Page 17 of The Secret

Brown didn’t needto be told. He knew who Morgan Sanson was. He took a deep breath and listened to the footsteps in his hallway. They approached the front door. It opened. Closed again. And there was silence. He breathed out. Gave Hercules a stroke and reached for his pipe. His nerves were shot. He packed the bowl. Brushed away a stray strand of tobacco. Held his lighter so its flame flickered and the tobacco began to smolder. He took a long, deep drag. Gulped down the smoke. Held it in his lungs. Exhaled, slowly. Sucked down some more. Kept the routine going until his head settled against his chair. His eyes rolled back in their sockets. Then globs of off-white foam started to dribble out of his mouth.

Veronica and Roberta stepped back into the room. They had never left the house. They watched as Brown’s back arched. The cat jumped down and ran behind the couch. Brown jerked and grabbed his stomach. Then his chest. He vomited, a long greenish watery stream. It soaked the front of his shirt and his pants and sprayed across a wide arc of carpet. He jerked again. His whole body spasmed. Twice. Three times. Then he flopped back and lay completely still.

—

Veronica and Robertawaited for five minutes, to be certain. Then they moved into the hallway. Brown’s telephone was sitting on a low, square table. Veronica put her gloves on and took an object from her pocket. A small tape recorder. She worked its buttons until she found the place she wanted, then picked up the phone. She dialed 911. Waited for the emergency operator to answer. Then she held the recorder up to the mouthpiece and pressed Play.

“Help me?” Brown’s voice said, a little muffled but easy enough to make out.

—

Reacher gave SergeantChapellier a couple of minutes to stem the bleeding and stretch his sore joints. He checked that Sergeant Hall wasn’t too much the worse for wear after getting flung out of the truck. Then he climbed back into the cab and made Chapellier drive behind Hall’s Humvee as far as the Arsenal’s guard post. He had formalities to complete. Medical attention had to be arranged. Escorts organized. Paperwork filled out. But first he had to make a phone call. Time was suddenly of the essence. Special arrangements needed to be made and Reacher knew how the machine worked.The regular cogs would grind too slowly. Shortcuts were called for; otherwise, a golden opportunity was going to slip through their fingers. Meat Loaf may have thought that two out of three ain’t bad, but Reacher didn’t agree. That was for damn sure.

—

Roberta and Veronicahad expected there to be vomiting. They had researched the side effects carefully when they were deciding what kind of substance would be best to add to Geoff Brown’s tobacco. They just hadn’t realized how much there would be. And they hadn’t anticipated that Brown would put his keys back in his pocket when he arrived home. They’d imagined that he would set them down on a table in the hallway or hang them on a convenient hook. The reality only dawned on them when Veronica dropped the receiver back onto its cradle after she ended the 911 call. Roberta had picked the lock on the front door when they broke into the house but they couldn’t leave that way because the agents who were watching the place were on station again, outside. They couldn’t climb out of a rear-facing window because there would be no way to lock it and they figured that a single unlocked, accessible window would be suspicious. So they needed the key to the back door. Only now it was on a ring that was encased in vomit-soaked cotton and attached to a corpse. Retrieving it was not an appealing prospect.

Veronica said, “Maybe there’s a spare?”

Roberta glanced at her watch. “Go look. Quickly.”

Veronica ran to the kitchen. She checked the walls near the door. There were no hooks or shelves with keys on them. She opened the nearest drawers. The cabinets beneath them. Looked inside the refrigerator. And found nothing that seemed like a viable hiding place. She figured she’d used up two minutes. They had maybe two morebefore the police would arrive, so she ran back to the living room. Roberta was standing six feet away from Brown’s body. She looked like she was ready to puke, herself. She said, “Anything?”

Veronica shook her head, then held up her hands. She said, “My gloves are leather. Yours are disposable. You do it.”

