Carlos Gaspar was hurting, but that was nothing new. Inside and out, mentally and physically, he lived with pain. He had slept badly and given up on it before three in the morning. He had crept out of the bedroom and holed up in the kitchen and started his day with Tylenol and coffee, like he always did. Nothing stronger, although God knew he was tempted. But that way lay ruin, and he knew he couldn’t afford to get any more ruined than he already was. He had a wife and four children and twenty years to go before he could relax.
He showered and shaved and dressed in a tan poplin suit from Banana Republic, which would have gotten him killed in DC, but which was the standard uniform in the Miami field office. He went back to the kitchen and ate more Tylenol and drank more coffee and sat still and imagined he could hear his family breathing.
His phone rang at three minutes past four in the morning. Not his regular phone. Not his personal phone, either, but a plain Motorola that had been bubble-wrapped and delivered to him through the Bureau’s internal mail service. He knew who had sent it. He had fired it up and noted its number and run it through the databases. It didn’t exist.
He answered it and a voice asked, “Gaspar?”
He said, “Yes, sir,” quietly, so as not to wake his family, and because a low tone seemed to be appropriate for this guy.
The voice said, “There are files for you in your inbox. Read them on the plane. You’re going to Atlanta.”
“When, sir?”
“Now.”
“OK.”
Then there was a pause. Just a beat, but Gaspar heard it. The voice said, “You’re going to be the number two on this. Your lead will be Otto, out of Detroit. No reflection on you.”
Which was bullshit, of course. Everything was a reflection on him. Although maybe this guy Otto was a big deal. People who were referred to by their first name only usually were. Gaspar wondered whether he was supposed to have heard of him. But he hadn’t. He had never worked in Detroit. Knew nothing about the office or the city, except that they used to make cars there.
He said, “No problem,” but he said it to nobody, because the voice was already gone. He put the phone in his bag, which was permanently packed and ready to go, laptop, shirt, underwear, Tylenol. The bag was made by the same people that made Swiss Army knives, which was OK, but it had wheels and a handle, which wasn’t. Trundling a bag around was one step from being in a wheelchair.
It was what it was.
He drove himself to the airport in his Bureau car, which was a blue Crown Vic with government plates. He could park it anywhere. He propped his laptop on the passenger seat and drove one-handed and stabbed at the keys and brought up his e-mail, not 3G wireless, but a secure satellite connection. One new message, as expected. One attached file, zipped and encrypted. No accompanying text. No hello, no best wishes. Par for the course.
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 née 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 née 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.