by Diane Capri
She said nothing. He slid the transmission into Park and turned off the lights. Kim waited for her eyes to adjust to the near total darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Sunday, January 30
9:55 p.m.
New York, New York
Nineteen minutes after hanging up with Finlay, Gaspar’s burner phone rang. Which meant two things. Finlay took his threat to call the Boss seriously. And Finlay didn’t want Gaspar to make that call. Both good to know.
He raised the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”
Finlay sighed. “We’re working on the same side, Gaspar. When are you going to accept that I’m not your enemy?”
“When you start acting like it.”
Silence. Static on the line was the only clue that Finlay hadn’t hung up. Gaspar watched the big clock on the wall as its second hand ticked around toward the twenty-minute deadline. Fifteen seconds left. He was tempted to hang up.
Finlay flinched first. “We tracked the Mercedes on traffic cams until it exited the I-95 expressway in Darien, Connecticut. After that, it seems to have disappeared.”
“Which means the driver knew how to avoid traffic cams,” Gaspar said.
“So it seems,” Finlay replied. “We checked various CCTV systems in the area where he went dark. We also checked the satellites and all known tracking devices and systems. No luck so far.”
“You’re saying an FBI agent has been abducted and you can’t find her?”
Finlay said, “We’re continuing to work on this, but for the moment, yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Gaspar understood all too well. There were only two reasonable explanations. Otto could be deliberately avoiding all monitoring. She’d done it before. Or her abductors were uncommonly savvy about government surveillance systems. In this case, he feared the latter.
“Suggestions,” Gaspar said through clenched teeth and only because Finlay’s resources were vast. He could actually have options that were unavailable to Gaspar.
“Not yet. Stay on the grid. Keep me posted. I’ll call you when we know more.” Finlay disconnected.
Gaspar donned his coat and gloves and limped back to the hotel. He was tired and hurting, and several times he thought he might not make it. But he didn’t stop to rest until he leaned against the wall inside the elevator as it rushed upward. When it reached his floor, he hurried out and down the hallway.
He used Otto’s key card to enter her room. Personal devices were exactly where he’d left them. He located the Boss’s burner cell phone and placed the call.
“We don’t know where she is. We’re working on it,” Cooper said when he picked up the call. Which meant he’d heard something from Finlay or he’d been monitoring another way. Gaspar didn’t inquire or object. Questions and objections were irrelevant and would be ignored. He didn’t have the energy.
He asked, “Where’s Deerfield? He’s responsible.”
The Boss replied, “He was here. Claims he doesn’t know where she is.”
“You believe that?”
“No.”
“What’s his objective?”
“Blackmail.”
“Why?”
“Career advancement.”
Gaspar blinked. Had he heard correctly? “He wants what?”
“My job, apparently. Or so he says. Came here personally to demand it.”
The Boss would have had him hauled out of his DC office in cuffs, at the very least. Deerfield was smarter than that. He’d have chosen a neutral location. “Where are you?”
“Phoenix.”
Phoenix to New York City was more than a four-hour flight and if he flew into Stewart to be closer to Garrison, the travel time was closer to seven hours. Deerfield was due back in the morning.
“Where is he now?”
“Thirty thousand feet above New Mexico, probably.”
From Cooper’s tone, Gaspar figured Deerfield was lucky he’d booked a commercial flight. A private jet might have tempted the Boss to take him down with a surface-to-air missile.
“What did you tell him about the job?”
“To kiss my ass.”
Gaspar chuckled quietly, which became a cough that caused the pain in his right side to grab his breath and hold it way too long. He pressed his side and took several shallow breaths, pushing the pain down to a tolerable level before he could speak again.
“He’s abducted Otto to use her for blackmail?” Gaspar asked weakly.
“Close.”
The Boss’s silence lasted a couple of beats before Gaspar puzzled out that the leverage Deerfield had applied must have been related to Reacher. Otto was merely the disposable tool he’d applied.
“I see.”
The terse reply came swiftly. “Good.”
Gaspar considered whether to mention Reacher’s phone and text messages. The Boss probably already knew about them. He might not know Reacher had called from a pay phone in Upstate New York, near Garrison.
The Boss made the decision easy. He said, “Order room service.”
Then, Gaspar heard nothing but dead air. He used the hotel phone to order coffee and an assortment of desserts. After that, he gave in and swallowed two extra strength Tylenol, and stretched out on the bed to wait.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sunday, January 30
10:15 p.m.
Upstate New York
The land around the house had seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions. Probably an optical illusion, since this was not Wyoming. They’d only traveled maybe three hours from Manhattan, at the most. Which meant the house probably had electricity and other modern conveniences.
She’d been trained to escape likely dangers and survive the aftermath. Locked doors, restraining devices, vaults, elevators, moving vehicles of all kinds, abductors, hostage takers, firearms and other weapons, as well as animal and human predators. The list of lethal threats to petite women like Kim was seemingly endless.
The driver, or maybe his boss, must have known her qualifications because he’d devised a confinement she couldn’t escape. Defeating Type III and Type IV ballistic resistant materials was beyond brute force or human ingenuity. She knew because she’d been trained there, too.
