Don't Know Jack

by Diane Capri

  And Gaspar would never manage a chopper. She’d be on it alone.

  Only one choice.

  She collected unjacketed hollow points from the SUV’s supply chest and stuck them in her pocket. She couldn’t risk more firepower inside a chopper. She wanted penetration sufficient to reach vital organs and stay there. Incapacitate. But not instantly. No head shots feasible.

  The onboard radar beeped and identified a Learjet incoming westbound at 3,500 feet. Control tower access. Female pilot requesting permission to land. Cleared for final approach.

  Kim met Gaspar’s gaze.

  He recognized the pilot’s voice, too.

  Sylvia Black.

  What?

  Now Hale’s reckless attack in the alley seemed less foolish.

  Gaspar said, “Hale grabbed Sylvia this morning because he needed a pilot, not a hostage.”

  Which confirmed one set of suspicions Kim had flushed out inflight. Sylvia had never been a dispensable pawn in Hale’s game. She was an integral actor in a long term criminal enterprise. She said, “Hale and Sylvia planned to meet Archie Leach at Wallace’s place. They planned to kill us in their crossfire.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “They’re on final approach. Five minutes, maybe?”

  Gaspar accelerated.

  CHAPTER FIFTY TWO

  Landing conditions were close to perfect. Winds were blowing straight down the runway at 10 knots. Clouds at 6,000 feet. Sylvia turned to line up with the runway. They would land, switch to the waiting chopper, and take off again. Maybe to a final destination in the mountains? Somewhere the Learjet couldn’t go?

  Gaspar put the pedal to the metal and raced the Learjet to the runway.

  He didn’t make it.

  Too far.

  Sylvia landed and taxied fast and came to a stop close to a waiting Huey. She and Hale walked from jet to copter. Just the two of them. No third party. No Reacher.

  Kim was puzzled, briefly. From the air Hale must have identified the SUV as an FBI task force vehicle. He should have aborted the landing and flown on. He would have been out of U.S. airspace before Kim could have done anything about it.

  Therefore Hale knew who was on the ground, and why.

  The Huey’s rotor started turning.

  Gaspar slammed the SUV to a stop.

  Kim opened her door.

  Gaspar asked, “Do you know how to disable a chopper?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Kim said. “But feel free to chime in with ideas.”

  She slid out of the truck and ran through the downdraft from the whapping blades and the storm of noise from the turbine. Sylvia was in the Huey’s pilot’s seat and Hale was about to climb in on the navigator side. He had one foot on the ground and the other on the Huey’s step.

  Kim drew her gun.

  She called, “FBI! Stay where you are!”

  Protocol satisfied.

  Legalities completed.

  Hale didn’t stop. He was too close to an escape planned over too many years. Or maybe Kim’s voice had been swallowed up by the Huey’s noise.

  Gaspar had driven up very close to the front of the Huey, but the bird could clear the truck for lift off. That was the nature of helicopters.

  Kim aimed and fired.

  Bullets hit rotors and ricocheted.

  Hale braced himself halfway into the cabin and returned fire. Covering fire. Not aimed. He was trying to keep Gaspar inside the SUV and hold Kim back until the Huey could get in the air.

  The turbine spooled up and the blades increased their speed. Runway dirt whirled and danced. The Huey went light, and then weightless. It rose steadily. Hale was still on the step, one foot inside, holding on with one hand, and firing with the other.

  Kim had no chance to get on board.

  She did not feel relieved.

  She aimed.

  She fired.

  Four shots directly at Hale’s receding body.

  Two missed.

  But one hit him in the hip and a second in the thigh.

  He fell.

  Forward, into the helicopter’s cabin.

  Shit!

  Sylvia lifted ever higher.

  No target now except the chopper itself.

  Kim emptied her clip into the tail. Solid hits. But no result.

  Sylvia turned the Huey straight toward the SUV.

  Gaspar’s was at the SUV’s weapons locker. He had a rifle. He braced. He aimed.

  He fired.

  Straight at Sylvia as she flew directly toward him.

  The first shot hit the windshield and deflected.

  The second shot deflected.

  Bulletproof. The Huey was armored for war zones. The Learjet was not. They’d stopped for armored transportation.

  Where were they headed?

  Gaspar fired again. He hit the glass in precisely the right spot to take Sylvia’s head off.

  The bullet deflected.

  The Huey raised higher and higher overhead. It turned south, toward Mexico, toward the mountains.

  Kim took a sniper rifle from the rack. She steadied herself against the SUV. She aimed. She fired.

  She hit.

  No result.

  She stared at the retreating helicopter.

  She’d lost.

  She’d failed.

  They were gone.

