Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (2 page)

She thought:
Shit. Now someone will remember me if they’re asked, for sure.
She didn’t glance back to give the guy another look at her face. She just jogged the last hundred yards to the gate, where another TSA agent waited, blocking the entrance. She flashed her ID. He nodded and stepped aside. The moment she crossed the threshold, he closed and locked the door behind her. She rushed through the tunnel and stepped onto the plane. The flight attendant closed and sealed the door behind her, the jet way retreated, and the plane backed away. The pilot had only a ten-minute delay to cover up.

Should anyone ask.

She found her seat in first class. The seat next to hers was empty, as was the seat across the aisle. Probably not by chance. She stowed her bags and buckled her seatbelt low and tight. She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She gripped the armrests until her fingers hurt.

God, she hated flying.

Experts said fear of flying was irrational. They were fools. Kim knew too much to believe that nonsense. Planes made powerful weapons and they were no match for Mother Nature. And she was in a bad way to start with. The acid in her stomach had boiled up the night before, when the untraceable cell phone had arrived. She unclenched one hand long enough to slide an antacid between her lips. She pressed it with her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and as it dissolved, she tried to calm her racing pulse. She kept her eyes closed until the plane was safely in the air and she could breathe again. She asked for black coffee and opened her laptop to find out why the hell she was headed to Atlanta.

She had two hours and thirty-eight minutes to learn everything she needed to know.

#

The encrypted file she had downloaded in the taxi was zipped. Inside, she found five separate documents. The first contained a short memo explaining her assignment. The other four files were identified by unfamiliar names: first, Carlos Marco Gaspar; second, Beverly Roscoe (Trent); third, Lamont Finlay, Ph. D.; and fourth, Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher’s file was the largest, and it ended fifteen years ago. The other three were brief resumes.

She started reading.

The assignment seemed straightforward enough: Complete background investigation on potential candidate Jack-none-Reacher. She’d handled dozens of these since she’d joined the Special Personnel Task Force. But this assignment was different in every respect. There was no indication of the job for which Reacher was being considered. Nor did the assignment memo explain the secrecy, the haste. Or why the boss was involved. Everything about it felt wrong.

She was instructed to begin in Margrave, Georgia. Nothing further.

The second document was brief but normal. It contained limited data on FBI Special Agent Carlos Marco Gaspar, her partner on this assignment. She’d never met Gaspar and the file told her very little about him. He was forty-four years old, married with four children, and he was currently posted to the Miami Field Office.

The only odd note was the explicit direction that she was to take the lead, even though Gaspar was ten years more experienced.

She’d never acted as lead on a SPTF assignment. Was this a test of her leadership ability? Was she being considered for promotion? No. Too soon. What, then? Another secret. She hated secrets unless she was the one keeping them. She popped another antacid and studied Gaspar’s official ID photograph, learning his face. Then she spent the next two hours reading, analyzing, and memorizing the limited information contained in the remaining three files.

The more she read, the less comfortable she became, but she was already on security alert level red, and there were no higher levels in her system.

She began with the candidate. His file was simply too thin. In her line of work, less was definitely not more. Where were Reacher’s tax returns? Credit card files? Property records? Criminal records? Had Reacher never bought a car? Rented an apartment? Owned a cell phone? Surfed the internet? Been arrested? What about banking records? Where did he get his walking-around money?

There had to be more documentary evidence on Jack-none-Reacher, but she’d been allowed no time to do her own thorough preparation using the extensive tools available to the FBI. And she couldn’t call and ask for assistance. She was under the radar. Only two people were authorized to help her: one she hadn’t met yet, and one she couldn’t ask.

She closed her eyes again.

CHAPTER THREE

Eventually, and reluctantly, Special Agent Kim Otto reached the only possible conclusion: Reacher’s file was deliberately thin. There had to be more. The rest was being withheld.

Which made her nervous. What always made her nervous were the things she didn’t know. What you didn’t know could kill you. She could handle anything, but only if she saw it coming. Two antacids this time, washed down with the cold coffee she hadn’t touched. She pushed the button for the flight attendant to refill her cup. Then she copied and stored the limited data on Reacher to her own encrypted files. When she had access to the satellite again, she would send her private files to secure storage.

Because too many people had access to FBI files. She had been burned before when confidential reports were acquired by unintended recipients who lived to tell about it. She never made the same mistake twice. In the field, she relied on memory alone. Her formal reports were carefully drafted and filed according to protocol, but her private records remained her own. It was impossible to be too careful.

She copied the Roscoe and Finlay files, too. Straightforward information there, a bit unusual but nothing mysterious. None of it explained why Roscoe and Finlay had been selected as interview subjects, except one point of possible connection: Margrave, Georgia.

Today’s destination.

Fifteen years ago, Roscoe and Finlay had been present in Margrave. Reacher’s honorable discharge from the army was six months fresh back then. Whether Reacher had been in Margrave, and whether they’d all met there, and what had happened between them, were just three of the thousand questions Kim would need to answer. But something happened. The boss wouldn’t send her there otherwise.

She glanced at her watch. There was still time before landing. She ran through the Reacher material one more time.

Birth certificate (West Berlin 1960); education record showing attendance on military bases around the world, including one year in Saigon, Viet Nam. Kim read that fact for the tenth time before the taser charge she’d felt the first nine times lessened. Kim’s mother was Vietnamese; her father served in the U.S. Army in Viet Nam. No connection to Reacher back then, right?

