CHAPTER FORTY

Friday, January 14

4:28 p.m.

Palm Beach, Florida

Almost three hours ago, Otto and Gaspar had downloaded materials from the Boss before they boarded the plane in New York. Their tickets were always for empty seats not purchased by regular passengers in the first-class section of the aircraft. If she’d booked and paid for her own ticket, she wouldn’t be sitting in 3A on a bet. The tail section was the safest place for passengers to sit. Closer to an emergency exit in the back was ideal.

Not that she’d request to move. Nothing would tank her advancement potential faster than any public acknowledgment of concerns about flying. Not to mention tipping off Gaspar to the extent of hers. He’d mock her endlessly, which she refused to encourage.

So she sat in 3A and spent almost three hours bouncing through turbulence, drinking coffee, swallowing antacids, and reviewing the files to distract herself from the inherent dangers of speeding through space sitting on enough jet fuel to destroy small cities.

Gaspar, of course, slept.

The files contained a curious mix of material. Sorted documents from the latest TrueLeaks mole were mostly about private contractors milking military coffers while U.S. armed forces were dying because of a shoestring budget.

The leaker’s interests seemed to be related to shortages of manpower, equipment, and support for the troops. What he’d chosen to leak suggested he was an enlisted man or a low-level officer.

The Boss included the same conversations they’d received from Finlay. But no Reacher recordings dated within the past six weeks, meaning nothing after he blew up the house in Rocky Pointe, Maine.

When the flight landed at Palm Beach International Airport, Otto was no closer to knowing whether Reacher was dead or alive than she had been back in Detroit.

She said a quick prayer of gratitude for the safe landing. So many ways a flight could go wrong, and she was intimately familiar with every last one of them. Someday, her luck might run out. But not today.

She gathered her laptop and deplaned. On her way past 1A, she nudged Gaspar to wake him up and waited for him at the end of the jetway.

Through the big windows, waning sunshine bathed the pavement outside. Palm trees wafted in the breeze, and green foliage dotted the landscape. The effect of transporting from bleak, cold winter to verdant, warm summer in just a few hours jarred her senses as it always did.

She turned the Boss’s cell phone on and checked for messages. Nothing. If he’d had enough time with the Scavo recording to identify the second voice, the one Scavo called “General,” he hadn’t bothered to share the name with them.

Gaspar ambled out of the jetway limping and lugging his laptop. “How about a quick pit stop and a donut or something before we get going?”

She nodded and walked with him. “Nothing new in the Boss’s stuff, if you were wondering.”

“I figured. If he’d found anything useful, he’d have called the moment you turned the phone on,” he replied before they peeled off into the restrooms.

While she picked up cheap sunglasses at the sundries shop, he bought a dozen donuts and four large coffees to go. Gaspar gobbled two of the donuts before they collected the rental, where he slid behind the wheel without comment.

She’d stopped fighting that battle on their first day. He was right. He was number two, and number two drives the vehicle, even as number one drives the case.

“Have you ever been to Palm Beach before, Suzy Wong?” Gaspar asked while he was familiarizing himself with the dashboard of the Japanese sedan.

He preferred a Crown Vic to every vehicle on the road, and he complained about all the others. But Ford was no longer producing Crown Vics, so finding one on a rental lot never happened.

Otto nodded. “When I was working in accounting, we had clients down here. It’s a different world from Miami or Detroit. Or New York, for that matter.”

She passed the sunglasses she’d bought for him across the console and adjusted hers to fit her face. She held the shoulder harness away from her neck with her right hand and the donut in her left.

“No doubt about that. Thanks for the shades.” He backed out of the parking space and slipped the aviators over his eyes before he rolled the sedan into the bright but fading sun. He grabbed another donut.

“Pauling’s place is on Ocean Boulevard. I put the address into the GPS.” She nibbled the fried dough. It settled like lead in her stomach, but she figured it would soak up some of the acid.

