Thriller (4 page)

They’re calling it arson.”

“Near Mojave?” Reacher said. “They would. They don’t like

fires down there.”

Penney nodded. “I was real mad. Seventeen years, and suddenly I’m shit on their shoe. And my car got stolen anyway, first

night I’m away.”

“There are roadblocks all around here,” Reacher said. “I came

through one south of the city.”

“For me?” Penney asked.

“Could be,” Reacher said. “They don’t like fires down there.”

“You going to turn me in?”

Reacher looked at him again, hard and silent. “Is that all you

did?”

Penney nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s all I did.”

There was silence for a beat. Just the sound of the wet pavement under the tires.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Reacher said. “A guy does a

jungle tour, works seventeen years and gets canned, I guess he’s

entitled to get a little mad.”

“So what should I do?”

“Start over, someplace else.”

“They’ll find me,” Penney said.

“You’re already thinking about changing your name,”

Reacher said.

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Penney nodded. “I junked all my ID. Buried it in the woods.”

“So get new paper. That’s all anybody cares about. Pieces of

paper.”

“How?”

Reacher was quiet another beat, thinking hard. “Classic way

is find some cemetery, find a kid who died as a child, get a copy

of the birth certificate, start from there. Get a social security

number, a passport, credit cards, and you’re a new person.”

Penney shrugged. “I can’t do all that. Too difficult. And I don’t

have time. According to you, there’s a roadblock up ahead. How

am I going to do all of that stuff before we get there?”

“There are other ways,” Reacher said.

“Like what?”

“Find some guy who’s already created false ID for himself, and

take it away from him.”

Penney shook his head. “You’re crazy. How am I going to

do that?”

“Maybe you don’t need to do that. Maybe I already did it for you.”

“You got false ID?”

“Not me,” Reacher said. “Guy I was looking for.”

“What guy?”

Reacher drove one-handed and pulled a sheaf of official paper

from his inside jacket pocket.

“Arrest warrant,” he said. “Army liaison officer at a weapons

plant outside of Fresno, peddling blueprints. Turns out to have

three separate sets of ID, all perfect, all completely backed up

with everything from elementary school onward. Which makes

it likely they’re Soviet, which means they can’t be beat. I’m on

my way back from talking to him right now. He was running, too,

already on his second set of papers. I took them. They’re clean.

They’re in the trunk of this car, in a wallet.”

Traffic was slowing ahead. There was red glare visible through

the streaming windshield. Flashing blue lights. Yellow flashlight

beams waving, side to side.

“Roadblock,” Reacher said.

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“So can I use this guy’s ID?” Penney asked urgently.

“Sure you can,” Reacher said. “Hop out and get it. Bring the

wallet from the jacket in the trunk.”

He slowed and stopped on the shoulder. Penney got out.

Ducked away to the back of the car and lifted the trunk lid. Came

back a long moment later, white in the face. Held up the wallet.

“It’s all in there,” Reacher said. “Everything anybody needs.”

Penney nodded.

“So put it in your pocket,” Reacher said.

Penney slipped the wallet into his inside jacket pocket.

Reacher’s right hand came up. There was a gun in it. And a pair

of handcuffs in his left.

“Now sit still,” he said quietly.

He leaned over and snapped the cuffs on Penney’s wrists, onehanded. Put the car back into drive and crawled forward.

“What’s this for?” Penney asked.

“Be quiet,” Reacher said.

They were two cars away from the checkpoint. Three highway patrolmen in rain capes were directing traffic into a corral

formed by parked cruisers. Their light bars were flashing bright

in the shiny dark.

“What?” Penney said again.

Reacher said nothing. Just stopped where the cop told him and

wound his window down. The night air blew in, cold and wet.

The cop bent down. Reacher handed him his military ID. The

cop played his flashlight over it and handed it back.

“Who’s your passenger?” he asked.

“My prisoner,” Reacher said. He handed over the arrest warrant.

