SYCAMORE BLUFF (Prequel to THE JACK REACHER FILES: ANNEX 1) (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 8)

by Jude Hardin

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Colt said.

  “Good. And by the way, congratulations on some fine detective work. I didn’t believe the vitamins could have been tampered with, but I see now that I was probably wrong.”

  “I got lucky,” Colt said. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

  “It’s more than luck. Since the first job we did together, I’ve been congratulating myself on picking such a good recruit.”

  “Now you’re embarrassing me,” Colt said. “Not that I really mind.”

  “I believe in giving credit where it’s due,” Diana said. “You’re a great investigator. But you want to know what really amazes me?”

  Colt thought about it for a second. “That I’m also witty and good looking?” he said.

  “No, that you went to breakfast without me. I’m starving.”

  “Three eggs, bacon, hash browns, pancakes. I have to say, it was really good.”

  “I hate you,” Diana said.

  “Can I offer you a can of beef stew, darling? There’s plenty.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass. You ready to start dragging these corpses down to the basement?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Colt said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lenny, Tumac, and the other three men boarded the helicopter around 9:30. Tumac instructed the pilot to fly in through the west and land on the bluff, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed. It was a little after ten when the copter touched down.

  “Now what?” Lenny said, speaking to The Unnamed Man with Connections through the radio headset in his helmet.

  “Now we walk,” Tumac said. “We’ll hike into town and steal a couple of vehicles, and—”

  “No,” Lenny said. “You guys will hike into town and steal a couple of vehicles. Then you’ll drive back here and pick me up. I’m the one footing the bill for this little excursion, and I’m not walking anywhere.”

  “There’s no road from the town to the bluff, señor. The only way in and out is through the woods. I thought you understood that.”

  “Why can’t we just fly into town and land on the roof, like the supply helicopter does twice a week? This is insane. It’s like five degrees or something outside.”

  “I don’t think it would be wise to announce our presence,” Tumac said. “What will we tell the townspeople? That we have come to burn their homes and their factory, so there will be no more vitamin pills ever? Is that what we should tell them when we land the helicopter on the roof of Town Hall?”

  “We can tell them the government sent us,” Lenny said. “Or something.”

  “Does this look like a government aircraft? Do my men look like government men? I’m afraid we have no choice, señor. We’ll have to walk into the town from here.”

  “With all the rough terrain around here, I’m sure some of the residents have four-wheelers. Find one of those and then come back for me. I’m not walking.”

  “There’s no time for that, señor. And I definitely need your help. If you can’t hike into town with me and my men, then I’m afraid the mission will have to be aborted.”

  “This is stupid,” Lenny said. “Remind me to hire someone with some competence next time I want to destroy a government facility and kill some government agents.”

  Lenny yanked his helmet off and tossed it on the floor. This was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever been involved in. He never should have come here in the first place. He should have insisted that Tumac find someone else.

  Lenny wasn’t a killer. He’d acted tough at the CigsMart station, but the ordeal had shaken him to the core. Dave had deserved it, but still. It had broken Lenny’s heart to stand there and watch while his dear old friend and fraternity brother was tortured and killed. Tumac and his men, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy it. They were barbarians of the highest order, and Lenny knew that they would get theirs someday. Live by the blowtorch, die by the blowtorch.

  Tumac opened the helicopter’s door. He and the men filed out, the last one passing backpacks to the others and then taking one for himself before disembarking.

  Lenny climbed out last. Tumac tossed him a backpack.

  “Really?” Lenny said.

  “Everyone must share in carrying the load, señor. Along with everything else, you’ll find a walkie-talkie in there. There’s no cell phone service throughout the township, so we will use the radios to communicate while we’re here.”

  “Whatever,” Lenny shouted. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

  Before they reached the edge of the woods, the copter lifted off and flew back westward. The pilot saluted from the air.

  “I thought he was going to wait for us,” Lenny said.

  “He would run out of fuel if he waited, and it’s too cold to cut the engine. I told him to be back at three o’clock this afternoon. And don’t worry. He will land on the roof of the town hall building this time. It’s not necessary for our departure to be as big a secret as our arrival. Everyone in town will be scurrying around trying to help put out the fires. They probably won’t even notice us. And if they do, no big deal. They won’t be able to identify us.”

  “Why not?”

  Tumac reached into his backpack and pulled out a black wool ski mask. He wrestled it over his head and face.

  “Because we each have one of these,” he said, his voice slightly muffled now. “And we will wear them for the duration. Look in your pack. You have one too.”

  Lenny unzipped his backpack, grabbed the mask and put it on. Immediately, he felt much warmer.

  “Why didn’t you tell me we had these in the first place?”

  “It was a surprise,” Tumac said. “Kind of like when I broke Señor Davidson’s teeth off with the pliers.”

  “I don’t really care for surprises,” Lenny said.

  “Okay. I’ll try to remember that.”

