Get Back Jack (12 page)

As was his habit, Gaspar poured coffee, added his usual excessive ration of sugar and cream, and snagged a cherry pastry from the room service cart. His tone was clear and firm and loud enough to be overheard when he said, “The last thing I remember clearly is standing outside of Neagley’s office after the paramedics left. How about you?”

Speaking with more confidence than she felt, for the benefit of both Gaspar and whoever was listening, she said, “I remember flashes. I recall dashing up the stairs and running to Neagley’s after leaving you to deal with the shooter. I remember the paramedics working on the victim. Paul Neagley’s crazy freak-out seems to go on and on in my head.”

All of this, Kim figured, was objectively verifiable, and therefore nothing their attacker should be overly worried about her remembering.

Kim moved closer to Gaspar and lowered her voice below the radio volume. “And his arm was bleeding, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Gaspar replied as quietly.

“What caused the bleeding?”

“Not sure. Gunshot grazed it, maybe. I think I smelled fresh gunfire at the time.”

Kim nodded, considering. Did she remember smelling anything? Nothing came to her. “After entering Neagley’s lobby, all I’ve got is a huge black hole where my mind should be.” She cleared the emotion from her throat. “Catch me up.”

Gallantly, he pretended he hadn’t noticed how fragile she was, and threw her a bone to make her feel better. “I don’t remember the important parts, either.” He turned away to refill his coffee and to give her a chance to man up again. “After paramedics removed the victim, Neagley took her brother deeper inside her office. She never came back and we couldn’t raise anybody else from inside, either.”

He dusted sugar off his hands and began to pace the room. “We talked a little bit to the guard, who was some kind of wiseass and didn’t tell us anything. Then we waited for the elevator. That’s the last thing I recall.”

Kim watched him. His familiar routine comforted her. He seemed exactly as she remembered. Everything that felt normal also felt welcome. She blinked, inhaled to fill her lungs, and stood to force down the panic that had rested on her chest since she’d ignored the Boss’s first call this morning.

She had interviewed date rape victims and robbery victims who reported memory losses that varied in duration from thirty minutes to several hours after the drugs were administered. Memory of events prior to unconsciousness also varied and depended in part on the administered dosage.

“Since our drug-induced amnesia is probably permanent,” she said, putting a deliberate edge in her voice, “we could try to investigate the attack to fill in the blanks. But it would be a waste of time.”

“So, we move on, grateful that our attacker was an expert in the art of drugging victims?” Gaspar’s tone let her know exactly what he thought about that suggestion. She felt the same way, but she knew they could chase their attacker until the end of time and would learn nothing. The evidence was gone as surely as her memory.

“The problem isn’t the attack, Chico,” she said, anger sharpening her response. “It’s being hung out to dry.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

An attack on two FBI agents should have caused swift, hard reaction from law enforcement. A backup team and additional agents should have flooded the building to apprehend their attacker. If he’d escaped, the full weight of the Agency should hunt him down for as long as it took to haul him to justice. Years, if necessary.

She and Gaspar were FBI agents on assignment. Every move they made was constantly monitored. Within seconds, the Boss had known, or could have known, that his two agents were down.

But no one came to their aid, either immediately or for several hours afterward. Or ever.

Only one conclusion possible. No agent in distress call was issued. No one was hunting their attacker. And no one would.

Kim and Gaspar were working under the radar. Kim knew that, had accepted it. But she had still expected the Boss to have her back. Now, she knew for sure that he didn’t.

Toe-to-scalp shudders she couldn’t halt threatened to escalate into something like convulsions.

She didn’t trust herself to say more. Even as Gaspar watched, her anxiety refused to subside. He crossed the room and sat next to her, placing a firm hand on her shoulder.

After a few moments, he said, “The Boss didn’t know, Kim. He didn’t know.”

She nodded.

He spoke as if he were calming a frightened horse many times stronger than he was. “Think it through. If the Boss had known we’d been attacked and laid out, either he wouldn’t have called last night at all, or he would have waited until we regained consciousness to call.”

