by Dan Ames
There was no need to hurry. The body may or may not have been found yet, but that was now far away.
In this line of business it paid to train for endurance. Sometimes, like this one, the ability to exert oneself for extended periods of time was essential. But being in command physically was important for other reasons. A steady hand. Clarity of thought. The courage to kill.
The shooter continued on, weaving through a dim trail that ran roughly to the main path nearly a quarter mile away. No trace was left behind.
That was certainty.
They could study bullet trajectory, try to pinpoint the shooter’s location and search for forensic evidence.
But they would find none.
Oh, they would probably be able to figure out the location, maybe even point to some slight disturbances in the dirt or grass, but it wouldn’t tell them any kind of story. Wouldn’t give them the narrative they were looking for.
They weren’t dealing with an amateur here.
Quite the opposite.
This wasn’t the shooter’s first mission.
That had been a long, long time ago. In a whole different part of the world.
The trail descended and the shooter branched off to his right, reconnected with the main path and soon found his vehicle.
It was the only one in the makeshift parking area.
After stowing the rifle and gear, the shooter checked the satellite phone.
No surprise there.
A message from the man paying the bills.
It was pretty clear.
This mission is not over.
Chapter Five
The dishonorable discharge prevented any kind of formal military recognition at Nate Figueroa’s funeral. It was a simple ceremony, attended by a few people, on a cold, rainy day in Minnesota.
The thick sheet of gray reminded Michael Tallon of how lucky he was to live in the desert. The blue sky, present nearly every single day, was an affirmation of life.
Tallon had grown up in rural Indiana where basketball was everything. He’d been a natural athlete, but football was where he’d excelled. Although a competent student, he’d been bored with studies and classrooms, even though he was an avid reader outside of school. He’d been transfixed by stories of men in far off countries fighting, loving, and sometimes dying.
So he’d joined the military and never looked back.
Until now.
Figueroa had been his brother. Not by blood in the traditional sense, but by blood in the literal sense. They’d seen their share of battlefields, saved each other’s lives multiple times, and returned back to their home country with plenty of scars, and enough money in the bank to allow them the freedom to pursue their life’s passion.
For Tallon, it had been to continue what he had been doing but on a much smaller, much less dangerous scale.
For Figueroa, it had eventually been to fight his most epic battle ever. Against cancer.
It had been the briefest of battles. From initial diagnosis to the end in a matter of weeks.
Figueroa must not have seen it coming.
And when he did, it was too late.
Tallon hadn’t even known his friend had been sick. The news hit him like a sucker punch.
Now, Tallon watched as Figueroa's family gathered after the funeral. A few with umbrellas, waiting for cars to arrive to carry them back to the house and celebrate what they knew about their son, brother and husband.
Tallon wouldn’t be joining them.
He’d already offered his condolences.
Paid his respects.
Said his final goodbye to one of the finest brothers he’d ever known.
Tallon checked the sky again.
It was still a solid sheet of gray.
No sign at all that somewhere behind the wall of darkness was a sun, trying to break through, but failing.
Forced to simply bide its time.
Chapter Six
Pauling sat on the couch in her living room, staring at the phone in her hand.
A voice had just told her Reacher was dead.
It was like being told the Earth was flat after all.
Impossible.
Jack Reacher dead?
Pauling felt a dull thud in the pit of her stomach. A void opened up within her and she was surprised by the reaction. It had been a fair amount of time since she’d seen Reacher, yet she thought of him often. Wondered where he was, what he was doing, if he was ever going to stop by and see her again. As always, it was a train of thought that always ended at the same place: not likely.
Reacher was a wanderer, a traveler, a rogue. It was a spirit and a frame of mind that naturally resisted constraint.
Some people were simply born for the open road. Reacher was one of them. Maybe the very personification of that innate wanderlust.
Now Pauling faced the possibility that he was gone.
Reacher dead?
“Who is this?” she said into the phone.
There was silence on the other end of the line.
On a most basic level, Pauling obviously knew that everyone dies. Some much sooner than others. Sometimes, death arrives as a surprise. Other times, it’s the end to a long period of suffering.
No one is immune.
Yet the idea that Jack Reacher was dead just didn’t sit well with Pauling. He seemed so immovable, like a cosmic force that just…was.
The most obvious questions came to Pauling’s mind. How had he died?
An accident?
Illness?
The questions raced through her mind like bullets from a machine gun.
“Hello?” Pauling said into the phone, this time with an edge in her voice.
She listened.
Thought she heard someone shift slightly.
“The body’s at a town called Pine Beach, on Whidbey Island, near Deception Pass,” the voice on the other end of the line finally said.
Something about the voice triggered suspicion in Pauling. The voice was too perfect. Scratchy. Gender-neutral. A neat, even cadence.
