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

by Jude Hardin

  Diana’s gun was still aimed at Henry’s chest, and Henry’s gun was still aimed at hers. If she pulled the trigger, he would do the same, and they would both die. She kept waiting for him to make a mistake, but she knew he wouldn’t. He was too experienced, too much of a professional. And, deep down in her soul, she didn’t want to shoot him anyway. In spite of everything, she still loved him. She knew it didn’t make any sense, but she couldn’t help it. You don’t stop loving someone just because they’ve lost their way. If she could only spend some time with him alone, she was sure she could convince him that he was making a big mistake, that being part of Del Chivo’s camp was a one way ticket to a lifetime in prison—or an early grave.

  She loved Henry, but she knew she could no longer trust him. Not even a little bit. And what could possibly be his motivation for revealing himself the way he was? She couldn’t imagine.

  Unless he knew for a fact that his revelations were never going to leave this room.

  “Are you telling me all this because you’re planning to kill me?” she said.

  “No,” Henry said. “I’m telling you this because I want you to join me.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me why you got involved with Del Chivo’s organization. Give me one good reason I should even consider following you. Then I’ll give you ten good reasons why I shouldn’t, and why you should get away from them as well.”

  “First, I need you to put the gun down. I’ll put mine down at the same time.”

  “No way,” Diana said. “Right now we’re on a level playing field, and I intend to keep it that way.”

  Henry laughed. “A level playing field,” he said. “Sure. You’ve known me for how long, Diana? Six, seven years? When have you ever seen me walk into a situation without a solid backup plan? Without a distinct tactical advantage, even if things go horribly wrong? See the backpack on the counter behind me? There are six blocks of plastic explosives in there, each about the size of a deck of playing cards. I was going to place them at various points inside this building and then detonate them from a helicopter. Which, by the way, should be landing on the roof of the town hall building any minute now. I planned to detonate the charges at exactly three o’clock, and then fly out of here safely with my men. But, as we know, sometimes things don’t go as planned. That’s why each of those blocks is also rigged with a timer, and each of those timers is set to go off at three-fifteen. That way, the mission—destroying this factory and all the evidence inside it—will still be a success, even if something terrible happens to me. So, my darling, we are decidedly not on a level playing field. We can either put our guns down and talk this over reasonably, or we can be blown to smithereens in approximately twenty minutes. Your choice.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Diana said.

  But as she said it, she heard the sound of helicopter rotors churning overhead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Both of Diana’s hands were wrapped around the grips of her 9mm Ruger semi-automatic pistol. Without taking her eyes—or the gun—off of Henry, she turned her left wrist far enough to see the face of her watch.

  2:56.

  If Henry was telling the truth, they had nineteen minutes before the bombs exploded. Even if she killed Henry right now, there still probably wouldn’t be enough time for her and Nicholas Colt to make it out alive. Not with Colt as disabled as he appeared to be. She couldn’t carry him, and she doubted he could walk on his own, much less run.

  The only way for Diana to survive was to shoot Henry now and then abandon her partner. She didn’t want to do either, but it was coming down to the wire. She needed to make a decision in the next thirty seconds—a decision to save herself, or to die along with her partner and the man she loved.

  “Be reasonable,” Henry said. “Put the gun down, and we can walk out of here together. I’ll disable the timers on the explosives, and I’ll drive you to Town Hall and we’ll climb to the roof and board the helicopter and fly safely out of here.”

  “Then what?”

  “There’s a private jet waiting on an air strip fifty miles away. Next stop: San Salvador. It’s going to be beautiful, my darling. I promise you.”

  “What about him?” Diana said, gesturing toward Colt.

  “It’s too late for him,” Henry said. “Forget about him. It’s just you and me now, forever and ever.”

  “He’s my partner, Henry. And my friend. I can’t just leave him here to burn.”

  “You can’t just leave him here to burn since when? I was your partner, and you left me. You left me in the CIAO camp. You even shot me first. Or at least you thought you did. And you know what? I don’t blame you one bit. You handled it the same way I would have, the same way any operative from The Circle would have. We’re not the army, Di. We don’t follow that whole leave-no-man-behind routine. In our world, it’s every man for himself, and every woman for herself. You know that. I’m not afraid to die today, but I would prefer not to. In eight hours, you and I could be sipping champagne in our own private suite in Del Chivo’s mansion. We could be standing on a balcony in our bathing suits, watching the moon rise over the pacific. Come with me. Please. Let’s get out of here, while we still have time.”

  Diana’s choices seemed clear: she could abandon her partner and follow Henry Parker to the dark side, or she could die.

  Which, in essence, meant there was no choice.

  Diana didn’t know a lot about Sergio Del Chivo, but she knew enough. He dealt in drugs and sex slaves and snuff films, and he was one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He hated the United States of America with a passion, and he would do anything in his power to see it fall. As much as Diana loved Henry, she loved her country more. There was no way she would ever work for the likes of Del Chivo, or get involved with anyone who did.

  “I can’t do it, Henry, and you know I can’t. You said you’re not afraid to die today. I’m not either. So that’s—”

  “Uhhhhhh,” a voice from behind Diana said.

