Page 9 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

There was a back exit leading directly to the parking garage. But that also meant taking Mr. X downstairs in the elevator and through the back lobby on the first floor.

The best option was to lift the body onto the roof and put him in a helo. Which was why Kim had called for the extraction. She could have organized a paramedic team with a gurney and an ambulance easily enough. Acquiring a late-night helo off the books was a bigger problem.

Of course, the next question was where to take the body and what to do with him once he was delivered.

Finlay would be thinking all of this through, just as Kim had already done.

“Okay,” Finlay finally said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Kim nodded. “We’ll need cleanup.”

“Okay.”

Finlay took everything in and asked no unnecessary questions, as expected. He had proven himself reliable several times before. And he kept secrets for a living.

Kim nodded. She’d made the right choice to call Finlay. Cooper would still be chewing her out at this point.

“I’ll meet you at the helipad. What’s your ETA?” Kim asked.

She heard him talking to someone else, but the conversation was muffled, and she couldn’t make out the words over the background noises the private jet generated as it taxied.

A couple of seconds later, Finlay replied, “Thirty minutes. Max.”

“Copy that.” Kim checked her watch after he disconnected the call.

She hustled into her bedroom to pack her bag. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and then twisted it into a low chignon at the base of her neck.

She dressed in jeans, boots, and a leather blazer. She settled her duty weapon into its holster and slid three cell phones into her pockets.

Finlay would be arriving soon.

She sat on the bed, pulled out her laptop, and clicked a few keys to bypass security to get into the CCTV system on the encrypted server.

Kim located the files containing video surveillance for the entire building. She began with the past forty-eight hours. She needed a place to start that made sense.

Mr. X or his killer could have entered the building earlier. But the system was set up to hold forty-eight hours of video in memory and then archive at hour forty-nine.

After she’d located and downloaded the current video, she searched the archives. She accessed and downloaded files for the past thirty days.

She saved the files to her laptop and uploaded them to her secure server. She’d always been a belt-and-suspenders agent. Redundancies had become a staple of her life. They had saved her bacon many times.

After she’d uploaded the video, she sent the fingerprints and the photos she’d captured on her phone to the same place.

She stuffed the DNA tubes with their samples into her breast pocket. She wasn’t worried about degradation from her body heat. Samples had lasted more than six million years, even under adverse conditions.

Kim checked her watch.

Finlay would be here soon.

But she had time for a quick look.

She rewound the current video stored on her laptop. She stopped at a point four hours ago, which was an hour before her friend had dropped her off out front.

She remembered the time because she’d glanced at the clock in the BMW just as she left the car.

Kim gulped the last of her cold coffee as she used the fast forward to skim through the footage, looking for three men.

Mr. X.

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