  Then the Huey’s blades slowed.

  The tail dipped low.

  Kim’s bullet had damaged the Huey.

  Maybe just enough to force Sylvia to land.

  Maybe not enough to make her crash.

  She fired again, and again, and again. She hit the Huey every time. It started to swing and falter. It lost power. It started to come down.

  “Get in!” she yelled to Gaspar. “Drive!” They scrambled into the SUV.

  The Huey started to fall.

  Gaspar closed the gap. The Huey lost its rotors. Began to dive.

  Gaspar reached the runway’s end and kept on going over the flat gravel apron. Kim watched the Huey fall and crash on the desert floor.

  Fifty feet away, Gaspar stopped the SUV.

  Kim jumped out and ran. Gaspar limped behind her.

  Kim felt the heat. Smelled the fuel.

  Sylvia was bloodied but alive. She was unbuckling her seatbelt, trying to rise. Hale had his pistol in his hand.

  Sylvia opened her door and got her left leg out.

  Hale shot her in the back.

  CHAPTER FIFTY THREE

  Afterward Kim figured the standoff lasted less than ten seconds, but at the time it felt like ten hours. Hale was still alive, but he couldn’t move. He was wounded in the leg, by her handgun rounds, and shaken by the crash. He stayed in his seat. Small tongues of flame were starting up. The desert air was shimmering with heat and vapor.

  She walked toward the crippled Huey. Gaspar tried to stop her, but she shook him off. She said, “Hale, I can help you. Hang on. I’m coming for you.”

  Hale lifted his gun, like a great effort, and aimed it at her.

  “Are you insane?” she called. “You can’t get out of there unless we help you.”

  The flames bloomed bigger, twisting and racing, searching out air and fuel. Gaspar came after her, slowed by his wounds. He called out. She couldn’t understand his words, but she knew he was warning her to stop before the Huey exploded.

  The fire was roaring now. There was black smoke and the stench of kerosene.

  Hale fell out of his seat, to the cabin floor, then to the step, and then to the ground. He tried to crawl away, but he was dazed and his hip and leg were too badly wounded.

  He stayed where he was.

  Kim rounded the tail section. Gaspar came up beside her.

  “We have to get out,” he said.

  “Hale! Hale!” she called over the roaring flames.

  Hale heard her. He rolled on his back. He stared at her.

  He aimed his gun at Gaspar’s chest.

  Instinct.

  Muscle
memory.

  Training.

  Kim stopped, braced, and fired.

  Once, twice, three times.

  Hale lay still.

  Gaspar pulled her back.

  She stood a moment longer, looking at the first man she’d ever killed.

  ***

  Washington, DC

  November 6

  5:45 p.m.

  Twelve hours later they were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the Hoover Building. FBI headquarters. Cooper’s lair. They had completed their formal encrypted reports to Cooper, detailing all the news fit to print about the last five days. They had divided the paperwork into two separate halves: the Reacher file and the Harry Black investigation.

  They would leave it to others to testify about Black. They themselves were under the radar, and would stay there. Their personal involvement in the Margrave mess, as they’d come to call it during private conversations, was completely redacted. They didn’t know how Cooper had managed to spirit them out of the evidence trail, and they didn’t want to know. Both agents were grateful, but neither said so out loud.

  Kim’s last task was to copy everything to her personal secure storage. Paying my insurance premium, she called it. She hit the send button and watched the upload and closed the laptop’s lid.

  She said, “That feels good.”

  Gaspar smiled. “Too bad about our numbered Swiss accounts, though. Could have made several little girls happy with all that cash.”

  Kim nodded and sipped her coffee. “Have you changed your mind about Finlay?”

  “Should I?”

  “Finlay sent us to the Empire Bank. That’s how we discovered Hale had set up the accounts in our name and Cooper’s, too. Those accounts would have lived forever. Without Finlay, where would we be? Testifying in front of a Federal Grand Jury and dodging the IRS, that’s where.”

  “If he gave us a heads up, he had his own reasons.”

  “I was wrong about him,” Kim said. “And at least I can admit it. He hated Hale, not Cooper.”

  “Probably hated them both.”

  “Maybe.”

  Across the street a young man in a suit came out of the concrete fortress. A junior agent. Little more than a messenger boy.

  Kim said, “Now what, compadre? Back to Miami? Hug the kids, say hi to the wife, drink sweet coffee and sit behind your desk for the next twenty?”

  The young man in the suit was crossing the street. Heading straight for them.

  “That would be a wonderful life,” Gaspar said. “But I think someone has other plans for me. Reacher is still in the wind.”

  “He had nothing to do with any of this, did he?”

