Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel (3 page)

Of course, in his experience so far, trouble seemed to find him no matter where he was. He had bad luck when it came to getting mixed up with trouble—a family curse. After learning as much as he could about Jack Reacher’s life so far, he had concluded that his father was full of bad luck and trouble. He had also concluded that his father’s bad luck had become his bad luck.

In the old days, before Cameron knew anything about his drifter father, there was a zero percent chance that someone had been out to get him. But in all honesty, he had made some enemies this last year. And even though he thought there was probably no one out to get him, he figured it was best to make himself difficult to locate. He believed it was better to err on the side of caution. “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst”
had been a family motto, preached by his father and handed down to him from his mother.

Of course, his mother also used to tell him was that the best defense was a good offense—contrary to what he had learned in sports and gained from common wisdom. Her opinion was that it was better to get your offense in first than to wait for the other guy. A swift offense was the fastest way to ensure no defense was required.

Having been on the road for the better part of a year, Cameron had adopted many new philosophies. Some of them were his own, and some of them weren’t. Most were from one of his two parents. He had always thought his mother had been the original source of all the things she’d taught him. But he was learning, in different ways, that while she was his mother, she had also tried to be his father. In doing so, she had passed on some of his father’s opinions to him.

In the diner in Austin, Texas, a waitress had brought him coffee. Black. He had said nothing about it. No complaint. No request for something different. Instead, he had let curiosity get the better of him, and he had taken a sip. That sip had turned into a swig, and that swig turned into a gulp. Somehow that cup of coffee turned into an addiction, and he was now a full-blown addict. It had started somewhere deep in his organs, bones, and sinews—an urge he couldn’t explain pulling at him like a shark dragging him into the dark, black ocean depths. He stood little chance against it. And now he loved coffee, just like his father did.

Like father, like son. Cause and effect.

Three things had changed Cameron’s life forever. The first was the death of his mother way back in Mississippi, way back in a different time, and the second was the quest that she had set him on from her deathbed.

“Get Jack Reacher,” she had said.

The third thing was far subtler to the untrained eye, the passerby, the uncaring man, but it was of great consequence to Cameron. It was life-changing to him because he now knew exactly who he was. Or at least he knew a significant part of himself that he had never anticipated, and that was that he was a full-blooded addict—not to drugs or booze, but to coffee.

Pure. Black. Coffee.

Fiend
was a better word to use to describe who he was when it came to coffee.
Fiend
. He was a coffee fiend—he loved it like an alcoholic loves vodka.

Chapter 4

RAGGIE ROWLEY WAS KNOWN
to her friends and family as Raggie and not by Nicole Marie Rowley, which was her real name. Not that there was anything wrong with the name Nicole, and not that she had any specific grievance against the name. In fact, it was a good name. Not too common but far from uncommon enough for her to get picked on by her friends. And the name Nicole wasn’t cliché at all. Not like some other names she thought were overused or
overhyped
as her friend, Claire, would say.

Claire had been her best friend since they were seven years old. They’d met in an after-school dance class both Claire’s and Raggie’s mothers had forced them to attend. The two young girls had entered, hating the idea of joining a dance class. Neither of them wanted to learn dance, ballet or otherwise. And they especially loathed the idea of learning to dance with boys. It wasn’t what the class was about, but to Raggie, the endgame of learning to dance was so that she could grow up one day and dance at her wedding with an old man who would be her husband. Of course, she hadn’t considered that, at that point, she’d be old herself. Not really old, but to a seven-year-old, everyone over fifteen was old.

Claire and Raggie had been best friends until Raggie had gone off with her family to live in South Africa. Raggie’s father had a very important job. He was a secret agent. At least, that’s what he used to tell her, but the real truth was that he worked for the United States Secret Service. He was the team leader for a temporary advanced unit, sent out to secure locations before the arrival of the president.

Back when Raggie was still called Nicole, and back when she was twelve years old, she’d had to say goodbye to Claire and the rest of her friends because her mother and father had decided that the family was spending too much time apart. But now, they were all going to be together. Gibson Rowley had been assigned to a vacancy not very popular among his coworkers. He was to head the advance team for the southern region of Africa. This meant he would be responsible for prompting a protection plan within forty-eight hours for any location in his region.

His job was divided into two parts. First, he had to evaluate a location on short notice. This meant that he and his small team would scout out the locations where the president would be while he visited the region. He was responsible for evaluating the risks and concerns. His team would recon the locales and then coordinate with local law enforcement officials to have escape plans ready as well as arrange transportation details for getting to and from the locations.

Without the knowledge of local law enforcement agents, they always made secret backup escape plans of their own. Breaking laws or pissing off the local officials wasn’t their concern—protecting the president at all costs was.

Their second mission was to guard the locations and routes after they’d been analyzed. This was to ensure that the locations remained secure until after the president had come and gone.

Being on the advanced operating team meant that Rowley needed to remain on site. He had to live in South Africa as long as the mission was ongoing. He and his team had to remain in place at all times.

And when Nicole was still Nicole and not yet Raggie, she and her mother had to go and live in South Africa with her father. Not that this made much difference because even though the president didn’t visit the region that much, her father was always gone anyway. He was always too busy for her.

