their table and asked if they needed anything else. Reacher smiled at her and told her that he wanted another cup of coffee. Shepard looked out the window and said nothing. After she returned with a fresh cup and left again, Shepard looked back at Reacher.
Then he asked, “First I need to clarify that this is a matter of national security. You can’t tell anyone. I’m trusting you with privileged information. Got it?”
Reacher nodded.
“I need you to say it.”
“I got it.”
“Good. That means that even though you don’t have top security clearance, you can still be prosecuted for giving away this information.”
“So can you. For telling me,” Reacher said.
“You got it. That’s right.”
Reacher took a long pull from his coffee and waited.
Shepard said, “Mike Jacobs is a CIA agent. He’s one of my guys. He’s my protégé actually. I handpicked him over a year ago. We mainly operate in North America. Mexico. Canada.”
Reacher stayed quiet, just listened.
Shepard said, “Two weeks ago we got intel that there is a terrorist threat here on Red Rain Reservation. There is a cell that moves throughout the Lakota world. We’ve known about them for some time, but mostly just whispers and rumors. No real credible threat.
“But two weeks ago we became more interested because we learned that the terrorist cell may have acquired a weapon.”
“What kind of weapon?”
“We don’t know. We think that it’s something biological. It’s small, something that was being transported in a metal suitcase.”
Reacher said, “That could be anything.”
Shepard nodded and then he said, “Being that Jacobs was from the Red Rain Reservation, he was the obvious candidate to go undercover.”
“What happened?”
“I sent him in three days ago. I lost contact with him 48 hours ago.”
“And then you sent in your two guys?”
“Right. They went in as FBI agents and were told to keep a low profile in case he was in deep cover. Then they ran into you.”
Reacher said, “Sorry about that.”
Shepard shook his head.
“Water under the bridge. Don’t worry about it. The crucial thing here is to find Jacobs and find the weapon before it’s too late.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Look out the window.”
Reacher craned his head and looked out the window.
“Look at the sky,” Shepard said and raised his hand and pointed off to the horizon to the north.
Reacher saw the gray gloomy clouds that puffed up high above the mountain peaks in the distance. They looked foreboding and menacing and unstoppable like slow-moving lava where all you can do to escape is to run.
“In the next six hours the Red Rain Reservation and Tower Junction and all of the wilderness and mountains and rivers in between are going to be buried in that snowstorm.
“The Indians don’t trust my guys. They don’t trust outsiders. But you have already won over their cops. And that girl, she likes you. I could see that.”
“So what? You want me to go back and work for you?”
“Reacher, that storm is the only thing protecting Red Rain Reservation.”
“What does that mean?”
“The reason why we think that the terrorists have a biological agent is because we’re missing a canister that contains the Ebola virus.”
Reacher stayed quiet.
Shepard said, “If Jacobs doesn’t surface by the time this storm passes over with news of where the Ebola agent is, I’ve been ordered to send in a military strike against the reservation.”
“Bullshit! The military wouldn’t bomb an American target. Not only that, but no pilot would do that either.”
“It’s not going to be done by a pilot. We’d use a UCAV.”
An unmanned combat aerial vehicle was what he referred to and Reacher knew it. Reacher looked down at the table. He studied Shepard. He couldn’t tell if Shepard was bluffing or not. The whole thing sounded like it was straight out of a spy thriller. Then again, that was the kind of thing the CIA did.
“Right. So now you see my concern. I don’t want to bomb a bunch of helpless people. But it’s better to say that the UCAV malfunctioned rather than saying that the U.S. government brought canisters of Ebola on American soil and had it stolen by a small terrorist cell.”
Reacher looked out of the window again at the snowstorm and then he looked back at Shepard.
“So will you help me find Jacobs and stop a terrorist from releasing a deadly virus? For which there’s no known cure or even how it’s transmitted. Remember the thing that we do know is that the Ebola virus is deadly and highly contagious.”
“What choice do I have? I’ll help you. What do I need to know about Jacobs?”
Chapter 18
The morning passed and Shepard gave Reacher a satellite phone that should work during the calmer phases of the snowstorm. There wasn’t much more information that Shepard could give Reacher. He didn’t know any names or locations of the terrorist cell on Red Rain Reservation. Reacher was going in blind.
“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this,” Shepard said.
About 15 minutes after he and Reacher had walked out of the diner, they were now headed back up the winding road to the reservation. They drove in Shepard’s gray Ford King Ranch truck. Reacher had seen nice trucks before, but this was really something. It was fully loaded with dual captain’s chairs in the front. It was the most comfortable ride that Reacher had had in a long time.
