by Diane Capri
Second, I still hadn’t opened that flat manila envelope from the sentry at the Fort Bird exit gate. I’d do that on the plane, too.
CHAPTER 14
The former Lesley Browning, and perhaps former Mrs. Joe Reacher, now lived in a suburb thirty minutes due west of Nashville, Tennessee. The non-stop flight from Charlotte was less than two hours in the air on a Canadair CRJ 700. Only sixty-six passengers aboard. The three-man crew consisted of a pilot, a co-pilot, and one flight attendant.
In my line of work, flying was as necessary as a root canal and nowhere near as pleasant. People who are not afraid to fly tell me fear of flying is irrational. They say flying is safer than driving a car or riding a bike. They are idiots.
Planes make powerful weapons; we all know that too well. They’re also machines that can fail like every other machine. They are operated by humans, none of whom is perfect. And planes are no match for Mother Nature.
But the worst thing about planes is that I wasn’t in control of the flight, which meant evasive maneuvers were never an option.
I tightened my lap belt, placed an antacid on my tongue and pressed it to the roof of my mouth, closed my eyes, and clenched the armrests for takeoff.
Once we were airborne and were at an altitude as safe as we were going to get for portable electronic devices, I unencrypted and opened the Boss’s file. The summary report for Joe [none] Reacher was first. Not much new. Most of it was information we’d uncovered when our assignment began.
Why had Stan and Josephine Reacher been opposed to middle names, I wondered again? Neither brother owned one.
I skimmed the data. Basic statistical information included date of birth and death. Joe had died in the field in the line of duty at thirty-eight. Not long after his brother left the Army and turned up in Margrave, Georgia.
Joe Reacher had enrolled in and graduated from West Point two years before his brother.
After West Point, Joe served in Army Intelligence. In my experience, no one serving in that position was likely to have been a saint. Those guys were laser-focused on the necessary and unencumbered by niceties. Joe’s file from those days was probably scrubbed as clean as his brother’s. I’d asked for it several times. The Boss said Joe Reacher’s Army Intelligence file was classified, which it likely was.
After that, Joe had moved into another classified and undisclosed position at Treasury, where he was working on January 10, 1990, when his mother Josephine died in Paris at the age of sixty. The only thing new to me here was that both Jack and Joe Reacher attended Josephine’s funeral on January 14, four days after her death.
A quick memory check confirmed that Jack Reacher had left Fort Bird for the last time on the day before he buried his mother. I made a note to check his flights. He could have arrived in Paris early, but he might have been doing something else between Fort Bird and Paris, too.
There was nothing in Joe Reacher’s file about Lesley Browning. No indication their marriage had ever happened or been terminated, which made me feel better. At least I hadn’t missed a lead as obvious as an ex-wife for no reason. Records should exist somewhere, but finding them would take time and effort, which I hoped would not be necessary. My plan was to go right to the source.
As requested, the Boss had located Lesley Browning, formerly of Newburgh, New York, the childhood home of Matthew and Anthony Clifton, not far from West Point. The encrypted file contained basic information about Lesley. She was a year younger than Joe, which meant they were both old enough to marry without parental consent at the time the union was purported to have been made.
Whether they had ever married or not, she should have known things about Joe that no one else had told us. Which could lead me to something relevant about Jack. Which could lead, well, anywhere.
Or nowhere. Again.
Looking at the pathetically slim connection with a clear eye from 40,000 feet, chasing down Lesley Browning seemed like a stupid idea. She was just a kid back then. Barely eighteen. Her marriage to Joe, if it had taken place, had been brief. She was married again now, with children. What could she possibly know that would help complete the Reacher file all these years later?
But we were on the way and there was no going back and nowhere else to go if we did turn back. Only one choice. Again.
I’d traveled the still icy and treacherous highway where Colonel Summers died on the way to the Charlotte airport, white knuckled and nervous the whole time. As I watched the downloaded news footage again on my laptop, I imagined what the crash must have been like for her.
Speed kills. Maybe those were Eunice Summer’s last thoughts if she had time to think at all. She was running late and traveling eighty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone when she slammed into the tanker. She was an excellent driver, but also a notorious lead foot who’d been warned a million times. Maybe that thought flashed into her head, too, half-an-instant before impact.
Then again, if the tanker hadn’t been there, she’d have been fine.
And even if it was there—and it definitely was—why in the hell did a driver as skilled as Summer simply plow into it?
Several factors contributed to the perfect setup for catastrophe. That section of Interstate banked on a steep, widening curve. Rain slicked the asphalt. Light fog settled over the road. Even if I’d been familiar with the road, I would have slowed to the fifty-mile-an-hour speed limit, at least, but I was no expert driver like Summer. Maybe she’d considered it a challenge or something.
No skid marks extended even a short, wavy distance behind her car. Even with both feet standing on the brake applying every ounce of strength she owned, she’d been running way too fast to lay a long trail of rubber in between rounding that bend and flattening her vehicle and herself into the truck.
But still. Not even a Sharpie-stroke’s worth of a skid mark?
