SYCAMORE BLUFF (Prequel to THE JACK REACHER FILES: ANNEX 1) (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 8)

by Jude Hardin

  “Just making sure,” Brad said. “Of course, everything you need to know is in The Rule Book.”

  “Of course.”

  “All righty. I’ll be moseying along then. Hope to see you at the service tonight. Have a wonderful day.”

  “Later,” Colt said.

  He closed the door and bolted it, still wondering where his lovely bride had gone.

  He went to the bathroom, found some towels and washcloths in the linen closet and some soap and shampoo. He stripped down and took a hot shower, hoping it would refresh him. It didn’t. He still felt groggy, like he needed more sleep.

  He fished some wrinkled clothes out of his suitcase and got dressed and started a pot of coffee. Still no sign of Diana.

  Colt put his jacket on, walked out to the front porch and looked around, hoping to find a newspaper. This seemed like the kind of town where a kid on a bicycle would ride by, whizzing copies of the Sycamore Bluff Gazette at every front door every morning at the crack of dawn. Like Mayberry in some sort of eerily perverted alternate dimension. Andy Griffith meets Rod Serling.

  Colt looked around, even glancing over at the neighbors’ porches, thinking he would steal a Sunday paper if necessary, and then he remembered what Diana had said about contact with the outside world. No TV, no newspapers or magazines, no Internet, no phones that reached anywhere outside of town. He remembered there weren’t any kids, either, no Opie Taylors or Wally Cleavers to deliver the Sycamore Bluff Gazette, even if such a thing existed. All the residents were childless adult couples, Diana had said.

  Colt walked back inside. The Monitors, he thought. The idea that invisible omniscient overseers were controlling everything that happened here intrigued him, and it frightened him a little. He wondered if they had the house bugged. Maybe there were hidden microphones and video cameras in every room.

  “If this is what it’s like to be on Mars, you can keep it,” he said out loud.

  He sat at the table and drank coffee and stared into space. Maybe this was what had caused Kyle Lofton to snap. Extreme boredom. No wonder The Monitors, whoever they were, forced the residents here to work so much. It was probably the only way to keep them from going stir crazy.

  With some caffeine on board, his head started to clear, and he remembered the special cell phones he and Diana had been given. He unzipped his backpack, pulled his phone out and turned it on and scrolled down the list of contact numbers. There were 614, a number for every resident of Sycamore Bluff, including his own.

  Colt knew better than to reveal anything about The Circle’s secret mission over the phone, just in case someone was listening in. He found the number for Karen Millington and hit the call button.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In a wooded area on the outskirts of town, Diana Dawkins walked along the fence line and wondered if any of the residents had ever tried to get out. They were here voluntarily, of course, but six years was a long time. None of the residents had children, but surely at least some of them had family members or even close friends that they wanted to keep up with. A lot can happen in six years. Weddings, graduations, births, deaths. Then again, they were all adults, and they knew what they were getting into when they signed the contract. The experiment was supposed to mimic what it might be like to colonize a finite number of people on a distant planet. If you were living under a plastic dome on Venus or somewhere, you probably weren’t going to make it to your nephew’s bar mitzvah.

  Every twenty feet or so, a red and black sign warned of high voltage. Maybe the signs were a bluff, but Diana dared not touch the fence to find out. That much current would paralyze you in your tracks and fry your heart before you knew what hit you. She was wishing she’d thought to bring a multi-meter when her newly-issued cell phone trilled. The caller ID said John Millington. She answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Colt said. “Where are you?”

  “Just out exploring. Familiarizing myself with the layout of the town and all.”

  She couldn’t tell him what she was really up to. Not over the phone.

  “I would have gone with you,” Colt said.

  “You looked so peaceful lying there. I figured you needed more sleep.”

  “Thanks. Unfortunately, our happy happy friend Brad Washington came by and woke me up anyway. He wants us to come to church tonight.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said we’d think about it.”

  “Good. Listen, about last night—”

  “Forget about it,” Colt said. “We were both tired.”

  “Right. Anyway, I don’t know why I freaked out like I did.”

  But that was a lie. Diana did know why she’d had that little meltdown last night. She couldn’t tell Colt, but she knew.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Colt said. “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  “Would you mind stopping somewhere and picking up a pair of gloves for me? And some thermal underwear?”

  “Who do you think I am?” Diana said. “Your wife or something?”

  “Please?”

  “All right. I guess I could do that.”

  “Thanks. Hey, you want to go to church with me tonight? There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do around here.”

  “Maybe,” Diana said. “Are you sure you won’t burst into flames when you walk through the door?”

  “You’re getting funnier every day. Ever think about doing stand-up?”

  “I tried that one time, but my legs got wet.”

  Colt laughed. “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

  “Goodnight, Gracie. I’ll be home in a little while. Bye.”

  She disconnected.

