CHAPTER 1
Saturday, June 4
Rural Vermont
Two hours ago, the shooter had set up his rifle in the back of the van parked on a hill overlooking the grave site. He had a panoramic view of the well-tended country cemetery.
Through the high-powered scope, he saw gently rolling hills covered in deep, verdant green. Damned grass was more plush than private golf courses favored by obscenely wealthy professionals.
Only the privileged rested beneath that grass. Most had been greatly admired in life and deeply mourned after death.
No one the shooter mourned was buried here. Or ever would be if he had anything to say about it.
A large lilac bush in full bloom shielded him from view even as its sweet fragrance filled his head with his mother’s memory. She had loved lilacs like crazy.
The scent conjured his childhood home surrounded by the huge green bushes heavily laden with sweet purple blooms. Until the end, he’d foolishly imagined the lilacs served as a thick blockade keeping danger from his family.
He’d believed, 100 percent, that his family was safe inside the compound where his dad, ever vigilant, could always protect them.
Dad said people passing by couldn’t see anything through the heavy bushes.
Even if they could have seen inside the family compound, they couldn’t execute a successful attack through the thick foliage.
There was only one way in or out of their property and dear old Dad had insisted the home was completely defensible.
Which turned out to be both true and irrelevant.
He’d been a child. And a fool.
The shooter shook his head to clear the memories threatening to lead him astray. He returned his full attention to the task at hand.
Through the rifle’s scope, he watched Congresswoman Sheryl Tardelli as she stood before her father’s headstone, bathed in the soft morning light. She was a good-looking woman at fifty, even with her shoulders bowed by the weight of unrelenting grief.
Tardelli had experienced great loss. She knew how it felt.
The shooter chewed on his lower lip, the pain keeping his mind focused.
Tardelli would have been better served by a heart full of righteous anger.
He understood the power of anger.
Anger pushed him to action.
He was in charge.
Never a victim. Not then, not now, not ever.
Anger could have done the same for Tardelli if she had embraced it.
She hadn’t. She’d embraced the enemy instead.
That window of opportunity had closed. She’d lost her chance.
He watched Tardelli as she stood amid the cemetery workers bustling about, tending to their duties. The caretaker, a kind, elderly man, approached her with a bunch of lilacs in his fist. The shooter imagined he could smell them from across the distance.
The caretaker gestured toward the vase of wilted flowers beside the headstone. He said something the shooter couldn’t catch through his earpiece.
Sheryl’s father, Bert Tardelli, had loved vibrant, growing things. He’d been raised on a farm before he went off to fight the Vietnam War at eighteen.
Sheryl often said that she wished her father had never volunteered. But his older brother had died in the war, and he’d felt obligated to finish what his brother started.
When Bert Tardelli returned, older, wiser, and worn out by his war experience, he’d been too debilitated to work the farm. But he’d nurtured the flower gardens with care despite his limitations.
Sheryl reached for the vase at the base of her father’s headstone, intending to
replace the withered flowers with the caretaker’s fresh bouquet.
The caretaker offered a gentle smile as he spoke. This time, the shooter heard the caretaker’s words, transmitted to his ear from the tiny listening device he’d planted earlier.
“I can dispose of the old ones for you, Ms. Tardelli.”
Sheryl nodded gratefully. “Thank you, Mr. Turner. That’s okay. There’s very little I can do for my dad now. I can handle this. I want to.”
Mr. Turner stood aside as Sheryl bent to gather the dead flowers.
The caretaker’s gaze lingered on Sheryl’s face and the pronounced scar above her lip. The surgeon’s failure had left a permanent mark that had drawn piteous glances from strangers most of her life. She had to be used to the curious stares after all these years.
Mr. Turner touched his upper lip gently. “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?”
Self-consciously, Sheryl covered the scar, her fingers tracing the imperfection. “Cleft palate repair surgery when I was a child. Army surgeon. He was new. Not as skilled as some.”
Mr. Turner’s eyes softened with sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that, dear. Can the scar be improved now? They have better techniques these days.”
Sheryl shook her head, her gaze drifting toward her father’s headstone. Tears welled up in her eyes and her voice trembled with emotion. “After Mom died, it was just me and Dad for many years. I keep the scar to remind me of the sacrifices he made for his family.”
The caretaker’s gaze flooded with understanding as he gently patted her shoulder. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Sheryl nodded as if her throat, tight with the weight of her grief, prevented sound for a moment. She cleared her throat before she said, “He suffered so much. He’s in a better place now.”
“I see,” Mr. Turner replied.
It was just the sort of thing people said to be kind when there was nothing they could do to help. He patted her shoulder again and left her to grieve in peace.
The shooter’s vigilant eye remained on his scope.
After Turner walked away, Sheryl carried the vase of dead flowers to a nearby trash bin.
Her fingers brushed against the withered rose petals, and she took a moment to inhale their faint, lingering scent.
With a firm hand, she lifted the vase and tipped it to dispose of the fetid water and lifeless blooms.
