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Monday, May 30
Dallas, Texas
Miller had driven south of Dallas until they reached the suburbs. He’d turned into the quiet, residential neighborhood populated with modest homes planted on substantial lots.
A mile away from the main road, he pulled up in the driveway of an ordinary looking ranch style house perched in the center of a one-acre parcel.
He stopped at the three-car garage and pushed a button. The door raised and he drove the SUV inside and closed the door again.
Miller lowered the privacy window between the seats and then turned off the engine.
He pushed another button. “Faraday Protocol X activated.”
Johnson said, “Wait here while we sweep.”
Miller and Johnson left the vehicle and entered the house.
“What are they looking for?” Kim asked.
“Surveillance devices,” Cooper replied. “The Faraday Protocol X is extremely secure. It excludes the penetration of electronic signals and surveillance devices from the exterior.”
“All devices?” Kim asked, skeptical that the US government had managed to apply the exclusions completely. Some cell phones worked inside Faraday cages.
Cooper nodded. “Excludes one hundred percent of all known consumer devices.”
Kim cocked her head. “Then what are they sweeping for?”
“Tech evolves. New bugs could have been installed since the place was used last. They’ll find them and remove them, if there are any.”
Kim nodded. “Where are we?”
“Safe house,” Cooper said. “We’ll regroup. Get food and sleep. Make a plan.”
Sleep sounded good to Kim. It had been a while since she’d had any. The break would give her a chance to think, too.
She missed discussing cases with Gaspar. And she’d already thought of half a dozen things she wanted to know that he could help with, if she had the option to contact him. Which, at the moment, she didn’t.
If Cooper could be believed, the Faraday Protocol probably made it impossible to connect with Gaspar or anyone else as long as she was inside the house.
While Faraday protection wasn’t absolute, the US government had access to the most effective techniques.
The protocol activated here in the safe house could probably be avoided if she had the right equipment, but breaching the protocol was not likely using the devices she had with her at the moment.
When she had the chance, she’d leave the building. Until then, she was stuck here without access to her usual contacts.
Perhaps she could squeeze useful intel out of Cooper in the meantime. He definitely knew more than he’d shared with her so far. No surprise there.
Johnson stuck his head out and waved them forward. Kim followed Cooper into the house. Johnson closed the door and set the interior alarm.
When the alarm’s confirmation notice beeped, the place felt more like a prison than a safehouse.
Kim walked through from the garage directly into an open floorplan. The cavernous space was divided by deliberately placed furniture. A sitting room with a wall-mounted flat-screen television and an eat-in kitchen were the two main areas.
The windows were covered with blackout shades, but to preserve the illusion that a family of some sort actually lived here, the shades allowed a sliver of interior light to escape on each side.
Across the open space on the other side of the house, Miller came through an archway jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Beds and baths back here. Take your pick.”
He began to check the security of doors and windows in the main room.
Johnson walked to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. “Fully stocked. Get washed up. I’ll pop a frozen pizza into the oven.”
He turned the oven on to preheat and prepared the pizza for baking while Kim and Cooper carried their bags toward the bedrooms.
Through the archway, there were three doors on either side of a wide hallway.
Cooper stuck his head into the first open doorway.
“I’ll take this one,” he said as he stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him.
Kim continued down the hallway and claimed the room on the end. The equivalent of sitting with her back to the wall and facing the exit.
Kim never entered any place without an exit plan. Knowing she was confined here was already making her twitchy.
The door was steel and heavy, like a hotel room fire door. She slid the deadbolt into place.
She scanned the space quickly.
The floor was carpeted. The walls were painted ivory and totally without adornment.
One closed window was covered with the same type of blackout shade as those in the front room.
The room was little more than a box, sparsely furnished.
Three-drawer dresser with a mirror above it.
Two cots fitted with rough sheets and a rougher blanket.
One bedside table between the cots with a lamp on it.
Single ladder-back chair next to each bed.
Small closet at the far corner.
Bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower directly adjacent.
Kim wasn’t particularly fussy about temporary accommodations, but this room was barely more than a cell for two. The place was secure, which was good. It was effectively a prison, which wasn’t.
She pulled out one of her phones to confirm that the Faraday Protocol was effectively blocking cell signals. It was.
No reason to spend any more time in here.
She left her bags on the bed and washed up before she returned to the kitchen, following the mouth-watering whiff of baking pizza that pulled her along. Her stomach growled. She spent half a moment trying to remember when she last had a meal before she shrugged and gave up the effort.
Johnson and Miller were seated at a round table talking quietly. They both looked up when she approached.
“What’s your story?” Miller asked. “Cooper didn’t tell us much.”
She shrugged. “He didn’t tell me anything about you, either.”
“Knowing Cooper, the omissions are deliberate,” Johnson said, extending his hand to shake hers as if they were being introduced for the first time. “Clay Johnson. Dallas Field Office.”
“Kim Otto, Detroit Field Office.” She shook his hand and turned to offer her hand to Miller.
“Bert Miller, Houston Field Office” he said with his handshake.
“You guys are not partners?” Kim asked on her way to the fridge. She ducked her head and snagged a water bottle.
“Not usually,” Johnson replied. “Joint task force has us working together on this.”
Kim stood against the counter. The pizza was smelling really good. Her stomach growled loudly and they both laughed.
“Ten more minutes,” Miller said with a grin. “Can’t vouch for the quality, though.”
“We were in DC. Talking to Cooper. He’s got access to more intel than we get in the field offices. Seemed easier to discuss the situation in person,” Johnson said.
Miller added, “That’s how we ended up escorting you two back to Texas. We were coming back anyway, after our briefing. He offered us a ride to Dallas.”
“Guess you’re on the task force now, too?” Johnson said, eyebrows raised.
Without Cooper to run interference, she had no idea what they were talking about. Or what they knew about Reacher or her covert assignment. It seemed safer to just nod.
“How many cases have you had in Detroit?” Miller asked, taking a swig from the soda can.
“I haven’t been briefed. So I’m not sure,” she replied. “You?”
“We’ve been pulling the intel together. It’s been a slog. The cases didn’t seem connected initially.”
“We’re not sure they are connected,” Johnson pointed out. “It’s a guess. An educated guess. That’s all.”
Miller nodded. “Right.”
“What suggests they’re connected now?” Kim asked, warming to the discussion. Whatever it was, she was intrigued.
“They may not be,” Johnson said. “The only real commonalities we’ve found so far are a murder where the perp dies afterward at the scene. Which is why the project was titled Double Death Task Force.”
“Double death?” Kim widened her eyes. “You mean like a gang war or a mass shooter/suicide thing?”
“No,” Miller said, shaking his head. “Suicide is a fairly common plan for mass shooters, as you know. They go into the situation expecting to be killed by the officers arriving on the scene. Planning on it, usually. They don’t intend to be caught and sent to prison. If we get them alive, it’s because they’ve screwed up their plan somehow.”
“And the gangbangers are pretty obvious. Bunch of idiots with guns fighting their turf wars and doing society a favor,” Johnson added.
Kim nodded.
“The Double Death Task Force is ruling out gang wars and mass shooters for the moment,” Miller said. “The cases we’re looking at first are individual murders where the killer also dies at or near the murder scene. We haven’t identified any multiple homicides that fit the pattern.”
“Until this one fell in our lap today,” Johnson said.
Miller replied, “Possibly.”
Kim noticed that the pizza smelled better with every passing minute. Surely it would be ready soon.
To distract her growling stomach, Kim asked, “How do the killers die?”