by Diane Capri
Uniformed first responders stood near their vehicles waiting their turn to work. No one seemed to mind the delay. It was a nice fall day. Warm enough. Slight breeze. No urgency.
Two news helicopters circled wide above the chaos. Three news satellite vans parked on the opposite side of the road. Two sets of photo-journalists and stand-up reporters were taping live shots.
“What a circus,” Roscoe said, quietly.
Kim saw three men, two wearing GHP uniforms and the third in a dark suit, approaching the Chevy. One Leach brother stood five feet southwest of the car; legs braced wide apart, arms folded, holding his shotgun precisely as he’d pointed it at her yesterday. He noticed the men, too, and walked to meet them.
Roscoe found a strip of grassy land off the shoulder a short hike from the focal point. She said, “I could get closer, but we’d get blocked in. If we park here, we can leave when we’re ready.”
The three men met up with the Leach brother and all four stopped next to the Chevy, exactly where Gaspar had collected the hound dog earlier.
Roscoe settled her Town Car into the place she’d selected.
Leach lowered his shotgun and extended his arm toward the Chevy’s door handle.
Roscoe reached toward her keys.
Leach opened the Chevy’s door exactly as Roscoe clicked off the ignition.
The click triggered Kim’s reptilian brain and the training memories embedded there.
Instantly, she saw, heard and understood.
“Get down!” she screamed.
And the Chevy exploded.
Chapter Twenty Three
THE HIGH PRESSURE BLAST WAVE hurled the Leach brother and the coroner and the two GHP officers across the weedy grass like boneless scarecrows, dead before they hit the ground, and then a monstrous orange fireball filled the sky. White flames swallowed the Chevy in a blinding hot flash. Black smoke plumed up, then out, erasing normal daylight.
Kim closed her eyes, covered her ears and ducked her head. Smaller shock waves bounced Roscoe’s Town Car on the grassy shoulder and squeezed Kim’s breath from her chest. Pain seared as if her lungs had collapsed.
Muffled sound far away.
Kim squeezed her eyes tighter and curled as far into the foot-well as the shoulder harness would let her. Her chest hurt. She gulped shallow breaths.
Another explosion, smaller, followed quickly by a third.
Unnatural silence.
Kim waited, struggled to breathe, finally felt her lungs working again. She gulped air, hungry for it.
How much time had passed?
She opened her eyes again. Saw Roscoe still belted in her seat, conscious. OK. Kim struggled upright in her own seat. Took her hands off her ears.
There were fires outside the Town Car. There were muffled noises. There were pieces, chunks, slabs of things scattered everywhere. There were burning vehicles. There was smoke too thick to see through.
The Chevy was still burning.
Kim’s brain was processing data like slow-falling dominoes, one thing leading to the next. Both tow trucks were covered in flames. Tow trucks usually carried extra gasoline. Hence the second and third explosions? Two GHP cruisers also burning. One rested on its roof, the other in the ditch, lying on its side. Thrown there by the initial pressure wave?
Several uniformed personnel were down, injured, but likely alive. Gawkers might be hurt, too, inside vehicles closer to the Chevy than Roscoe’s Town Car.
On site rescue workers mobbed the scene. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames. Helicopter blades fought to disperse the blackness. The noise must have been outrageous, but everything remained muted by the Town Car’s body and the cotton that filled Kim’s head.
Behind the wheel, Roscoe seemed dazed, too, but conscious and not bleeding.
“Gaspar?” Kim asked. But how loud was her voice? She couldn’t tell. And she heard no answer. “Gaspar?” she called, louder. No response.
She unhooked her seatbelt. She took stock of her body, which seemed to be unhurt and functioning. She turned in her seat but couldn’t see him over the high seatback.
“Gaspar?” she said again. She raised up as far as she could without kneeling, craned her neck and looked down into the deep foot well.
She saw him, face down, prone.
She remembered he’d been lying on the bench seat, not wearing his seatbelt. Had he been thrown to the floor when the car bounced? Was he hurt?
Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.
“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.
He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright. Kim thought he looked unharmed. But percussion injuries could manifest hours or days later, hard to detect and potentially devastating. They patted themselves down, checked for broken bones, or blood. Found none.
Kim and Gaspar moved away from the vehicle. Roscoe stared forward, pale, rigid, horrified. Kim understood. The dead, the injured, were Roscoe’s friends and colleagues. She could have been among them. All three of them could have been standing at the Chevy when it exploded, had Roscoe not stopped back there on the county road.
And then the shaking started. Kim felt it, but was powerless to stop it.
Gaspar wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his body.
“What is it? Are you hurt?” he yelled, patting her down, looking for anything, everything.
Kim shook her head and mouthed without sound, “No, I’m fine.”
Then she thought: Gaspar might have opened the Chevy’s door this morning when he first found the body. And her shaking intensified. Her teeth chattered. She couldn’t stop.
But she had to stop.
She had to help those people. She knew combat first aid. They all did. She was fine. She wasn’t hurt. She had to go help.
She pushed Gaspar away and walked three steps on spaghetti legs toward the carnage. Gaspar grabbed her arm, pulled her around to face him.