“He got ID?” the cop asked.

Reacher leaned over and slipped the wallet out from inside

Penney’s jacket, two-fingered like a pickpocket. Flipped it open

and passed it through the window. A second cop stood in

Reacher’s headlight beams and copied the plate number onto a

clipboard. Stepped around the hood and joined the first guy.

“Captain Reacher of the military police,” the first cop said.

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The second cop wrote it down.

“With a prisoner name of Edward Hendricks,” the first cop said.

The second cop wrote it down.

“Thank you, sir,” the first cop said. “You drive safe, now.”

Reacher eased out from between the cruisers. Accelerated

away into the rain. A mile later, he stopped again on the shoulder. Leaned over and unlocked Penney’s handcuffs. Put them

back in his pocket. Penney rubbed his wrists.

“I thought you were going to turn me in,” he said.

Reacher shook his head. “Looked better for me that way. I

wanted a prisoner in the car for everybody to see.”

Reacher handed the wallet back.

“Keep it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Edward Hendricks,” Reacher said. “That’s who you are now.

It’s clean ID, and it’ll work. Think of it like a veteran’s benefit.

One soldier to another.”

Edward Hendricks looked at him and nodded and opened his

door. Got out into the rain and turned up the collar of his leather

jacket and started walking north. Reacher watched him until he

was out of sight and then pulled away and took the next turn

west. Turned north and stopped again where the road was lonely

and ran close to the ocean. There was a wide gravel shoulder and

a low barrier and a steep cliff with the Pacific tide boiling and

foaming fifty feet below it.

He got out of the car and opened the trunk and grasped the

lapels of the jacket he had told Penney about. Took a deep breath

and heaved. The corpse was heavy. Reacher wrestled it up out of

the trunk and jacked it onto his shoulder and staggered with it

to the barrier. Bent his knees and dropped it over the edge. The

rocky cliff caught it and it spun and the arms and legs flailed

limply. Then it hit the surf with a faint splash and was gone.

It’s no accident that five of James Grippando’s ten thrillers

are legal thrillers featuring Jack Swyteck, an explosive criminal defense lawyer. Grippando is a lawyer himself, though

fortunately with far fewer demons than Jack. What’s it like

to be Jack? Simply imagine that your father is Florida’s governor, your best friend was once on death row and your love

life could fill an entire chapter in
Cupid’s Rules of Love and

War (Idiot’s Edition).
Throw in an indictment for murder and

a litany of lesser charges, and you’ll begin to get the picture.

Readers of the Swyteck series know that Jack is a selfdescribed half-Cuban boy trapped in the body of a gringo.

That’s a glib way of saying that Jack’s Cuban-born mother died

in childbirth, and Jack was raised by his father and stepmother, with no link whatsoever to his Cuban heritage. Grippando is not Cuban, but he considers himself an “honorary

Cuban” of sorts. His best friend since college was Cuban born

and that family dubbed him their
otro hijo,
other son. Quite

remarkable, considering that Grippando grew up in rural Illinois and spoke only “classroom” Spanish. When he first arrived in Florida, he had no idea that Cubans made better rice

than the Chinese, or that a jolt of Cuban coffee was as much

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a part of midafternoon in Miami as thunderclouds over the

Everglades. He’d yet to learn that if you ask a nice Cuban girl

on a date, the entire family would be waiting at the front door

to meet you when you picked her up. In short, Grippando—

like Jack Swyteck—was the gringo who found himself immersed in Cuban culture.

In
Hear No Evil,
the fourth book in the Swyteck series,

Jack Swyteck travels back to Cuba to discover his roots. Naturally, he runs into a mess of trouble, all stemming from a

murder on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Grippando prides himself on his research, and threw himself into

all things Cuban when researching the thriller. At the time

it was impossible to speak to anyone about the U.S. naval

base at Guantanamo Bay without the problem of the detainees dominating the conversation. It was then that Grippando came across a forty-year-old plan—Operation

Northwoods—which, in the hands of someone with an extremely devious mind, could cause a mountain of trouble.