The shooter growled low in his throat from his nest in the back of the van, still peering through the scope. “Get on with it.”
He needed the situation to unfold while the witnesses were there to see it happen in real
time.
Otherwise, he’d be forced to shoot her.
Which was okay because she’d die today either way.
But a quick bullet to her head wasn’t the plan.
Stick to the plan, he murmured.
The mantra his driver lived by.
Sheryl had dawdled too long.
The shooter was losing the light. And she’d exhausted the last ounce of his patience as she ran out the clock.
Five more minutes and he’d take her out. He set the timer on his watch.
Sheryl continued to linger over the dead flowers until she eventually realized there was something stuck to the bottom of the vase. She tipped the vase and reached inside to loosen the bent flower stems he’d carefully positioned there.
Which was when the tripwire activated precisely as he’d intended to release the poison.
A hissing sound pierced the quiet country stillness.
A heavy green cloud rose from the vase and settled over Sheryl like a shroud.
The sticky green substance covered her skin, her eyes, her nose. Her eyes closed tight and then widened. Her nostrils flared. Her mouth widened to scream.
Taken together, her face resembled a moldy Halloween pumpkin carved for horror.
The shooter smiled.
“Finally,” he muttered under his breath.
Dousing Sheryl in a thick blanket of oily, cold, and utterly fatal toxins wasn’t as easy or quick as shooting her. Which was totally okay.
Speed was not the goal. Only the result mattered.
“Never confuse effort with results, son,” his father had often said.
As the shooter watched through the scope, Sheryl’s eyes widened further with terror. The green cloud entered her eyes, mixing with her tears, and turning the whites to a sickly yellow.
She clutched her throat as she gasped for breath, inhaling more of the poison, while the chemicals assaulted all of her senses at once.
The shooter knew what was coming next. He’d watched this particular poison perform many times before. He smiled as the scene unfolded exactly as planned.
Sheryl dropped the vase and stumbled backward, eyes stinging, vision blurred, heart racing, gasping to breathe.
She fell to the ground in a heap of flailing limbs, writhing on the ground like a dying lizard.
Blindly, Sheryl reached for her phone and her trembling fingers struggled to dial 911.
The shooter’s grin widened.
Her throat would
be tight now, making it difficult to speak or to be understood.
“Poison...help...,” she managed to whisper, the words barely audible.
Sheryl’s body collapsed as panic and confusion gripped her.
At this point, she must have realized that she would never live another day.
The shooter resisted the urge to laugh. His eyes crinkled when he laughed, making it difficult to see clearly. He wanted to witness every last nuance.
In the distance, the cemetery workers and Mr. Turner heard the woman mewling for help like a newborn kitten. They rushed to her side, faces contorted with concern.
Of course, they were too late. From the moment the tripwire triggered, they were defeated. Whether they knew it or not.
The shooter watched closely from afar until Sheryl took her last, gasping breath even as the old caretaker made frantic but feeble attempts to revive her.
“Mission accomplished,” he muttered, pulling back from the scope.
No need to shoot. He could save the bullet.
He watched another satisfyingly long moment. Then he drew the rifle deep inside the van, closed the back doors firmly, and moved to the passenger seat.
“Time to go,” he said as he snapped his seatbelt into place. “She’s done.”
“Good work,” the driver replied, rolling the van slowly along the rugged fire trail deeper into the trees.
“I had a clean shot. Would have been easy to end her suffering.” He shook his head slowly. “Could have done that old guy and the four worker dudes, too.”
“No reason to do that. We don’t want that much heat coming down on our heads, either. We’ve got too much left to accomplish. Stick to the plan.”
“Yeah, yeah. Stick to the plan. That’s always your answer,” the shooter groused angrily. “That’s what my old man used to say. Stick to the plan. We both know how that turned out.”
The driver gave him a fierce scowl in response as the van bounced into a deep rut in the gravel road. He gave it more gas and struggled with the steering wheel.
When the driver managed to clear the ruts and they were moving forward again, he said, “You want to grab a bite and catch some sleep?”
The shooter gave him a terse nod. He slumped down into his seat and closed his eyes. “Let’s wait until we cross the state line. Just in case Vermont’s local yokels are smarter than the others.”
CHAPTER 2
Two weeks later
Friday, June 17
Detroit
Follow the money was a solid strategy for any investigator. FBI Special Agent Kim Otto and her partner, Carlos Gaspar, had certainly tried to do exactly that when she was assigned to find Reacher. No luck. For a variety of reasons.
Yesterday, after eight months of looking, she’d found a breadcrumb. More digging last night had persuaded her that the breadcrumb shouldn’t be dusted off into the trash.
Gaspar had retired a while back, and she’d been working the off-the-books assignment on her own since then.
Still, she made a fresh pot of coffee, settled into the most comfortable chair in her apartment, and called him at home in Miami.
“What’s up, Sunshine?” he asked when he picked up.
“I may have a lead,” she said, getting right to the point. They were both too busy for chit-chat.
“You’ve found Reacher?” Gaspar joked, slurping something like a kid. ...
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