  As part of The Circle’s rigorous training program, Diana Dawkins had been conditioned to function at full capacity with only two hours of sleep a night. Anything less than that was pushing it, although there had been times when she’d gone several days with no sleep at all.

  So fatigue hadn’t been Diana’s problem last night. She wished it was as simple as that, but it wasn’t. No, she’d freaked out about the sleeping accommodations last night because the last person she’d shared a bed with was also a fellow agent.

  A fellow agent named Henry Parker.

  Henry was her problem. She hated to admit it, but there was really no other explanation. The fact that she had fallen in love with him was messing with her head in a big way.

  It had all started out innocently enough. Henry had been assigned to monitor the CIAO compound from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and Diana had been assigned to do the same on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. They were to take turns covering Sundays and holidays, and there was another pair of agents covering the daytime hours seven days a week. The four agents traded shifts occasionally, for personal reasons or whatever, subject to the approval of The Director, but for the most part everyone showed up when they were supposed to show up and went home when they were supposed to go home.

  Then, a few months into the mission, Henry suggested to Diana that they work Sundays together. It would give them a chance to compare their weekly notes face-to-face, he said, and to discuss the most logical ways to proceed with the investigation.

  At first, Diana was hesitant to deviate from the prescribed schedule, especially without clearing it with The Director first, but Henry finally talked her into it.

  “I’ve been doing this for quite a while,” he said. “And the best operatives in the field, the ones who get the most commendations and promotions and pay hikes, are the ones who take the initiative to improvise occasionally. As long as we’re not disobeying a direct order or breaking the budget or something, The Director’s not going to care if we put in a little extra time.”

  “So why don’t we just go to The Director and ask him?” Diana said.

  “Sometimes it’s just better not to ask. He might be forced to deny the request on a technicality. His superiors like to have a
certain number of agents available at all times, people they can call on in case of a national emergency, so that would be the only problem The Director might have with it.”

  “Right. So if I’m in a tree taking pictures of the CIAO compound with an infrared camera, and he wants me on an airplane to Wyoming or somewhere in an hour—”

  “It’s not going to happen,” Henry said. “CIAO’s the biggest thing we have going right now. He’s not going to pull anybody off the assignment for any reason. Trust me.”

  In The Circle Operative’s Training Manual, Module One, the very first chapter was titled, “Trust Nobody But Yourself.” So Diana didn’t trust Henry Parker, not at first anyway, although she did agree to the Sunday meetings on a trial basis.

  While she didn’t fully trust Henry right away, there was something about him that made her heart beat a little faster every time he came near her. He must have felt the same way, because that first Sunday night in the woods, at exactly 3:24 a.m., sitting together on a government-issue olive green blanket, he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, and then on the lips. Diana knew it was never a good idea to get intimately involved with a colleague, that it was in fact forbidden in The Circle’s bylaws, but for some reason she couldn’t resist. She passionately accepted his advance, and by 3:36 the two of them were making love there on the forest floor in the heat of the August night.

  Diana’s job wasn’t exactly conducive to forming lasting relationships, and she didn’t believe in one night stands. So, before Henry, Diana hadn’t been with a man in a long time. There was a hungry animal caged up inside her, and once it was unleashed, it consumed everything in sight with a reckless abandon. Henry Parker made Diana feel things she’d never felt before, and it was almost violent the way she went at him that first night and nights thereafter. There was no telling how many shirts she’d ripped from his chest, or how much blood she’d drawn from his back with her fingernails. It was wild and unbridled and forbidden, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

  She and Henry started spending more and more time together, not only on Sundays but during their off hours, venturing out to a restaurant or movie occasionally, but mostly remaining in the confines of motel rooms where they weren’t in danger of being seen together. They both had multiple aliases, courtesy The Circle, with proper documentation for each phony name, and of course being invisible was part of their training, part of their secret agent job description. Which was ironic, in a way, because if The Director had found out about the affair, Diana Dawkins and Henry Parker would have been terminated immediately. No questions asked.

  And in the super-clandestine world of The Circle, the word terminated did not mean to lose one’s job.

  They knew the risks, but they couldn’t help themselves. They were in love, and, as always, love found a way.

  “Run away with me,” Henry said, one Monday morning after their shift monitoring the CIAO compound. “We’ll leave the country. I have a cousin who lives in a tiny village in France. We could disappear there and never be found.”

  “What would we do in France?” Diana said. “How would we survive?”

  “I have some money saved. I could buy us a house in the country. We could raise sheep or something. Who cares, as long as we are together?”

  “They would find us. The Circle would find us, and they would kill us. You know they would.”

  “We would never be found,” Henry said. “They’ve trained us too well. We could even have surgery to alter our appearance if need be.”

  “They might be listening to us right now. Have you thought about that?”

  “But they’re not. You know they’re not. Diana, I love you, and I want to be with you forever. The only way for that to happen is for us to leave The Circle, and the only way to leave The Circle is to leave the country.”