So was born this story.

In
Operation Northwoods,
Jack and his colorful sidekick,

Theo Knight, find themselves in the heat of a controversy

after an explosion at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay,

Cuba—an explosion that rocks the world.

6:20 a.m., Miami, Florida

Jack Swyteck swatted the alarm clock, but even the subtle green

glow of liquid-crystal digits was an assault on his eyes. The ringing continued. He raked his hand across the nightstand, grabbed

the telephone and answered in a voice that dripped with a hangover. It was Theo.

“Theo who?” said Jack.

“Theo Knight, moron.”

Jack’s brain was obviously still asleep. Theo was Jack’s best

friend and “investigator,” for lack of a better term. Whatever Jack

needed, Theo found, whether it was the last prop plane out of

Africa or an explanation for a naked corpse in Jack’s bathtub. Jack

never stopped wondering how Theo came up with these things.

Sometimes he asked; more often, he simply didn’t want to know.

Theirs was not exactly a textbook friendship, the Ivy League son

of a governor meets the black high-school dropout from Liberty

City. But they got on just fine for two guys who’d met on death

row, Jack the lawyer and Theo the inmate. Jack’s persistence had

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delayed Theo’s date with the electric chair long enough for DNA

evidence to come into vogue and prove him innocent. It wasn’t

the original plan, but Jack ended up a part of Theo’s new life,

sometimes going along for the ride, other times just watching

with amazement as Theo made up for lost time.

“Dude, turn on your TV,” said Theo. “CNN.”

There was an urgency in Theo’s voice, and Jack was too disoriented to mount an argument. He found the remote and

switched on the set, watching from the foot of his bed.

A grainy image filled the screen, like bad footage from one of

those media helicopters covering a police car chase. It was an aerial shot of a compound of some sort. Scores of small dwellings

and other, larger buildings dotted the windswept landscape. There

were patches of green, but overall the terrain had an arid quality,

perfect for iguanas and banana rats—except for all the fences. Jack

noticed miles of them. One-and two-lane roads cut across the

topography like tiny scars, and a slew of vehicles seemed to be

moving at high speed, though they looked like matchbox cars

from this vantage point. In the background, a huge, black plume

of smoke was rising like a menacing funnel cloud.

“What’s going on?” he said into the phone.

“They’re at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay. It’s about your

client.”

“My client? Which one?”

“The crazy one.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow things down,” said Jack.

“You know, the Haitian saint,” said Theo.

Jack didn’t bother to tell him that he wasn’t actually a saint.

“You mean Jean Saint Preux? What did he do?”

“What did he
do?
” said Theo, scoffing. “He set the fucking

naval base on fire.”

6:35 a.m., Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Camp Delta was a huge, glowing ember on the horizon, like

the second rising of the sun. The towering plume of black smoke

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rose ever higher, fed feverishly by the raging furnace below. A

gentle breeze from the Windward Passage only seemed to worsen

matters—too weak to clear the smoke, just strong enough to

spread a gloomy haze across the entire southeastern corner of the

U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Major Frost Jorgenson was speeding due south in the passenger seat of a U.S. marine Humvee. Even with the windows

shut tight, the seeping smoke was making his eyes water.

“Unbelievable,” he said as they drew closer to the camp.

“Yes, sir,” said his driver. “Biggest fire I’ve ever seen.”

Major Jorgenson was relatively new to “Gitmo,” part of the

stepped-up presence of U.S. Marines that had come with the creation of a permanent detention facility at Camp Delta for “enemy

combatants”—suspected terrorists who had never been charged

formally with a crime. Jorgenson was a bruiser even by marine

standards. Four years of college football at Grambling University had prepared him well for a life of discipline, and old habits