Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel (8 page)

Weston had been his mom’s lawyer and the guy who had given him her instructions for her remains after her death. It was probably something important. So he clicked on the most recent message and waited as the mail program scanned the email. Then it opened, and Cameron read the short message:
Call me as soon as you get this. I have information on Jack Reacher.

No greetings. No goodbye. No signature. Just the fourteen words and two periods. Cameron figured that Weston had sent so many messages he had probably grown tired of saying
hello
and asking
how are you
. At this point, Weston was just sending a message with the essential words. Straight to the point. He probably figured it was a nearly fruitless endeavor to email him because Jack Cameron was out on the road trying to get to know his father, and that meant he would be difficult, if not impossible, to find. Like father like son. It meant he’d be far away from emails and the Internet.

But here Cameron was, a victim of time and chance. One thing leads to another. Cause and effect.

Karen had asked him to leave. He’d caught a ride. The guy’s car had broken down. The rain had come in. And Cameron then stepped into the only café that had space for a customer, the only cafe that hadn’t asked him to leave because of his appearance—and it happened to be an Internet café. Now he sat at a computer he’d been forced to pay for, which had, in turn, convinced him not to waste his money and time there and to log on. And the high school he had gone to, not all that long ago, way back in Mississippi, had forced him to open an email account in the first place. And since he was forced to sit there and pay for Internet and use it, he might as well check the only email address he’d had from a lifetime ago. Well, maybe not a lifetime, but definitely a different lifetime ago.

One thing led to another.

Cameron put the mouse over the reply button and clicked it. He put his fingers to the keyboard and typed a short message:
Will call today.
He clicked the send button, and the computer made a swooshing noise like a reverse vacuum cleaner—and his email was off.

Cameron wondered what information Weston had. He figured that, perhaps, he could scroll back through the older messages and find the answer, but what was the point in digging through older messages? They were technically things of the past, and Cameron didn’t like to sift through the past. What was the point in doing that? On the other hand, Jack Reacher was from a long-ago and unknown past—his past. Therefore, it was sometimes necessary to go backward in order to move forward.

Chapter 13

THE NEXT THING THAT CAMERON SET OUT TO DO
after the rain stopped and he paid his tab at the Internet cafe was to find a pay phone. In the twenty-first century, this was not an easy task. Even in a major city like Seattle, pay phones weren’t that easy to come by, but Cameron asked around and ended up on what felt to him like a scavenger hunt, at least at first. Go here. Turn there. Look by that place. Search by this place. But in the end, he found a pay phone down by the fish market.

As he stared at the pay phone, he felt something he couldn’t quite explain, a sense of
déjà vu
, like some sort of ghost stood over his shoulder. He felt like he’d been there before. He got that kind of feeling like he knew—not sensed, but
knew
—that he was meant to be at that pay phone.

Strange
, he thought.

The pay phone was located across from a streetlight that had just turned red. He looked over at the idling cars and then examined an interesting coffee shop across the street. It had maroon paint and scarred wood. A chalkboard menu stood outside. Nothing was written on it because it was covered in rainwater, but Cameron imagined that it was a sign used to display the day’s specials for onlookers and passersby so they could decide to try the red cake or the mocha frappe with cherry drizzle or the pumpkin spice latte or whatever such nonsense they created to draw in today’s American coffee drinker.

No one knew what the big deal about Seattle and coffee was, but Cameron imagined it had something to do with the bleeding-heart, poetic, artistic stigma the city carried, or maybe it was the fact that Starbucks had opened its first pilot store in Seattle. Either of these two options could’ve been a reason, or both, or neither. Whatever, Cameron didn’t care. What he liked about Seattle so far was that there
was
a coffee shop on every corner. What he didn’t like about Seattle was that, in his short stay, it had definitely lived up to the hype about rain. It rained a lot, but then again, Cameron had only been in the city for less than two hours.

Cameron walked over to the pay phone and didn’t have to wait in line, which wasn’t a shock. If there had been even one person using the phone, Cameron would’ve been surprised. He recalled seeing old movies where people waited in line forever to use a pay phone, but those days were long gone. Even the days when people didn’t have cell phones were almost before he was born. This made seeing a pay phone for Cameron like seeing a relic from another time.

A smile flickered across his face as he thought of his father using pay phones. Then he wondered if his father had used
this
pay phone. According to some study or article he had read, America had less than 500,000 pay phones left—and that was something he had read more than five years ago, probably dated information by now. Now the number was probably less than 450,000. Maybe even much less, but Cameron wasn’t sure about the exact number of pay phones, and he remembered numbers and facts pretty well when he paid attention.

If his father had been in Seattle and had needed to use a pay phone for some reason, then perhaps he had also been directed to the fish market, and maybe he had used this particular pay phone.

This thought made Cameron smile.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out five quarters and slipped them into the pay phone coin slot. He figured that Mississippi was a long distance number from Seattle and it would cost a dollar and a quarter, which was what it had cost in Mississippi to call long distance a long time ago, but he wasn’t sure if there was a difference nowadays or not. He hadn’t used a pay phone in a long time. However, taking inflation and deflation and time out of the equation, he believed $1.25 was the correct price because pay phones were no longer used for profit, not really. Cameron had no idea why the phone companies that controlled them kept them around.

