Jude Hardin - The Reacher Code - Timestream 1

“Please don’t kill me,” he said.

“The stairs,” Wahlman said. “Take me there. Now.”

17

On the way to the supply closet, Gary went on and on about what an asshole someone named Ron had been lately. Top didn’t know who Ron was, but he figured it would be best to agree that he’d been a total jerk. So that was what he did. He agreed. Adamantly. When they got to the closet, Gary slid his key into the slot and twisted the knob and pushed his way inside. Top followed him and gently pulled the door shut. While Gary was reaching for the oil on one of the upper shelves, Top grabbed a handful of his shaggy blonde hair and shoved his face into the edge of the sink, again and again until his skull cracked open. Top let go of him and he slumped to the floor, his face coated with blood and bone and gooey bits of brain tissue.

“You should have left me alone,” Top said.

He reached up and grabbed the oil can and exited the closet.

Gary had left his key in the door. Top broke it off inside the lock, so that nobody could get into the closet for a while. The lock would have to be drilled out, and that would take time, and Top would be finished with his mission by then. He would be drinking a cold one with Kyle Harrison back in 2101 and thinking about the piles of money he would be rolling around in soon.

He hurried on back to the cart, put a couple of drops of oil on the squeaky wheel, and proceeded down the hallway.

There were a total of fourteen beds on Ward B, each with a curtain along the side that you could pull for privacy, each with a number painted on the wall above the headboard, and each with a metal clipboard hanging from the footboard.

Reacher’s bed was all the way on the end.

Number fourteen.

Top wheeled the cart past the nurses’ station, glanced over and saw three women sitting there, each with her nose in a patient’s chart. Crisp white uniforms, traditional hats. An extremely old-fashioned look, even back in 1983. One of them had an open bag of potato chips in front of her, and another one was smoking a cigarette.

Smoking.

In a hospital.

Insane.

The one with the potato chips needed to lose a few pounds, and the one with the cigarette needed to gain a few. Maybe they should swap for a while, Top thought. Or maybe take some advice from the one who wasn’t eating or smoking. Her weight seemed to be just right.

None of them said anything to Top as he passed by. They didn’t even look up from what they were doing.

Top started thinking that this was going to be even easier that he’d thought it would be. He quietly pushed the cart toward the end of the gloomy space, an occasional grunt or moan reminding him of exactly where he was and of how anxious he was to get out of there.

He stopped in front of Reacher’s bed. Only Reacher wasn’t there. The bed was empty.

Top picked up the metal clipboard. Reacher’s name was on the flowsheet. His vital signs had been recorded at midnight. Everything looked fine. Blood pressure, pulse, respirations, temperature, everything. Voicing no complaints , the nurse had written. So where was he?

Top looked at his watch. In thirty-one minutes and twenty-seven seconds, he would need to spin back to 2101, or risk being stuck in 1983 forever. He certainly didn’t want to be stuck, but he didn’t want to leave prematurely either. A lot of time and money and painstaking research had gone into arriving at this precise location at this precise time. He had chosen the Ramstein Air Base Medical Center, Ward B Bed 14, October 28, 1983 between 01:45 and 02:30, because it was a historical fact that Jack Reacher would be there at that time, and because there was a good chance that he would be sleeping. All of that was supposed to have been a given. Yet Reacher wasn’t here. Of course Top could always try a different timestream if this didn’t work out, but he only had fifty-seven minutes per spin to work with, and nailing Reacher’s exact location at any other point in his life—and ensuring that the location could be accessed within the limited timeframe—would be difficult, to say the least. Maybe even impossible. And it wasn’t like you could just go back home and start over. Once you visited a particular time in a particular timestream, you could never go back to that exact same time again. You could go a few hours earlier, or a few hours later, but there was something about the temporal frequency spectrum that rendered repeat visits to a specific chunk of history highly unstable. The TFS was nothing to mess around with. A couple of Top’s guys had been reduced to gelatinous mounds of glop during the initial human trials. So there was definitely no coming back to this place at this time. Which meant that Top needed to finish the mission here and now. It would take months to put another one together, time that could be utilized developing the next phase of the program.

The phase that would make him a very wealthy man.

He left the cart by Reacher’s bed and walked to the nurses’ station. The young lady who’d been eating potato chips looked up from the chart she was working on.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Top was about to respond when something caught his eye. He glanced to his left and saw two men approaching from the other end of the corridor. Rounding the corner. Passing the area where Top had parked his cart earlier. Moving steadily toward the ward. One of the men was wearing a long white lab coat buttoned in front, the other jeans and a leather jacket.

The one in the leather jacket said something to the one in the lab coat.

The one in the lab coat turned around and started running in the opposite direction.

Disappeared around the corner.

The one in the leather jacket kept walking toward the nurses’ station. Not fast. Not slow. Just a steady pace. When he was about a hundred feet away, Top recognized him. It was Wahlman. Top had seen pictures of him. He was supposed to be in a coma. That was what Harrison had said. But that obviously wasn’t the case.

Wahlman reached into the back of his waistband and produced a pistol.

Aimed it at Top as he continued walking toward the nurses’ station.

“On the floor,” Wahlman said. “Hands behind your head. Now!”

Top didn’t get on the floor, and he didn’t put his hands behind his head. He leaned forward and grabbed the nurse who’d been smoking a cigarette by the hair and dragged her over to his side of the counter, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the syringe that had been loaded with morphine. He uncapped the needle with his teeth and held it an inch or so away from the nurse’s throat.

“There’s enough morphine in here to kill a horse,” he said. “Drop the gun or I’ll shoot every bit of it into her neck.”

18

Wahlman stopped walking. He recognized the man who’d grabbed the nurse. It was William Top, the leader of the group called Topple. Wahlman had seen pictures of him. Top had obviously decided to carry out the assassination himself. Morphine. So Reacher’s death would look like an accidental overdose. Since Top still had the syringe, it was pretty safe bet that he hadn’t gotten to Reacher yet.

Wahlman was about fifty feet from where Top was standing. Close enough to take some shots with the pistol. Close enough to drill a couple of rounds into his core. Put him out of business. Forever. But Wahlman didn’t take the shots. Because of the nurse Top was holding. And the two other nurses sitting there at the station. And the patients in the beds on the other side of them.

“I’m assuming you’re in a hurry,” Wahlman said. “You need to get back home soon, or you’ll end up being stuck here, like me. Let the nurse go, and I’ll let you go.”