by Jude Hardin
Thinking ahead.
Smart.
He hadn’t underestimated his opponent after all. He’d done everything just right.
And now the only thing Wahlman could do was lie there and wait.
But maybe not.
He still had the folding lock-blade knife he’d taken from Nefangar.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
He reached into his pocket to get it as Drake’s footsteps creaked rhythmically up the staircase.
24
Drake was moving slowly, cautiously. It took him a minute or so to make it to the section of the catwalk behind the tank on the right. Now he was standing directly across from Wahlman, who was still lying on top of the tank, near the edge.
Drake slammed a fresh magazine into the Uzi, and then he aimed the barrel at Wahlman’s core.
“You win,” Wahlman said. “You killed Darrel Renfro, and Allison Bentley, and your own man out in the swamp, and Mike Chilton. Now you’re going to kill me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you. All I want to know is why.”
“There’s no short answer for that,” Drake said.
Wahlman kept his eyes glued to Drake’s right index finger. The one on the trigger.
“Then give me the long answer,” he said.
“What’s the point?”
“At least tell me who hired you. At least give me that.”
Drake looked at his watch.
“My plane back to New Orleans isn’t scheduled to take off for another couple of hours,” he said. “I suppose I could stand here and chat for a while. Watch you slowly bleed to death. Or I could finish you off right now. I’ll get paid the same regardless, so it really doesn’t matter to me. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Drake laughed. “If I were in your position, I suppose I would want to know everything too. Delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Maybe the cavalry will show up just in the nick of time. Maybe I’ll drop dead of a heart attack. Anything could happen, right? But we both know that nothing like that is going to happen. And we both know that the little knife in your left hand isn’t going to do you any good, and that the thirty-eight revolver in your right hand isn’t going to do you any good. Or maybe you haven’t tried the gun yet. Maybe you don’t know. Go ahead. Aim it at me and pull the trigger. There aren’t any bullets in it. I threw them away. All six of them. I discarded the ammunition from the other guns up there beside you as well. So all you really have is the little knife. Which isn’t going to help you, no matter how long I stand here and talk. What are you planning to do? Throw it at me? Hope it sticks in my throat or something? Get real.”
“Like I said, you win. I’m not delusional, Drake. I just want to know why all this had to happen.”
Drake nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Okay. Everything. Well, believe it or not, it all started in nineteen eighty-three, at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. Quite a few American soldiers and officers were there being treated for injuries sustained during an attack in Beirut, Lebanon. During one of the routine a.m. blood draws, an army general called in an order for forty extra vials to be taken from forty of the American patients. Nobody’s sure exactly why he called in the order, but he did. The vials were labeled and shipped to the States, where the cells were analyzed and then cryogenically preserved in a secret underground laboratory in Colorado. Fast forward seventy-four years. Two thousand fifty-seven. A lot of things had changed by then. Politically. Financially. Technologically. An independent group of scientists petitioned the United States Army for funds and a venue to conduct a series of experiments on human cloning. It was illegal, of course, just as it is now, but the army said they would go along with it—in an unofficial capacity—as long as no living person was used as a donor. One of the scientists did a little research and discovered that the preserved samples from nineteen eighty-three were still in the deepfreeze, right there in the lab they wanted to use. Long story short, a total of eighty fetuses were produced, two from each specimen. Out of those eighty, only two survived. Both from an officer named Jack Reacher.”
“So I was one of the two,” Wahlman said. “And Renfro was the other.”
“Correct. Two surrogate mothers were hired, strict non-disclosure agreements and all that, but at some point during the pregnancies, the army decided to bail on the experiment, leaving the independent group of scientists with no funding and no venue. You and Renfro were given fake identities and fake histories and sent to orphanages in different states. That should have been the end of it. You should have been left to live out your lives. No harm, no foul. Happily ever after. Unfortunately, the army recently discovered that an electronic file containing a thousand or so pages of classified data might have been hacked into. They’re not sure, but they think some of the correspondence between the geneticists and the officer in charge of the clandestine funding might have been included in that data. So they’re basically trying to cover their tracks, trying to eliminate any sort of evidence that would link them to the illegal study.”
“Why don’t they just kill the hackers?” Wahlman asked.
“That would be one way to approach the problem. Unfortunately, they have no idea who the hackers are. In fact, they don’t really know if there are any hackers. It’s just a strong suspicion, based on—”
“So they hired you to kill Renfro and me as a precautionary measure? Just in case some of that classified data was breached? That’s insane.”
“What can I say? It’s the army. They pay well, I can tell you that. And now that Nefangar and the other three guys are gone, I’ll get to keep it all for myself. One squeeze of the trigger, and I get to retire. In style.”
“One squeeze of the trigger,” Wahlman said.
And as he was saying it, he discreetly flicked his wrist and whizzed the little lock-blade knife off the side of the tank. It toppled down through the dirty pipes and the electrical conduit, making enough noise to create a momentary diversion. When Drake turned his head slightly to the right, the barrel of the Uzi shifted slightly to the right as well.