This was the first time in weeks when she hadn’t felt engulfed in bone-chilling cold. The GPS led them north and then east. Gaspar drove with easy familiarity, and as the miles passed, Otto relaxed a bit.

He swallowed a big gulp of the flavored syrup he called coffee before he asked, “Did you learn anything new while I was sleeping?”

“Bottom line, still no hard evidence that Reacher’s alive.”

He grinned. “Guess I should bump my bet.”

“You’re a riot, you know that, Chico?” She scowled behind the sunglasses, which he couldn’t see. But he must have felt the vibe.

“No hints about what Pauling did with the money?” His grin widened briefly before he popped half of a donut in his mouth.

“The nine million? What makes you think Pauling did anything with it?” She cocked her head. Sometimes his tangents were hard to follow. “Brewer didn’t say Pauling moved the cash, only that she might know what happened to it.”

“Seems obvious, doesn’t it?” Gaspar swigged the coffee as he maneuvered around the heavy traffic. “Peck’s dead, so he didn’t take it. Brewer says he didn’t take it, and we’ve found no evidence to the contrary. If the money had been there when the mysterious stranger arrived, who was probably Scavo’s general, too, he would have had no reason to kill Peck. Who else could it be?”

“Your theories have more holes than a screen door.” She paused while the GPS instructed him to turn east in another two miles.

“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” He shrugged. His all-purpose gesture for everything. “You think it was Reacher? Doesn’t sound like him, does it? Reacher working with Pauling? No evidence to support that, either.”

She viewed Gaspar as her best window into Reacher’s head. His background was a lot like Reacher’s. Same training. Both ex-Army. Both men. She tried to keep an open mind to his suggestions, even when they made no sense to her.

“Why would Pauling take the money?”

“Why not?” He shrugged again, slowing for the traffic light ahead. “The Colonel’s gone. Disappeared. His family, too. Probably not coming back, the way it looks. Hell, the guy could be dead for all we know. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Reacher had something to do with all of that.” The light changed. He turned right behind a long line of vehicles.

Otto didn’t reply.

“No question. Pauling’s involved. She knows what happened to the nine million, at the very least. And Peck’s killer will figure that out pretty quickly, too. If he hasn’t already,” Gaspar said.

Otto felt the Boss’s phone vibrating in her pocket. She dropped her nibbled donut into the empty bag. She maneuvered around the seatbelt to dig the phone out while holding the safety harness away from her neck to avoid decapitation.

“Yes?” Her tone was grouchy. She didn’t care.

“You’re on the ground, I take it,” the Boss said.

Otto said nothing. He watched them every second of every day, one way or another. He knew damn well precisely where they were.

“Pauling is expecting you.”

Interesting. How did she find out? Brewer? “Any reason to believe she’s hostile?”

“Any reason to believe she’s not?” he countered.

Point taken. “So what’s your suggestion?”

“Improvise.” He disconnected before she could ask questions.

She sent a quick text. “What about Scavo?”

The reply was equally quick. “Nothing yet.”

Gaspar glanced her way. “I take it he’s as helpful as ever.”

“He says Pauling knows we’re coming. He suggests we improvise.” She curled her lip and looked out the window.

Gaspar shrugged. “Sounds like a feasible plan.”

They were traveling over a bridge. According to the GPS, the waterway beneath was called Lake Worth.

She wondered about the price of real estate on Palm Beach Island these days. And how Pauling could possibly afford to live here on her FBI pension and the income from her private investigator business. Not only to live here, but also in New York City, two of the most expensive places to own housing in the entire country.

Gaspar was right. The only answer that made sense. Pauling took the nine million. She was at the center of whatever was going on here. She had to have been involved before she met Reacher. Brewer was involved before Reacher, too.

But somehow, Reacher came on the scene, and something more happened. Probably something deadly, because violence was Reacher’s way. Whatever that something was, it must have made Pauling a very wealthy woman.

“How far do you think she’ll go to keep what she’s already got?” Otto asked.

“As far as she can.” Gaspar shrugged.