Hostage

1

The last thing Caminha Sozinho remembered was a fat black gun barrel pointed at his face.

He opened his eyes.

He was flat on his back on a king size mattress. Blurred vision, throbbing headache, sharp stinging pain on the right side of his neck. He touched the center of his forehead with the tips of his fingers, felt the hard knot that had formed there, wondered why he wasn’t dead.

He raised his head and looked around, felt a wave of nausea come and go. He was still in the motel room he’d rented after leaving the CHOKE compound. The man in the black leather jacket-the man who’d hired him for the hit-was sitting on the foot of the bed switching television channels with the remote control. He stopped on an old cowboy movie.

“What time is it?” Sozinho said.

“It’s night. After ten o’clock. You’ve been out for a few hours.”

Sozinho had accepted a large sum of money to assassinate a former army officer named Jack Reacher. He thought he’d been successful, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Apparently he’d shot the wrong man. He’d expected the man in the black leather jacket to kill him and take the money back. Now he wondered if some sort of fate worse than death awaited him. Daily torture sessions, perhaps. He’d heard rumors that the organization the man in the black leather jacket belonged to did such things just for entertainment sometimes.

“Why am I still alive?” Sozinho said.

“You’re still alive because you’re one of the best hit men in the world. I’ve been on the phone with my associates, and we’ve decided to give you another chance at Jack Reacher.”

“Good. I’ve never made a mistake like this before, and I can assure you it won’t happen again.”

The man in the black leather jacket nodded. “I know it won’t happen again,” he said. “But your carelessness has delayed what should have been a relatively simple assignment. Reacher’s going to be expecting something to happen now. He knows that he has been targeted for some reason. He’s going to be twice as difficult to locate, and it’s going to be twice as difficult to achieve the results we were expecting. We could wait until the smoke clears, but it might be a long time before we could go after him again in any sort of conventional fashion. We don’t want to wait, so we’re going to have to draw him out, lure him into coming to us. Which brings me to the real reason you’re still alive. We have another job for you.”

“Another job?” Sozinho said.

“Yes. And since you botched the first one so spectacularly, we’re going to expect you to do this one for free.”

“Of course,” Sozinho said, although he had no intention of doing anything for free. He’d been doing this kind of work for a long time, and his services were in high demand. He would listen to what the man in the black leather jacket had to say, pretend to accept the assignment, and then simply disappear to one of his homes abroad. It didn’t matter that he would never be able to work in the United States again. There were plenty of opportunities elsewhere.

And it wasn’t his fault that he’d shot the wrong man. Not altogether. The sketchy intelligence he’d received was partly to blame. So why should he take on a new assignment with no compensation? It just wasn’t going to happen.

The man in the black leather jacket turned the volume up on the television.

“You might be thinking that you can slink away to a place where we won’t find you,” he said. “You might be thinking about leaving the country and never coming back. If that’s what you’re thinking, then you need to think again.”

“I would never consider such a thing,” Sozinho said. “You must not know me very-”

“Touch the right side of your neck. Be gentle about it. I wouldn’t want you to start bleeding again.”

Sozinho brushed his fingertips across the area of his neck where he’d been experiencing some discomfort, felt a square of gauze held on with two strips of tape.

“What have you done to me?” he said.

“Just a minor surgical procedure. Local anesthesia. It only took a few minutes.”

A rage boiled up inside Sozinho. He wanted to jump to the foot of the bed and wrap his fingers around the man in the black leather jacket’s throat.

“What kind of-”

“It’s a tiny electronic circuit, a disk no larger than a headache tablet. I placed it under your right carotid artery, and now I’m going to activate it.”

The man in the black leather jacket pulled a phone out of his pocket, flipped it open and punched in a number.