Which gave Wahlman just enough time to aim the .38 and blast a hole through the left side of Drake’s jaw.
One bullet was all it took. Which was a good thing, because one bullet was all Wahlman had. He’d found it in the bottom of his pocket a few minutes ago, when he’d reached in for the knife, leftover from the extras he’d taken out when he first opened the box of shells in Allison’s car.
An extremely expensive box of shells, but worth every penny.
Strike fast.
Strike hard.
And now it was time to get out.
Wahlman crawled back over to the catwalk and used Drake’s cell phone to call a friend—a retired navy surgeon who owed him a favor.
25
Four days later, Wahlman was sitting on a bus, traveling on I-75, somewhere between Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee, staring out at the rural landscape and wondering what he was going to do, how he was going to live.
Our clients aren’t the kind of people who give up. Ever. They’ll hire someone else to track you down, or maybe they’ll do it themselves this time. They’ll find you. Tomorrow, next week, whenever.
Nefangar was right. They weren’t going to give up.
The United States Army. Not the entire branch of the service, of course. Probably some sort of special research division. Isolated. Rogue. Working in their own little bubble. Trying to cover their own little asses, conspiring to conceal the division’s involvement in an experiment that took place decades ago.
Which didn’t really make sense.
Wahlman was doubtful that it was just a matter of eliminating a pair of lookalikes who’d grown up in separate orphanages. Maybe there were more clones running around somewhere. Maybe it was something else. Drake had said that this thing was bigger than all the people involved. Bigger than big, he’d said. And if that was the case, there had to be more to it. Way more. The co
ver-up had to involve something that was happening right now. Something that would jeopardize the careers of the personnel working on it right now. Wahlman figured that he and Renfro were just the tip of the iceberg. He had no idea how deep it all went, but he intended to find out, and he intended to use the information as a bargaining chip. Maybe threaten to take it all to the media. The people who were trying to kill him obviously wanted to play hardball, but that was okay. He would give them a game. At the very least, he would go down swinging. He figured it was the only potential pathway back to any sort of normalcy.
Not that things would ever return to the way they were before all this happened. He knew now that his entire life had been a lie. No mother, no father, no car accident. He’d been produced in a lab, grown inside a woman who’d rented her body to the army for nine months. A woman who had probably never been allowed to hold him after he was born. His entire life had been a lie, but he could deal with that. In a way, it eliminated some of the bitterness he’d held onto since childhood. Since there never were any actual grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins, there were no reasons for Wahlman to be angry at them. So the whole bogus personal history thing wasn’t bothering him much. It was the loss of Mike Chilton that he was having a problem dealing with. It never should have happened. It was a totally unnecessary tragedy, and it was a weight that Wahlman would carry around for the rest of his life.
He had convalesced at the surgeon’s house for two days, and during that time he’d made some phone calls. He’d spoken to Detective Collins, who told him that Walter Babineaux had regained consciousness and had given the department detailed descriptions of the men who shot him, neither of whom looked anything like Wahlman.
“So we’ve dropped the charges on that one,” Collins had said. “But we still need to talk to you regarding the shooting at the hotel.”
“I already told you what happened. It was self-defense.”
“You left the scene in a hurry. You took the woman’s cell phone with you. We can’t just let it go. You know that, as well as I do. We need you to come in and make a formal statement. We’ll have to book you, but if everything points toward self-defense, then naturally we’ll drop those charges as well. And we’re still waiting for—”
“I’m going to have to disappear for a while,” Wahlman said. “But not because of that. Get with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Three men were found shot to death in an abandoned factory day before yesterday. Bad guys. Assassins. The guy you found in Allison Bentley’s hotel room was working with them. I was the target. I’m pretty sure Allison was involved too. I’m pretty sure she sold me out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She owed a guy ten thousand dollars. She was desperate to get her hands on the money. The guys who were trying to kill me might have found out about that, might have offered to clear the debt in exchange for a quick favor. All she had to do was let one of them come into her room and hide behind the drapes for a while. I’ve thought about it, and I’m pretty sure that was the only way it could have happened. Maybe Allison didn’t know the guy was planning to kill me. Maybe they told her he was just going to rough me up or something. I don’t know.”
“Who did she owe money to?” Collins asked.
“Guy named Tanner. He’s a loan shark. He also runs a business called Dena Jo’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream. It was where I bought the .38 that I killed the guy in Allison’s room with.”
“Tanner. I’ll check him out.”
“Also, I think I have the knife that was used to kill Darrell Renfro. I’m going to overnight it to you in a padded envelope. It belonged to one of the guys at the factory. Guy named Nefangar. I don’t know if that’s his real name. Get your forensics team to check it out.”
Wahlman had disconnected then. He hadn’t been able to think of anything else he needed to talk to Collins about. The results of the repeated DNA tests weren’t especially important anymore. Not to Wahlman. He knew for sure now that the initial results had been correct, that he was an exact genetic replica of a man named Jack Reacher. He was an officer in the army. Special Investigations. Served thirteen years. Apparently he was involved in some questionable activities after he got out. Wahlman had been thinking about that, thinking he might like to learn more about Jack Reacher someday, maybe take the time to research some of those questionable activities—if anything had ever been written about them.
