THE JACK REACHER FILES: VELOCITY (with bonus thriller CROSSCUT)

by Jude Hardin

  06:43.

  Now I had no choice. I had to crash through the gate. I backed up another forty or fifty feet, slammed the shifter into first gear and floored the gas pedal. The tires squealed and the car shot forward and I aimed toward the center of the gate, hoping to push it outward a few feet and then cut the wheel hard and spin into a counterclockwise 360. The gate would roll to the left while I spun to the right, and then I would be clear of it. That’s the way I saw it in my head. That’s the way I would have scripted it for Nicholas Colt: The Movie. But that’s not what happened. The brace in the center of the gate broke away and the car plowed on through, taking about twenty feet of the chain-link wire mesh with it. I kept my foot on the gas, glanced in the rearview mirror. The gate was just a frame now, and I was dragging the fencing that had been stretched across it down the road with me at seventy miles an hour. I downshifted and fishtailed onto the two-lane I’d traveled into town on, heading west back toward the airstrip.

  Bright orange sparks pelted the windshield as the heavy steel chain-link wire etched its way into the asphalt. Smoke started seeping into the cabin, but I couldn’t slow down. The bomb was going to explode in less than two minutes. I needed to get the device at least a mile from the grain elevator. Then I needed to get myself away from the device—if possible. I didn’t know how much time was left on the delay. There was a chance that the bomb would detonate as soon as I pulled it off my skin. I considered that as I downshifted into third, redlining the tachometer, pushing the engine to its limit.

  And that’s when I noticed the set of headlights behind me and the bullets smashing through my back window.

  7

  Wheat fields to the left.

  Wheat fields to the right.

  There was nowhere to go but straight ahead.

  I veered over into the eastbound lane, then back to the westbound, swerving from side-to-side in an effort to dodge the bullets.

  The smoke was getting thick inside my car, so I rolled the windows down. It didn’t help much. Tears streamed down the sides of my face, and my lungs felt like they’d been bathed in acid.

  But as The Circle’s grain elevator faded into the distance, I realized I was probably at least a mile away from it now. So that was good. The overall mission had been a failure, but at least we’d avoided the possibility of a nuclear blast. Now all I had to do was stop the car and whiz the bomb over into one of the fields.

  Only I couldn’t stop the car, because someone was tailing me and shooting at me.

  I started coughing and the car started shuddering. Then, through the black smoke rising up from the vents in the dashboard and the fiery sparks bouncing off the windshield, I saw a helicopter in the sky ahead. I hoped it was one of ours. I hoped it was coming to help me, and not the guys in the car behind me. I figured there were two of them back there, one driver and one shooter. I had no idea who they were, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the helicopter flying toward us belonged to them.

  The clock on the dash clicked over to 06:44.

  I slammed on the brakes and cut the wheel and went spinning down the center of the highway. Centrifugal force can be a beautiful thing sometimes. The chain-link fencing flew from the front of my car and whipped toward the car behind me. When something is coming at you at a hundred miles an hour, you instinctively react to avoid it. There’s no thought involved. The driver behind me would have been better off doing nothing, but by the time he or she realized that, it was too late. The car went into a skid and the tires on the passenger’s side slid off onto the shoulder and the car rolled several times and ended up on its roof twenty feet or so into the wheat field. I sped over there and ripped the black case off my belly and wadded it together with the wiring and the timer and tossed it through the blank space where the overturned vehicle’s windshield used to be.

  The helicopter was hovering overhead now. It wasn’t spraying bullets at me, so I figured it was one of ours.

  I waved it away.

  Maybe the pilot could have landed on the road and I could have darted over there and climbed on board and we could have been high in the sky by the time the bomb exploded, but of course that wasn’t going to happen.

  It wasn’t going to happen because I couldn’t dart anywhere. I couldn’t even walk.

  So this was it for Nicholas Colt. I was going to die there in a wheat field along with the guys who’d been chasing me. I could see them now. Both male, both upside down, both unconscious.

  I kept waving and shouting frantically, but the helicopter kept hovering.

  I didn’t want to die. I wanted to see Juliet and Brittney and Jesse again. I wanted us to be a family again. I wanted us to live happily ever after. But if the percussive impact from a hundred grams of C-4 was powerful enough to trigger a nuclear warhead, I figured it was powerful enough to knock a helicopter out of the sky. And it didn’t need to happen. The pilot had time to fly away.

  “Get out of here!” I shouted.

  But the helicopter kept hovering.

  Then I looked up and saw a rescue harness being lowered down to the field. I opened my car door and rolled out onto the ground and slid my arms through the loop and five seconds later I was a hundred feet in the air and half a mile west of the crash site.

  The bomb exploded.

  I heard it, and I felt it in my chest.

  Like a sonic boom from a fighter jet.