It was mechanical.
As in, processed.
“Who the hell are you–”
Pauling knew she had little chance of getting her question across in time, and she was right.
The line made a popping sound and she was disconnected.
Pauling again looked at the phone in her hand. The number was blocked. She hit redial anyway but the call wouldn’t go through.
She set the phone down in frustration and picked up her wine glass, got to her feet.
It was clearly a crank call. If Reacher was dead, she probably would have heard about it from someone in law enforcement. Her contacts or friends who knew she’d worked with Reacher before.
And if someone did call her, it wouldn’t be done this way. Like some weird anonymous sex pervert.
And if it was a hoax, what was the point?
Did someone want to lure her to this town called Pine Beach? And was using the idea that Jack Reacher was dead to motivate her?
Or maybe she was convincing herself of a conspiracy because she didn’t want to face a horrible prospect.
That Jack Reacher really was dead.
Pauling thought about her next move as she went into the kitchen and dumped the rest of her wine down the drain.
Sure, she could hop on a plane and be on her way.
But she was an investigator, first and foremost.
Occasionally, she had considered trying to track Reacher down. To see him again. But she never had, because she felt like she knew him well enough to understand that wasn’t in his plans. She could have forced the issue, but there would have been no point.
Now, she had a reason to try to find him. A legitimate one, not born out of loneliness and, frankly, lust.
Hopefully, she would be able to find him.
Alive.
Chapter Seven
The shooter paid cash for an anonymous beige sedan and drove to northern California. It was
better than flying. Easier than renting a car. The right dealership, the proper amount of financial persuasion, and a complete absence of paperwork.
It also meant that all of the shooter’s gear could be used for the next job. Ordinarily, that wasn’t the best way to go. Better to ditch a hot weapon from the last job, start fresh with the next one.
But time was tight.
Besides, the killer was used to traveling and rarely got hassled by cops. Just drive the proper speed limit, avoid doing anything stupid, and everything would be fine.
The fee for these two jobs was crazy money.
The kind that lets a professional in this particular industry take a couple of years off, or, properly invested, maybe even retire.
The shooter had no intention of doing that, however. Too much time off and rust sets in. The eyes don’t stay as sharp. The reflexes start to slow.
In this business, that was how a person retired early, as in permanent retirement.
The rifle in the trunk was a factory model, paid for with cash and sans paperwork. The weapon was mostly factory with a few modifications. This made it not only cheaper, but almost impossible to trace. It was a well-known brand whose civilian models were very popular with deer hunters. Hundreds of thousands of the rifles were sold every year.
It was a fine weapon, with a smooth action, devastating power and perfect accuracy.
The shooter had just proven that on a lonely road on Whidbey Island.
It was a long day’s drive but the shooter made it to his location, settled in and spent the night.
At the appropriate time the next day, it was time to fulfill the last part of the contract.
Now, the shooter sighted the target, adjusted for the very slight east-to-west breeze and waited.
It wasn’t a difficult shot.
The shooter had made many, many more difficult ones under high duress. This was a soft target, no one shooting back. The only difficulty was evasion and escape.
But that wasn’t a problem, either.
Civilian police forces weren’t really designed to quickly identify and apprehend a long-distance shooter. Certainly not a professional one with a military background.
Overconfidence and arrogance were the twin engines on the flight to failure, however. A professional knew that. The wrong street cop showing up at just the wrong time could ruin everything.
So necessary precautions had been taken.
Always plan.
Always prepare.
Always be ready to walk away.
But today, there wouldn’t be any walking away.
Especially for the target.
Everything was ready. The evacuation vehicle and route were in place, all designed to avoid any areas with security cameras. There would be no eyewitnesses.
And there would be very little evidence left at the scene. But the professional knew that on a microscopic level, there was always something that would remain.
But all precautions had been taken to make sure none of it could be traced back.
Now, nearly two thousand yards away, there was movement.
The shooter eased into position with steadied breathing and waited.
Fifteen seconds later, the trigger was pulled.
Chapter Eight
To do the necessary research, Pauling left her apartment, and crossed over to West 4th Street where her office building was just around the corner.
She climbed the narrow staircase to her second floor office suite. Pauling unlocked the door and went inside. There was a waiting room in the front and then a second room that housed her office, which consisted of a desk, a computer, two visitors’ chairs and a low cabinet with drawers that doubled as file cabinets.
Everything was sleek, modern and upper tier corporate design. Not outlandishly expensive, but not cheap, either. Most of Pauling’s clients were high-income types, and her office reflected that.
She fired up her computer, zipped through her email and electronically filed anything outstanding.
And then she began to pursue Jack Reacher electronically.
There was really only one way, and she knew what it was.
