by Jude Hardin
Remarkably, Wahlman had managed to escape, and even more remarkably, he had managed to leave the team of assassins, the team that Major Stielson had unofficially commissioned with unofficial funds, shot to death in a variety of locations.
Renfro was dead, but his body had been recovered, which was never supposed to have happened. If Renfro had simply disappeared from the face of the earth, then Wahlman never would have been curious about why the two of them looked almost exactly alike, and a New Orleans homicide detective named Collins never would have sent blood specimens that eventually confirmed a genetic connection.
In essence, the fact that Darrell Renfro’s body had been recovered was the main reason Major Stielson presently found himself in such a predicament. Of course it wasn’t his fault that the body had been found. The assassins had been careless. They’d failed to follow his precise instructions, leaving him holding the overstuffed, flimsy-bottomed bag. Idiots. At least they were all dead now. If one or more of them had been captured by the police, Stielson probably wouldn’t be breathing right now, and he definitely wouldn’t be parked outside an abandoned filling station waiting to meet with their potential replacement.
Not a team this time.
Just one guy.
But he was supposed to be the best. A bona fide hit man with over one hundred successfully completed assignments to his credit.
They called him Mr. Tyler.
He didn’t come cheap, that was for sure. But according to one of Stielson’s most trusted sources, he was worth every penny. There were some things you just didn’t skimp on, the source had said, and hiring a man to kill another man was one of those things.
Stielson certainly couldn’t argue with that. Not after his experience with the first people he’d hired. He supposed the old saying, that you get what you pay for, was true most of the time, although it had taken quite a bit of effort to convince Colonel Dorland to let go of the additional funds. If things weren’t taken care of this time, the current sling Stielson’s ass was in would seem like biscuits and gravy compared to what would come next. Another old saying—that failure was not an option—was true in a way that couldn’t be stressed strongly enough.
As the digital clock on Major Stielson’s dashboard changed from 11:29 to 11:30, a car skidded up beside him. The driver side door swung open and a man climbed out. Average height, average weight, dark glasses, thick wavy hair the color of the desert sand. He was wearing a black leather coat. Long. Like a trench coat. He opened Stielson’s front passenger side door and slid into the seat.
“Are you Mr. Tyler?” Stielson asked.
“Who else would I be?”
Stielson’s heart did a little flip-flop in his chest. Mr. Tyler’s voice was deep and flat, and there was something about him that made Stielson immediately uncomfortable. Like being out in the middle of a lake in a leaky rowboat with dark swollen thunderheads approaching. Exactly like that. An overwhelming urge to be somewhere else as quickly as possible.
“I had to ask,” Stielson said. “There’s always a chance that—”
“I checked my account on the way out here,” Mr. Tyler said. “There hasn’t been a deposit.”
“It should go through sometime early this afternoon.”
“Should?”
“It will.”
“Tell me about the job.”
Stielson handed him a nine-by-twelve envelope.
“Everything you need to know is in there,” he said.
“Photographs?”
“Of course.”
“What’s the target’s name?”
“Everything you need to know is in the—”
“What’s the target’s name?”
“Rock Wahlman. Although he’s probably using aliases.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He closed his bank accounts and abandoned his home in Florida about three months ago,” Stielson said. “We haven’t been able to establish his whereabouts since then.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“No. He could be anywhere, although we’re pretty sure he hasn’t left the country.”
Mr. Tyler laughed. “Do I look like a bloodhound?”
“I thought—”
“You thought wrong. I have other jobs. I don’t have time for this.”
“What if I offered to increase your payment?” Stielson asked.
“I’m listening.”
“You tell me. How much would it take?”
“Ten.”
“Ten million dollars?”
“That’s my price. I’ll stay on it for as long as it takes. Satisfaction guaranteed.”
Ten million. Dorland was going to blow a gasket.
“I don’t have the authorization to go that high,” Stielson said.
“Are you interested in my services or not?”
“I am, but—”
“Then get the authorization.”
Stielson reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He punched in Colonel Dorland’s unofficial private number, the one that only a handful of people knew about, a line secured with scrambling software for voice and encrypting software for text, a device to be accessed only during otherwise unsolvable situations surrounding unofficial clandestine activities.
The connection went through.
One ring, and then Stielson heard a squeaky little thud to his right. A bright squeal and a hammering throb. Two distinctly different sounds, but in unison. As if a sneaker had stopped hard on a basketball court as the ball simultaneously got slammed against the backboard. The unusual noise was followed by a pinch somewhere deep in his gut, followed by the realization that he was bleeding profusely.
He glanced to his right and saw the sound-suppressed semi-automatic pistol.
Mr. Tyler reached over and gently removed the phone from his hand.
“I always prefer to deal directly with the person in charge,” Mr. Tyler said.