He gazed out the window because in case Shepard peered over at him, he didn’t want to stare at the scar.
Snow fell in a slow arch across the road, creating a dreary gloom. Not a whiteout but the beginning of one. The truck drove steadily with no problems over the snowy terrain. They took it slow because the traffic in front of them was slow. Shepard sped up every chance that he got. He’d slow behind a slow-moving vehicle and then he’d pass around them and speed up again.
<
br /> The King Ranch had a big advantage over most of the vehicles because they were high up and could see much farther than the cars they’d passed.
Shepard turned the wheel and moved around a small yellow Beetle that was whining to survive the terrain. The petite car was buried up to the rims by snow.
Then he thought back to a girl he had known in high school. He didn’t realize it at the time, but she had liked him. She sat in homeroom next to him. She used to watch through the window every day around 1:15 for the same blue Volkswagen Beetle to pass by, some lady who worked down the street and must’ve taken her lunch break at the same time every day. Whenever the Beetle passed, she’d slug him in the arm and say, “Punch bug!”
Reacher had an impeccable memory. He had total recall, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall her name because he had never bothered to learn it. He was completely awkward and shy at the time and he was flummoxed that a girl would pay any attention to him. He hadn’t ever paid any attention to her name.
Shepard swerved around another car. The driver blared his horn like he was shocked by the sudden truck that barreled around him. And maybe he was. If the guy was only paying attention to the whiteout in front of him, then he would’ve been shaken by a two-ton truck flying around him.
Reacher asked, “Why not alert the real FBI?”
“I wish that I could, but we can’t let it be known we’re responsible for the virus.”
Reacher nodded. Made sense. The CIA has let some homegrown terrorist cell get their hands on some Ebola virus and now they need to recover it, all while keeping the whole thing a secret.
“The government is okay with bombing and killing a bunch of innocent people over letting out an embarrassing secret like that?”
“Look. It won’t make anything better if we make it public that there’s a terrorist threat involving Indians. Every place that has an Indian reservation would be targeted by hate groups.
“If we tell this community that there is Ebola present, everyone will panic and the terrorists will be forced to release the virus. Then we’ll have to mobilize the National Guard and quarantine the residents of a huge area. And even then there’s little that we can do for them. A lot more people will die if we inform the public.
“So go in there. Investigate. Find Jacobs for me. You don’t need to interact with him. Just find his location. We can go in after the storm and get him out. If he’s dead, then get me a location or a name. Hitting one target will make it a lot better for everyone than hitting the whole community.”
“Do you have the manpower for an assault?”
Shepard switched the wipers to the highest setting and the blades scraped across the glass. Then he said, “I have a small team waiting.”
He paused a beat and stared at the entrance to the reservation coming up on the left. Then he said, “Make sure to call me as soon as the snowstorm passes or when you know something. If I don’t hear from you by morning, I’ll have no choice but to have this place leveled. It’s better to sacrifice a few lives over thousands.”
He slowed the truck and turned without stopping onto the track that entered the reservation. They passed the sign and drove up to the community center.
He pulled into the parking lot and made a U-turn and pulled the truck right up to the curb.
He clicked the button on the center console and Reacher’s door unlocked.
Shepard said, “Open the glove box.”
Reacher grabbed the handle to the glove box and popped it. The door fell open like a crocodile’s mouth and he saw a Walther P99 staring back at him.
It was black with a matte finish. It had a manual decocker and rear slide serrations. The whole gun was nonslip, including the ergonomic grip. It was a small gun: 9mm with a 7.1-inch length from nose to butt. The gun weighed 1.5 pounds completely unloaded. It was a world-famous gun that had been trusted by European and Western military and police forces for decades. There was one other factor that made this particular gun very famous.
Reacher picked up the gun and tilted it in his hand and then he said, “James Bond’s gun? This is the gun used in some of those movies. That’s a little ironic.”
“Take it. It’s fully loaded with 15 rounds in the mag. You might need it.”
So far Reacher had heard an insane story about Native American terrorists, undercover CIA operatives, and a deadly virus. Why shouldn’t there be the gun used by 007?
Reacher took the gun and made sure that the safety was on and slipped it into his pocket. He didn’t chamber it. He didn’t think that he’d need it.
Shepard said, “My number is programmed into the phone. Good luck.”
Reacher opened the door, climbed out into the snowy gloom, and watched as Shepard pulled away from the lot, drove off onto the track, and was lost to sight.
