Licensed to Thrill: Volume 1

by Diane Capri

  Kim met Gaspar’s gaze.

  He recognized the pilot’s voice, too.

  Sylvia Black.

  What?

  Now Hale’s reckless attack in the alley seemed less foolish.

  Gaspar said, “Hale grabbed Sylvia this morning because he needed a pilot, not a hostage.”

  Which confirmed one set of suspicions Kim had flushed out inflight. Sylvia had never been a dispensable pawn in Hale’s game. She was an integral actor in a long term criminal enterprise. She said, “Hale and Sylvia planned to meet Archie Leach at Wallace’s place. They planned to kill us in their crossfire.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “They’re on final approach. Five minutes, maybe?”

  Gaspar accelerated.

  Chapter Fifty Two

  LANDING CONDITIONS WERE CLOSE TO PERFECT. Winds were blowing straight down the runway at 10 knots. Clouds at 6,000 feet. Sylvia turned to line up with the runway. They would land, switch to the waiting chopper, and take off again. Maybe to a final destination in the mountains? Somewhere the Learjet couldn’t go?

  Gaspar put the pedal to the metal and raced the Learjet to the runway.

  He didn’t make it.

  Too far.

  Sylvia landed and taxied fast and came to a stop close to a waiting Huey. She and Hale walked from jet to copter. Just the two of them. No third party. No Reacher.

  Kim was puzzled, briefly. From the air Hale must have identified the SUV as an FBI task force vehicle. He should have aborted the landing and flown on. He would have been out of U.S. airspace before Kim could have done anything about it.

  Therefore Hale knew who was on the ground, and why.

  The Huey’s rotor started turning.

  Gaspar slammed the SUV to a stop.

  Kim opened her door.

  Gaspar asked, “Do you know how to disable a chopper?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Kim said. “But feel free to chime in with ideas.”

  She slid out of the truck and ran through the downdraft from the whapping blades and the storm of noise from the turbine. Sylvia was in the Huey’s pilot’s seat and Hale was about to climb in on the navigator side. He had one foot on the ground and the other on the Huey’s step.

  Kim drew her gun.

  She called, “FBI! Stay where you are!”

  Protocol satisfied.

  Legalities completed.

  Hale didn’t stop. He was too close to an escape planned over too many years. Or maybe Kim’s voice had been swallowed up by the Huey’s noise.

  Gaspar had driven up very close to the front of the Huey, but the bird could clear the truck for lift off. That was the nature of helicopters.

  Kim aimed and fired.

  Bullets hit rotors and ricocheted.

  Hale braced himself halfway into the cabin and returned fire. Covering fire. Not aimed. He was trying to keep Gaspar inside the SUV and hold Kim back until the Huey could get in the air.

  The turbine spooled up and the blades increased their speed. Runway dirt whirled and danced. The Huey went light, and then weightless. It rose steadily. Hale was still on the step, one foot inside, holding on with one hand, and firing with the other.

  Kim had no chance to get on board.

  She did not feel relieved.

  She aimed.

  She fired.

  Four shots directly at Hale’s receding body.

  Two missed.

  But one hit him in the hip and a second in the thigh.

  He fell.

  Forward, into the helicopter’s cabin.

  Shit!

  Sylvia lifted ever higher.

  No target now except the chopper itself.

  Kim emptied her clip into the tail. Solid hits. But no result.

  Sylvia turned the Huey straight toward the SUV.

  Gaspar’s was at the SUV’s weapons locker. He had a rifle. He braced. He aimed.

  He fired.

  Straight at Sylvia as she flew directly toward him.

  The first shot hit the windshield and deflected.

  The second shot deflected.

  Bulletproof. The Huey was armored for war zones. The Learjet was not. They’d stopped for armored transportation.

  Where were they headed?

  Gaspar fired again. He hit the glass in precisely the right spot to take Sylvia’s head off.

  The bullet deflected.

  The Huey raised higher and higher overhead. It turned south, toward Mexico, toward the mountains.