No. Reacher was a kid when Kim’s parents left the country; Reacher’s father was a Marine; Army and Marines hadn’t mixed much in Viet Nam. There couldn’t be any connection between them. But was Viet Nam the reason the boss had chosen her to lead this assignment?

She pushed that new worry aside. No time to deal with it now and nothing she could do about it from 35,000 feet anyway.

Reacher had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1984). Parents deceased (father 1988; mother 1990). One brother, also deceased (1997).

At West Point and afterward, until he was honorably discharged, the file contained the usual batch of military forms crafted in army-speak. Uninitiated readers would need an interpreter to decipher the batch of acronyms. When Kim copied the contents of Reacher’s file into her own private documents, she included the full phrases and definitions, and studied them carefully, testing herself, building her knowledge. She’d labeled the section “Accomplishments,” but the title was far too benign when you knew what each entry meant. Reacher had investigated, arrested, subdued, and otherwise dealt with some of the most highly trained soldiers on earth, all of them capable of extreme violence.

He had done it by matching their violence with his own.

He was a killer.

So what did the FBI want from him now?

He’d been decorated several times, each for some form of extraordinary heroism or outstanding service or extreme military achievement. He had been wounded in combat and been given a Purple Heart. He’d been trained and won awards as a sniper. Summary: Reacher had handled whatever had come his way. He’d faced the enemy and come out alive. More than once. Kim imagined the type. He’d be confident, hard to persuade, manipulate or overpower. In no way like any other candidate she’d investigated before.

No wonder the project was under the radar.

And how the hell would she accomplish it?

The pilot announced the initial descent into Atlanta. Not much time left for electronic devices. She kept on working. Reacher’s file contained no details on the situations he’d handled as a military cop. Those would have been filed separately at the time the investigations took place. Kim made a note to find them. The search wouldn’t be easy, but the years Reacher spent doing his job were the last that would have clear and complete records, and those records would be the only clues to his current activities or location. Understanding how he’d performed back then would teach her the man and his methods. And scare her out of her wits, probably, if she had any wits left by then.

The file ended with Reacher’s army discharge papers, followed by a short memo stating that he’d been off the grid for more than fifteen years. No one knew where he was. FBI files, Homeland Security files, all were empty of references to Major Jack (none) Reacher, U.S. Army, Retired.

No way,
she’d typed into her notes.
Can’t happen.

Was he dead? In prison? Witness protection? Classified assignment? At a minimum, either Reacher himself or someone else didn’t want him found.

Maybe he was unfindable.

And maybe that was the good news.

#

Twenty minutes from Atlanta the plane started to bounce around like a steer on cocaine. Clear air turbulence, the pilot called it, but Kim didn’t believe him. More likely a fatal mechanical fault. She pulled her seatbelt as tight as possible. The belt failed to hold her securely in the wide seat. She would have some odd bruises tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow. Not that anyone would see her bruises. The Danish she’d eaten threatened to come back up. She wanted to grab the airsickness bag, but she’d have to crack her fingers away from the armrests to reach for it.

Then the plane’s wheels bounced twice on the tarmac and skidded a long, loud, smoky distance before grabbing the runway hard enough to jerk her head off the seat and slam it back again. She breathed out and felt stupid, as always. Then her embarrassment doubled when she looked down at her lap and realized she’d never finished getting dressed.

#

Kim waited curbside behind the wheel of a rented Chevy Traverse. She took a look at the airline’s web site flight tracking data on her personal smart phone. “Terrorist.com,” she called it, because constant flight status updates on any commercial flight were quick and easy to find. Agent Gaspar’s flight from Miami had just landed. He’d be with her soon. She ate the last antacid in the roll. When it melted, she washed the chalky taste away with a swig of black coffee.

Then she opened her computer and stared one more time at Jack Reacher’s face, critically analyzing the full photo, committing every pixel to memory. The Army’s black and white regulation head shot suggested but didn’t confirm Reacher’s height, which was recorded at six-five, or his hair color, described elsewhere as fair, or his eye color, which was blue, or his enormous build, listed at two hundred and fifty pounds.

Kim shuddered. On the inside she was one hundred percent lithe, lanky, formidable German, like her father. But on the outside, she was exactly 5’0” tall, like her mother, and she weighed 100 pounds on her fat days. Reacher was more than twice her size; she hoped she was more than twice as smart. Brains, not brawn, would have to be her weapon.

Therefore she needed a better photo. An army photo wouldn’t do the job. People would remember Reacher. He wasn’t just memorable. More like unforgettable. But no doubt patriotism was still alive and well in Margrave, Georgia. Locals would say nothing negative about a man dressed in army green and gold and sporting a chest full of medals. Witnesses might even deny knowing him, even though it was a federal crime to lie to an FBI agent in the course of an investigation.

Kim had been trained to observe witness reactions to photographs. Witnesses found it difficult to deny recognition, and harder still to lie effectively when confronted with a picture. People had trouble remembering names, but faces were imprinted in a different area of the brain, more easily recalled. So she would know if a witness recognized Reacher, even if they lied. She’d be able to tell. But failure was not an option, so she needed a different picture.

She switched to the altered head shot she had created on the plane. She had cropped out Reacher’s army uniform and removed his hat in this version. Was her photo editing good enough to deny Reacher his unfair advantage?

Then knuckles rapped hard on the Traverse’s side window. Kim closed her computer and looked at the inquiring face only inches from her own. She pressed the button to lower the window. Before she had a chance to speak, Special Agent Carlos Gaspar said, “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. I tried to open the hatch, but it’s locked. Give me the key. I’ll toss my bags in and we can get on the road.”