A second or two later, Stielson felt the barrel of the pistol being pressed against the side of his face. It was still warm from being fired.
He thought about the first time he’d held a girl’s hand. It was at the roller rink, the summer between sixth and seventh grade. He’d looked for her that next Saturday. And the next. He never saw her again. He wondered what had happened to her.
Then he heard the squeaky little thud again.
4
Kasey steered into the parking lot, pulled around to the front entrance and stopped at the curb.
“It’s not a very big library,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Wahlman said. “I just want to use one of the computers for a while.”
“Let me guess. You’re going to look Dr. Surrey up and make sure he’s not some kind of mad scientist.”
Wahlman laughed. “That’s not what I had in mind, but it’s not a bad idea. You’d have to trust someone quite a bit for something like that.”
“Something like what?”
“Watching you sleep. Especially if there’s some kind of drug involved.”
“I don’t think there is. It’s the psych department. They probably just hook some wires up to your head or something.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s two hundred dollars a night,” Kasey said. “Just for sleeping. I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Wahlman said.
“Are you going to call him?”
“Probably.”
“Don’t forget to tell him I sent you.”
“I won’t.”
“And let me know how it goes.”
“How can I do that?”
“You can call me.”
Kasey started digging around in her center console. Wahlman figured she was looking for a pen.
“You don’t have to write it down,” he said. “Just tell me. I have a good memory.”
She told him the number.
“You can call me even if you don’t participate in t
he study,” she said. “You know, if you just want to hang out for a while or something.”
“You’re very nice,” Wahlman said.
“Not everyone in Barstow is like those three guys at the diner.”
“Good to know.”
“Call me.”
“I will.”
Wahlman climbed out of the car and walked into the library. He stopped at the circulation desk and got a guest pass, and then he sat down at one of the desktop computers and logged on to the internet. He’d been trying to gather some information on a former army officer named Jack Reacher—who probably wasn’t the actual reason he’d been targeted, but whose history might provide some clues as to why, and some clues as to who exactly might have ordered the hit.
That was what he was hoping for, anyway.
Someone was out to get him. That was for sure. Someone in the army, supposedly. Probably not just one person. Probably a rogue outfit led by a rogue colonel or general. That was his guess, and he figured that exposing the culprits and blowing the whole thing wide open in the media would be his best chance of putting a stop to it.
But first he had to find out who the culprits were, and why they were trying to kill him. He couldn’t just call one of the major newspapers and tell them that some people in the army were trying to kill him. They probably got dozens of calls like that every day. The more persistent callers probably ended up in nice restful rooms somewhere. He couldn’t go to the police, because of the arrest warrant in Louisiana. If he went to the police, a different kind of room would be waiting for him. One with bars.
So he needed information.
Which, so far, had been hard to come by.
According to one of the assassins who’d tried to kill him three months ago, his entire life had been a lie. His parents hadn’t died in a car accident when he was two, as he’d always been led to believe. Instead, he had been produced using a vial of cells taken during a routine hospital blood draw way back in 1983.
According to the assassin, Wahlman was an exact genetic duplicate of this Jack Reacher fellow. A clone. Grown in a laboratory for a few days, and then implanted into a surrogate mother for the gestation period.
Supposedly, a total of eighty fetuses were produced, from a variety of unwitting donors, and only two survived—both grown from cells that had been harvested over a hundred years ago.
Both grown from cells that had been harvested from Jack Reacher.
It was an outrageous claim, and Wahlman might have dismissed it as such if not for a DNA test performed by the New Orleans Police Department. The NOPD detective who ordered the test had assumed that the lab had made an error, but Wahlman knew better. He’d seen the other surviving clone, a man named Darrell Renfro—had watched him die, in fact—and a few weeks ago he’d finally found a picture of Jack Reacher online.
Physically, Wahlman, Renfro, and Reacher were nearly identical. Same hair color, same eyes, same facial features. Same extreme musculature. Reacher was listed as being six feet five inches tall, and Wahlman was only six-four, but environmental factors could have accounted for the difference. Wahlman had smoked cigarettes for a while when he was a teenager. Maybe they had stunted his growth.
He smiled. It amused him that anyone might think of six-four as being stunted.
Through previous searches, he’d learned that Reacher had once been assigned to an elite military police outfit called the 110th Special Investigations Unit. The unit no longer existed, and some of their files had been declassified over the years.
Thousands of them, actually.
More pages than one person could read in a lifetime.
Wahlman had started skimming through the documents a couple of weeks ago in Tucson, Arizona, which was the last place he’d taken the time to visit a library. He looked around now to make sure nobody was watching him, and then he accessed a search engine and found the appropriate website and went back to where he’d left off.