  Henry glanced toward the door. He only took his eyes off Diana for an instant, but it was enough time for her to pump three rounds into his heart. He staggered back against the counter and looked at her in astonishment. She thought she saw him mouth the words I love you before his face lost all expression and he crumpled to the floor.

  Diana pivoted and took aim at the sloff responsible for the diversion. It was a woman, and she was carrying an ax. Her eyes were glazed, and a line of white foam frothed from one corner of her mouth.

  “Uhhhhhh,” she said again.

  “Thanks for saving my life,” Diana said.

  Diana said it, and she meant it. Then, with absolutely no hesitation, she pulled the trigger and blew the left side of the woman’s skull off.

  3:03.

  Diana walked to where Henry lay on the floor. She had to know for sure this time. She had to know it was really him.

  Like the man last night, this man didn’t resemble Henry as much as he had from a distance. The change wasn’t dramatic, but it was probably enough to fool the latest facial recognition software. She lifted his shirt and checked for the birthmark on his belly.

  It wasn’t there.

  Impossible. Henry must have contracted a plastic surgeon to remove the birthmark, and to alter the shape of his face. Or, maybe Diana really was losing her mind. She untied the man’s left boot and pulled it off, along with the sock.

  And the gauze bandage.

  Now she knew for sure. Henry’s entire left pinky toe was missing, and there was a concave area on that side of his foot where new skin and tissue had been grafted. It appeared as though someone had hacked a chunk off and then had patched it with pink Play-Doh. It was something Diana had never seen before, the price an operative had to pay—in flesh—for removing the blood tattoo.

  She allowed herself about five seconds to mourn for Henry, and then she got up and ran over to Colt and started unwinding the duct tape from his ankles.

  “Get out of here,” Colt said. “I’m not
going to make it.”

  “Shut up.”

  Diana grabbed the ski mask Henry had been wearing, slapped it on Colt’s thigh and used the duct tape to create a pressure dressing. She could tell by the color of the blood that the bullet hadn’t hit an artery; but, from the amount of pain Colt was in, she figured it had at least clipped the femur. She hoped the bone wasn’t shattered. If it was, they were doomed.

  She quickly removed the tape from his wrists.

  3:07.

  “I want you to try to stand,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to try. If we’re not out of here in six minutes, we’re going to be molecules in a mushroom cloud. I’m not going to leave you, so you have to get up. You have to at least try.”

  “All right. I’ll try.”

  Diana took him in her arms and helped him swivel to the edge of the table, every inch a struggle. Colt grunted in extreme agony as she guided him to a sitting position.

  “I want you to ease off the edge and put your weight on your good leg,” she said. “Then you’re going to put your arm around my shoulders and use me for a crutch. You’ll still have to put some weight on the wounded leg, but not a lot. Okay?”

  Colt nodded. He eased off the edge of the table and proceeded to fall straight to the floor.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “I don’t have any strength, Di. Shoot me. Please. Just shoot me, and then run like the wind. You can still make it out of here if you leave right now.”

  3:10.

  With the time ticking away, there was very little hope now that either of them would survive. Colt couldn’t move, and Diana refused to leave him.

  But maybe there was another way.

  Diana had been so focused on getting Colt and herself out of that room, on putting some distance between their bodies and the explosives in Henry’s backpack, she hadn’t taken the time to think about any possible alternatives. Now that she was forced to, there was one that struck her as glaringly obvious, and she felt stupid that she hadn’t thought of it before.

  Instead of moving Colt, she needed to move the bombs.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

  She grabbed Henry’s backpack and pushed her way through the emergency exit. She jammed her pistol between the hinged side of the door and the jamb, preventing the spring-loaded mechanism from locking her out.

  She looked around.

  To her left was the long narrow building she knew to be the production area, and to her right were a series of diesel powered emergency generators and a large metal shed with a SHIPPING AND RECEIVING sign mounted over a double set of bay doors. Straight ahead there was a sidewalk that led to the parking lot.

  The helicopter hadn’t landed on the Town Hall roof yet. It was still circling overhead. Diana wondered if the pilot was waiting for a signal from Henry.

  3:12.

  If she’d had more time, Diana would have made a run for the parking lot. It was vacant, because all of the workers had gone to help fight the fires. She could have placed the backpack there in the middle of the paved lot, and then she could have turned around and ran back to the conference room and closed the door. With a little luck, the blast would be far enough away so that the pressure from the concussion wouldn’t rupture the alveoli in her and Colt’s lungs. The parking lot would have been the best place, if she’d had time.

  But she didn’t. Diana was a fast runner, but the parking lot was too far away for her to make it there and back before the explosives went off.

  There was only one place close enough that might adequately shield her and Colt from the blast, and that one place was the production area. The walls appeared to be solid concrete, and there weren’t any windows. It was a common design for top secret installations, and although there was nothing being manufactured in there other than the special vitamins and some other nutritional supplements, Diana figured NASA had future plans for the building that would warrant the bloated security measures. She had wanted to preserve the area for evidence, but all the evidence in the world wasn’t going to help her if she got blown to bits.

