Tom Clancy Duty and Honor Read Free

vehicle on North Kings Highway near Telegraph Road last night shortly after eight p.m. He is yet to be identified. If you have any information, the police ask that you—”
    Jack muted the television. “Unidentified,” Jack said. No mention of witnesses, which could mean something or nothing. If the figure at the guardrail had made a report, the police were just as likely to withhold the information until they could come at him with something solid. Especially someone named Jack Ryan.
    For twenty minutes he paced and drank coffee, occasionally leaning over his laptop to scan online news sites for more information. There was nothing. He wanted to call someone, to confide in someone, but he resisted the impulse. He needed to think. Better still, he needed to do something.
    —
    W ith his mind only partially registering the pre-rush-hour traffic, Jack drove back to the Supermercado. The rain had stopped falling, but overhead, the clouds were still dark and swollen. Sidewalks and lawns were still wet, and potholes brimmed with water. Overhanging tree branches showing the first hint of green buds drooped under the weight of the moisture.
    It was past seven, the sun just coming up, and an hour before the Supermercado opened. The parking lot appeared empty. Jack made a second pass, scanning for police cars. Seeing none, he made a U-turn, pulled into the lot, and parked in a stall close to the front doors. He climbed out.
    With his breath steaming in the morning air, he walked to the spot beside the guardrail where he’d parked the previous night. He stopped and looked down the embankment.
    Aside from a string of yellow police tape looped along the line of Jersey barriers at the bottom of the embankment, the scene seemed unremarkable. In his mind’s eye he’d imagined his fight with the mugger had churned the slope into a jumble of mud, grass, and shredded cedar brush. Beyond the barriers, cars on the Kings Highway streamed past at a steady pace.
    Jack glanced around. The parking lot was still empty. He climbed over the guardrail and picked his way down the embankment until he reached the flat area alongside the barriers. It was a goulash of mud and patchy, green-yellow grass. On the other side of the barriers the passing cars’ tires sent up billowing mist.
    Following his mental map, Jack found the barrier against which his attacker had fallen. He knelt before it. There was no trace of blood on the gray concrete. Either the rain or a first-responder fire truck had washed it away. Jack stood upand walked along the barriers, looking for any trace of what had happened the night before. There was nothing.
    He headed back up the slope. Ten feet from the top, a flash of something caught the corner of his eye. He stopped, scanned the ground. Jutting from under a scrub brush beside his foot was the corner of a business card. Jack stooped over and picked it up. Not a business card, but a hotel key card.
    “Hey, what’re you doing down there?” a voice barked.
    Jack looked up and saw a man in a dark blue suit standing at the guardrail, one foot resting on the post. “What’s that?”
    “I said, what’re you doing? Come here.” The man removed a wallet from his suit pocket and flopped it open, displaying what Jack guessed was an Alexandria Police Department investigator’s badge. “Come on, get up here.”
    Shit. Jack took a breath, trying to slow his heart.
    With the hotel key card palmed, Jack climbed the remaining distance, then stepped over the guardrail. He stuffed his hands into his anorak’s pockets. Under his right forearm he felt the reassuring bulge of his Glock 26 in its hip paddle holster.
    “Take your hands out of your pockets,” the cop growled. He was in his mid-forties, stocky like a wrestler, with wavy red hair.
    Jack did so and the cop gave Jack a practiced head-to-toe scan.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Jack Ryan.”
    “ID.”
    Jack pulled out his wallet and handed over his driver’s license. The cop