  “Even if we could defeat the blood tattoo and manage to disappear, they would come after our families. I know you wouldn’t want that to happen.”

  “I know a way around all that,” Henry said. “It’s very complicated, but there is a way. Please tell me you’ll at least think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it, okay? Now come to bed.”

  Diana had thought about it then, and she still thought about it now. Often. A place in the country, in France, with a pasture full of sheep and a garden and a fireplace to cuddle in front of on cold nights. And, in time, maybe even a child or two. Was anything that lovely even possible?

  She didn’t know. She would probably never know. At any rate, she needed to forget about all that now, put it on the back burner at least, and focus on the task at hand.

  One of the first things she’d learned in her training as an operative for The Circle was to always have a way out if a mission went sour. An escape route. An emergency evacuation plan. But, as she stared at the eight-foot electric fence topped with razor ribbon, knowing from her briefing with The Director that a concrete barricade had been poured beneath it to prevent any sort of tunneling, knowing that it surrounded the town in a U-shape from one end of the bluff to the other with no gates or openings of any kind, knowing that there was no above-ground access to switches that would disable the deadly voltage, she came to the realization that escape from Sycamore Bluff on foot or by car was virtually impossible. The only way out was the way she and Colt had come in: by helicopter.

  It made her a little nervous to be trapped like this, but she was sure everything would be all right. She and Colt would spend a few days here, enough time to put together a comprehensive report showing that there was no anti-government activity or other national security problems to worry about, and then she would contact The Director over the shortwave radio and arrange for transportation home.

  Sycamore Bluff was a little strange, but there was nothing to indicate that she and her partner had been placed in a hostile situation.

  Nothing yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It was 5:37 when Colt woke up from his nap. He felt better now, fully rested. He felt like a million bucks. He shrugged into the same wrinkled jeans and long-sleeved pullover he’d been wearing earlier and walked to the kitchen.

  Diana was sitting at the table with a sandwich, a bag of potato chips, a glass of milk, and a copy of The Rules in front of her.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  Colt looked out the window. “Evening is more like it. It’s starting to get dark already. I can’t believe I slept so long.”

  “You must have needed it. Hey, I got the stuff you asked for.”

  She gestured toward a white plastic bag on the sofa.

  “Thanks,” Colt said.

  Have you had a chance to look this over yet?”

  She held up the rule booklet.

  “Yeah. I read it cover-to-cover while you were gone. It’s mostly just common sense stuff.”

  “Mostly. This part about texting and driving, for instance, is common sense to me. It’s an idiotic thing to do, and yet a lot of people still do it. Kyle Lofton was sending a text message to his wife immediately before the incident. The report said he skidded to a stop and almost ran over the woman on the bicycle.”

  “Betsy Whittaker,” Colt said. “He avoided hitting her with his car, and then he got out and chewed her head off. Literally.”

  “Right. But, the point is, he was breaking a major rule even before that happened. He was texting and driving. People here just don’t break the rules. They just don’t.”

  “I have a feeling people are breaking more rules than anyone knows about,” Colt said. “Anyway, Lofton was a rebel from way back. He’d been involved with that group down in Central America and all.”

  “True. Still, there was no evidence that he’d broken any rules here before that day. The whole thing is just bizarre.”

  “Bizarre isn’t even the word. I was thinking more like surreal.”

  Diana munched on a chip. “Hey, you want something to eat?”

  “Not hungry,” Colt said. He sat down next to her
at the table. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Okay.” She took a bite of sandwich and a drink of milk.

  “When Brad Washington stopped by this morning, he mentioned something about The Monitors. He talked about them as if I should know who they are. But I don’t.”

  Diana swallowed her food and then gulped down the last of the milk in her glass. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and said, “There are eight people here—four couples—who were assigned to monitor the experiment and to report to the scientists running it. The other residents don’t know which four couples are The Monitors, which is probably another reason why everyone follows the rules. You never know who has the capability of ratting you out. Plus, by not knowing the identity of The Monitors, there’s no danger that conflicts of interest might arise. Being anonymous, The Monitors don’t have the perceived power that, say, a uniformed police officer would have. They’re not treated any differently than anyone else, because nobody knows who they are. They’re basically here as journalists.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe they were part of some unseen force that was going to rain fire down on us if we misbehaved or something. It just sounds so ominous. The Monitors. Like something from a horror movie.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Diana said. “Although they do sometimes dictate addendums to the rules in town meetings. They use a tape recorder and disguise their voices.”

  Colt nodded. “That explains the reel-to-reel on stage there in Town Hall. Not exactly state-of-the-art, but whatever works.”

  “To me, it looked like a big mechanical owl or something.”

  “An owl?”

  “You know, from a distance. The way the light was hitting it and all.”

  “If you say so.”

  Diana picked up her plate and drinking glass, took them to the sink and rinsed them off and loaded them into the dishwasher.

  “So do you know which couples are The Monitors?” Colt asked.