Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel (4 page)

The wave swept up underneath her, and she leaped to her feet. Both feet landed on the board at the same time, like they were supposed to do. She balanced and was riding the wave.

She looked to the shore and saw her friends leaping and waving their hands. At first, she thought they were cheering her on. A split second later, she noticed the bystanders were joining in on their cheers.

She looked for the opportunity to make the jump, her instincts controlling her every move. She was ready.

But suddenly, she saw the lifeguards speeding out to her on wave runners. There were two of them—on red machines with white stripes on the bottom. They were still close to the shore and far from her. The closest one must’ve been going full speed, bouncing and crashing back down into the water. The idiots were headed right for her. The worry that they’d crash into her swept over her like a sudden swell of high water. Then she feared they’d ruin her jump, and next she feared they were headed toward her for breaking the rules and going out while there was a red flag.

At the moment before she had planned to jump, something big and dark and rough slammed into her board. The force of the blow knocked her clear off of her board, and she was instantly plummeting into the wave. Her body crashed and sank. She felt the safety string jerk at her leg from the surfboard as it, too, was dragged down into the ocean like a rag doll.

Under the surface of the water, she must’ve flipped and twisted several times. She hadn’t had much time to take a breath before she’d been pushed into the water, and she hadn’t had much air. Her lungs pounded worse than her knee injury, and she swallowed salt water for a second before she closed her mouth. Her eyes stung from the sudden impact of the water. She shut them tight and tried to stay calm. She knew that the first thing to do was to remain calm. In the ocean, panic could cause death faster than anything else.

She let the water pummel her and then what she took to be the undertow dragged her down.

Suddenly, a shooting pain came from her wrist. She thought it must’ve been the pull of one of the lifeguards as he dragged her back to the surface. She strained and opened her eyes. Under the ocean and the booming of the waves, there wasn’t much to see, but the one thing that was still visible and recognizable by human eyes was light and darkness. The light was the last rays of the sun, and the darkness was the depths. She didn’t want to go to the dark side—that she knew for sure. So she stared back at the reddish hues of distorted light that fish-bowled into her sightline.

The thing that immediately confused her was that the lifeguard was supposed to pull her to the surface. He should’ve been pulling her up and not down. But then again, she was disoriented and may have had her directions completely wrong. She might even have had her sense of sight wrong. She was snaking and flipping so much that maybe the red hue from the sunlight was below her and not above her.

Nicole reached up or down—she really wasn’t sure—toward whatever was clenching down on her arm. She reached toward it and found something rough and dry even in the water, like sandpaper suspended underwater.

She felt around it and looked for her hand. She couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, it was wrapped around her hand and wrist. She jerked and wrenched and couldn’t get free.

Seconds turned into minutes, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that it had been several minutes. Nicole’s personal record for holding her breath was under a minute, but she was certain she had been underwater for much, much longer. Probably, it had been at least two minutes.

Suddenly, whatever the sandpapery thing was that held onto her moved, and she felt the unmistakable brush of a huge dorsal fin whipping past her head like a rotor.

Chapter 7

NICOLE THOUGHT
SHARK!
And she accepted her fate.

After a minute and seventeen seconds of the shark thrashing and pulling her under, it bit off her hand and a significant portion of her wrist and swam away.

The first lifeguard to reach her leaped into the water without thinking of himself and grabbed her by the leg. He cut the rope to her surfboard and let it go.

She reached out to feel the remains of her hand. Nothing was left but bone and skin.

She clenched onto her exposed appendage and felt the lifeguard drag her through the surf back to the wave runner. She sucked up saltwater through her nose. He pushed her body over the hump in the back, and then he climbed up onto the machine and sat in the front.

She huffed and spit out the salt water. He turned to face her and examined her wound—quickly. He turned back to the front and started to search through a saddlebag for emergency bandages. He found the necessary equipment and wrapped her arm up as tightly as possible so that she wouldn’t lose any more blood, and then he cranked the throttle and took off back to shore.

Nicole’s eyes were open. She felt as though she were on the back of a horse as the wave runner galloped through the waves. She gazed back to the sea and watched her surfboard as it drifted away, and she saw the dorsal fin of the shark one last time as it swam off and was lost to sight.

Later, the doctors patched her back together—without her arm. Her friends visited her and brought her gifts and
Get Well
cards. She drifted in and out of sleep and awakened each time to a room filled with flowers and different family members. Sometimes she saw her mom and sometimes her dad. Sometimes they were together. Other times, it was just her uncle.

After she had recovered, her mother insisted that she never surf again, which wasn’t a possibility because the call of the ocean was a far stronger attachment than the attachment she’d had to her one arm. She fought her mother’s decision by attending surfing competitions as a spectator, but this was only so she could be closer to the sport.

Her friends who witnessed the whole thing told her that she was most likely attacked by a shark breed known as the Ragged Tooth Shark, which was the ugliest thing in the ocean and generally nocturnal, but still known to attack in all hours of the day. They were big sharks with a mouth full of so many crooked and ragged teeth that there was far more bone visible in their mouth than gums. This breed was common in the waters surrounding Durban’s beaches.

After a long time, the horror of the incident started to wear off, and Nicole started to recover. She began by leaving her room and venturing slowly into the rest of their rented house. She spent only a couple more weeks indoors with her mother, and that was enough to push her back out into public. She called her friends and met them out. Slowly, she started to stay out longer and longer, and before too long, she was involved again in their social gatherings.

Her friends renamed her Raggie, slang for the type of shark that attacked her.