  Kim took a sniper rifle from the rack. She steadied herself against the SUV. She aimed. She fired.

  She hit.

  No result.

  She stared at the retreating helicopter.

  She’d lost.

  She’d failed.

  They were gone.

  Then the Huey’s blades slowed.

  The tail dipped low.

  Kim’s bullet had damaged the Huey.

  Maybe just enough to force Sylvia to land.

  Maybe not enough to make her crash.

  She fired again, and again, and again. She hit the Huey every time. It started to swing and falter. It lost power. It started to come down.

  “Get in!” she yelled to Gaspar. “Drive!” They scrambled into the SUV.

  The Huey started to fall.

  Gaspar closed the gap. The Huey lost its rotors. Began to dive.

  Gaspar reached the runway’s end and kept on going over the flat gravel apron. Kim watched the Huey fall and crash on the desert floor.

  Fifty feet away, Gaspar stopped the SUV.

  Kim jumped out and ran. Gaspar limped behind her.

  Kim felt the heat. Smelled the fuel.

  Sylvia was bloodied but alive. She was unbuckling her seatbelt, trying to rise. Hale had his pistol in his hand.

  Sylvia opened her door and got her left leg out.

  Hale shot her in the back.

  Chapter Fifty Three

  AFTERWARD KIM FIGURED THE STANDOFF lasted less than ten seconds, but at the time it felt like ten hours. Hale was still alive, but he couldn’t move. He was wounded in the leg, by her handgun rounds, and shaken by the crash. He stayed in his seat. Small tongues of flame were starting up. The desert air was shimmering with heat and vapor.

  She walked toward the crippled Huey. Gaspar tried to stop her, but she shook him off. She said, “Hale, I can help you. Hang on. I’m coming for you.”

  Hale lifted his gun, like a great effort, and aimed it at her.

  “Are you insane?” she called. “You can’t get out of there unless we help you.”

  The flames bloomed bigger, twisting and racing, searching out air and fuel. Gaspar came after her, slowed by his wounds. He called out. She couldn’t understand his words, but she knew he was warning her to stop before the Huey exploded.

  The fire was roaring now. There was black smoke and the stench of kerosene.

  Hale fell out of his seat, to the cabin floor, then to the step, and then to the ground. He tried to crawl away, but he was dazed and his hip and leg were too badly wounded.

  He stayed where he was.

  Kim rounded the tail section. Gaspar came up beside her.

  “We have to get out,” he said.

  “Hale! Hale!” she called over the roaring flames.

  Hale heard her. He rolled on his back. He stared at her.

  He aimed his gun at Gaspar’s chest.

  Instinct.

  Muscle memory.

  Training.

  Kim stopped, braced, and fired.

  Once, twice, three times.

  Hale lay still.

  Gaspar pulled her back.

  She stood a moment longer, looking at the first man she’d ever killed.

  Washington, DC

  November 6

  5:45 p.m.

  Twelve hours later they were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the Hoover Building. FBI headquarters. Cooper’s lair. They had completed their formal encrypted reports to Cooper, detailin
g all the news fit to print about the last five days. They had divided the paperwork into two separate halves: the Reacher file and the Harry Black investigation.

  They would leave it to others to testify about Black. They themselves were under the radar, and would stay there. Their personal involvement in the Margrave mess, as they’d come to call it during private conversations, was completely redacted. They didn’t know how Cooper had managed to spirit them out of the evidence trail, and they didn’t want to know. Both agents were grateful, but neither said so out loud.

  Kim’s last task was to copy everything to her personal secure storage. Paying my insurance premium, she called it. She hit the send button and watched the upload and closed the laptop’s lid.

  She said, “That feels good.”

  Gaspar smiled. “Too bad about our numbered Swiss accounts, though. Could have made several little girls happy with all that cash.”

  Kim nodded and sipped her coffee. “Have you changed your mind about Finlay?”

  “Should I?”