  They walked on in silence, maintaining what Lenny considered to be an unreasonably exhausting pace. He wasn’t accustomed to vigorous physical activity. His heart pounded and his lungs burned, and his thigh muscles felt as though someone was beating them with a mallet. Fortunately, the trek wasn’t as long as he feared it might be. They reached the outskirts of town a few minutes before noon. The ski masks definitely helped. Lenny wondered if they would have even survived without them. Maybe Tumac and his band of outlaws would have, but Lenny had doubts about himself.

  Tumac stopped at the first house they came to with a car in the driveway. He didn’t have to say anything. The three thugs he’d brought with him were inside the car and heading down the street within two minutes.

  Lenny stood at the curb with Tumac and looked on in amazement as they drove away.

  “I’m guessing they’ve done that before,” Lenny said.

  “Maybe once or twice. I have given them the addresses of all the residents. They will take care of the houses while you and I work on the factory. We’ll use that car over there.”

  Tumac pointed to a mid-sized sedan in a driveway across the street.

  “There are over three hundred homes that are occupied in various parts of the town, and there are only two fire engines. As you’ve seen, my men work very fast. There’s no way the fire department will be able to keep up. When word gets around about the fires, all the residents will leave their places of employment and run to help. Bucket brigades, garden hoses, whatever. Their efforts will be futile, but they’ll have to try. It’s the American way. They’ll all run out to help. When they do, I will waltz into the factory like nobody’s business while you wait in the car outside. When I’m finished, we will speed away. We’ll meet with my men on the roof of Town Hall at three o’clock, and bam! We’re out of here. Problem solved.”

  Lenny nodded in approval. “I have to say, I’m very impressed.”

  “Any more questions about my competence, señor?”

  “None,” Lenny said. “None at all.”

  CHAPT
ER THIRTY-NINE

  Colt figured the guy in the radio room would be the most difficult to relocate to the basement, so he suggested saving him for last. Diana agreed. They moved the tall blond woman who had fallen from the second floor balcony first, and then the man Diana had frozen up on, the man she’d thought was Henry Parker. In both of those cases, Colt and Diana each simply grabbed a leg and dragged the deceased on his or her back.

  Going down the stairs—two flights for the man and one for the woman—turned out to be the most challenging part of the process. It would have seemed disrespectful to just throw the bodies down like sacks of potatoes, so they pulled them along slowly and carefully, the backs of their skulls sliding off the edge of every step and landing hard on the next one. Lugging those first two corpses down the staircase risers had created a rhythmic series of tympanic thumps that Colt knew would haunt his nights for a long time to come.

  Struggling with extreme muscle fatigue the last few feet, they finally managed to wrestle the Henry Parker lookalike into the basement office they’d chosen to use for a morgue. They positioned him beside the woman, and then headed back up for the guy in the Communications Center.

  “One more,” Diana said.

  “Seems like they would have installed an elevator in this place,” Colt said, breathing heavily.

  “Just be thankful it’s only two stories.”

  When they made it back up the stairs and over to the radio room, Colt noticed something on one of the black and white monitor screens. There was a row of houses in the frame, six or seven of them, and two of the residences seemed to have faint ribbons of white smoke snaking out of their windows.

  “Look at this,” Colt said. “The sloffs are at it again.”

  But by the time Diana turned to see what he was talking about, the monitor system had cycled to a different camera and the image of the smoking houses was gone.

  “What?” Diana said.

  “I thought I saw something. Smoke coming from a couple of the houses.”

  “A couple of them?”

  “Yeah, and they weren’t right next door to each other. So it wasn’t like a fire had spread from one place to the other.”

  “You’re sure it was smoke?”

  “Pretty sure. Look!”

  Another monitor showed three men walking up the steps to the front porch of a house. One of the men kicked the door in, and the three walked inside. Seconds later, they exited and disappeared from the view of the camera.

  “Who are those guys?” Diana said.

  “I don’t know. But they’re not Sycamore Bluff residents.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Those ski masks they’re wearing. Totally against The Rules.”

  “You’re right,” Diana said. “So, if they’re not residents, then that means they’re not sloffs.”

  “Yeah. I knew that right away. You can tell by the way they’re walking.”

  Colt and Diana kept their eyes on the monitor, and soon white smoke started billowing from the windows of the house the three men had entered.

  “They’re setting fires,” Diana said. “They’re targeting the houses assigned to the residents, and they’re torching them one by one.”

  “But why?”

  As Nicholas Colt and Diana Dawkins stood there perplexed about this totally new development, this apparent rash of arson attacks from outsiders, sirens started wailing from the firehouse two blocks away.

  “There are three hundred and seven occupied homes here,” Diana said. “Including ours. And only two fire engines. The whole town’s going to burn, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  “The pills,” Colt said. “The vitamin pills. Someone is trying to get rid of the evidence.”

  “They’re going to burn every house to the ground just to get rid of some pills?”

  “How else could they do it? Contact each resident individually and demand that they relinquish their supply? That would take a while, and these guys seem to be in a hurry. Don’t you see? This way, there’s no chance that any of the supplements will survive. It’s extreme, yes, but altogether effective.”