  I didn’t see a lot of shrapnel flying up into the air or anything. Apparently the overturned car contained most of the blast. It was on fire now, along with my little silver coupe there beside it, thick black smoke rising in the distance as the helicopter made its way toward the airstrip.

  I figured The Circle’s cleanup crew would take care of all the dead bodies, those back at the grain elevator and those out in the wheat field. The vehicles would be loaded into an enclosed trailer and hauled away.

  I doubted if the guys who’d been after me were local. The only wildcard was the security guard. He wasn’t an operative. He probably had family nearby. A wife, maybe. Kids maybe. But people just disappear sometimes. It happens more often than you might think.

  The townspeople traveling west out of town might wonder about the charred spot in the field. A lightning strike, maybe. They might wonder, but they would never know for sure.

  And they would never know how close they came to being tomorrow’s headlines.

  8

  The Circle recruits people from all walks of life. The guy changing the oil in your car might be an operative. The young lady bagging your groceries. Your hairstylist. Your insurance agent.

  Your doctor.

  There was a small hospital ward on the fifth floor of the Colorado headquarters building. Three days after the incident in Mother’s Rest, the surgeon who removed the bullet from my leg walked in and asked me how I was feeling.

  “It still hurts,” I said.

  “Of course it still hurts. You were shot. But the swelling looks better, and your blood work looks good. Vitals stable. I’m going to start you on some physical therapy tomorrow. You’ll be running around good as new before you know it.”

  He took a few minutes to explain the course of treatment he had in mind, and then he left the room.

  The nurse on duty brought my breakfast tray. Bacon, eggs, biscuits, hash browns, coffee and juice. It was good. I’d been given a couple of blood transfusions, and I’d been able to eat everything they brought me. My leg still hurt, but the staff there on the fifth floor was taking good care of me. I could tell that my body was getting a little stronger every day.

  A few minutes after I finished eating, Diana Dawkins walked in. I hadn’t seen her since the day I left for Mother’s Rest.

  “You were right about needing to go through all of the files on Jack Reacher,” she said. “We discovered that some of those documents were fabricated. We’re not sure why, or how, but we’ve launched a peripheral investigation to try to get some answers. In the meantime, The Director has suspended the
order to eliminate Reacher.”

  “So Reacher’s in the clear?” I said.

  “No. We’re still going to keep an eye on him.”

  I was glad to hear that we weren’t going to kill Jack Reacher. At least not yet. The more I studied him, the more I liked him. As far as I was concerned, he was one of the good guys.

  “Talk about irony,” I said. “In a way, the guy who brought the bomb up to the observation booth ended up saving Reacher’s life.”

  “Yeah. In fact, that’s the main reason I came up here to talk to you. The man with the explosive device went by several aliases. One of those aliases is a known associate of Sergio Del Chivo.”

  “Are you saying that Del Chivo knew where I was three days ago?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “There’s only one explanation,” Diana said.

  “A mole?”

  “Yes. We’ll find out who it is. Eventually. But I’m afraid this means that you’re not going to be able to work as a field operative anymore.”

  “What are you going to do? Lock me in a room and put me behind a desk?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. You’re going to have to undergo more plastic surgery, and then we’re going to put you in DIFTFOTE.”

  DIFTFOTE. Disappear From The Face Of The Earth. It was The Circle’s ultra-extreme version of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

  “What about my family?” I said.

  “We’re going to put them in DIFTFOTE as well.”

  That was good news. It meant that we could all be together again.

  “When will I get to see them?” I said.

  “See them? No, you can’t see them.”

  “But you said—”

  “I’m sorry if you misunderstood, Nicholas. We can’t put you all in the same location. You’ll be in one part of the country, and they’ll be in another.”

  “For how long?”

  “At least until we can eliminate Del Chivo. Then we’ll reassess the situation.”

  A rage boiled up inside me. My heart rate went up to 133. I could see it on the monitor beside my bed. I felt like ripping the IV out of my arm and smashing everything in the room. I’d waited so long, and now I was going to have to wait some more. Maybe forever. Maybe I would never get to see Juliet and Brittney again. Maybe I would never get to meet my son for the first time. It wasn’t fair. I felt like destroying something. But I didn’t. I knew it wouldn’t change anything.

  I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying to stay calm, trying not to take my frustrations out on Diana Dawkins. It wasn’t her fault. Don’t kill the messenger, I told myself. I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t say anything. Maybe she knew better. Maybe she could tell that I was about to blow. We’d been working together for a while, and she’d seen me lose my cool before. It wasn’t something that I was proud of, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. Especially when it came to my family.

  The initial surge of anger had started to fade by the time the nurse came in to check on me.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Your alarm went off. Sinus tachycardia. That means—”

  “I know what it means. I’m all right.”

  She took my blood pressure and my temperature, and then she checked the bandage on my leg. By the time she finished her assessment, my heart rate was back to normal.

  “Don’t scare me like that,” she said.