A rectangular green sign with reflective white letters said CHATTANOOGA, 46 MILES. Wahlman was hungry, and his leg was hurting. The surgeon had given him some pain pills, but they didn’t help much. Mostly they just made him feel groggy, and he didn’t like that. He needed to stay alert while he was traveling. He needed to be aware of his surroundings. His life depended on it.
He had a little over three thousand dollars in his pocket, but he knew it wouldn’t last long. Maybe a month. Cheap hotels, diners, fast food joints. Bus tickets, train tickets, maybe thumbing it sometimes. His retirement check had been credited to his checking account on Tuesday, as scheduled, and he’d managed to close the account and withdraw the balance, but there was no way he could continue receiving the direct deposits every month. No way to do any sort of business that would leave a paper trail. No way to have a permanent address or an automobile.
No way to do anything except run.
And keep running.
Maybe forever.
And try to find out what Drake had meant by bigger than big.
MOVING TARGET
THE JACK REACHER EXPERIMENT BOOK 2
1
The money ran out in Barstow.
Wahlman got off the bus at 10:37 a.m. He randomly chose a direction and started walking. Fifteen minutes later, he pushed his way through a swinging glass door and entered a place called The Quick Street Inn. It was a diner. It was on Main Street. So the name made no sense. It was eight blocks from the depot. Quite a little walk in the desert sun, even in January when the daytime temperatures usually maxed out at around sixty. There was a hardware store on one side of the diner and a pharmacy on the other. Storefronts with awnings and plate glass windows and welcome signs. Old-fashioned. Retro. Like a scene from an old movie. Like the days before strip malls and discount superstores. The electric vehicle charging ports mounted to the bottoms of some of the parking meters—and of course the cars themselves—were the only visual indications that it was 2098, and that Wahlman hadn’t actually traveled back in time.
As you walked into the restaurant, there was a long counter on the left with a long row of chrome and vinyl stools in front of it. A guy was sitting on the fourth stool from the door. Collarless knit shirt, dark glasses. There was a cup of coffee on the counter in front of him, and a plate with a slice of apple pie on it. He was reading a newspaper. A coat had been draped over the stool to his right. Black leather. Long. Like a trench coat. Behind the counter a man wearing jeans and a t-shirt and a white apron was scraping down the flattop grill with a broad steel spatula, and a woman wearing a crisp blue-and-white-striped dress was rattling some ice cubes around in one of the glass coffeepots. Wahlman guessed the woman to be in her mid-thirties. Medium-length black hair, shiny and silky, pulled back from her face with plastic tortoise shell barrettes. She moved with a certain kind of poised confidence and balance. Like a dancer. Or a circus performer, maybe. Wahlman could see her in one of those skimpy little sequined bathing suits walking a tightrope or swinging from a trapeze.
Five booths lined the wall on the right, and then the room doglegged around the counter to an area with several freestanding tables. All of the tables were vacant, and only one of the booths was occupied, the one furthest from the entrance. Three guys were sitting there drinking coffee. One facing the front of the restaurant, and the other two with their backs to it. The guy facing the front of the restaurant was wearing a red ball cap. Pale skin, dark circles under his eyes. He was holding a short yellow pencil. The kind you use at a golf course. He was showing the other two guys something on the back of
a paper placemat.
The restaurant looked safe enough for the moment. The breakfast crowd was long gone, and it was still a little early for lunch. Wahlman’s disguise had held up so far, the wraparound shades and the ball cap and the beard, but he still tried to avoid people as much as possible. He ate at odd hours and took buses to unusual locations and never stayed in one place for more than a few days.
He walked past the center point of the counter, set his backpack down on the waxed rubber tiles and sat on the tenth stool from the door, leaving five stools between him and the guy with the newspaper. Four stools between him and the leather trench coat. The woman in the crisp dress walked over and smilingly asked if he would like to see a menu. Her nametag said Kasey.
“Why the ice cubes?” Wahlman asked.
“Pardon me?”
“Why were you shaking ice around in that coffeepot?”
“I was cleaning it. You sprinkle some salt in there, and then you swirl the ice around, and it gets all the residue off the inside of the pot.”
“Why not just wipe it out with a towel?”
“The ice and salt works better. You need a menu, or—”
“What can I get for two dollars?”
Kasey looked at her watch. “You can get the breakfast special if you order in the next thirty seconds,” she said.
“What’s the breakfast special?”
“Coffee, one egg, and a slice of toast, all for a buck fifty.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Great.”
Kasey hurriedly punched the order into the computer, and then she asked Wahlman how he wanted his egg.
“Over easy,” he said.
The guy with the newspaper grabbed his coat, got up and exited the restaurant. Abruptly. As if some sort of urgent situation had been brought to his attention. He left a five between his cup and his plate, the bill weighted down with a bottle of hot sauce.
“Such a waste,” Kasey said, walking toward the spot where the man had been sitting. “Why order a piece of pie if you’re not going to eat it?”