  “Finlay sent us to the Empire Bank. That’s how we discovered Hale had set up the accounts in our name and Cooper’s, too. Those accounts would have lived forever. Without Finlay, where would we be? Testifying in front of a Federal Grand Jury and dodging the IRS, that’s where.”

  “If he gave us a heads up, he had his own reasons.”

  “I was wrong about him,” Kim said. “And at least I can admit it. He hated Hale, not Cooper.”

  “Probably hated them both.”

  “Maybe.”

  Across the street a young man in a suit came out of the concrete fortress. A junior agent. Little more than a messenger boy.

  Kim said, “Now what, compadre? Back to Miami? Hug the kids, say hi to the wife, drink sweet coffee and sit behind your desk for the next twenty?”

  The young man in the suit was crossing the street. Heading straight for them.

  “That would be a wonderful life,” Gaspar said. “But I think someone has other plans for me. Reacher is still in the wind.”

  “He had nothing to do with any of this, did he?”

  “He was in Margrave fifteen years ago. I bet he never went back. Why would he? So no, he had nothing to do with any of it. We wasted a lot of time.”

  The junior agent approached their table. He said, “Otto? Gaspar?” When they acknowledged, he handed each a small padded envelope.

  Unmarked. But recognizable.

  Gaspar ripped his open. A cell phone. He shrugged. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Kim looked up at Cooper’s office window. Was he standing behind the reflective glass? Right then? Watching? She saw the messenger boy head back toward the building.

  And she saw a man, too, motionless in a shadowed doorway. He was looking straight at her. He was tall, easily six-five, and broad, easily two-fifty. A giant, really. He wore jeans and a leather jacket. Work boots on his feet. He had fair hair and a tan face and big hands. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He looked infinitely patient, just standing there, self-possessed, self-confident, simultaneously alert and relaxed, both friendly and dangerous.

  She turned to Gaspar, to point the guy out. When she looked back, he was gone.

  THE END

  For Lee Child

  1.

  FBI SPECIAL AGENT KIM OTTO’S slowly descending eyelids abraded like forty-grit sandpaper along her corneas and rested briefly before ascending in gouging retraction. How long had she been sitting here? The FBI headquarters building was quiet here in the basement. Activity was limited to higher floors where essential matters were handled.

  “What are you missing?” she asked the empty room as if she expected the answer to be revealed, when she expected nothing of the sort. If she was going to find anything at all, she’d have found it long before now. But she couldn’t give up, so she thought it through again.

  She’d begun by searching for general information. Finding none, she’d narrowed her search to the fingerprints. Fingerprints never changed, never disappeared, never failed to identify. Every law enforcement officer knew a fingerprint was worth a thousand eyewitness reports and often better even than DNA.

  But like DNA, fingerprints were only useful when compared to known identities. Law enforcement files around the globe were filled with unidentified prints and DNA. The first order of business was to find proof of positive identity. She’d thought that would be easy. Wrong.

  Jack Reacher must have been fingerprinted by the Army, like every other soldier. Maybe a single set of prints made all those years ago could have been misplaced in the days before computers ruled the world. Or maybe accidentally destroyed somehow.

  Kim thought not.

  Relevant military files were integrated with FBI and other agency files now, Kim knew. But Reacher’s army discharge was long before 9/11. Back in those days, government agencies didn’t share information in the way they did now. Some old files involving military personnel instead of criminal defendants were not searchable in the various FBI databases Kim had the necessary security clearance to examine without raising the alarms she didn’t want to trigger.

  Her plan was to check the military files last because they were the oldest. Her accounting background led her to prioritize the most recent information first, or first in, last out.

  Reacher wasn’t an army grunt who’d been drafted, served a quick term, and mustered out. He’d spent thirteen years in service to his country, including his last stint with the military police. As an MP his reference fingerprints would have been routinely used to exclude his prints from those left by witnesses and suspects at crime scenes.

  Kim should have found at least a few Reacher exemplars in the FBI databases. But she hadn’t.