The marks left by the tires of the double tractor-trailer rushing down the mountain incline behind her jaunty red sports car were a damn sight longer. Proving the driver tried to stop, but failed. Not that it mattered. She never felt the second hit.
The captain jarred me from reliving Summer’s crash when he turned on the seatbelt sign and chimes from overhead indicated our initial descent into Nashville. We’d hit some bumpy air on the way down, he said. Lovely. I closed the files and my laptop and prepared for landing.
I’d been stuck in seat 1A, the worst seat on any plane. 1A was Gaspar’s seat. I hated 1A. Too much open space around 1A. From 1A, I could see the galley and the door to the flight deck. I could hear the flight attendants talking among themselves or on the phone with the cockpit crew. In 1A I’d be the first to know when something went wrong.
Usually, of course, absolutely nothing went wrong. And the good news about 1A was that I could hear when the landing gear was up and locked or down and locked—among the best sounds on any flight, second only to hearing my feet firmly strike the ground.
As the Canadair CRJ 700 struggled with the promised turbulence, I ran through my standard rationalizations. Flying was safer than driving. Only a small percentage of flights actually crashed and eighty-two percent of plane crashes were non-fatal. I’d already survived three crashes, which meant I was a lucky flyer, for sure.
Then again, forty-seven percent of fatal accidents occurred during final approach and landing. But I ignored that statistic whenever possible.
The flight attendants rushed down the aisle checking seatbelts and tray tables and seat backs, hanging on to avoid falling. The beverage trays the attendant on my side of the plane had left on the galley counter bounced onto the floor and coffee, juices, and water splashed everywhere.
When the attendant reached the crew’s jump seat and buckled in, her face looked a little green, though probably not as green as mine.
My hands clenched the armrests instinctively on the first bump. I braced my feet flat on the floor. I kept my eyes open and nausea at bay through sheer force.
The plane then bounced hard enough to jam my teeth t
ogether. A baby seated somewhere behind me squalled. The first baby’s cries encouraged another child to scream.
More equally hard bounces followed the first and more passengers joined the children in their screaming each time.
And then, we were swooping up into the air again, leaving my stomach somewhere down near the tarmac.
The captain’s smooth voice came on again. “Folks, we’re having some difficulty with the landing gear in the nose of the aircraft. We’re going to circle the runway and give the gear one more opportunity to deploy correctly. We may have a bumpy landing, but we’ll have you on the ground safely in just a few minutes. Please stay in your seats with your seat belts securely fastened.”
Difficulty with the landing gear? Difficulty could mean anything from a flat tire to no landing gear at all. Any difficulty with landing gear could be disastrous, but the landing gear in the nose? Worse still.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the last time I’d been on a plane with malfunctioning landing gear and we’d ended up with an emergency evacuation on an air slide.
The plane’s slow circle and final approach was punctuated by the sounds of landing gear grinding but not locking into place after several tries. The motors repeatedly whined and too long.
From 1A, I couldn’t see the ground outside even if I’d had the nerve to try. But I’d been to Nashville many times. It is a mountain city, not a coastal town. Belly-landings on the hard ground were a lot less survivable than skimming the Hudson River’s surface.
Finally, the landing gear’s grinding whine changed. The captain spoke to us again. “Folks, we’ve got the nose gear down and locked. It’ll be bumpy, but we’ll be fine. Remain seated and braced for landing.”
A cheer from the other passengers, but not from me. I’d noticed he didn’t say the nose gear was operating perfectly.
The pilot touched down and braked and the plane began to slow and the nose gear did not snap off and drop us to our fiery ends. After the longest seconds of my life, the Canadair CRJ 700 came to a complete stop, all in one piece. Once again passengers exploded with laughter and applause and, this time, happy tears from the adults. Even I joined in the celebration, taking my first full breath since our initial failure to rejoin the planet’s surface.
Summer’s imagined last moments rose up in me once again, even as I’d survived yet another battle with the gods of air travel with nothing worse than bruises. There was no ice on the runway and no deer on the road and no enormous vehicle ten times heavier than the CRJ 700 sitting in front of us. Unlike Summer, my survival had been in the hands of experts. I’d been lucky.
Even so, we weren’t safe yet. Something was seriously wrong because the flight attendant hustled us off the plane down the emergency chute where ground crews whisked us away from the disabled bird on wobbly legs. I’d had no chance to shake the pilot’s hand and slobber with gratitude. Nor did I hang around for the debriefing, apologies, and offers for flight coupons.
By the time I made my way outside the Nashville International Airport terminal into yet another cold November afternoon, I’d seen several televisions broadcasting video of our breathtaking landing. I didn’t stop to hear the blow-by-blow. I’d already lived it and that was more than enough.
Gaspar was waiting at the curb behind the wheel of an old Crown Vic. Who knows where he’d acquired it. The full-sized brown tank was always his first choice and my last. I bent to knock on the passenger window and jerked my left thumb toward the back.
He popped the trunk. I stowed my bag and joined him inside the cabin. The whole process was as fluid as an Olympic gymnast’s performance and took half the time.
