Hostage

Jude Hardin Hostage

A book in the Jack Reacher Files series

Copyright © 2015 by Jude Hardin

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.