The Reacher Experiment

by Jude Hardin

  “Mind if I take my coat off?” he said. “It seems to have gotten terribly warm in here over the past few minutes.”

  “Don’t worry,” Wahlman said. “You’re not going to live long enough for it to bother you much.”

  Inside the right cuff of Mr. Tyler’s leather coat there was an electronic switch, a tiny computerized device that could only be activated by a certain series of sounds. The switch had been tuned to recognize Mr. Tyler’s voice and Mr. Tyler’s voice only. The switch was connected to a two-minute delay circuit, which was connected to a long thin tube, which had been sewn into the bottom hem of the coat. The long thin tube had been filled with a highly explosive putty-like substance. Enough to destroy a room or two with the initial blast. Enough to reduce a human being to itsy bitsy pieces.

  Every time Mr. Tyler contracted a job, he guaranteed that the intended target would be eliminated. Colonel Dorland was going to get what he paid for. Rock Wahlman was going to die. The exploding coat was something of a last resort, of course, because while it would certainly take care of the target, it would also take care of any other living beings in the vicinity, including Mr. Tyler himself.

  That was where the timer came in. The idea was to activate the switch and then skedaddle. Two minutes was plenty of time to get far enough away, even on foot.

  Plenty of time if you weren’t staring at the barrel of your own pistol.

  Escaping unharmed was clearly a long shot at this point. A million to one. Mr. Tyler knew that, but he figured he might as well give it a try. The target was definitely going to be eliminated—obliterated, as it turned out—in a few minutes, along with the pretty young lady who’d been stupid enough to get involved with him. Mr. Tyler still had a chance to get away, but first he needed to convince Rock Wahlman to let him take the coat off.

  “Please,” Mr. Tyler said. “I’m sweating.”

  “Who are you working for?” Wahlman said, scooting the sole of his boot away from Mr. Tyler’s chest and pressing it against his throat.

  “Let me take my coat off and I’ll tell you everything,” Mr. Tyler said.

  “Let him take it off,” Kasey said. “It’s worth some money. Probably two hundred dollars or more at a pawnshop. It would be a shame to get blood all over it.”

  “Guys like this don’t walk into situations like this without some kind of backup plan,” Wahlman said. “He probably has a weapon he’s trying to get to. Maybe another pistol. Maybe something else. I’m not going to give him the opportunity to make a move.”

  “How is he going to make a move?” Kasey said. “If he tries anything, I’ll shoot him.”

  “You can pat me down if you want to,” Mr. Tyler said. “You’re not going to find another weapon.”

  Kasey got up from the couch. She walked over to where Mr. Tyler was lying and searched him, starting at the ankles and ending at the shoulders. She found a cell phone and a wallet and a set of keys. She tossed everything onto the coffee table, looked at Wahlman and shrugged.

  Wahlman took his foot off Mr. Tyler’s throat and backed away a couple of steps

  “Go ahead and take the coat off,” Wahlman said. “Slowly.”

  Mr. Tyler wriggled out of the sleeves.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s so much better.”

  “Who hired you?” Wahlman said. “I want names.”

  “I need to use the restroom,” Mr. Tyler said. “I drank about ten cups of coffee a while ago, and—”

  Wahlman fired a round into Mr. Tyler’s right thigh. The pain was immediate and intense. It felt as though someone had driven a railroad spike into his leg with a sledgehammer.

  “Go ahead and piss your pants,” Wahlman said. “You’re not getting up from that floor until you tell me what I want to know.”

  Mr. Tyler turned his head and retched.

  “I guess I’m not getting up at all now, am I?” he said, trying to fight the continuous waves of nausea washing over him.

  “So much for not getting blood on the coat,” Kasey mumbled.

  “Who are you working for?” Wahlman said.

  “You’re persistent, aren’t you?” Mr. Tyler said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was contacted by a man named Stielson,” Mr. Tyler said. “He was a major in the United States Army. He gave me an envelope that contained—”

  “I already know about Stielson,” Wahlman said. “Who was his supervisor? Who was calling the shots?”

  “Colonel Dorland. I don’t know his first name.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “There’s a cluster of singlewide trailers out in the Mojave Desert,” Mr. Tyler said. “Not far from where the police found Major Stielson. Just south of there. A little southwest, I think. Not more than a couple of miles. It seems to be the command center for whatever they’re doing out there. I would guess that everything you want to know is inside those trailers.”

  “Tell me how to get there.”

  “It’s off the beaten path. I wasn’t even supposed to know about it. I don’t know if I could find it again, but I could try.”

  Kasey was on the couch again. Wahlman glanced that way.

  “Sounds like our best chance,” Kasey said.

  Wahlman nodded in agreement.

  “I need to put a pressure dressing on his leg,” he said. “I need some tape and some sort of absorbent padding. Gauze, washcloths, whatever you have.”

  “The only kind of tape I have is duct tape,” Kasey said.

  “That’s fine. I’ll use it to tie his wrists together while I’m at it.”

  Mr. Tyler turned his head away from them and smiled.

  So far, so good.

  Maybe this was going to work out after all.

  15

  The assassin’s name was Mr. Tyler.