Heavy clouds blocked every hint of celestial light and sunrise was at least eight hours away. She could sit here until daylight, but then what?
Reluctantly, she concluded that she’d have a better chance of defeating the situation if she acquiesced to his demand. The decision infuriated her, but that wasn’t helping, either.
She removed her gun from the holster and field stripped it in the dark in less than six seconds. She placed the parts on the seat, as instructed.
He turned the lights on and pushed the button to unlock her door. Wisely, he didn’t say anything more. If he thought he’d won this war, he was an idiot. Perhaps he knew enough about her to understand that, too.
She opened the door and stepped outside, and shoved it closed. She’d already memorized the license name and number posted on the partition. Now that she could see it, she memorized the gold and blue New York state license plate.
She pulled the two burner phones from her pocket. Still no signal.
Great. Now what?
Standing on the driveway, darkness as far as the eye could see under a cloudy night sky, Kim wondered where in the hell she was. Manhattan was a long way to walk from here. She’d seen no traffic of any kind on the roads for quite a while. Hitchhiking wasn’t an option.
A splash of light spilled from the top of the steps behind her when a large, swarthy man opened the front door.
The driver noticed the light. As if he’d handed her off and could now be gone, he rolled the Mercedes along the driveway toward the back of the house out of sight.
The man at the top of the stairs said, “Agent Otto. We’ve been expecting you. Please come in.”
Kim briefly considered refusing, but what purpose would that serve? She trudged up the stairs, walked i
nside, and he closed the door behind her.
The front door opened into a central hallway. On the right and left, double doors led to dining and living rooms. Beyond the dining room, on the left side, a carpeted stairway led to the second floor. Framed photographs accompanied the treads along the left wall, and an elaborate dark oak handrail atop dark spindles marched up the right.
“This way.” He turned his back and moved deeper into the house.
She shrugged and walked behind him. He stopped to open a doorway on the right and stood aside.
She entered a small library. Fully loaded bookshelves lined one wall. Floor to ceiling windows filled another. A working fireplace warmed the room and cast a pleasant glow over the traditional furnishings.
Four comfortable reading chairs were grouped to face the fire. A slender blonde Kim recognized occupied one of the chairs.
“Jodie Jacob, right?” She asked as she entered the room.
The woman looked up from her book as if she’d just noticed her visitor. Her eyebrows dipped into a concerned frown. “Do I know you?”
Kim heard the door close, and the lock click into place.
“I’m FBI Agent Kim Otto.” She showed her badge to comfort the woman.
“I’d almost concluded no one even noticed I was missing.” Jodie’s mouth quivered, but she was remarkably composed under the circumstances. Whatever they were. The fire’s shadows played over her skin, giving her an unearthly appearance.
Kim pressed her lips into a hard line. She was in no mood for waifish women jerking her around. She’d had more than enough of that for one night.
She moved to stand near the fire where she could see Jodie’s face clearly. “Actually, we thought you’d been murdered. Assistant Director Alan Deerfield has custody of a body. He believes it’s you.”
Jodie barely blinked. The news seemed not to faze her at all. Perhaps her murder wasn’t news to her, though. The story had been reported by several news outlets. She could have learned about the murder somehow. But her composure was surreal, even if she already knew.
“We found the victim in your father’s house in Garrison.”
No gasps or blinks or reactions of any kind, voluntary or involuntary, to this, either. As if she hadn’t comprehended the words. Was something wrong with her? Did she lack mental capacity or something?
Kim tried stabbing her with the blunt truth, as a test. “Deerfield thinks Jack Reacher murdered you and left your body in a bathtub filled with green paint.”
Jodie’s weird composure cracked. Her breath caught. Her already translucent skin blanched to stark white, and her fingers lost their grip on her book, and it dropped heavily onto the rug. She didn’t speak at all.
What had evoked her reaction? Reacher’s name? The green paint murders?
Kim’s curiosity temporarily trumped everything else. She softened her tone. “Tell me what’s going on here, Jodie.”
Her eyes rounded. She shook her head. “I wish I knew. I left my apartment late on a Tuesday morning, thirteen days ago. It was too cold and blustery to walk. I was in a hurry. I ordered a car from the service I’ve used a thousand times.” She paused. Shrugged. “When I saw he was abducting me, I tried to get out of the car, but I couldn’t. The driver brought me here.”
“Could you identify the driver if you saw him again?” Kim asked.
“I never saw his face, and I figured the car was stolen.” Jodie closed her eyes and cocked her head. “He was a redhead, I think. He wore a cap that covered his hair, but his eyebrows were sandy-colored, and his skin was freckled. He had blue eyes.”
“What happened after he dropped you off here?” Kim asked.
“Not much. I tried to escape several times. Once, I made it a couple of miles down the road before they chased me down. After half a dozen failed attempts, I gave up. Since then, nothing really. I’ve been comfortable. I have a lovely room. I’m free to use the house or the grounds. They feed me regularly. There’s a gym.” She looked at Kim as if the story was too bizarre for her to believe. “But I’m a prisoner. I’ve had no contact with anyone outside of this house since I arrived.”
