by Dan Ames
He hurried to his vehicle.
He didn’t have much time.
He needed to reach Pauling before it was too late.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Is Maitling legit?” Pauling asked Tallon. She was on her way home from the meeting with Maitling, her head still swimming with the information he’d provided. Pauling had immediately called Tallon to find out if she should believe what she’d just been told. She didn’t have time for any bullshit. If what Maitling had told her was true, she finally had a sense of what was going on. If he was a crazy ex-merc, then she was back at square one.
“Of course he is,” Tallon said. “The guy’s one of the best in every sense of the word. “Why? Pauling, what the hell is going on?”
“It’s going to take awhile to explain,” she said. “Where are you?”
“In a hotel in Los Angeles.”
“Why are you in a hotel in Los Angeles?”
“It would take awhile to explain,” he said with a sigh. “Why don’t you go first?”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and began with receiving the mysterious file on Jessica Halbert, seeing Reacher’s name on the document, to finding Tallon’s name also, and then putting two and two together in terms of the mission in southern Turkey being the common denominator.
He didn’t question her line of logic. Instead, he asked, “So you were able to pin down Maitling and talk to him?”
“Yeah, and what he told me was crazy but it makes sense.” She described the story of the fifth man who had apparently been in the process of raping or killing a young girl when he’d been discovered by Zenz. “Maybe Zenz stumbled into what he was doing to the young girl at the same time the girl’s family did,” Pauling said, trying out a theory. “No matter how it went down, you guys left him for dead.”
“Well, technically Zenz did, but yeah, we all agreed it was the right decision,” Tallon said, his voice taking on an edge. Pauling knew Tallon probably would have preferred to kill the man with his own hands.”
“Who was this guy?”
Tallon laughed but it was utterly devoid of humor, instead colored by a caustic bitterness. “A real piece of shit named Leo Waters. There’d been rumors about his overzealousness with some of the locals. Including a mission where he disappeared for an hour or two. He was a really effective soldier, though. Vicious. Utterly without hesitation. Turned out, though, that violence was more than a career choice. It was in his soul, in a bad way.”
“Wait a minute,” Pauling said. “Does all of this have to do with why you’re in LA? It’s your turn. Tell me what’s going on.”
Tallon told her about the mysterious email with Halbert’s photo, the news that it most likely came from within the army’s firewalls, and then the arrival of two men who wanted to have a word with him. “Ultimately, they decided to spend some time in the desert, just the two of them, and asked me to drive their vehicle to LA for them.”
There was a silence as Pauling processed the real meaning of his words.
“I see,” she said.
“That’s not all, though,” Tallon continued. He told her about the news of Doug Franzen’s murder and suicide. He finished by saying, “I don’t believe in coincidences. I find it hard to believe that two men tried to kill me, someone killed Franzen’s girlfriend and maybe it wasn’t a suicide, and now you’re having a secret meeting with Maitling. It’s all connected.”
“You think Leo Waters survived?” Pauling said. “You guys said Zenz was sure he was dead. If the locals knew he was raping one of their young women, they would have killed him. They don’t mess around in Syria with that kind of thing.”
“We called in air support, though,” Tallon said. “It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. If he was still alive when the bombs were dropped, I suppose there’s a chance he could have escaped in the confusion. If he hadn’t been dead already, of course.”
“In which case, he might have revenge on his mind.”
“And since he’s a rapist, he could have raped Franzen’s girlfriend, killed Franzen and arranged it to look like a murder-suicide,” Tallon ventured. “It would be just the kind of sick, twisted plan Waters would come up with. It would serve two purposes for him.”
“Or maybe he framed Franzen for the murder hoping he’d commit suicide,” Pauling said. “Same result, either way.”
“Yeah,” Tallon said.
Pauling heard the anger in his voice and considered the new information for a moment. “But is this Leo Waters powerful enough to hire two killers to take you out? Does he have that kind of money?”
“No, I doubt it,” Tallon said.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re still in danger,” Pauling said. “Waters is out there looking for you.”
“He’s looking for Maitling, too.”
“And Zenz.”
“Zenz is dead,” Tallon said. “He died of cancer last year.”
Pauling made an executive decision.
“I’m getting you the first direct flight from LA to New York. You can be here in six hours.”
“We need to find Waters as soon as possible,” Tallon said. “And stop him. Once and for all.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
They met at a safe house Jacobs paid for through a variety of shell companies, some involved with the military and some not. Key, however, was that part of the trail wound its way right back into the Department of Defense.
The government’s own firewalls were some of the most impressive in the world. Any investigation there would stall, unless it came from within. And if that were the case, Jacobs would know about it.
He watched as Leo Waters entered the front door and locked the doors behind him. The safe house was a duplex in a low-rent neighborhood full of people in transition as the social workers liked to say. Both sides of the duplex were vacant, but someone from Jacobs’ office occasionally spent the weekend there to make it look occupied. They also collected the mail and made sure the place wasn’t overrun with pests or local vandals.