Her father relocated and went back to the US the following year, taking on a more high-profile role in the Secret Service, and he brought with him some agents that were also his personal friends. Therefore, she had to relocate as well.

Raggie had to leave surfing and her friends in South Africa behind, but she took with her a love of the sport as well as her new name.

Chapter 8

A YEAR HAD PASSED, AND RAGGIE STILL
kept in touch with her friends in South Africa. Her dad was busier than ever protecting the president, which she never really thought too much about—to her, it was everyday life. It was his job. No big deal.

Raggie sat in a café on the east side of DC. She wore stonewashed blue jeans with large slits cut into the knees. A gray skull cap was pulled down over her head, making her look slightly like a cancer patient, and her hair was stuffed underneath it. A light patina of makeup dusted her face—her mom didn’t like her to leave the house without it. She wore black Converse shoes with pink trim that she’d painted herself. It had originally come out of the box in white, but she liked to modify her clothes. She liked to make them a little more like herself.

Her handless arm was hidden under the long sleeve of a white hoodie. She dressed like a boy, and that was something she was proud of. She liked being different than her American friends. Like her friend Claire who she rarely saw anymore. Because while Claire had become more like the girls that Raggie hated, Raggie had become more like her friends back in South Africa—and right then, she was missing them.

And her love of surfing was her reason for sitting at the café at a small round table with a MacBook Air in front of her, the Apple icon glowing white as she watched YouTube videos of surfing. She’d lied to her mother and Uncle Lucas that morning. She had told them she was going to meet with her friends and hang out with them that whole day. She’d told them she was going to the mall—as if she’d be caught dead walking around a stupid mall.

She was actually meeting a boy—well, not a boy, but an older man.

She was going to meet one of her idols—Jai Jai Slater. He was the guy who made the YouTube videos she liked and followed. She’d watched each of his videos dozens of times. He wasn’t related to Kelly Slater, a surfing legend and another hero of hers, but he was just a guy from DC who loved surfing. He spent his time between a part-time lobbying job and surfing in Mexico every summer.

A couple of weeks ago, Jai Jai had started communicating with her out of the blue. Probably because she had sent him big donations through the Internet to help fund his videos. It wasn’t a big deal to her. The donations were put on her mom’s credit cards. Her mom didn’t even notice.

Raggie and Jai Jai had talked on a daily basis. Now he wanted to meet her in person. He wanted to show his gratitude for her support—or that’s what she thought. Besides, she could use a new friend in the surfing community since all her old ones were more than eight thousand miles away. She liked Jai Jai. He was cool, and his surfing videos were informative
.

So why not?
she thought.

Even though he was older, it didn’t bother her. She didn’t know exactly how much older, though. If she had to guess, she’d say he was over thirty.

She waited with her MacBook and waited and waited. She drank three coffees and thought about eating a meal, but instead she settled for two different blueberry muffins, the second an hour after the first.

Jai Jai never showed, and the sun was going down. Raggie would have to head home soon before Uncle Lucas got suspicious. He was like that—overprotective was an understatement. Of course, it was a side effect of his profession because he used to work with her dad and was a retired Secret Service agent. So it was in his nature to be overly protective. And Raggie knew he loved her. He was her godfather after all.

Raggie paid her check for the three coffees and the blueberry muffins and then gathered her belongings and headed out the door.

Chapter 9

JAI JAI SLATER WAS DEAD.

The guy sitting in a white panel van in the parking lot of a café in east DC had put a bullet in the YouTuber about eight hours earlier. Jai Jai had cried and even wet his pants, but he hadn’t fought back. How could he? He’d been tied up and gagged for nearly two weeks. The only time the guy with the gun and the black suit, tie, and Secret Service earpiece had let him free was so that Jai Jai could go to the bathroom. And even in those instances, he’d never let him out of his sight.

Jekyll’s main job had been law enforcement. Because of his training and his involvement with Secret Service agents, he knew a thing or two about abduction, too. He knew how to watch a prisoner and make sure he consumed just enough food and water so he wouldn’t die but wouldn’t make his body stronger, either.

Jekyll knew that the best way to keep a protectee cooperative was to keep him fed, distracted, and feeling protected. It gave a feeling of security and safety. To break the spirits of a captive meant doing the opposite. Take away food. Take away communication. Take away dignity. Take away hope. And then you had full control over them.

Jai Jai had been an easy captive. But Raggie would be even easier because she’d trust Jekyll from the start. He’d have no problem getting her into the van and no problem getting her to eat sleeping pills crushed up and sprinkled onto the Beacon Fizz Pop from South Africa she used to love. He did worry that she might refuse it while she was in the van because maybe she was full from the café. That’s why he had contingencies for these two obstacles. In case she didn’t want the pop, he’d use chloroform on her, which was riskier because she would struggle. Raggie was only a teenager, and she trusted him, but she wasn’t stupid. Certainly, she’d seen enough movies to know what chloroform does and why a man would be shoving a rag soaked in it over her mouth and nose.

Jekyll watched as Raggie exited the café and pulled her hoodie over her head.

He waited until she walked out past the line of sight of the security camera above the door. He never went into view of the café or its windows. He didn’t want to be caught by that camera or the traffic camera mounted to the street light on the main turn out of the parking lot. He fired up the engine. The van’s motor kicked into action and whirred. He already had the nose facing forward, so he tapped the gas and turned the wheel.

The van drifted off toward Raggie. She walked away from it and toward the street. The bus stop was her destination.

Jai Jai’s body was under a tarp in the back of the van. Jekyll peeked back and took one last look at it to make sure none of it was visible. He pulled the van up alongside Raggie.