  Kasey had asked while Wahlman was bandaging his leg. There were two wounds. An entrance wound, and an exit wound. The bullet had lodged into one of the oak floorboards beneath the assassin.

  Mr. Tyler.

  Just a regular name.

  Like a regular human being.

  Only he wasn’t a regular human being. He was a predator. A killer. He did it for money. He stayed alive by seeing that other people didn’t. Wahlman’s plan was to leave him out in the desert and then make an anonymous call to the police. Maybe a cruiser and an ambulance would get out there before the vultures picked him apart.

  Wahlman looked out the living room window.

  “Is that your car parked across the street?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tyler said. “It’s a rental.”

  “How much gas is in it?”

  “Three quarters of a tank.”

  “Good. We’ll take your car and leave Kasey’s here.”

  “Do either of you have anything I could take for pain?” Mr. Tyler asked.

  “I could put a bullet in your skull,” Kasey said. “That would take care of it for you.”

  “I’m trying to cooperate here,” Mr. Tyler said. “The least you could do is—”

  “Shut up,” Wahlman said. “I’m going to go get your car and back it up to the door. Then I’m going to open the rear hatch and load you into the cargo area, like the sack of shit that you are.”

  “What if someone sees him back there?” Kasey asked. “What if a cop sees him?”

  “Nobody’s going to see him,” Wahlman said. “I’m going to cover him with this.”

  Wahlman picked up the leather trench coat, and then he grabbed Mr. Tyler’s keys off the coffee table. As he headed out the front door, Mr. Tyler uttered something in a language Wahlman wasn’t familiar with. He turned around and looked the assassin directly in the eyes, and then he continued over the threshold.

  He trotted across the street, opened the rear passenger side door and draped the coat over the back headrest on that side, where it would be easy to grab and pull over Mr. Tyler once he was in the cargo area. He walked around the front of the car, opened the driver side door and climbed behind
the wheel and adjusted the seat. Before he slid the key into the ignition, he looked in the rearview mirror and noticed something odd about the coat. There was a slight tear along the bottom hem. The bullet he’d fired into Mr. Tyler’s leg must have grazed the coat on its way out.

  But that wasn’t the odd thing.

  Something was showing through the tear in the hem.

  Something that looked like modeling clay.

  Wahlman had spent several weeks studying explosive ordnance during his training to become a Master at Arms in the United States Navy. He knew what plastic bonded explosives looked like. And now he knew why Mr. Tyler had been so anxious to get the coat off.

  He started the car and slammed it into reverse and squealed up onto Kasey’s yard, spraying the stucco on the front of the house with landscaping pebbles and destroying a few decorative cacti as he fishtailed his way to the porch. He skidded to a stop about four feet from the front door, climbed out of the car and ran inside and picked Kasey up and held her in his arms and started running toward the rear of the house.

  Mr. Tyler was still on the living room floor. He started shouting, pleading for help as Wahlman twisted the knob and slung the back door open and ran outside.

  Then there was a great big boom.

  Then there was silence.

  16

  Kasey had packed a suitcase, and she’d loaded it into her trunk before Mr. Tyler had come to her house. The explosion hadn’t done much damage to her car. Just some scratches and small dents from the debris that had fallen on it.

  Wahlman was sitting in the passenger seat, checking the 9mm semi-automatic pistol he’d taken from Mr. Tyler. He pushed the magazine into position and jacked a round into the chamber as Kasey steered into the driveway of the abandoned filling station where her ex-husband had been murdered.

  “So this is the place,” she said.

  “This is the place,” Wahlman said. “Supposedly, the cluster of singlewide trailers Mr. Tyler told us about is just southwest of here.”

  “Which way is southwest?”

  “That way,” Wahlman said, pointing toward an area between the setting sun and a large cactus plant in the distance.

  “There’s no road,” Kasey said. “I’m not sure how well my car is going to do on this terrain.”

  “I want you to wait here,” Wahlman said. “I’m going to walk the rest of the way.”

  “Two miles? It’s going to be dark in an hour.”

  “That’s why we stopped and bought flashlights.”

  “I didn’t know you were planning to walk all that way.”

  “I wasn’t. But you’re right. Your car’s not going to make it.”

  The revolver Wahlman had taken from the private investigator in Bakersfield was in the glove compartment. Kasey reached over and unlatched the door and pulled it out.

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “You should wait here.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t been trained for this kind of thing.”

  “So?”

  “It might get ugly.”

  Kasey took a deep breath.

  “A guy got blown to bits inside my house a while ago,” she said. “I think I can handle ugly.”

  “Have you ever killed a person?” Wahlman said.

  “Of course not.”

  “If you come with me, you might have to.”

  “My daughter was threatened,” Kasey said. “She’s basically in hiding right now. I want this thing to be over as much as you do.”

  “You want your daughter to be an orphan?”

  “No, but—”

  “Stay here.”

  Wahlman climbed out of the car, slid the 9mm into his waistband, and started walking. He had one of the flashlights they’d bought in his backpack, along with a bottle of water and a black ski mask and a compass and the partial roll of duct tape from Kasey’s house.