  “I’m sure there are still plenty of pills in The Factory,” Diana said.

  But as she said it, Colt saw the stark realization wash over her face.

  “Exactly,” he said. “They’re going to burn that too.”

  Diana stared at the bank of video screens. “You might be right,” she said. “And if that’s the case, we have to find a way to stop them. We need hard evidence that the pills causing these violent killings were being produced right here in Sycamore Bluff.”

  “Produced here, and distributed to the residents,” Colt said. “As a mandatory supplement. But what if the government was in on it all along, like Westinghouse suspected?”

  “I’m pretty sure The Director would have filled me in if that was the case. I know he would have. He wouldn’t have sent me here without giving me such a key piece of information. No, I think we’ve stumbled onto something nobody in The Circle—or any other government agency—knows about. But what we’re doing right now is just guessing, really. Theorizing. And even if we’re right, and we see some things with our own eyes, we can’t just assume that The Director will take our word for it. We need evidence, and the evidence is in The Factory. The evidence is The Factory.”

  “I still have this partial bottle of pills I took from the blond woman,” Colt said.

  “That could have come from anywhere. That’s not going to be nearly enough to nail the people responsible for this. We need the big picture. We need to physically stand guard over The Factory until the supply helicopter gets here tomorrow morning.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” Colt said. “It’s a big building, and there’s only two of us. No telling how many bad guys are out there. We can’t ask the townspeople to help, because we don’t know which of them might turn into sloffs and try to kill us. And eat us. I just don’t see how—”

  “Come on,” Diana said. “Let’s go. We need to move the barricade in case we need to get back in here.”

  Colt shook his head. “You told me to not leave the building, and for once I’m going to follow orders.”

  But he didn’t. Instead, he followed her down the stairs and out the front door.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Lenny parked the car on Locust Street, half a block from The Factory. As The Unnamed Man with Connections had predicted, the workers were running out and getting into their cars and heading toward the fires.

  Tumac had been in contact with his men, and they had already torched more than one hundred homes. What had taken months to build took less than an hour to destroy. Giant clouds of gray smoke rose in the air over the residential section of town. Everything was going as planned. Everything was right on schedule.

  “We’ll wait here until my men are almost finished,” Tumac said. “It won’t take me long to set the charges in The Factory, and then we’ll ride over to Town Hall and climb to the roof. We’ll time it so we get there at approximately the same time as the helicopter, and I’ll detonate the explosives after we lift off. We can watch the big explosion from the air.”

  “This is wild,” Lenny said. “I feel like I’m in some kind of action movie or something.”

  “I told you it was going to be fun, señor.”

  “Fun isn’t even the word.”

  Tumac nodded. He lit a cigarette and cracked the window so most of the smoke would vent outside. The cold air and the stench of tobacco bothered Lenny, but he didn’t say anything. The two men sat in silence for a few minutes. Lenny turned on the car radio, thinking a little music might be nice, but there was only static.

  “What about the government agents?” Lenny said. “We need to eliminate them while we’re here too.”

  “Of course. It is imperative, because we don’t know how much they know. Plus, it was the only way my connection in Central America would agree to supply the helicopter and the men we needed.
That’s how much he hates the United States of America. He has invested a lot in this mission, and all he asks in return is that America receives a nice big slap in the face. So yes, it’s crucial that we find the agents and take their heads to my connection on a platter.”

  “Then why aren’t we out looking for them?” Lenny said.

  Tumac snapped the rubber band off the blueprints and started to unroll them. “Be patient,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Lenny was trying to be patient, but he really just wanted this whole thing to be over with. Fun isn’t even the word, he’d said, and he’d meant it literally. This was a nerve-racking, anxiety-producing, emotionally-draining roller coaster ride that he could have done without. He kept seeing the look on Dave Davidson’s face as Tumac’s men bound him with duct tape and gagged him and positioned him on the convenience store’s counter. After he was rendered helpless, they proceeded to burn his fingerprints off with the blowtorch. Dave couldn’t make much noise with the tape over his mouth, but his facial expressions screamed bloody terror.

  Tumac and his men didn’t want to have to move the body from the CigsMart and dispose of it elsewhere, so they needed to make sure Davidson was unidentifiable. They could have burned his fingers and yanked his teeth after shooting him in the head, but they seemed to enjoy inflicting the pain. They laughed at his suffering and spat on him and elbowed him in the groin. Amazingly—and this really took the cake—one of the men used an iPhone to make a digital video of the proceedings while the other two did the dirty work.

  It was sickening.

  Tumac promised to send Lenny a copy of the video, but Lenny had no desire to watch his friend die over and over again. He wanted to get home and wash his hands of this entire horrible mess, and he wanted to get back to his garage laboratory and start tweaking the U-3 formula some more. He was sure he knew the problem now. It could only be one other molecule causing the adverse side effects. He was almost sure of it. If he was correct, it shouldn’t take more than a few months to find a solution. Then he could get back on track. He wasn’t going to give up. He wasn’t going to stop trying. Ever.