He heard the change slide into the phone and stop dead, and then he heard a dial tone from the receiver. He pulled up the number from his memory and dialed it. He hoped that Weston hadn’t moved offices or changed his phone number. He hit the last digit with his index finger and waited.

Cameron looked across the street at the coffee shop again and then to the sky. By the looks of the clouds, it might start raining, or it might clear up—there was really no way of predicting it.

The phone whirred and buzzed silently like it was trying to go through different towers or wires or however pay phones worked, Cameron wasn’t sure. Then it rang. A distant kind of ring. Then a click. Another ring. And a voice.

Weston sounded a little husky, like he had fallen asleep and was answering the phone straight from a deep nap.

“This is Chip Weston.”

“It’s Cameron.”

“Yes,” Weston cleared his throat and said, “Yeah. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

Cameron stayed quiet.

“I got a call about you.”

“A call?”

“I haven’t been looking for your dad or anything. What I mean to say is that I didn’t go around searching for him after your mother passed.”

Cameron asked, “Who called you?”

He swallowed, and then he said, “The United States Secret Service.”

Cameron looked around the street and wondered why Weston had announced it in that way.

Probably.

A truck pulled up along the side of a building in his view and waited. The passenger got out and walked into a storefront. The engine ran idle, and exhaust pooled out of the back pipe.

Cameron arched a brow and asked, “What about exactly?”

“They’re looking for Jack. They tracked your mom down—I guess because she’d been searching through so many case files across the country for so many years. For some reason, it makes a difference to them now.

“I told ’em that she was dead, but that didn’t seem to matter to them. The agent said that she had tripped a flag in her relentless searches.”

“So what? They’re only now asking about it?”

“I’m not sure why. But anyway, I told them I represented her estate. And about you.”

Cameron stayed quiet, processed the information.

“The guy got suddenly very interested in who you are. He started asking questions about you. I mean he was
very
interested.”

“What sorts of questions?”

“Your age and where you were born. What you thought of your father. What your relationship with him is like. Stuff like that.”

Cameron said, “What else?”

“The guy left a contact number. He wanted you to call him.”

Weston paused a beat, and then he asked, “Do you want the number?”

“Give it to me.”

Weston asked, “Got a pen?”

“I’m ready.”

Weston told him the number. Cameron committed it to memory.

“How’re you out there?”

Cameron said, “I’m good.”

“Any luck finding Jack?”

“Not so far, but the longer I’m out here, the more I start to think that my mother may not’ve ever expected me to find him.”

Obviously, Cameron couldn’t see Weston, but he imagined a confused look on the guy’s face like it said, “
What the hell are you talking about?”

Cameron didn’t wait for Weston to ask. He said, “I better get off the phone. It’s a pay phone.”

Weston cleared his throat again quickly and asked, “Is there a way for me to contact you? The email thing isn’t efficient.”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll call you. Got to go.”

And Cameron hung up the phone. Didn’t wait for an acknowledgment or anything else. He clicked the receiver back into its cradle and listened as his change rattled down into the stomach of the pay phone and was lost in the mechanism.

He wasn’t interested in setting up some kind of long-term communication with Weston or anyone else from his old life or hometown because that was in the past, and Cameron wanted only to move forward, wanted only to get a lead on Jack Reacher and move on with his life.

Nothing else.

The delivery truck that had pulled up a little down the street had remained idle. No change. Cameron watched as the driver got out and walked to the back of the truck, opened it up, and went inside. He the exited with a dolly stacked with boxes. His partner came out of the store with a clipboard, and they hauled in the boxes.

Cameron turned back to the pay phone and dug in his pocket for his last quarters, found them, and fed the phone. The quarters rattled again into the slot.

He dialed the number and waited.

“Hello,” a voice answered.

“This is Cameron.”

Silence fell across the line, and then a voice said, “Cameron? Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“I know. I heard. So what’s the information you have about Jack Reacher?”

The guy on the other end asked, “Jack Cameron?”

“That’s right.”

“Great. I want to talk to you, but I want to meet in person.”

“Who is this? Exactly?”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve told you that at the beginning of this conversation. My name is Sean Cord. I’m a Federal Agent.”

Cameron paused a beat and then asked, “Special agent?”

“Yeah.”

“Special agent of what exactly?”

The guy on the other end said nothing for a moment. Cameron counted down the seconds left on the phone line in his head.

The guy came back on the line and said, “Sorry, I’m in the middle of something. I work for the United States Department of Treasury. I knew your uncle.”

“You knew Joe?”

Cameron felt hopeful for the first time in months that this was a break in finding Jack.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst
.

“Yeah. I used to work for him.”

Cameron said, “You work for the Secret Service?”

“That’s right.”

Cameron stayed quiet and heard the sounds of a busy street on the other end of the phone. A car motor. The heavy sounds of tires on pavement. And another voice that Cameron assumed was another agent said something.

Cord came back on the line and asked, “I really can’t speak now anyway. Where are you?”

“Seattle.”

Cord said, “I’d love to talk to you. I’m sorry that I’m busy right now.”

“You work the protection side or the financial side?”

The United States Secret Service has two main functions. One is the investigation into financial crimes like counterfeiting, and the other is protection detail—the side everyone knows about. Those are the guys who run alongside the president’s motorcade and the guys who are famous for being willing to take a bullet for the president. The guys like Clint Eastwood from that movie from way back in the 1990s.