Chapter 19
The community center was surrounded by trees set way back from the complex. Off in the distance, a pair of sandhill cranes stood in the snow taunting each other with calls. They communicated something. Maybe they were friends. Maybe not. Reacher thought that they would’ve flown south for the winter and perhaps they still would. He wasn’t 100 percent sure of their migrating patterns. Yellowstone was not a mecca for birds migrating south. The high altitude and cold winters didn’t make the park an optimal location for birds to migrate to. But there they were. Surely they were going to fly away before the storm moved south.
Reacher moved his eyes from the birds and scanned the horizon. Over the landscape he could no longer see the luminous clouds from the north because the sky was gray and white. He flicked his eyes back to the ground and saw a bear rearing up and staring at him from the tree line.
It looked around casually, then looked directly at Reacher, and then scurried off into the woods like it was more scared of him than he was of it.
Reacher walked past the office to the community center and then around the corner of the building and made his way to the front entrance to the stationhouse. He saw that both police cruisers were parked in the lot as well as a green Jeep Cherokee. It was an older model. Probably early 2000s. The tires were speckled with snow, but relatively clear. Reacher saw his reflection in the front windshield as he passed. He looked like an elongated object that moved past.
He walked under a tin or aluminum overhang and read, etched on a double glass door, simply the word Police. The door squeaked as he pulled it open and heard a buzzer ding in order to indicate that a member of the public had entered the stationhouse.
Inside the station, he was immediately greeted by a bulletin wall with different public service announcements on it: dates that the General Store would be closed, times that there would be town hall meetings held in the community center, and a new schedule for school buses that ran from the reservation to Tower Junction. Reacher guessed that there weren’t enough kids on the reservation to warrant building a school of their own, although he suspected that most kids were homeschooled in such a place. The local public school was unlikely to teach tribal history and matters that concerned the community.
In the center of the bulletin board there was a big black-and-white printed sheet that read: Warning! Snowstorm! Curfew in effect for nightfall!
It was dated for today’s date.
To Reacher’s right there was a small cheap-looking desk with papers stacked on one side and nothing but a small computer on the other. A small white woman sat behind it. She was young, probably early 20s. She had glasses that blended right into her face. She had long, curly red hair with dark streaks flowing through it and was pale. She was skinny in that bony way as if she could double as a teenage boy and fool most people.
She had a very warm smile, showed her white teeth to Reacher, and said, “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Officer Red Cloud.”
“Okay. Just a second. She just walked in, I think.”
Reacher glanced down at the girl’s nameplate on her desk. It was Martha.
Martha must’ve been from T
ower Junction. He didn’t imagine that there were any white people who lived on the reservation.
She must commute every day, Reacher thought.
Martha stood up and walked behind a partition into what Reacher guessed must have been the bullpen. The stationhouse was a basic rectangle, leaving no more space beyond the partition for any other room, but the bullpen, chief’s office, and the two empty cells at the rear.
Reacher turned his back and looked at the door. He heard a car pull into the lot. The drive belt squealed like it was due to be changed and then there was a loud whine from the brakes, the sound of chunks of snow being thrown away from the tires, and then an emergency brake being pushed in and the click of it locking into place. Then there was the sound of two doors opening and closing.
A moment later, a man and woman of middle age walked into the stationhouse. They smiled at Reacher and waited behind him.
He said, “Good morning.”
They said it back.
Then Reacher heard a voice say, “What the hell are you doing back here?”
He turned to see Amita Red Cloud. She had a confused look stretched across her face that was rivaled only by the expression of fear that he had seen on it the night before when he had beaten up the two CIA agents who were pushing her around.
Reacher felt the Walther P99 in his pocket poking him in the thigh. He tugged at the bottom of his shirt the best that he could to keep the gun’s small bulge hidden from view. The last thing that he wanted to do was to let Amita know that he’d returned with a gun.
In his back pocket was the satellite phone. Basic design. Basic package.
It fit in his pocket with only the antenna poking out. He reminded himself not to sit on it. He was sure that a sat phone that came from a CIA agent probably was built with some durability in mind.
Amita repeated herself and said, “What the hell are you doing back here?”
“We gotta talk,” he said.
“Come back,” she said. And then she looked past him at the middle-aged couple that had entered. She said, “I’m sorry. My dad’s not here. He knows about your problem and he’ll be here shortly if you want to wait.”
The wife nodded but the husband looked mad to have his time wasted like he had had an appointment with Chief Red Cloud.