—

As soon aseverything was squared away at Rock Island, Reacher set out to drive east, to Chicago. He made good time, so when he left the highway and saw a line of large, soulless buildings crammed around three sides of a square, open-air parking lot, he pulled over. He had no civilian clothes with him and he knew he was going to need some later in the day. He figured he might as well get the task out of the way as quickly as possible, so he headed into a sporting goods store and picked up the first things he saw that would fit. Black sneakers. Beige pants with all kinds of extra pockets sewn onto the legs. A blue T-shirt with a logo he’d never seen before. And a lightweight, blue, waterproof jacket.

Reacher paid for the clothes and changed in the store’s fitting room. He folded his BDUs, placed them in the bag the clerk had given him, and stowed them in his trunk, alongside his duffel. Then he continued toward the west side of the city, slightly south of the center, which he figured put him closer to the White Sox than the Cubs. He found the building he was looking for without difficulty. The FBI field office. A mid-rise tower of glass and concrete. It had a bowed front but otherwise looked like a child had designed it with a construction set that only had square-shaped parts.

—

Roberta and VeronicaSanson heard the siren at the same moment. They listened to it draw closer. Crossed to the window andpeered around the side of the drapes. Watched a patrol car barrel down the street and slide to a halt outside the house. And saw the two agents jump out of their Crown Victoria and intercept the cops before they made it halfway up the path.

That was their cue. The watchers were occupied, so Roberta and Veronica hustled to the back door. Roberta had already unlocked it. They hurried out into the yard, relocked the door, and retraced their steps to their stolen minivan. They’d left it three streets from Geoff Brown’s house, facing away. Veronica climbed up into the passenger seat. Roberta dropped her gloves and Brown’s key down a grate in the gutter and slid behind the wheel.

Veronica waited until they were under way, then said, “Where next?”

It was an important tactical decision. They couldn’t work their way down the list in order, or whoever had noticed that the former CIA agents were dying would know where to focus their resources. Roberta and Veronica wanted their opposition spread as thin as possible, which meant picking their next target at random. But nothing is truly random. All kinds of studies have been done. Subliminal influences shape people’s choices in diverse, subtle ways. So they resorted to a technique they’d learned years ago.

Roberta said, “Three names left to pick from.” In her head she allocated a number to each remaining one. “Give me three colors.”

“Red. Silver. White.”

The next car they saw was white. The third color Veronica had named. The third name on Roberta’s mental list was Michael Rymer, who lived in northern Colorado.

Roberta said, “Get ready for some altitude. We’re going to Denver.”

—

Reacher dumped hiscar in the lot and headed inside to the reception desk. He asked for Agent Ottoway, who did exist. She was small and wiry with long black hair and she arrived to collect him after only a couple of minutes. She used a plastic card to let him through a turnstile and escorted him to a bank of elevators and then on to a meeting room at the end of a corridor on the third floor. It was a small, stale space with no windows. It smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat, like half its air was piped in from a bar and the other half from a locker room, and its contents made it look like a dumping ground for redundant furniture. There were half a dozen chairs. Two tables, one balanced on the other, upside down, with its legs pointing at the ceiling. And a handful of squat bookcases that were all missing half their shelves.

Reacher wasn’t surprised by the place. He knew the score when it came to interagency cooperation. Choosing a room like that was a way of expressing a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the hosts. Reacher could understand their position. He was on their turf. His request hadn’t come through the proper channels. And it had come with next to no notice. It had probably stretched their resources thin on one of their other operations. But if this one worked out, it was going to be worth the inconvenience. He was confident about that.

Agent Ottoway’s supervisor arrived hard on their heels and he kept the briefing mercifully short. Just the three of them, huddled together on dilapidated chairs under a flickering fluorescent light. No need for notes or diagrams. No unnecessary complications, which was the way Reacher liked it. Just confirmation of the objective. The time and place. The principal players. And the code word should it become necessary to abort.

When all the details were set, Agent Ottoway led the way back tothe elevator. She hit the button and while they waited for the car to arrive, she said, “Captain, can I ask you one question?”

---