Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers Read Free

three of the thousand questions Kim would need to answer. But something happened. The boss wouldn’t send her there otherwise.
    She glanced at her watch. There was still time before landing. She ran through the Reacher material one more time.
    Birth certificate (West Berlin 1960); education record showing attendance on military bases around the world, including one year in Saigon, Viet Nam. Kim read that fact for the tenth time before the taser charge she’d felt the first nine times lessened. Kim’s mother was Vietnamese; her father served in the U.S. Army in Viet Nam. No connection to Reacher back then, right?
    No. Reacher was a kid when Kim’s parents left the country; Reacher’s father was a Marine; Army and Marines hadn’t mixed much in Viet Nam. There couldn’t be any connection between them. But was Viet Nam the reason the boss had chosen her to lead this assignment?
    She pushed that new worry aside. No time to deal with it now and nothing she could do about it from 35,000 feet anyway.
    Reacher had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1984). Parents deceased (father 1988; mother 1990). One brother, also deceased (1997).
    At West Point and afterward, until he was honorably discharged, the file contained the usual batch of military forms crafted in army-speak. Uninitiated readers would need an interpreter to decipher the batch of acronyms. When Kim copied the contents of Reacher’s file into her own private documents, she included the full phrases and definitions, and studied them carefully, testing herself, building her knowledge. She’d labeled the section “Accomplishments,” but the title was far too benign when you knew what each entry meant. Reacher had investigated, arrested, subdued, and otherwise dealt with some of the most highly trained soldiers on earth, all of them capable of extreme violence.
    He had done it by matching their violence with his own.
    He was a killer.
    So what did the FBI want from him now?
    He’d been decorated several times, each for some form of extraordinary heroism or outstanding service or extreme military achievement. He had been wounded in combat and been given a Purple Heart. He’d been trained and won awards as a sniper. Summary: Reacher had handled whatever had come his way. He’d faced the enemy and come out alive. More than once. Kim imagined the type. He’d be confident, hard to persuade, manipulate or overpower. In no way like any other candidate she’d investigated before.
    No wonder the project was under the radar.
    And how the hell would she accomplish it?
    The pilot announced the initial descent into Atlanta. Not much time left for electronic devices. She kept on working. Reacher’s file contained no details on the situations he’d handled as a military cop. Those would have been filed separately at the time the investigations took place. Kim made a note to find them. The search wouldn’t be easy, but the years Reacher spent doing his job were the last that would have clear and complete records, and those records would be the only clues to his current activities or location. Understanding how he’d performed back then would teach her the man and his methods. And scare her out of her wits, probably, if she had any wits left by then.
    The file ended with Reacher’s army discharge papers, followed by a short memo stating that he’d been off the grid for more than fifteen years. No one knew where he was. FBI files, Homeland Security files, all were empty of references to Major Jack (none) Reacher, U.S. Army, Retired.
    No way, she’d typed into her notes. Can’t happen.
    Was he dead? In prison? Witness protection? Classified assignment? At a minimum, either Reacher himself or someone else didn’t want him found.
    Maybe he was unfindable.
    And maybe that was the good news.
    #
    Twenty minutes from Atlanta the plane started to bounce around like a steer on cocaine. Clear air turbulence, the pilot called it, but Kim didn’t believe him.