“Do you have any idea who’s responsible for holding you here or why they won’t allow you to leave?” Kim asked.
Jodie shook her head. “At first, I thought I’d been kidnapped for ransom. That’s a rampant problem, as you probably know. I’ve handled such cases for clients over the years. My old firm has insurance policies to pay the ransom, although those policies wouldn’t cover me now. I haven’t worked there for a while.”
“Where have you been working, anyway?”
“The high pressured corporate lawyer life wasn’t for me. I’ve been doing volunteer legal work for Army vets. I’ll get another kind of job at some point. I told all of that to Agent Brice, Deerfield’s right-hand guy when he came around to my apartment to ask me about the Petrosians last month.”
Kim nodded. “I guess no one would assume a volunteer lawyer would have kidnap insurance, then?”
“Maybe not. The situation hasn’t progressed normally at all. No request for a proof of life has come through to me. No ransom demands that I’ve been told about. No one has tried to harm me.” She paused and took a breath. “Except that I can’t contact anyone and can’t leave here, once I stopped trying to escape this has been very civilized.”
“Why can’t you contact anyone?”
“My cell phone doesn’t get a signal. There are no landline telephones. And we don’t have internet access.”
Kim nodded. “Why didn’t your escape attempts work?”
“Mostly because it’s so damn cold and there’s nowhere to go. Getting out of the house is easy. But then what?” Jodie shook her head, and a wry grin lifted one side of her mouth. “After sunrise, look outside. You’ll see why I gave up. Meanwhile, tell me, why you’re here.”
“I have no idea. I was abducted in the same way you were. Probably by the same person,” Kim replied. “I’m not even sure where we are. Do you know?”
“Upstate New York. The driver took a long time to get here, and it seemed like he was trying to confuse me. But this is Orange County, I think. Maybe less than fifty miles west of Garrison, if I was asked to guess.” Jodie said. “I’m not much of a horsewoman myself, but there are a lot of equestrian areas when you get away from the city. So I could be wrong.”
The room was probably being monitored. Someone could be both watching and listening. More than one someone, for that matter. But Kim had no idea whether she’d have another chance to ask, so she took the gamble and added a white lie. “Reacher called me tonight. He’s worried about you.”
“Really? I haven’t seen Reacher in years.” Kim interpreted Jodie’s expression as a truthful mix of curiosity, amusement, and concern. “Haven’t talked to him or emailed him or anything else, either. If it’s information about Reacher that you want, Agent Otto, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“You knew Reacher very well at one time, though, didn’t you? Deerfield says you were the love of his life. The one that got away,” Kim smiled. She couldn’t help it. The mere idea of Reacher being that smitten by any woman was amusing.
“My father was very fond of Reacher, and I was a daddy’s girl. So of course, I fell in love with Reacher when I was fifteen years old. He didn’t know I was alive back then. We reconnected very intensely for a short period after my father died. We were both grieving. I suspect that had something to do with how we felt.” Jodie cocked her head. “I’ll probably always love Reacher. But don’t imagine that he was heartbroken when I moved to Europe.”
“So Deerfield is wrong about that?”
“Completely wrong,” Jodie nodded emphatically. “Reacher has extreme wanderlust. Always will. The desire within him to travel and explore and be a free man is massive. Reacher will never settle down. It’s simply not an option.”
“Weren’t you sad about that? When you broke up?”
“Sure. He was, too. But it was the only decisi
on we could make, really.” Jodie shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself. “I was excited about my promotion, the move to Europe. Every moment of my life was spoken for already. I didn’t have time to mope about Reacher or anything else.”
“He gave you the Garrison house, though. The one your father bequeathed him.”
Jodie smiled again. “Dad thought Reacher might need a home, or he could use the money it would bring. But he wasn’t interested in either. He’s the least encumbered person I’ve ever met. Real estate is for people who want to put down roots. That was the last thing Reacher wanted.”
Kim nodded. “So you sold the house. When was the last time you were out there?”
Jodie cocked her head and thought about it for a few seconds. Which Kim figured she wouldn’t have had to do if she’d been there a few days ago.
“I don’t believe I’ve been back to that house since Reacher moved out.” Jodie grinned with genuine mirth this time. “The truth is that he never moved in. He didn’t have anything to move. And he wasn’t interested in acquiring anything that had to be moved, either. He just left one day. And then there was no reason for me to go back there.”
“You didn’t drive your car to the Garrison house fourteen days ago?”
“Agent Otto, I told you. No, I didn’t go out to the Garrison house. As far as I know, my car’s in the garage at my apartment, where I left it before I was abducted.” She folded her hands and sat stiffly in the chair. Her body language and her questions became more formal. “What’s this all about?”
“Once again, I wish I knew.”
“I’m pretty good at what I do. Tell me what’s going on. I know all the players and the history of this thing better than you do. Maybe we can figure it out together.”