No doubt in Reacher’s mind that the guy deserved it.
Maybe the guy had deserved everything he got and more.
He continued, still stern, still angry, “There’s trouble in Carter’s Crossing again. Another dead woman. A similar cause of death to the old case. If we’re lucky, Reacher may feel like he needs to fix the situation like he thought he did before. He’s not one of ours anymore. We won’t be able to run interference for him this time.”
“Got it,” she replied, because a response seemed to be expected, even as he refused to be straight with her. He never showed his hole cards.
He didn’t expect Reacher to show up in Carter’s Crossing simply to find out who killed a woman he didn’t even know.
Reacher lived totally off-the-grid, wandering around according to his whims. He wouldn’t even hear about a single murder in such a small town in the middle of the country. Her death wouldn’t make the national news. It’s not like someone could call him up and tell him, even if they’d wanted to.
If Reacher were that easy to find, Kim wouldn’t have been given this job at all.
Which meant the Boss wasn’t telling her the whole story, either. He never did. He didn’t flat out lie. Nothing that obvious.
So sure. There might be another dead woman. Same method. Maybe even the same killer, although it wasn’t like Reacher to have left the first scumbag alive.
But none of that was the reason the Boss thought Reacher might show up in Carter’s Crossing.
Whatever his intel was on that score, he wouldn’t share it with her. He never did that, either.
“So the current CO at Kelham, does he know I’m coming?” Kim asked.
“Let me be clear,” the Boss said, leaning forward again. “You’re already off-the-books. Stay that way. There will be authorized personnel looking into this thing. Including a guy named Major Lincoln Perry. You can work with him and liaise with the locals, too, if you want. But that’s all.”
“So the answer is no. You’re not running interference for me at Kelham,” she replied cheekily. Which earned her another glare. “So I’m using my cover story. Doing a classified background check on Reacher. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“See that it isn’t,” the Boss said, poking the blue folder again, making her wonder what was inside it. “Your job is to be on the scene if Reacher shows up. Look for him. You know where he’s likely to hang out by now. You see him, you call me. I’ll deal with him myself. I don’t need a dead agent to explain at the moment.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, trying not to smirk.
The Boss didn’t care if she died. He just didn’t want to be the one on the hot seat when it happened.
Plausible deniability, they called it.
She understood the desire.
Sooner or later, if she survived, she’d be required to testify somewhere about hunting Reacher. She’d need plausible deniability, too. Many things about her Reacher assignment should be concealed from investigative spotlights.
But the last thing she intended to do was simply observe what happened in Carter’s Crossing and report back to him. She’d come way too far down the road for that. If the Boss didn’t understand that much, he was dumber than she gave him credit for.
“Details in the file.” He picked up a padded manila envelope like all the others he’d sent her over the past few weeks and tossed it to her.
She didn’t need to open it to know an encrypted cell phone and a jump drive rested inside.
“Car’s waiting downstairs. Your flight to Memphis leaves in two hours.”
“Memphis?”
“Closest major airport. About a ninety-minute drive from there. You’ll have a vehicle.”
“Got it.” She stood and walked toward the door.
She stopped with her hand on the knob and turned to look at him, backlit by the big windows behind him so that she couldn’t see his features clearly. Which was how he always seemed these days. Shadowed. Menacing.
“What about my new partner? Gaspar’s been retired a while now. FBI field agents travel in pairs. Safer that way,” she said.
“I’m still working on that,” he said smoothly. “Gaspar was perfect for the job. Hard to find a replacement.”
She believed him. He’d had plenty of time to replace Gaspar if he intended to do so. Gaspar had said they were both expendable. Finding another expendable agent might not be easy.
“I guess that leaves me on my own until I locate myself a partner, then,” she said, stuffing the manila envelope into the pocket of her trench coat. Which pissed him off, as she’d intended.
“Just follow orders for a change, and you’ll be fine,” he said wearily as if tired of dealing with her. He probably was. The feeling was mutual. “There’s a local sheriff. Rumor is that he’s more than competent. You’re not jumping out of a jet into an active volcano.”
She walked through the door and left him glaring at her back.
On the way to the car, she turned up her collar against the blowing rain and hunched into her coat.
She wondered what the hell had happened in Carter’s Crossing, Mississippi, fifteen years ago to get Reacher kicked out of the army and send him living so far off the grid no one could find him.
More to the point, what impending disaster might draw him back to Carter’s Crossing after all this time?
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday, May 11
Kelham Army Base, Mississippi
11:30 a.m.
General Alec Murphy had a long list of tasks to complete before Friday. He kept his head down, his reading glasses on his nose, and his mind on the work at hand.
Most of the work had been done and the soldiers redeployed. The remaining base personnel were similarly occupied with final duties.
Best-case scenario was that everything would go smoothly from this point until he turned the lights out Friday morning. Which wouldn’t happen. He sighed. Things rarely went smoothly with so many moving parts to be coordinated.
He’d left the most tedious work for last. Paperwork. The amount of paper the army could generate when closing a facility like Kelham would have been overwhelming to any normal civilian.
But not to Murphy.
He’d seen it all before.
In triplicate.
The work was somewhat mindless, which left him free to ponder. Damned shame he was ending his army career in a place like Kelham, and he was more than a little peeved about it.
There’d been a time when a guy like him would have been sitting at the Joint Chief’s table instead of being shoved out of the way.
Murphy was a man’s man. He got things done. The old-fashioned way.
Time was, his results alone would have been more than enough to satisfy the brass. These days, they all wanted to focus on the methods and motives more than results. Can’t do this. Don’t do that. Pure crap, that’s what it was.
The army had changed, like everything else in the world. Passed him by. This man’s army wasn’t the army Murphy had signed up for. Not even close.
If they hadn’t pushed him to retire, he’d have done it anyway. He had no desire to be a part of whatever the army was becoming.