Kim nodded again, slowly, desperate to regain sufficient control over her central nervous system to speak without tremor.

Gaspar’s tone remained quiet, but steady. And hard. “He kept calling because he
didn’t
know. He didn’t know where we were or what had happened.” Gaspar flashed a sardonic grin. “He figured we were ignoring him.”

Kim’s shudders slowly dissipated as she listened to his calm logic reinforce the cold conclusions she’d already reached intellectually, even though her body hadn’t quite metabolized them. If Gaspar believed the same evidence . . . .

Maybe to show he’d already left Kim’s fear behind, returning to business as usual, Gaspar talked tougher. “She must have disabled the surveillance cameras in the building corridor and in the stairwell before she attacked us.”

“She?”

“Top of the list of the three most likely options.” He raised his fingers one at a time as he ticked off the possibilities, like teaching a child to count. “The woman with the scars on her face. She shot at us shortly before we were attacked. Second choice, Neagley. Distant third, her security guy.”

There were other options. Including an unknown subject. Hell, it could even have been Reacher. He was ahead of them all the way. He could have been waiting. Could have disabled the security guy. Kim liked the idea that it was Reacher better than Gaspar’s three options. Reacher was more frightening, but at least he was twice her size and an experienced killer. She couldn’t berate herself as much if Reacher had used stealth to overcome them both.

But Kim agreed Gaspar had named the three most likely suspects. She cleared her throat again. “We’ll never prove it.”

“We don’t need to.”

“Maybe
you
don’t need to.”

“We’re not going to arrest any of them for laying us out. As far as the world is concerned, we weren’t even there,” Gaspar said.

Right.

“Look, he’s a bastard,” Gaspar said, referring to the Boss, whose name they both refused to speak. Safer not to, they’d decided. “But we’ve been doing this wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to give him a vested interest in keeping us alive and on his team.”

“It’s pretty obvious he’s not there yet, Chico,” she said.

He grinned at the crack and she knew he was glad for the sign she’d come through her panic attack, even if neither of them would ever mention it. Just as she didn’t ask about his injuries and frailties, he didn’t ask about hers. Don’t ask; don’t tell. As if unacknowledged meant untrue.

That situation would have to change. But not now.

One thing at a time.

Gaspar paced the narrow hotel room, fueled by caffeine and sugar and something like outrage. “The Boss has enemies. Powerful people who’d love to destroy him. We’ve learned things the Boss never wanted anyone to know. As long as we keep the secrets, dead or alive, it’s possible no one else will ever know. If we’re killed in the course of this assignment, they’ll offer some bullshit explanation and people will believe them.”

“You’re not making me feel safer, if that was your goal.”

“But if we survive, we will always know them for what they are, always be a threat to them. Unless they’re prepared to kill us, they won’t dare to harm us. Don’t you see that?” Gaspar’s tone was triumphant.

“What I see is that the Boss and Neagley, and who knows how many others before we’re done, are all involved with Reacher somehow. The Boss doesn’t want anybody to know about whatever it is.”

“Exactly. Because if we
can
find out? Working in this straightjacket they’ve fitted around us? Then whatever
it
is, we’ll prove that it’s findable. And that’s the very last thing they want. If it’s findable, then they want to destroy
it
before anyone else finds out.”

“Of course,” she paused, “and destroy everyone who knows about it, too, don’t you think?”

He stared straight into her face, heavy black brows pointed directly at the bridge of his nose, nostrils flared, tone determined. “First thing I learned in the Army: stop thinking like
you
and start thinking like
them
.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“You’re still struggling inside the upwardly-mobile-FBI-agent straightjacket. You still think you can pull your fat out of the fire and mine, too. That’s what’s crazy.”

He stood a bit apart from her now—away from her, as if he could create distance from their situation, too. “The Boss and Reacher,” he said, “and probably Neagley and the scar-faced woman and who knows how many others—they’re all playing some game we don’t even know. And their game has no rules at all.” He turned his back to her and stuffed both hands into his pockets. “Follow your own advice, why don’t you? Caffeinate and carry on, Susie Wong.”