  Nor had she really expected to find anything relevant, although she hadn’t abandoned all hope. But her realistic plan was only to confirm her assumption that nothing concerning Jack Reacher existed in FBI files. After that, she and Gaspar could move on to conducting additional interviews with victims, witnesses, reporting parties, and informants. Always assuming they could find any of the above.

  “Coffee. You need a caffeine jolt,” Kim said aloud.

  She stood, eyes closed to avoid the gouging, stretched like a cat, then a downward dog, working the kinks out of her stiff muscles. She heard nothing but her own breathing. She stretched her neck and shoulders again before making her way to the elevator in search of java, nectar of the gods.

  Kim pressed the elevator button and completed another round of stretches while she waited. Lights above the door flashed up and down and up and down, stopping at floors high above. The basement was low priority, below stops where others were consumed by important activity, Kim concluded. The only coffee at this hour would be inside the busiest sectors of the building, places she didn’t want to be seen. Yet. . . She sighed, shrugged, headed for the stairs.

  When she exited on the ground floor her personal cell phone vibrated. She checked the caller ID before answering.

  “Good morning, Dad. You’re up early.”

  2.

  FBI SPECIAL AGENT CARLOS GASPAR had planned to leave early even before the classified envelope arrived containing nothing but a copy of Major Jack (none) Reacher’s formal headshot; on the back, a time and place for a meeting.

  Had Reacher planned the meet? Or was it someone else who wanted Otto and Gaspar present? Either way, the big question was why?

  Nothing traceable about the envelope or its contents. He chased down the delivery service but got no further data. The headshot was easily obtainable by any number of people. Hell, he’d been supplied one just like it when he initially received the Reacher file assignment.

  The time and place for the meet was a bit out of the ordinary, but not alarming. The National Gallery of Art, East Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Ten o’clock tonight. It would be dark but not deserted. The building was one of those modern designs full of angles and shadows suitable for clandestine activities. But not a bad neighborhood, unless you hated politicians, and
the entire town was infested with those.

  He’d tried to call Otto, but her plane was already in the air and flying straight into an early winter storm. She hated flying under the best conditions; she’d be too wired by the storm and her errand to make any sense, even if he’d reached her. They’d talk tonight. In DC.

  Fifty minutes before he planned to depart, his bag was packed and stowed in the Crown Vic’s trunk. He’d dressed in his Banana Republic suit. Gaspar popped another Tylenol, rested on the chaise lounge, and watched his youngest daughter from behind mirrored sunglasses that reflected little of Miami’s winter sunlight and none of its heat.

  Today was Angela’s fifth birthday, meaning five giggling girls had invaded his home overnight. That was one of his wife’s rules. No sleepovers until age five, then five girls for her fifth birthday, six for the next, and so on. His eldest would be thirteen in a few months; the idea raised gooseflesh along his arms and not only because thirteen teenagers in his small house would be ear splitting.

  Thirteen was a dangerous age. Rebellion. Independence. Sex. He clearly recalled himself and his buddies at thirteen. The prospect of launching his firstborn daughter into that realm terrified him, but he acted as if it didn’t. He shrugged. No way to stop the clock. It is what it is.

  Gaspar felt his eyelids slide closed and shoved them up again. Yes, he was tired, but that was nothing new. Exhaustion had been a constant companion since his injury. He rarely slept more than an hour before throbbing pain in his right side awakened him. He’d become a quick nap expert to capture missing sleep, but he felt his senses dulled, his reaction times slowed. The healed scrape where a bullet seared his abdomen felt like a burning rash reminding him to stay alert, how grateful he was to have the fearless Otto as his partner, a solid assignment, and how damn lucky he was to be alive to see his daughters’ birthdays.

  Cacophonous noise drowned such thinking. Five girls cavorting in the back yard pool, squeals, shouts, splashes. Surely decibel level ordinances in Miami’s residential neighborhoods were violated. He’d tried asking them to quiet down, and they did, but joy erupted again louder than ever after maybe five subdued seconds. Was impulse control equal to age? Would the quiet seconds lengthen to six and then seven? Would it be five more years before he might enjoy ten seconds of silence at home from his youngest girl?