  It took him about forty minutes to find the complex. He was about a quarter of a mile away when he spotted it. There were four identical singlewide trailers arranged in a square, sealed off from the rest of the desert by a chain link fence. The fence was eight feet tall. It was topped with barbed wire and razor ribbon. There was no light coming from any of the windows of the trailers, but that didn’t mean anything. The glass might have been painted. Or blacked out with static film.

  Wahlman put the ski mask on and got down on his belly and crawled closer to the complex. There was a sentry by the gate, an enlisted man wearing desert cammies. The guy was sitting on the ground with his ankles crossed, leaning back against the fence and smoking a cigarette. That was when Wahlman knew for sure that there weren’t any senior officers around. The guy should have been standing at parade rest. He was in charge of granting or denying access to the complex. That was his job. The fact that he was treating his duty so casually meant that the brass had secured for the day. Or maybe for the week. It was Saturday. Maybe intelligence officers posted out in the middle of nowhere only worked Monday through Friday.

  Whatever the case, the sentry was a total slacker. If he’d been caught sitting on his ass smoking a cigarette while standing a quarterdeck watch—or any watch—in the navy, he would have been dealt with severely. Wahlman figured the army had similar standards. He waited until it got completely dark, and then he snuck up beside the guy and grabbed him by the collar and forced his face into the sand.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” Wahlman said, planting his right knee between the guy’s shoulder blades.

  “I can’t breathe, sir,” the guy said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “This is a restricted area, sir. I’m going to have to ask you to identify yourself, and I’m going to have to ask you to—”

  “It’s a simple question,” Wahlman said. “Tell me your name and maybe I won’t have you court-martialed for dereliction of duty.”

  The sentry coughed. His lips were caked with sand.

  “Pickerman, Arnold,” he said. “Private First Class. It’s my duty to inform you—”

  “What kind of outfit is this?”

  “Sir?”

  “What’s your mission out here?”

  Pickerman coughed some more.

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?” he said.

  “Permission granted,” Wahlman said.

  “I’m just out here on temporary duty. It’s not my unit. They bugged out. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “When did they leave? Where did they go?”

  “Sir, I have orders to—”

  “Forget about your orders. You need to talk to me.”

  Pickerman reached for his pistol. Before he could unsnap the holster, Wahlman clubbed him in the back of the head. Turned him over, pressed a strip of duct tape across his mouth, wrapped some around his wrists and ankles. Took his gun and his wallet and his walkie-talkie. The fact that he was communicating by radio meant that there was at least one other person in the vicinity. Maybe someone inside one of trailers. Maybe someone in a truck, patrolling the area or watching from a distance with binoculars. Wahlman kept that in mind as he opened the gate and trotted over to the nearest trailer and tried the door. It was locked. He tried the doors on the other three trailers. They were locked too. He walked through the gap between two of the units and saw that a courtyard had been fashioned back there. Concrete pavers, picnic tables, fifty-five gallon drums cut in half lengthwise and topped with steel grates for barbecuing. He also saw that there weren’t any generators back there, and that the ports on the electrical boxes had been covered with steel caps and tagged with laminated cards that said ARMY.

  Which meant that Pickerman had been telling the truth. The personnel who’d been posted there were gone now.

  Wahlman sat down at one of the picnic tables and went through Pickerman’s wallet and found nothing of interest. There was a half-eaten hotdog under the table. Wahlman picked it up and examined it. The mustard on it hadn’t completely dried out, and the bread wa
s still soft. Which meant that it was probably less than a day old.

  The walkie-talkie chirped.

  “Rover One radio check,” a male voice said. “Over.”

  “Radio check loud and clear,” Wahlman said. “Over.”

  “I need to log a report for eighteen hundred. Over.”

  “All secure. Over.”

  “Get your head out of your ass, Pickerman,” the male voice said. “Over and out.”

  Wahlman pitched the hotdog back under the table where he’d found it, and then he used the butt of Pickerman’s pistol to break one of the windows on the trailer that was facing west. He climbed inside and used his flashlight to look around. All of the desks were bare, and all of the file cabinets were empty. The rubber tiles on the floor had a fresh coat of wax on them, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on any of the surfaces. The place had been vacuumed and wiped down and shined and scrubbed and polished. It had been left exactly the way that a well-disciplined military outfit should have left it, and Wahlman knew that the other three trailers would be the same.

  He decided to exit through the front door. As he was heading that way, he noticed something on the floor, a tiny strip of paper, partially hidden under one of the legs of a portable metal shelf unit. He crouched down and tilted the shelf unit and aimed the flashlight at the strip of paper and picked it up. It was about three inches long and about as wide as a cocktail straw. Wahlman figured it had fallen on the floor while someone was emptying a paper shredder. There was something printed one side of it, but the shredder blades had lopped off the tops and bottoms of the letters, making them extremely difficult to decipher. Wahlman stood there and studied the mutilated text for a couple of minutes, finally managing to fill in the missing pieces imaginarily.

  acher and backorder another bat

  The first word could have been Reacher, but it also could have been teacher. Or maybe it was the tail-end of some other word that Wahlman couldn’t think of at the moment.