Most of the cases he’d read about in Tucson were routine, and none of them had been relevant to his current situation. Which was to be expected, on both counts. Wahlman knew enough about military life and law enforcement to know that there were thousands of hours of thumb-twiddling boredom for every minute of pulse-pounding excitement, and he knew that finding a connection between the army of Reacher’s day and the army of 2098 was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Still, he felt like he needed to keep trying. He felt like it was his only chance of getting out of this thing alive.
He clicked on a file.
United States Army Court Martial 18793-15B. National Archives, War Department, Office of the Judge Advocate General. This case was tried in Rock Creek, Virginia, with Colonel Harrison Lee Whitmore presiding. Primary investigator: Major Jack (none) Reacher.
A non-commissioned officer had been suspected of smuggling automatic weapons from one Central American country to another. The non-com, whose name had been blacked out in the public version of the file, was being tried on a variety of charges, the most severe of which was treason against the United States of America.
Wahlman read through the file. The proceedings did not go well for the non-com. Not well at all.
Major Reacher had been a good detective, Wahlman thought.
Better than good.
Great.
Maybe one of the best of his day.
Solid groundwork, exceptional deductive skills, ducks in a row on the day of the court martial.
Reacher had been a great detective, and he had been a great soldier. Highly decorated, including the Silver Star Medal for valor in combat.
Wahlman started thinking about his own military career. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that he had chosen law enforcement. Maybe he had inherited some of Reacher’s aptitude for that kind of work. He’d been enlisted, of course, whereas Reacher had been an officer, but still. Cops are cops, and it appeared that Reacher had done his share of work out in the field. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be happy sitting behind a desk all day, dealing with the bullshit those kinds of guys had to deal with. He seemed like the kind of guy who liked to get his hands dirty. Which was something Wahlman could appreciate, because he was the same way.
He clicked back to the homepage of the website, scrolled down and found another document with Reacher’s name on it, but before he had a chance to open the file, a woman who smelled like cinnamon walked up behind him and reminded him that there was a waiting list and that his time was about to expire. He exited the internet and cleared the browsing history and dropped his guest pass back at the circulation desk.
He browsed the stacks for a while, and then he decided to call the number on the business card Kasey had given him.
Dr. William Surrey
Department of Psychology
D.U. Coffee University, Barstow, CA
He wasn’t crazy about the idea of someone watching him sleep, but he also wasn’t crazy about the idea of spending the night on a bench or under a bridge. Especially with temperatures forecasted to dip into the thirties. He was still planning on talking to Greg at the diner later, but maybe this research thing would be okay for a night or two.
Wahlman didn’t own a cell phone. They were too easy to hack, too easy to track, and the taxes on usage had gotten out of hand back when he was a kid. In his current situation, one of those things would have been nothing but a boatload of potential trouble. He didn’t want one, even if he could have afforded one.
And a lot of people felt the same way. Payphones had made a comeback. They were almost as ubiquitous in 2098 as they were in 1958. There was one just outside the front entrance of the library. Wahlman had noticed it on his way in. He walked out there and fed some coins into it and dialed Dr. Surrey’s office number.
One ring.
Two.
Wahlman smelled cinnamon again. A group of young ladies had set up a folding table and some folding chairs on the side of the library entrance opposite the payphone. There was a larg
e poster board taped to the front of the table. Apparently the young ladies were band members from one of the local high schools. They were having a bake sale to help pay for new uniforms. The woman who’d reminded Wahlman about the waiting list must have bought a cookie or something.
After eight rings, a robot voice announced that Dr. Surrey was currently out of his office and to please leave a message after the beep. Wahlman hung up and tried the cell phone number written on the back of the card.
One ring.
Two.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dr. William Surrey?”
“Yes. May I ask who’s calling, please?”
“My name’s Tom. I’m interested in participating in your research study.”
“Which one?”
“There’s more than one?”
“We have one we’re doing right now, and two more we’re starting next month.”
“I’m interested in the one you’re doing right now,” Wahlman said. “The sleep thing.”
“Are you a student?”
“No.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m retired,” Wahlman said.
He heard some papers shuffling. Dr. Surrey checking to see if there were any available slots, he supposed.
The girls sitting at the bake sale table looked bored.
“We had a cancellation for tonight,” Dr. Surrey said. “So if you’re available, we could certainly use you.”
“Are there any drugs involved?”
“No. In fact, if you normally take any sort of medicine to help you sleep—”
“I don’t,” Wahlman said.
“Good. We’ll need you on campus no later than ten tonight. Social Sciences building, third floor. You’ll be meeting with Belinda. She’s one of the graduate students working on the study with me.”
“I’ll be there,” Wahlman said.
“Great. I’ll tell Belinda to be expecting you.”
“Thank you. By the way, a waitress over at The Quick Street Inn gave me your card. Her name’s Kasey. She said that you’d offered her a referral fee.”
“I know who you’re talking about,” Dr. Surrey said. “I’ll take care of her.”