  “I’ll try not to. Could you bring me something for pain?”

  “For your leg?”

  “Yeah.”

  She made me jump through the usual hoops, scale of zero to ten and all that, and then she left the room.

  My leg still hurt. That wasn’t a lie. But at that moment my jaw was bothering me more than anything. It was still sore from holding onto the ladder. I hadn’t told anyone about that. I figured they might put me on a liquid diet or something. I didn’t want that. I wanted to eat.

  “I have to go,” Diana said. “We’ll need to schedule your plastic surgery right away.”

  “I understand.”

  “By this time next week, you’ll be living in a different state under a new identity. I probably won’t see you before you leave, so—”

  “It’s been good working with you, too,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Any idea where they’re going to put me?”

  “No. Even you won’t know until you get there. A special team of operatives will be in charge of transportation.”

  “What if one of them is the mole?”

  “Highly unlikely. But even if that happened to be the case, it wouldn’t matter. The Director is going to drive you the final five hundred miles himself. When all is said and done, only two people on the planet will know your new name and your location. One of those people is you, and the other is The Director.”

  “What if The Director is the mole?” I said.

  Diana smiled. “Then we’re all in a lot of trouble,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that DIFTFOTE isn’t that bad. They let you do what you want, as long as you don’t reveal your true identity to anyone or try to get in touch with your family. You can even work if you want to. Maybe you can start giving guitar lessons again.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Take care, Nicholas.”

  “You too.”

  We shook hands, and I thought that was going to be it. But it wasn’t. Not quite. She leaned over and kissed my forehead and whispered that she was sorry.

  Then she turned and opened the door and walked away.

  Thanks so much for reading VELOCITY!

  My Nicholas Colt thriller series includes nine full-length novels: COLT, LADY 52, POCKET-47, CROSSCUT, SNUFF TAG 9, KEY DEATH, BLOOD TATTOO, SYCAMORE BLUFF, and THE JACK REACHER FILES: FUGITIVE (Previously Published as ANNEX 1).

  All of my books are lendable, so feel free to share them with a friend at no additional cost.

  All reviews are much appreciated!

  VELOCITY takes the Nicholas Colt series in new direction, and sets the stage for THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS (A Cam Retro Thriller). If you would like to read the prologue and first four chapters, please turn the page.

  PROLOGUE

  Sometimes, when you least expect it, you find just what you’ve been searching for—even though you might not have known that you were searching at all. It’s a remarkable thing when it happens, and it happened to me recently on a trip to Zurich. I was there on pleasure, just visiting a friend, and I decided to take a train to the university one afternoon while he was at work. I ate lunch and strolled around the campus for a while, eventually ending up where I always end up, at the science library. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just browsing through some archived lecture material when I ran across a series of journals written by a surgeon named F.T. Blood. Long forgotten, apparently. Nothing on the Internet, and the name didn’t ring a bell. Which was astounding, really, because the volumes I started flipping through had obviously been penned by a genius of the highest caliber. There were seven notebooks in all, three of them outlining the procedure Dr. Blood had been working on at the time, and four of them filled with a variety of extremely complex chemical formulas. The earliest entry was from 17 October 1942, the latest from 28 January 1947. The pages had yellowed and some of the ink had faded, but enough of the text had been preserved for me to know that I was looking at something extraordinary. When I read through some of the pages and started considering the possibilities, I knew that the notebooks had to be mine. I still feel sort of bad about taking them, but I doubt they’ll ever be missed.

  And as it turned out they’ve done me a world of good.

  Part 1

  Thrasher

  1

  He couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  Not that he wanted to. He was enjoying thinking about her, and there wasn’t much else to do at the moment anyway.

  Kei
Thrasher was sitting on a plastic chair in the emergency room, waiting to be seen for an infection. It had started out as a paper cut, of all things, a slit about the size of a mouse whisker on the print side of his left index finger. He’d been opening envelopes and shredding their contents, had gotten a little carried away and a little careless. That was a week ago. Now his finger looked like a steamed hotdog.

  Thrasher should have sought treatment sooner, but he didn’t. He’d put it off, and now he was going to have to be admitted to the hospital for a course of IV antibiotics. He knew this because he used to be a doctor himself.

  His finger was red and fat and it hurt like crazy.

  But he still couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  She had been working in the deli at the supermarket where Kei shopped. He was passing by on his way to the fresh produce one day when he noticed her for the first time. Blue eyes, olive complexion, smile radiating like some kind of magnetic force, beaming past the stainless steel meat slicer and straight to Kei Thrasher’s heart.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  Kei glanced down at her nametag. Anna. She wore a hairnet and an apron and black leather shoes. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  “Sandwich,” he said.

  “You want a sandwich?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t usually order anything at the deli, couldn’t afford to, but at that moment he would have handed over his entire paycheck for one slice of cheese.

  “What kind of bread?” Anna said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”