“They’ve got enough help,” he said. “There’s more coming. Better that we stay out of the way.”
Kim heard him as if he was at the end of a very long tunnel. She looked ahead at the scene. Medical personnel, first responders, firefighters, sirens, helicopters. She shook Gaspar’s hand away, put one foot in front of the other, determination as wobbly as her steps, but she kept on going. Her next thought was foolish nonsense. She said, “No way to keep the media away now, Roscoe. No way in hell.”
She smiled. How silly was that? She giggled. She covered her mouth with her hand, pressed hard until only stifled silence remained.
Hysteria was the last thing anyone needed.
Chapter Twenty Four
KIM FELT GASPAR’S HAND on her shoulder again after she’d walked only twenty feet. She glanced at him, noticed his limping, and slowed her pace. Maybe he was hurt after all? Roscoe had stayed behind. She’d moved the Town Car and parked it across the county road, bubble light flashing. Kim saw her talking on the cell, probably calling Brent for roadblocks. Preventing more chaos was a good plan.
Gaspar put weight in his grip on her shoulder. She turned her head toward him. He leaned closer, squeezed her shoulder tighter, stopped their forward momentum. He tapped his watch and spoke slowly to make her understand words she was unable to hear.
“We can’t stay too long,” he said. “We need to get out before our presence is recorded or questioned. Keep your head down. Talk to no one.”
She nodded agreement. He squeezed her shoulder once more before they moved deeper into scenes resembling a war zone. Roscoe jogged over and met them at the outer perimeter of most serious damage.
The November air was now blackened with sooty pollution. Kim tasted the stench; smoke burned her eyes. Explosion debris blocked all normal paths. Hot spots glowed in weed patches, threatening to reignite. Noise levels continued to rise around her as v
ehicles and personnel overwhelmed.
“Holy Christ,” Gaspar said, crossing himself in the traditional Catholic way when they saw the Leach brother’s charred corpse pass by on a stretcher. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a linen handkerchief and handed it to Kim. “Here. Cover your nose and mouth. You don’t want to breathe this stuff any more than you have to. It’s toxic.”
He bent his left arm at the elbow and covered his own face with his sleeved forearm. Roscoe did the same.
“Let’s split up,” Kim said, through the fine linen filter. Was she whispering or shouting? She raised her voice anyway, just in case. “Meet back here or call me. OK?”
He nodded through the crook of his elbow and peeled off to the southwest. Roscoe melted into the crowd of responders.
Kim moved north, making slow progress toward the smoldering Chevy. Along her route she helped where she could until the last of the victims was hustled into rescue vehicles. Then finally she reached the center of combustion. For a good long time, she stood away from the knot of investigators and simply stared at the debris.
Kim had recognized the blast for what it was: a VIED. A Vehicle Improvised Explosive Device. The idiot’s weapon. She had learned in specialized FBI training that car bombs were easy to build and always effective and indiscriminately murderous. A nearly perfect disaster machine. No prior experience required.
Except everything she’d observed had confirmed that the Chevy bomber was an expert. He had demonstrated abilities idiots do not possess.
Kim pulled out her smart phone, running video and clicking stills as she surveyed the scene. A circle of burned grass surrounded the Chevy’s blackened chassis. The vehicle and all forensic evidence it might have contained were obliterated. Perhaps charred fragments of the dead man would eventually be located here and there, but probably not.
Before the blast, when Roscoe was parking the Town Car, Kim had seen the trunk lid open while crime scene techs calmly processed the trunk’s interior. Meaning there had been no explosives in the trunk. The Chevy hadn’t been packed with low-grade explosives, as idiots’ car bombs often are. Something more powerful in smaller quantities had been used.
Judging from the explosion’s properties and the significant amount of damage, Kim figured the bomb was most likely PETN. An odorless, powerful military grade plastic explosive, PETN had become the first choice of serious terrorists. It was stable and it produced maximum damage employing a minimum amount of product. Quite effective.
The difficulty should have been obtaining access to PETN. In theory, unauthorized personnel couldn’t acquire it. But laws are for the law-abiding and where there’s a will, there’s a way. Supplies were not as well controlled as Homeland Security would have the populace believe. Kim’s team back in the Detroit field office collected PETN from radicals too often.
The Chevy’s placement had been exact. Not only did the vehicle explode, the blast took out two flanking GHP cruisers. Tow trucks parked in front of the Chevy provided the secondary explosions. Five vehicles destroyed with one bomb. Either the Chevy bomber knew precise details of local procedures or he’d been blessed with dumb luck.
Kim didn’t believe in luck.
She decided the bomb had been carefully designed to damage or destroy interstate travel north and south for miles. Which meant the bomb’s designer was not only knowledgeable about local traffic patterns, but also ruthless. He was willing to kill cops, roadside crews, and innocent travelers as well. Kim shuddered, noticed, and forced herself to stop before the shudder escalated to violent shaking again.
Engrossed in her assessment and her self-control efforts, she didn’t immediately notice the phantom cell phone’s vibrations in her pocket.