Sozinho climbed out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. He peeled off the dressing and looked at the wound on his neck in the mirror. The incision was about half an inch long, closed and tied off with several blood-crusted stitches. The skin surrounding the site had been shaved, and it was stained orange from the solution used to clean it. Whatever anesthesia the man in the black leather jacket had used was starting to wear off, the pain becoming more and more intense as the minutes went by.

This was outrageous. There was no way Sozinho was going to let the man in the black leather jacket get away with this horrendous assault.

He grabbed the straight razor he’d used to shave with earlier and stomped back out toward the bed, intending to perform a little surgery of his own, but the man in the black leather jacket had already moved to the little round table by the window. He was sitting there picking his teeth with one hand and pointing his pistol at Sozinho with the other.

“I know you’re not going to shoot me,” Sozinho said.

“How do you know that?”

“There’s someone in the room next door. I heard the toilet flushing when I was in the bathroom. Your gun will make a loud noise, even with the sound suppressor on the barrel. I will shout out that I’ve been shot, and the person in the room next door will call the police.”

“I could drill one in your forehead from where I’m sitting,” the man in the black leather jacket said. “You wouldn’t have time to shout. Yes, the gun will make a noise, but anyone who hears it will probably think it came from the television. I doubt if anyone will call the police. But even if someone does, I will be long gone by the time they get here. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

“Take this thing out of me, or I’m going to take it out myself.”

“That would be unwise. In slightly less than twenty-four hours, a signal will be sent from my cell phone to the device implanted in your neck. Your entire body will be electrified for a moment, and then a smaller charge will burn a hole in the artery that supplies blood to the right side of your brain. Death won’t be quite instantaneous. You’ll feel the warm oxygenated blood trickling internally as the darkness slowly engulfs your consciousness. Any attempt to remove the device will trigger the process automatically.”

“I have the contacts and the money to make you disappear very quickly,” Sozinho said. “All I have to do is make one phone call.”

“That would also be unwise. I’m the only person on the planet who knows the code to deactivate the circuit. If anything happens to me-or if you’re not successful with the assignment-you’ll be dead by this time tomorrow.”

“You expect me to coordinate a hit in less than twenty-four hours?”

“It’s not a hit. It’s a kidnapping.”

“I don’t do that,” Sozinho said.

“Now you do.”

Sozinho was angrier than he’d ever been in his life. He felt as though he’d gone spinning into some sort of elaborate nightmare that he couldn’t wake up from.

“Who am I supposed to abduct?” he said.

“A certain police officer. I’ll tell you all about it in a little while.”

“You want me to locate and kidnap a cop in less than twenty-four hours?”

“Don’t worry. The officer will come to you. You’ll be arrested, and then you’ll escape. I’m going to give you a key that fits ninety-five percent of the handcuffs manufactured worldwide.”

“Ninety-five percent? What if this particular cop has a pair of cuffs from the five per cent that the key won’t open?”

“Then you will die in a jail cell.”

“You’re kidding, right? You really think I’m going to-”

“A few hours ago, you thought your chances of living were zero. You should be pleased with the current odds.”

The man in the black leather jacket was right. Earlier that afternoon Sozinho had expected a bullet in the brain for failing to kill Jack Reacher. At least now he had an opportunity to make it out of this alive.

He sat on the edge of the mattress. “This is unnecessary,” he said, pointing to the surgical wound on his neck. “I’m a professional, and you’re treating me like-”

“Let’s just call it insurance. And maybe you’ll do a better job this time knowing that your life depends on it.”

Sozinho didn’t want to die, but he also didn’t want to provide his services for free. Not that he needed the money. It was a matter of principle.

Kidnapping wasn’t his thing, but he didn’t think it would pose much of a problem as long as he had the right tools. He would go ahead with the assignment. The man in the black leather jacket had left him no choice. He would do the job, but then he would get his payment one way or another.

Perhaps in cash.

Perhaps in blood.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” Sozinho said.

“Get your things together. You’ll be flying to Hope, Colorado in a private jet. I’ll tell you more about the job on the way to the airport.”