“Good to see you survived the flight, Suzie Wong.” He grinned and waited while I settled into the front passenger seat. Gaspar didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He didn’t know how close we’d come to not meeting right here and right now. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have joked like that, and I was glad not to talk about it yet.
“Right back atcha, Chico.” I pulled an alligator clamp out of my pocket and secured it to the shoulder harness at the retractor to avoid beheading on sudden stops. I left the wings of the clamp open to be sure it would fly off and the belt would grab in the event of an actual catastrophe.
I avoided thinking about how no seat belt would have helped us if our pilot had been less skilled or lucky, and how no safety restraint in her red sports car would have saved Eunice Summer, either.
When it’s your time, it’s your time. Summer the speed demon had tempted fate once too often and she finally lost. I made a mental note to remember that.
CHAPTER 15
When I leaned against the seatback, I could barely see over the Crown Vic’s long hood. Once again, I felt like a child in need of a booster seat. My breathing continued to even out as my heart rate slowed to near normal. It was good to have him behind the wheel now instead of me.
Gaspar smirked and watched my process, and after I’d straightened myself out, he gestured to my cup holder. “The coffee’s a present from me”—he tossed a small padded envelope into my lap—“and that’s one from the Boss.”
He shifted the slow boat into drive and lumbered away from the curb.
Experience, along with heft and weight, told me what was inside the envelope. A secure cell phone complete with the latest and greatest FBI monitoring equipment installed. I tossed the envelope into the back seat, where it landed next to Gaspar’s identical unopened one.
My mind flashed to another envelope, this one the same color, but larger and flat. The one I’d received from the sentry at Fort Bird on the way out yesterday, still unopened, too. I shrugged. That envelope was stowed in my bag in the trunk where I couldn’t get to it until we stopped again.
I took a grateful sip of the hot java. “So how’s Maria? And little man Gaspar?”
“Maria’s tired. She’s got our daughters and her family with her, for now.” He’d frowned and then his mouth lifted up at the corner. “Little man Gaspar is still being stubborn. Looks like it’ll be a while before he joins us. Docs are saying it could be two weeks past her due date.”
I sighed. “Men. Never ready when we are.”
“Hey, keep it clean in here. This vehicle is G-rated.”
For the next ten minutes, I filled him in on the events he’d missed yesterday. Gaspar had served in the Army. His background was similar to Reacher’s in some ways. He would have been an asset on the scene. He thought like Reacher would, which I’d learned to harness as a tactical advantage, too.
When I’d finished, Gaspar said, “What was your impression of Tony Clifton?”
“Sounds like you have an opinion.”
He shrugged. “I know the guy. He was always, shall we say, a favorite with the ladies. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice. You notice everything.”
“He seemed serious enough to me when he offered to help us with General Clifton.” No way would I be discussing my personal reactions to Major Clifton with Gaspar. Not now. Not ever.
He remained quiet for a few minutes, thinking things through in his own way, I assumed.
The area around the Nashville airport was similar to other major civilian airports. Good roads, parking lots and garages, gas stations, hotels, and car rental joints. Nothing special. Gaspar kept his eyes on the road as we merged onto the Interstate amid heavier traffic than I’d expected for midday.
“What you need to keep in mind about the Army,” he said then, “is that they take care of themselves first. Reacher is a distant memory to those guys.”
True enough. “Whatever Reacher was involved in back then, it’s long forgotten,” I said. “Which means none of the current officers will care about it at all, even if they do remember.”
He nodded. “Or, less likely, bringing old Reacher history up now will be bad news for whoever was involved. Which means watch your back.”
What was important to our assignment probably didn’t matter to anyone else, but we were stuck on this well
-worn track. The only records we had access to on Reacher were his old Army files. Everything else that should have been in government files and public records had been deleted or hidden. We’d been warned to stop snooping into all the places where newer files should have been. We had tried anyway. So far, no dice.
Gaspar said, “We’ll know soon enough whether the Clifton brothers are friend or enemy.”
“Agreed.” If Tony Clifton investigated the possible connections between Summer’s death and The Lucky Bar shooting and Reacher’s activities at Fort Bird, he would find something. We’d know which side Tony Clifton was on after he found the connection.
Of course, we would find the connections first. We had to.
Gaspar said, “Matthew Clifton would have been around when Jack Reacher’s 1990 case was unraveling. He’s two years older than Reacher, so he’d likely have been higher up the food chain, too.”
We’d finally moved far enough from the airport to see some daylight between vehicles. Gaspar set the Crown Vic’s cruise control and leaned back to stretch his right leg. He drove along the Interstate at a steady five miles an hour above the speed limit.
Once he’d settled in, he said, “Joe was already at Treasury late in 1989, according to the Boss’s file. But he and Jack spent a lot of time with each other around the time of Reacher’s Fort Bird misadventures, flying back and forth to their mother as she was dying. Tony said his brother Matthew and Joe were still friends at that point, right? So it’s possible both might have known what Jack was involved in.”
My gut said both Cliftons knew a hell of a lot more than we did. “What do you think about Lesley Browning?”