She laughed. The first time she’d really laughed since they were attacked. It felt good. And she didn’t care who heard her. “Are you packed, Cheech? We’ve got a plane to catch as soon as we’re done here.”

“Done with what?” he asked.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Saturday, November 13

9:30 a.m.

Chicago, IL

Kim stood, smoothed her suit, sucked in a deep breath. She reached for the radio and turned the volume a bit higher. She moved to the bathroom, flipped on the second overhead fan for more interference. Then, she sidled closer to Gaspar and lowered her voice.

“Yesterday, Neagley invited us to ask more questions after we reviewed those files she gave us on Dixon and O’Donnell. So I called her this morning. They said she’s out of town. Return date open.”

Gaspar snorted. “Three guesses where she went.”

Kim shrugged. “Two options: Nowhere or somewhere, right? But we’ll find her soon enough. I need to confirm something else quickly before we go.”

She meant to tread carefully. Because they’d been ordered not to use official resources at all, every time they did so they were violating orders. Which was not great, but she felt it was justified under the circumstances—though putting their colleagues in harm’s way
wasn’t
justified. She wouldn’t do it. So she’d use her personal connections inside the FBI and at other agencies sparingly, and with the utmost care.

This was doubly true with her partner and
his
connections.

Ultimately, Agents Otto and Gaspar would be forced to testify about this investigation when it went south, assuming they survived. The less they each knew about the other’s extra-legal activities, the better.

“What about Reacher’s bank records?” She phrased the question carefully, working around the minefield.

She didn’t ask how Gaspar managed to get Reacher’s bank records to begin with. Banks were hacked every day. Confidential information was leaked every day. Don’t ask, do tell—they kept coming back to that. Certainly seemed like a good policy for the moment, where confidential sources were concerned.

Leaning in tight, Gaspar quietly reported the facts. “He’s got one account. Branch in Virginia near the Pentagon. That’s all. Army pension deposited once a month, always on the 5th. Early on he’d call to withdraw cash now and then. Never large amounts. Usually a few hundred dollars. The bank would wire the cash to a Western Union office of his choice. Always a different Western Union office. Withdrawals sporadic. Amounts varied. No pattern I could find.”

“But he doesn’t do that now?”

“After 9/11, Reacher started using an ATM card. Meaning the withdrawals are traceable. And there’s likely photographs of his mug collecting the money at the machines, too.”

“Only after the fact. You could go to the spot where he used the card last, but that doesn’t tell you where to find him now.”

But maybe it did explain how the Boss lost track of Reacher. Assuming he actually did lose track.

“No pattern at all to the banking?” she asked. “He’s not withdrawing regular amounts? Regular intervals? Nothing?”

Gaspar shook his head.

She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Reacher’s habits seemed like complete idiocy to her. Could he really be wandering aimlessly from town to town? Taking a bit of cash here and there, and then moving on? It made no sense.

And even if it did make sense, in Reacher’s world, maintaining that lifestyle would be too awkward to succeed for fifteen years, and flat out impossible to implement indefinitely. The more she thought about the idea, the more preposterous it seemed. Which meant her early-morning epiphany became more plausible by the second.

She reached for her coat and pointed from the face of her Seiko toward the door.

Gaspar didn’t move. He said, “I see the wheels turning over there, Sunshine. What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure. But we’ve got to go.”

He grinned. “Another minute. Once we walk through that door, we can’t talk about this again for a while. Give me something else to dream about while I sleep on the plane.”

She scowled at him. Sleeping on an airplane was the height of idiocy, too. At least being awake gives you a fighting chance to save yourself during a fiery plane crash. Not a significant chance. But a better chance than if you slept through whatever fleeting opportunities might present themselves.

“Maybe it just happens that trouble finds Reacher wherever he lands,” she said, “but generally people get what they ask for, don’t they? Normal people don’t find themselves in bar fights and fistfights and gunfights every day. Walks like a killer, talks like a killer, trained as a killer . . . .”