Chapter Twenty Five
HOW LONG HAD THE PHONE been ringing? Hard to say. She fished it out, opened it, and it nipped her thumb again. She juggled the two phones long enough to remove the cracked plastic’s hold on her skin, then she lifted it to her left ear. She snapped photos as she talked. Two more black vans had arrived.
“Agent Otto,” she said, into what sounded like silence. Maybe a satellite delay, or maybe her hearing was more impaired than she thought.
“Damage report?” her boss asked. Was there concern in his tone? Perhaps he was relieved to hear her voice. In which case he should have said so. What would he have done if someone else had answered because she’d died in the blast? Dumb question. If she’d died, no one would have answered. The phone would have died, too. Its vibrating insistence would have been permanently stilled. And the phantom cell was untraceable, dead or alive. If someone found its parts eventually, it would have made no difference; the boss would never have been officially involved. She was under the radar. She could be dead now. Did he care?
“Agent Otto?” he asked again, louder. More insistent this time. “What is your status?”
“No physical damage,” Kim said, answering the question he should have asked.
“And Gaspar?”
“Gaspar’s fine, too. Thanks for asking.” Cheeky response. Too defensive. Maybe she was just tired. Or still a little hysterical.
“No damage at all?” She thought he sounded relieved. So he had known. About the bomb. When he ordered them away from the Chevy this morning.
“Not to us,” Kim said.
“That’s good,” he said, as if he actually believed it.
Uniformed teams approached from vehicles parked on all sides of the disaster site. She had to move. She put her personal phone back in her pocket and walked away from the Chevy, still holding the phantom cell to her ear.
“What else is going on out there?” he asked.
“It’s difficult to hear you, sir. The noise is overwhelming. Fire’s controlled. Injured transported. Casualties processing. Local professionals doing their jobs. Federals moving in on schedule. Atlanta FBI either here on the way, most likely.” She added the last sentence to make him sweat.
“How long before you can get out of there and finish your assignment?”
Finally, he gets to the point. With something like curiosity, she observed her detachment morph to anger. A normal reaction? Odd in context, she realized. She asked, “Which assignment is that, sir? The Reacher file? Or the Sylvia Black case?”
“Both,” he said, but the admission cost him.
She smiled to herself. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe longer.” Oh, what the hell, she thought, before plowing ahead. “We could use some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“We need background. Access to FBI databases, at least. Someone inside to get information to us as we need it. For now, send me Sylvia Black’s tax returns, both before and after she married Harry. Include all the attachments, too.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He paused, but he didn’t promise. “When will you have a report for me?”
Flash point. Her simmering hurt triggered like another VIED. She felt the familiar millisecond sequence in her head: click, blast wave, percussion, shrapnel, massive fire, billowing black smoke, unbreatheable air.
Darkness.
She pulled the phone away from her ear. Snapped it closed. It bit the skin it had damaged twice before. She held the beast away from her body. She squeezed hard to release its grip. The crack separated, pinched and pierced her skin, refused to release her. Blood trickled across the phone’s surface and down her wrist.
She threw the damn thing down and crushed it with the heel of her FBI regulation footwear. She left its pieces on the hard ground and walked away.
She was through the barrier, to where she stopped worrying and did what needed doing. She had been there before. She welcomed the feeling, slipped into it like an old leather jacket.
Gaspar was waiting for her twenty yards ahead. Behind him were the four old burned-out warehouses that Reacher had somehow wrought.
Death begets death.
More was coming.
She picked up her pace.
Chapter Twenty Six
> Margrave, Georgia
November 2
1:40 p.m.
GASPAR MATCHED KIM’S PACE stride for stride. He said, “Eyes and ears everywhere. We’ve got to go.”
Chemical smoke poisoned the air, burning their eyes. Whapping helicopter blades raised the decibel level to painful proportions. News media swarmed, multiplied like wasps. Ambulances, fire rescue, law enforcement, and tow trucks rushed inbound and outbound from all directions. Arriving vehicles slammed to quick stops, sirens wailing, flashing lights bouncing off every solid object, occupants dashing through the chaos. The gathering crowd of civilians provided more cover and confusion.
Kim and Gaspar walked away unnoticed, down the ramp, along the county road’s shoulder, farther and farther from the Chevy’s blackened husk. He breathed hard, but he didn’t slow. Nor did she. They made it to Roscoe’s car. Gaspar pressed the key fob, released the door locks. He went one way and she went the other, peeling apart like wide receivers, and they yanked door handles and slid into the front seats.
Gaspar started the engine, three-point turned, flipped on the bubble light. Kim pulled the power connector to the dash-cam mounted near the windshield. Front audio-video disconnected, but this was a wired state-of-the-art law enforcement vehicle recording every moment. Other devices might still be powered. No termination switch on the instrument panels.
Only one choice. For now. Least said was soonest mended. She put her finger to her lips. Gaspar nodded agreement. He drove south in silence. She held out her hand, palm up.
Gaspar shrugged and fished out the boss’s phantom cell.
She disabled the GPS before shutting it down. She repeated the process on both their personal smart phones. They’d have maybe five to ten minutes of extra breathing room if they needed it. No more.
Plausible deniability was always good.
She saw the sign for the washboard dirt ribbon: Black Road.
She pointed.
Turn here.