Page 94 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

“Copy that.”

Morin terminated the call. The text came in half a moment later. He opened his map to pinpoint Ruston’s exact location.

Satellite imagery of the wooded area around the path was obstructed by cloud cover. He tried several different angles before he gave up.

Morin couldn’t confirm Audrey was there, but he had no reason to doubt that she went in, just as the operative reported. She’d found something. Or she was waiting for someone. She knew something.

Time to find out exactly what that something or someone was.

He punched the coordinates into the GPS and headed toward Devil’s Punchbowl.

Driving with his left hand, he opened the laptop with his right and picked up the trace signal he’d assigned to her vehicle.

The blue dot pulsed near the location of the path in the woods. Not exactly confirmation of the operative’s report, but probably not that far off, either.

Morin made a quick call to deploy two operatives to shadow Krause’s murder investigation. He had no suitable personnel active inside Canada that he could repurpose for the task.

By the time the covert team arrived from New York, anything remotely useful at Krause’s residence would probably have been removed by the local law enforcement team.

Morin shrugged. Better late than never. He hoped.

“Audrey Ruston, what the hell are you up to?” Morin swore under his breath, puzzling through the options aloud. “Why kill Krause? Makes no sense. Even if you’ve found Liam Stuart, you’ve eliminated our backup. Stuart could fail. Then where will we be? Dumb thing to do. Totally stupid.”

Ruston’s hubris was almost as limitless as her ambition. It was one of the reasons he had ended their affair years ago.

In his business, confidence was essential but only when tempered by experience. There was always a better shot, a stronger fighter, a smarter tactician. Hubris, in short, could get you killed.

Audrey never seemed to learn the right lessons from the failures of her colleagues. She took their failures as a challenge instead of a chance to do better.

“Okay. So you’ve found Stuart. And you’re with him now.” Morin shrugged, talking it through as if Ruston was in the passenger seat. “It’s not enough to recover the drone. We also need an operator. How will you persuade Stuart to complete the FQT tomorrow?”

He imagined her sultry smirk in reply.

Audrey’s secret weapon was sex. She used sex to get what she wanted. And she was masterful at that game.

One of the best.

Morin and Brax could so testify from personal knowledge.

“But Stuart isn’t the same as other men, Ruston. His singular focus is his work. Your considerable sexual expertise won’t work on him.”

Morin had been so engrossed in his analysis that he’d lost all sense of time. When the GPS system announced his turn was five miles ahead, the robotic voice startled him back to the present.

He squinted at the small screen display and located the turn.

The GPS guided Morin to pull off the main road onto the entrance to the Devil’s Punchbowl conservation area. Casting his gaze from the poorly illuminated road to the map, he slowed to a crawl and lowered the window.

He stuck his head out, peering amid the trees for the two-track.

The tree canopy concealed, and the underbrush camouflaged the narrow trail well. The rain and wind pelted his face.

But a few feet farther up the road, his diligence was rewarded. He found it. The path was so well hidden that he’d have driven past if he hadn’t been told it was there.

Which meant Audrey had been told exactly where to look, too. Not for the first time, Morin wondered who was feeding intel to her. Brax? Fox? Someone else?

He turned onto the dirt two-track and squelched his headlights, peering into the shadows as he moved cautiously along. If Audrey Ruston was back in here somewhere, she had a good reason. And Ruston’s reasons were good enough for Morin.

His gut led him toward her like a moth to flame, knowing full well she could and would burn him to ashes without a moment’s remorse.

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