Reacher carried an ATM card, a toothbrush, and a little bit of cash.
No way to trace a toothbrush or cash.
The ATM card, however, was another matter.
Pauling knew Reacher didn’t spend much money on a daily basis. In fact, his biggest expenditures were coffee, and a change of clothes. The coffee he bought every day, the clothes, every few weeks or so.
Reacher lived easily and cheaply, always on the move.
Still, she figured he would need to replenish his cash occasionally, even though he hitched rides and stayed in cheap hotels.
Pauling estimated that if he lived frugally, he would still need to get cash at least once every few months, more or less depending on the level of his activity and where he was. If he was in a major city, it could be difficult to keep daily expenses down, as opposed to some small town in the middle of North Dakota where coffee and a huge breakfast came to a total of seven bucks or so.
It helped that Pauling had gotten to know Reacher on an intimate level, and even gotten a glimpse of his ATM card, so she knew which bank to sneak her way into. She hoped he hadn’t changed banks for some reason. Pauling guessed he hadn’t. Reacher was a guy who liked to keep things simple. If it wasn’t broken, no need to fix it.
Armed with more knowledge than she usually had to work with, Pauling quickly slipped into the database of Reacher’s bank. It was low-level hacking, essentially an open door left for Pauling by one of her former clients.
Pauling located Reacher’s account with efficiency and noted his transactions. Small withdrawals, spread out sporadically every two to three months, ranging all across the country.
She noted with wry amusement, and maybe a touch of hurt feelings, that he had been near New York almost six months ago. But he hadn’t reached out to contact her.
Oh well, she thought and continued to study the withdrawals.
Pauling let out a long breath.
His last withdrawal had been in Seattle.
Less than a week ago.
The mechanical voice on the phone had told her Reacher’s body was near a town called Pine Beach, on Whidbey Island.
Pauling knew that Whidbey Island was in the Pacific Northwest, just north of Seattle, less than an hour by car.
For the first time, Pauling considered something that was difficult for her to even imagine.
Jack Reacher.
Dead.
Chapter Nine
Tallon pushed himself in the desert. It was his place of solace. His chair in front of a therapist. His temple.
The sun bore down on him with merciless intensity as he ran. The hills of Independence Springs were brown and barren to the naked eye. If one paused, life was abundant, it just didn’t appear that way.
Tallon ran the long loop, a distance of nearly nineteen miles.
As with his body, his mind also ran free. And it turned to thoughts of Nate Figueroa. Tallon still couldn’t believe his friend was gone. No warning. No word. Here one day, dead the next.
It happened before, of course. In his line of work, people died. Plain and simple. Some of them were men he knew slightly. Others, like Figueroa, were brothers-in-arms who’d fought, bled, and bonded on the battlefield.
It was never easy.
The experience always made Tallon take a step back and challenge his approach not only to work, but also to life.
The miles cruised by as Tallon’s running rhythm comforted his thought process, made him feel like he could run forever. He’d made that mistake before, though. It was tempting to push on and add miles, but restraint in training was essential.
By the time he closed the loop and arrived at his predetermined stopping point, he was covered in sweat. His water was nearly gone and he walked the rest of the way back to his compound.
Tallon had carefully chosen the site that would come
to be his home. It was a small ranch, or a casita, as the locals called it, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It wasn’t visible from any main road or highway, and it afforded excellent protection.
The community was a modest size, but still big enough to provide anonymity, thanks to a fair percentage of the population being snowbirds who only flocked to the area during the winter months. Come April or May, they would lock up their homes or condos and head north.
Tallon lived at the place year-round. The hotter the better, in his opinion.
Building his casita had required a fair amount of time and a hefty budget, mostly because of the special requirements demanded by a man in his line of work.
There were multiple security cameras, some visible, some camouflaged. An elaborate security system with two backup generators. An underground armory, accessible only by a palm scanner.
There was a weightlifting room that occupied a space next to the garage and the landscaping had been chosen carefully.
Instead of arranging the plants to orchestrate a year-round bloom, Tallon’s needs focused on preventing cover for an attacking force while also providing clear shooting lanes for someone inside the structure.
Tallon had also spared no expense on the communication system. There was a hardwired landline, buried. A wireless radio unit. Two satellite phones with multiple batteries and chargers. A hardwired communication system for cable and Internet, along with a satellite-based stream that could continue to feed the home information without power and if the physical cables were somehow severed.
The windows were bulletproof, the entry doors made of specific construction materials designed to withstand explosives and high-impact rounds.
It wasn’t that Tallon had a large number of enemies. It was all about the high-level capabilities of people who could, in theory, seek to find Tallon for reasons counter to his health.
Now, before he entered the house, Tallon checked his security screens, and then used the facial recognition scanner to unlock the back door to the casita.