Don't Know Jack

She cracked the window. Petroleum-heavy air hit her face and entered her lungs and chased away the more noxious odors inside the cab. She patted her sweat suit pocket to settle the cell phone more comfortably against her hip.

Twenty past four in the morning, Eastern Daylight Time. Three hours before sunrise. The moon was not bright enough to lighten the blackness, but the street lamps helped. Outbound traffic crawled steadily. Night construction crews would be knocking off in forty minutes. No tie-ups, maybe. God willing.

Before the phone vibrated again three minutes later, she’d twisted her damp black hair into a low chignon, swiped her lashes with mascara and her lips with gloss, dabbed blush on her cheeks, and fastened a black leather watch band onto her left wrist. She needed another few minutes to finish dressing. Instead, she pulled the cell from her pocket. While she remained inside the cab, she reasoned, he couldn’t see she was wearing only a sweat suit, clogs, and no underwear.

This time, she didn’t identify herself when she answered and kept her responses brief. Taxi drivers could be exactly what they seemed, but Kim Otto didn’t take unnecessary risks, especially on alert level red.

She took a moment to steady her breathing before she answered calmly, “Yes.”

“Agent Otto?” he asked, to be sure, perhaps.

“Yes, sir.”

“They’ll hold the plane. No boarding pass required. Flash your badge through security. A TSA officer named Kaminsky is expecting you.”

“Yes, sir.” She couldn’t count the number of laws she’d be breaking. The paperwork alone required to justify boarding a flight in the manner he had just ordered would have buried her for days. Then she smiled. No paperwork this time. The idea lightened her mood. She could grow to like under the radar work.

He said, “You need to be at your destination on time. Not later than eleven thirty this morning. Can you make that happen?”

She thought of everything that could go wrong. The possibilities were endless. They both knew she couldn’t avoid them all. Still, she answered, “Yes, sir, of course.”

“You have your laptop?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” She glanced at the case to confirm once more that she hadn’t left it behind when she rushed out of her apartment.

“I’ve sent you an encrypted file. Scrambled signal. Download it now, before you reach monitored airport communication space.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a short pause, and then he said, “Eleven thirty, remember. Don’t be late.”

She interpreted urgency in his repetition. She said, “Right, sir.” She waited for dead air again before she closed the phone and returned it to her pocket. Then she lifted her Bureau computer from the floor and pressed the power switch. It booted up in fourteen seconds, which was one fewer than the government had spent a lot of money to guarantee.

The computer found the secure satellite, and she downloaded the encrypted file. She moved it to a folder misleadingly labeled Non-work Miscellaneous and closed the laptop. No time to read now. She noticed her foot tapping on the cab’s sticky floor. She couldn’t be late. No excuses.

Late for what?

CHAPTER TWO

At precisely 5:15 a.m. the cab driver stopped in front of Delta departures at McNamara terminal. Fifty-five minutes, door to door. So far, so good, but she wasn’t on the plane yet.

She paid the driver double in cash, as promised. She ignored the cold November wind and pulled her bags from the car and jogged inside as quickly as she dared. Running made airport officials nervous. Airports were touchy places in America these days, particularly those close to known arrival and departure points for terrorists. Detroit- Wayne Metro had two strategic advantages for the bad guys. Proximity to the Canadian border allowed rapid deployment once they entered the country, and they could easily blend in. Greater Detroit was home to more people of Arabic descent than any city outside the Middle East. Which was the very reason Otto had requested the Detroit deployment: more opportunity for advancement on the front lines.

Right then she thought she would have been better off somewhere else.

She slowed to a walk. There were cameras everywhere. She was under the radar, but she wasn’t invisible.

She approached the checkpoint and looked for her contact. She saw a man with Kaminsky on his nameplate, manning the crew line, putting each crew member through the same screens as the regular passengers. He was focused intently on his work.

Come on, come on, come on.

She willed him to notice her. When he did, she ducked under the rope and walked up to where he stood. She said, “You’re expecting me.”

He said, “Correct.”

He glanced at her credentials and passed her along, with her bags, and her electronics, and her gun, around the outside of the metal detector hoop. Behind her a passenger called out, “Hey! What’s so special about her?”

She thought: Shit. Now someone will remember me if they’re asked, for sure. She didn’t glance back to give the guy another look at her face. She just jogged the last hundred yards to the gate, where another TSA agent waited, blocking the entrance. She flashed her ID. He nodded and stepped aside. The moment she crossed the threshold, he closed and locked the door behind her. She rushed through the tunnel and stepped onto the plane. The flight attendant closed and sealed the door behind her, the jet way retreated, and the plane backed away. The pilot had only a ten-minute delay to cover up.

Should anyone ask.

She found her seat in first class. The seat next to hers was empty, as was the seat across the aisle. Probably not by chance. She stowed her bags and buckled her seatbelt low and tight. She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She gripped the armrests until her fingers hurt.

God, she hated flying.

Experts said fear of flying was irrational. They were fools. Kim knew too much to believe that nonsense. Planes made powerful weapons and they were no match for Mother Nature. And she was in a bad way to start with. The acid in her stomach had boiled up the night before, when the untraceable cell phone had arrived. She unclenched one hand long enough to slide an antacid between her lips. She pressed it with her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and as it dissolved, she tried to calm her racing pulse. She kept her eyes closed until the plane was safely in the air and she could breathe again. She asked for black coffee and opened her laptop to find out why the hell she was headed to Atlanta.

She had two hours and thirty-eight minutes to learn everything she needed to know.

***

The encrypted file she had downloaded in the taxi was zipped. Inside, she found five separate documents. The first contained a short memo explaining her assignment. The other four files were identified by unfamiliar names: first, Carlos Marco Gaspar; second, Beverly Roscoe (Trent); third, Lamont Finlay, Ph. D.; and fourth, Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher’s file was the largest, and it ended fifteen years ago. The other three were brief resumes.

She started reading.

The assignment seemed straightforward enough: Complete background investigation on potential candidate Jack-none-Reacher. She’d handled dozens of these since she’d joined the Special Personnel Task Force. But this assignment was different in every respect. There was no indication of the job for which Reacher was being