She hit.
No result.
She stared at the retreating helicopter.
She’d lost.
She’d failed.
They were gone.
Then the Huey’s blades slowed.
The tail dipped low.
Kim’s bullet had damaged the Huey.
Maybe just enough to force Sylvia to land.
Maybe not enough to make her crash.
She fired again, and again, and again. She hit the Huey every time. It started to swing and falter. It lost power. It started to come down.
“Get in!” she yelled to Gaspar. “Drive!” They scrambled into the SUV.
The Huey started to fall.
Gaspar closed the gap. The Huey lost its rotors. Began to dive.
Gaspar reached the runway’s end and kept on going over the flat gravel apron. Kim watched the Huey fall and crash on the desert floor.
Fifty feet away, Gaspar stopped the SUV.
Kim jumped out and ran. Gaspar limped behind her.
Kim felt the heat. Smelled the fuel.
Sylvia was bloodied but alive. She was unbuckling her seatbelt, trying to rise. Hale had his pistol in his hand.
Sylvia opened her door and got her left leg out.
Hale shot her in the back.
CHAPTER FIFTY THREE
Afterward Kim figured the standoff lasted less than ten seconds, but at the time it felt like ten hours. Hale was still alive, but he couldn’t move. He was wounded in the leg, by her handgun rounds, and shaken by the crash. He stayed in his seat. Small tongues of flame were starting up. The desert air was shimmering with heat and vapor.
She walked toward the crippled Huey. Gaspar tried to stop her, but she shook him off. She said, “Hale, I can help you. Hang on. I’m coming for you.”
Hale lifted his gun, like a great effort, and aimed it at her.
“Are you insane?” she called. “You can’t get out of there unless we help you.”
The flames bloomed bigger, twisting and racing, searching out air and fuel. Gaspar came after her, slowed by his wounds. He called out. She couldn’t understand his words, but she knew he was warning her to stop before the Huey exploded.
The fire was roaring now. There was black smoke and the stench of kerosene.
Hale fell out of his seat, to the cabin floor, then to the step, and then to the ground. He tried to crawl away, but he was dazed and his hip and leg were too badly wounded.
He stayed where he was.
Kim rounded the tail section. Gaspar came up beside her.
“We have to get out,” he said.
“Hale! Hale!” she called over the roaring flames.
Hale heard her. He rolled on his back. He stared at her.
He aimed his gun at Gaspar’s chest.
Instinct.
Muscle memory.
Training.
Kim stopped, braced, and fired.
Once, twice, three times.
Hale lay still.
Gaspar pulled her back.
She stood a moment longer, looking at the first man she’d ever killed.
Twelve hours later they were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the Hoover Building. FBI headquarters. Cooper’s lair. They had completed their formal encrypted reports to Cooper, detailing all the news fit to print about the last five days. They had divided the paperwork into two separate halves: the Reacher file and the Harry Black investigation.
They would leave it to others to testify about Black. They themselves were under the radar, and would stay there. Their personal involvement in the Margrave mess, as they’d come to call it during private conversations, was completely redacted. They didn’t know how Cooper had managed to spirit them out of the evidence trail, and they didn’t want to know. Both agents were grateful, but neither said so out loud.
Kim’s last task was to copy everything to her personal secure storage.
She said, “That feels good.”
Gaspar smiled. “Too bad about our numbered Swiss accounts, though. Could have made several little girls happy with all that cash.”
Kim nodded and sipped her coffee. “Have you changed your mind about Finlay?”
“Should I?”
“Finlay sent us to the Empire Bank. That’s how we discovered Hale had set up the accounts in our name and Cooper’s, too. Those accounts would have lived forever. Without Finlay, where would we be? Testifying in front of a Federal Grand Jury and dodging the IRS, that’s where.”
“If he gave us a heads up, he had his own reasons.”
“I was wrong about him,” Kim said. “And at least I can admit it. He hated Hale, not Cooper.”
“Probably hated them both.”
“Maybe.”
Across the street a young man in a suit came out of the concrete fortress. A junior agent. Little more than a messenger boy.
Kim said, “Now what, compadre? Back to Miami? Hug the kids, say hi to the wife, drink sweet coffee and sit behind your desk for the next twenty?”
The young man in the suit was crossing the street. Heading straight for them.
“That would be a wonderful life,” Gaspar said. “But I think someone has other plans for me. Reacher is still in the wind.”
“He had nothing to do with any of this, did he?”
“He was in Margrave fifteen years ago. I bet he never went back. Why would he? So no, he had nothing to do with any of it. We wasted a lot of time.”
The junior agent approached their table. He said, “Otto? Gaspar?” When they acknowledged, he handed each a
