Don't Know Jack

He dumped the file to his desktop and closed the laptop’s lid. Ten minutes later he was wheeling his hated bag into the terminal.

A TSA supervisor met him and gave him a boarding pass and fed him through the crew channel. An airside supervisor took him onward from there. The plane was waiting for him. The cabin door closed right behind him. He was in seat 1A, which was the seat airlines usually saved for late bookings. He hated 1A. You had to put your bag in the overhead, which he absolutely couldn’t do. He couldn’t lift it over his head. But 1A-type passengers were used to a certain standard of service, so he took his laptop out and left his bag in the aisle, and a stewardess bustled up behind him and dealt with it.

Then he eased himself into his seat. He had been shot twice, once in the right side and once in the right leg, and the wound in his side had collapsed the network of muscles there, and sitting was painful. The weight of his upper body crushed his organs, literally, like his ribs and his pelvis were the jaws of a vise. His doctors weren’t concerned. They were like mechanics who had rebuilt a totaled car, and they weren’t about to listen to complaints about a tiny scratch in the paint.

His leg wound had been dismissed as trivial. The bullet had hit the shin bone and hadn’t even broken it. But day to day it was far worse to deal with than his side. It ached constantly, like someone was in there with a drill from the Home Depot. Hence the Tylenol.

He ate two more from his pocket and waited respectfully until the plane was in the air and the road warriors all around him started firing up their approved electronic devices. He opened his laptop and the screen came to life and he leaned to his left, partly to relieve the pressure on his right side, and partly to keep the screen away from his seat mate. He asked the software to decode the text and unzip the files.

Five documents. Four of them routine, one of them a big surprise.

The four routine files were the assignment, a target and two sources. Some guy named Jack Reacher was the target, and Beverly Trent nee Roscoe and Lamont Finlay were the sources.

No big deal.

The big deal was the surprise file. Otto was not some famous agent’s first name. He was not a Bureau legend. He wasn’t even a he. He was a she. Kim Otto, younger than Gaspar, newer, less experienced. His leader.

No reflection on you.

Which, he supposed, way deep down, was true. Once or twice, back in the day, he had led older agents. He had no objection in principle. And even if he had, it would have been disqualified immediately, by the Bureau of course, and by himself. He had woken up in the ICU and his first thought had been: what the hell do I do now? He had a wife and four children and twenty years to go. Then his Special Agent in Charge had visited, and told him that he still had a job, and always would. Modified duty, of course, mostly behind a desk, not the same as before. But a job. Gaspar had been flooded with gratitude, simple as that, and he kept that gratitude in his mind the way people keep lucky charms in their pockets, and he touched it often, to console himself, to reassure himself. Number two? Hell, he would fetch the coffee.

He read all four files. There were photographs. Kim Otto was cute as anything. Asian and tiny. Reacher was a shadowy ex-military psychopath. A perfect prospect, all things considered. Trent nee Roscoe and Finlay had been cops in a place in Georgia, probably where Reacher had first shown up again on the official radar after leaving the army. That place was a town south of Atlanta called Margrave, which was a place Gaspar had been before, which was maybe why he had gotten the assignment, not that the man who had mailed the phantom phone had a huge labor pool to pick from.

Gaspar tried to read more, but there was a headwind out of the north, and the engines were straining a little, and the vibration was making him sleepy. A precious gift, to which he yielded happily, his head on the window to his left, his right side for once mercifully uncompressed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Carlos Gaspar woke up when the stewardess fussed at him about shutting his computer down before landing, but then she made up for it by hauling his bag down for him when they made the gate. He wheeled the bag for what seemed like a mile and then he stopped and telescoped the handle and picked the bag up like a regular guy when he saw the sidewalk ahead of him. He figured Otto would be waiting on the curb in a rental, and he didn’t want to make a bad first impression. He found her pretty quickly, in a Chevy Blazer. Her head was down. She was reading. An A-student. Asian, too. Maybe her first lead assignment. She wanted to be ready.

He tried the tailgate, but it was locked. He knocked on her window. She glanced up. She looked about eighteen. No more than five feet, no more than a hundred pounds, maybe less. She got out and he lifted his bag in and kept the pain out of his face. He offered to drive, which she seemed a little unsure about at first, but hey, she was number one and he was number two. Number two drove, simple as that. It was what it was. And they were already late. No time for a big discussion. He got in and she got in on his right and he took off.

***

Margrave was one hour and about a hundred years south of Atlanta. As always, traffic was bad at first and then it got easier. Strip malls changed to agriculture. Red earth, peanuts, the whole nine yards.

Georgia, for Christ’s sake.

Gaspar asked, “You tired?”

Kim Otto said, “A little.”

“Let me guess. He called you at four o’clock exactly.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he called me at three minutes past.”

“Were you OK with that?”

“I was already awake.”

Otto said, “I mean, are you OK with being number two?”

Gaspar said, “I’m OK with being number anything.”

“Really?”

Gaspar smiled to himself. Asian, a woman, ambitious. She wanted to go all the way. She wanted to be the Director. He wondered how she would deal with being a cripple. A charity case. Her head would explode, probably.

He said, “You know his name?”

“Whose name?”

“You know whose name. The guy who called you at four o’clock and the guy who called me at three minutes past.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know his name. Do you?”

“Yes,” he said. “You going to say it out loud?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

She asked, “Did you read the files?”

“I looked at the pictures.”

“Is that all?”

“No, of course I read them.”

“And?”

Audition time. First duty of a number two was to make his number one feel confident in his competence. Second duty was to get a little competition going. He said, “I’m not sure why we got the call at four in the morning. Seven would have been OK. Flights into Atlanta from other major U.S. cities are not rare. So what’s the rush? And the target file asks more questions than it answers. No IRS, nothing from the banks, no debts or loans or liens, no titles to houses or cars or boats or trailers, no arrest record, no convictions major or minor, no rent rolls, no landline or cell, ever, no ISP data, and he’s not in prison. He’s not in witness protection or undercover for any of the other three-letter agencies, or why would we be looking for him? We’d already know where he is. So either his file is