  “He was in Margrave fifteen years ago. I bet he never went back. Why would he? So no, he had nothing to do with any of it. We wasted a lot of time.”

  The junior agent approached their table. He said, “Otto? Gaspar?” When they acknowledged, he handed each a small padded envelope.

  Unmarked. But recognizable.

  Gaspar ripped his open. A cell phone. He shrugged. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Kim looked up at Cooper’s office widow. Was he standing behind the reflective glass? Right then? Watching? She saw the messenger boy head back toward the building.

  And she saw a man, too, motionless in a shadowed doorway. He was looking straight at her. He was tall, easily six-five, and broad, easily two-fifty. A giant, really. He wore jeans and a leather jacket. Work boots on his feet. He had fair hair and a tan face and big hands. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He looked infinitely patient, just standing there, self-possessed, self-confident, simultaneously alert and relaxed, both friendly and dangerous.

  She turned to Gaspar, to point the guy out. When she looked back, he was gone.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Thank you for reading this first book in what we hope will be a new series, if enough readers enjoy it. Kim and Gaspar have much work to do yet if they're to succeed in The Hunt For Reacher. He's a wily prey, to be sure. If you liked the book, you can help keep the series going by "liking" the book on Amazon and everywhere the option is offered, and by posting your honest reviews of the book to help other readers decide whether it's worth their reading time. I hope you will. And we hope you'll sign up to be on our mailing list so we can let you know when new adventures are ready and make sure you don't miss opportunities for free books. You can do that easily here: Sign me up!

  Readers who want to know the stories Behind the Book can find them on my website. Here's a taste of the stuff we post there:

  The United States Secret Service handles counterfeiting crimes. Technology has made both counterfeiters and law enforcement more effective. Neither player in this tense drama is likely to be finally defeated. Almost as soon as new currency is created in the ongoing effort to thwart them, the counterfeiters find a way to copy the new designs. As early as 1989, the first "supernote" or "superdollar" counterfeit was identified by the Central Bank of the Phillipines and submitted to the Secret Service for analysis. The quality of the ink, paper, engraving and printing were superior even to authentic U.S. currency. The Secret Service believed the counterfeit operation was perpetuated by a single organization, perhaps even a foreign government. North Korea and Iran were the most likely. By 1992, the estimated value of Superdollars in circulation was estimated in excess of one billion. Superdollars are considered a serious terrorist threat to the United States. A lengthy article, published in the New York Times on July 23, 2006, lent support to the already researched facts in Don't Know Jack. You can read Stephen Mihm's fascinating piece No Ordinary Counterfeit online at newyorktimes.com.

  Lest readers think counterfeiting is too difficult for the average person, consider Albert Talton, dubbed The Most Notorious Counterfeiter when he was convicted of making more than $7 million in counterfeit bills using ink-jet printers. Before he began his business, he'd never used a computer. His bills were first noticed in 2005 and by 2007, they travelled across the country in significant quantities. He was convicted and sent to prison in 2009. Privately, law enforcement conceded that Talton's counterfeits likely exceeded the $7 million estimate.

  Rural Georgia has been the focus of several large scale crime investigations by U.S. authorities in recent years involving Mexican drug cartels. Perpetrators have been charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy, money laundering, and various weapons charges. In November 2010, 45 people were arrested and more than $23.8 million in cash was confiscated along with drugs having a street value of more than $10 million, the Augusta Chronicle reported.

  Switzerland's famously private banks are no longer places to stash illicit cash and stolen goods. Everyone from mobsters to art thieves to families who inherited sizeable estates were caught by surprise when legendary secret banking laws were bested by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in its ongoing efforts to bring tax cheats to justice. Even more alarming to tax evaders, their confidants may now be paid a handsome reward by governments when they turn cheaters in. The IRS has recently offered tax amnesty for people hiding money in offshore accounts with stiff penalties for failing to voluntarily comply. The IRS has collected billions under these programs. For the most recent effort, see Forbes Magazine.

  Hide Your Assets and Disappear, a book written by a former FBI agent, provided significant insight into how and why people choose to leave their lives behind and why they choose to come back, a subject that has fascinated me for years.

  That said, the criminal activities herein depicted are pure fiction, as are the characters. Any events or real places mentioned are used fictitiously. As we all know, truth is stranger than fiction.

  About the Author

  Diane Capri is a lawyer and multi-published author.

  She’s a snowbird who divides her time between Florida and Michigan. An active member of Mystery Writers of America, Author’s Guild, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime, she loves to hear from readers and is hard at work on her next novel.

  Please connect with her o
nline:

  http://DianeCapri.com

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/@DianeCapri

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DianeCapri

  http://www.facebook.com/DianeCapriBooks

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