The best thing about the safe house, and the reason Jacobs had chosen it for this meeting with Waters, was that it was the kind of place where strange faces meant nothing. The population was mostly transient and there was plenty of turn over, so even a face as bizarre as Waters’ wouldn’t be remembered.
Jacobs watched as Waters went into the living room and dropped into a chair.
As usual, Jacobs had a hard time looking directly at the man. His deformities were fairly well concealed, but their shared history made it difficult for Jacobs to look him in the eye.
“Three down, one to go,” Waters said. “Matey is kinda dead-y.”
The grotesque shell of a man began laughing and Jacobs fought down a bout of revulsion.
“I’m sure you made it as messy as possible so the police will be extra motivated.” Jacobs had urged Waters to make the murders look like accidents, much the way he’d done with the original Army investigator Thomas Wainwright.
“Hey, that’s your problem,” Waters replied. “I make the messes, you clean them up. It’s what makes our partnership work. Everyone has a role and they know what it is.”
“Great,” Jacobs replied.
“Hey, you made the first mess, so don’t put this all on me.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jacobs fired back.
“It means if you hadn’t gotten so pissed when Jessica Halbert rejected you, none of this would have happened,” Waters said. A lopsided, ghastly grin covered his face. “You raped and killed her–”
“You were right there with me, don’t act all innocent.”
“–and then tried to blame me for it, which was a real piece-of-shit move.”
“I didn’t blame you,” Jacobs replied. “Besides, you were the one who did most of the raping.”
“We tag teamed her and I think you loved it more than I did,” Waters said. “She wasn’t my first,
but she was yours, right?”
Jacobs sat in a chair across from Waters. The furniture in the safe house had been bought secondhand from a Salvation Army store. Same with the horrendous artwork on display. One of them was a paint-by-numbers Jacobs noticed.
“How many others were there?” he finally asked Waters. He’d always wondered just how evil the man was he’d chosen to join forces with. At the time, it was really his only option.
“Lots.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So when Zenz left me to die in that shithole, you were secretly happy,” Waters continued. His voice was calm but filled with venomous animosity. “Until I got word to you that I’d survived, and had plenty of evidence tying you to Halbert’s murder so you’d better help a brother out.”
Waters laughed hard.
“Oh, I’m going to help you out, all right,” Jacobs said.
He swung the pistol he’d been holding behind his back and fired at Waters. But Waters had seen it coming and torqued his body off the chair onto the floor, firing as he went.
Jacobs’ bullets plowed into Waters’ left side, shattering his left elbow and embedding itself in his shoulder.
Waters jackknifed forward and kept firing back at Jacobs. When his elbows hit the floor it forced his pistol up and his first shot went high, missing altogether. In a flash, he readjusted his aim and fired again, just before the bullets from Jacobs ruined his left arm.
Waters’ second shot didn’t miss.
It caught Jacobs just underneath the point of his chin and it plowed up through his mouth, cratering his palate and blowing out the back of his brain.
Jacobs’ body went slack and he slumped to the floor.
Waters sat up and looked into Jacobs’ lifeless eyes.
It took a minute for him to realize how badly he’d been hit. His left arm was useless, his elbow was a mess and his shoulder wouldn’t move.
Even worse, Jacobs had also shot him in the right hip, a devastating blow that had certainly cracked bone and dug a deep furrow through his flesh. Parts of his body were completely unresponsive and he struggled to get to his feet.
“You miserable piece of shit,” Waters said to the lifeless body of Jacobs. Waters emptied the rest of the clip in his pistol into Jacobs. The bullets smacked into the corpse and the sound reverberated in the room.
Waters staggered to his feet and retrieved Jacobs’ phone. He saw the last message. It was from someone on Jacobs’ staff and it showed an intercepted message relaying that a flight had been booked for Michael Tallon to New York. It showed Tallon’s arrival time at LaGuardia.
Waters knew Lauren Pauling would pick him up and he checked his watch. The timing would work perfectly.
It was time for the final act.
Get rid of Tallon.
Rape and kill Pauling.
Maybe disappear for awhile.
Stranger things had been known to happen.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Pauling returned to her condo and had the building’s valet bring around her car. She rarely drove in the city, but occasionally she needed transportation beyond cabs or Ubers. Her ride of choice was a Range Rover and it was kept in the building’s basement garage, sometimes sitting there for months on end, unused.
It would take a few minutes for the valet to bring the Rover around, so Pauling took the opportunity to go to her condo to retrieve her iPad. She’d already downloaded the case files onto it and while she waited for Tallon, she could revisit them in light of the new information she’d received.
Back downstairs, she tipped the valet and climbed into the Rover, and fought traffic all the way out to the cell phone lot at LaGuardia. She parked, and read all of the horrible news stories about the murder-suicide of Doug Franzen and his girlfriend, Dawn Fitzgerald.