  There didn’t appear to be access to the production area from outside, so she ran back through the conference room and down the west wing hallway to the central lobby area where she and Colt had first come in.

  She turned the corner and trotted up to the production area door, intending to jerk it open and hurl the backpack as far as she could.

  But she had forgotten about the pushbutton lock.

  3:13.

  Diana had been trained to defeat all sorts of security devices, and the mechanism guarding the production area was no exception. She knew how to open it, but the procedure took time. There were five buttons arranged vertically on the lock, numbered one through five, and opening it required that the proper numbers be pushed in the proper sequence. The lock could be set, by its owner, to use one, two, three, four, or all five of the buttons, which meant there were exactly 1,082 possible combinations. In her training as an operative for The Circle, Diana had memorized every possible sequence, and she could open any of these locks in ten minutes by process of elimination.

  But Diana didn’t have ten minutes. She didn’t have anything close to ten minutes. If her watch was correct, and if Henry had been telling the truth about the timers, she had approximately sixty seconds until the bombs exploded. So all she could do was make a series of guesses, based on the most popular combinations.

  Pushbutton locks were usually placed on the doors to laboratories or supply closets or other rooms with limited access, but most of the businesses that used them made the combinations as easy for their employees to remember as possible. Therefore, 1-2-3 was the most popular sequence, followed by 5-4-3, and then 2-3-4. Diana tried all three of those, with no success.

  She tried 1-3.

  2-4.

  3-5.

  Still, the door did not open.

  Thirty more seconds.

  1-2.

  4-5.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was no use. She was out of time, and she was going to die.

  Then she remembered something. They called this the five-one building, because the address was 51 Locust Street.

  It was worth a try.

  She punched the five, and then the one.

  The door clicked open just as the second hand on Diana’s watch swept past the twelve.

  Just as the minute hand and the hour hand lined up on the three.

  It was 3:15 in the afternoon, and Diana’s time had run out.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Colt heard the explosion, and he felt it. The factory’s trembling foundation reminded him of the earthquakes he’d experienced living on the west coast back in the eighties, back when he’d been a top recording artist.

  A rock star.

  Before meeting his first wife in Kingston, Jamaica, and finally settling down a bit, Colt had spent quite a bit of time in LA, writing and recording music with his band. They would go out on tour for a while, maybe hit thirty or forty cities, and then fly back and spend a few months working in the studio.

  And partying like there was no tomorrow.

  Drink, drugs, women, food. The best of everything. The best money could buy. For a while, Colt’s address in Bel Air was the place to be if you wanted to get drunk or stoned or make it with a groupie or—on a really good night—a stray from the Playboy Mansion. There was something going on there practically every night. Swimming pools, Jacuzzis, Havana cigars hollowed out and filled with marijuana from places like Thailand, Colombia, and the Mat-Su valley in Alaska. Russian caviar, foie gras, live Maine lobsters. Decadence at its finest.

  There were entire months from that period that Colt didn’t even remember. It was as if those pages had been ripped out and tossed aside, never to be seen again. The parts he did remember were good, mostly, other than the occasional drug overdose or near-drowning in the pool. Or the fistfights. Those were the worst, because someone’s girl
friend would always freak out and call the cops. Colt was never convicted of anything back then, but it cost him a big chunk of change every time one of those radio cars came around. He sometimes wondered if his lawyer instigated another altercation whenever he needed a new boat or something.

  On Colt’s twenty-seventh birthday, at The Troubadour in LA, a very famous movie director introduced him to a very famous film star, one who later won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. After several cocktails and several lines of cocaine, they left the club together, caught a flight out of LAX, and spent the next two weeks together in Hawaii. That was the kind of life Nicholas Colt lived in the 1980s.

  All that seemed impossibly distant now, as if it had happened to someone else. Or, as if it had happened to him in a dream.

  Was he dreaming now? Had the explosion sent him crashing through the window to oblivion? Was he dead? Was this what people meant when they talked about seeing their lives flash in front of their eyes?

  The pain in Colt’s leg was worse than ever. It was so severe, he’d started to see ghostly faces of lost loved ones every time he closed his eyes. His saw his mother. He saw Susan and Harmony, and Joe Crawford, his best friend since sixth grade. He saw Joe’s face and he heard Joe’s voice: Find them, Nicholas. Find The Sexy Bastards and kill them all. Do it for me. It made Colt wonder if he was teetering on the edge of some crazy threshold, a paper-thin membrane that separated the physical world from the spiritual.

  But he didn’t have to wonder long.

  Enormous.

  It was the only word that even came close to adequately describing the clanging, cracking, splintering din of that gasoline-powered forklift crashing through the conference room’s emergency exit. Dust and rubble and freezing cold sunshine filled the room as the jagged gash widened before Colt’s eyes. Sparks flew from severed electrical connections. Two-by-four studs creaked and moaned and clattered to the floor. The door itself lay off to the side, buckled and twisted and ready for the scrap heap.