Tallon had forwarded her the links.
The killing was beyond gruesome. It sounded like a vicious rape, perhaps drug-and-alcohol-induced. The autopsies would reveal more, but Pauling already had her suspicions and they had to do with Leo Waters. The name had been a surprise to her and she tried to remember if she’d seen the name in the case files from the Halbert murder. She was sure there had been no mention of him.
Or had there?
Pauling dug out her iPad and searched back through the files.
If Leo Waters had actually survived, how had he done it? He’d been caught committing a horrific crime by enemies of the U.S., and his own army had left him behind, committing him to a swift and certain death.
But somehow, he may have survived.
And started killing.
Or, perhaps he had continued to kill, picking up where he’d left off. If he’d been in his late twenties in the army, there might be more transgressions in his past. Serial killers often began working out their demons quite young. Starting with the torture of animals. Working their way up to assault, then rape, and finally murder.
So what had happened when he’d returned, if he made it back? How did he survive? And where did he show up? The army base in Turkey? Or had he somehow gone in a different direction, deeper into Syria?
Wouldn’t people have spotted him as an American soldier? Were there even friendly allies in the area at that time?
She dug through the files some more.
There was nothing. She couldn’t find anything to shed light on the Leo Waters mystery.
As she glanced at her phone, a news bulletin appeared describing the discovery of two men in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Both of them were decorated military veterans and they had been murdered.
Their last names were Edgar and Silvestri.
Pauling’s breath caught in her throat.
Those names were in the report, along with a man named Jacobs. If she recalled correctly, they hadn’t been actively involved in the mission, but she’d seen their names nonetheless. Maybe as part of the support team on the mission? Or had their names been in the homicide file?
Jesus Christ, she really needed to talk to Tallon in person.
It seemed to take ages before he finally texted that he had landed and it took another twenty minutes before he finally emerged near the baggage claim. He looked the same as always to Pauling; handsome, capable, and smiling.
He hopped into Pauling’s Range Rover and she spirited him away from the airport.
“You look good,” he said. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“You too,” she answered. There would be plenty of time for them to get reacquainted later. Right now, she needed answers. “Edgar, Silvestri and Jacobs.”
“The big three,” Tallon said. “They ran a lot of major operations back in the day. Rumor was Jacobs had more to do with the CIA than the military. But that was just a rumor. I never really worked with them, though, and certainly not on the mission with Halbert. Why do you mention them?”
“Because Silvestri and Edgar are dead. Murdered. This morning. According to what I read, their wives used GPS to track down their phones and vehicles. Found them at some fake business in a strip mall outside D.C.
“A CIA front, no doubt,” Tallon pointed out. “I wonder if Jacobs was involved.”
“Or Leo Waters.”
“Yeah, goddamned Leo Waters.”
“Why don’t you tell me about him?” Pauling wound her way through traffic, heading back to Manhattan and her condo.
“I already did tell you what I know. The veneer of an excellent soldier over the soul of a psychopath. There’s more than one in this man’s army,” Tallon said. “They’re tough to see, sometimes. Especially when the fog of war sets in.”
Pauling enjoyed hearing the sound of Tallon’s voice. He smelled nice, too.
“Where was Waters originally from?” she asked.
“Who knows? I never knew anything more about him. He was just another guy.”
“We’ll have to go back to my place and research him. Maybe I can find some files on him like I did these,” she said, gesturing toward her iPad on the seat between them.
>
Tallon looked out the window of the Rover into the darkness of the night. “It just doesn’t make sense. It was impossible for him to survive. There’s no way he could make it out of Syria alone, and we never heard a word from any other units they’d found one of our guys.”
“Would they do that?”
“Hell, yeah. You rescue a guy from a unit, one of the first things you do is send word to that unit. We never heard a word. Which means he wasn’t picked up by any friendlies.”
“So how’d he make it back?”
“He would have had to have gotten help. No other way.”
“When you say ‘our guys,’ who do you mean?”
“At that time, army guys. It was an army op, mostly.”
“What if he’d gotten help from friendlies, just not your friendlies?” Pauling asked.
“Who do you mean?”
“What you said about Jacobs,” she answered. “CIA.”
Tallon turned in his seat and looked at her. He nodded.
“Yeah, that could have been what happened. If the spooks picked him, they probably wouldn’t have told us. That’s how they work.”
Pauling thought they might be onto something.
“Yeah, those CIA creeps,” Tallon said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Waters had to marvel at his partner’s efficiency. Not only had he quickly figured out how to plan to kill him, Jacobs had even put together a quick op for Pauling and Tallon.
He felt a grudging respect for the man he’d just killed.
Even though that man had put several bullets into him and was causing him a great deal of pain and blood loss at the moment.
Waters giggled. He felt a little lightheaded and dizzy, but he still felt good. He was excited.
He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Pauling.