While Raggie was in South Africa, she made friends with some local girls. A small, tight group of them. Immediately, she picked up on something about these girls that set them worlds apart from the girls back home. These girls weren’t really girls at all. Not the baking cookies and wearing dresses kind. These girls were fun, and they tore down the American conventions of girls.

Nicole became good friends with them. Six weeks after the end of winter, they introduced her to something that would change her life forever. The girls were surfers.

It started as an exercise in trying to fit in with them, but over the course of that first summer, Nicole spent every afternoon—with or without her new friends—on the beach learning how to surf.

She loved it! Surfing was the thing that had been missing from her life.

That first time she caught a wave without tipping over or crashing into the unforgiving surf was one of the best moments of her life. She’d wished that Claire could’ve been there to know that feeling. To feel the rush of the wind and the unpredictability of the surf.

Even after her first injury from surfing, she’d longed to get back out into the waves. Before she understood how to ride a wave, she’d sprained her left knee trying to ride waves the wrong way. She had to stay out of the water for the rest of the summer, and it wasn’t until her thirteenth birthday that her mother had even let her return to the water.

Nicole spent her time away from the ocean thinking about the water and researching the sport of surfing. She watched videos on the Internet on how to surf. She even found a guy with a series of YouTube video—or a YouTube channel, as it’s known—who was a former pro surfer. He had great videos teaching techniques and tricks for getting the most out of a surfboard. The guy didn’t have a lot of followers, but he had an account with patreon.com so that he could accept donations from people to finance his lessons. And Nicole used her mom’s credit card to donate money to him on a regular basis. She had never met the guy, but she learned a lot from his lessons.

So when the first rays of warm weather hit the beach the following summer, she was ready to get back on the board. Nicole rejoined her friends and surfed every day. She even got good enough to look somewhat graceful. Her friends asked her how she’d gotten so good after her injury. And she replied, “How does anyone get good at anything these days? The Internet!”

Chapter 5

NICOLE WATCHED THE SURF
from the shore. Her break was coming up. She knew it. She felt it in her bones. The wetsuit was form-fitting, but she didn’t have any form that would indicate she was a girl. She was thirteen years old and had a boy’s body—athletic arms, stringy legs, and a flat chest. She thought back to the girls back home in Virginia. She thought about Claire, who was at that very moment most likely praying she’d grow a pair of breasts and hoping for more curves to show off in a dress. She was probably trying to convince her mom to take her to Bebe or GAP or some department store and buy her some clothes that weren’t really appropriate for a girl who was barely a teenager. But that was how Nicole imagined the girls back home to be.

Right now, all she cared about was the surf. All she concentrated on was trying out the new trick that she’d been working on. She’d watched the advanced videos, and she’d practiced the jump every day during sunup. She practiced while the other girls were still asleep.

She wasn’t the only surfer around at sunup. In fact, most of the really dedicated surfers were at the beach by dawn. If midnight was the witching hour, then sunrise was the surfing hour.

Today was a weekday, and she had come early at dawn and practiced the jump, but she hadn’t done it in front of any of her friends yet. And they were there now. Three other girls stood in a circle behind her on the beach. Their surfboards were laid out on the sand like seals lying in the sun.

The tallest girl was Nicole’s closest friend out of the bunch. Her name was Saffron.

Saffron was fifteen and already had a sleeve tattoo—all tribal. And even though Saffron was her best friend, she was also the best surfer out of all of them. This was the reason Nicole had kept her new trick a secret from them. She wanted to impress Saffron. She wanted her to see her perform a jump that not even Saffron could do.

The trick was a high jump with the surfboard over a wave. It wasn’t anything special in the eyes of true-blooded surfers, but for a thirteen-year-old girl who’d had a knee injury several months before, it was pretty impressive.

Nicole watched for the perfect break. She’d been on the beach since sunrise, and now the sun was nearing sunset—not quite ready to set, but not far away. She didn’t have much light left to show her new skill.

The beach had been crowded, but not many people had been out in the surf because of the warning flag. There was a small crew of lifeguards on duty, and one of them had spotted dark shadows about a hundred yards down the beach. The shadows were probably from a school of fish or a group of sea turtles—it could’ve been anything really—but the beach wasn’t far from a place known for the likelihood of spotting
Carcharodon carcharias. Which is the scientific name for the Great White shark. So whenever there was the tiniest possibility that one had been spotted, the lifeguards threw up a red flag. Which meant danger. Which usually meant shark. And today, for the last hour, they’d had the red flag up.

Nicole watched out over the sea and saw her waves coming and crashing down. The perfect chance. No one else was on the water, nothing between her and her chance to show off her new jump.

She ignored the flag and went out onto the water.

Chapter 6

NICOLE PADDLED OUT PAST
the first crashing waves and the shallowest parts of the beach. She felt the waves underneath the board. She cleared her mind and paddled forward. First she passed the three-foot depth and then five and then seven, and she kept going. She felt no fear. She’d practiced and practiced the jump and was ready to do it in front of her friends.

She passed the ten-foot depth and then the twelve and the fifteen.

The ocean wasn’t too brutal, but the surf was much higher than normal. Of course, she was getting further out so that she could ride in longer and then take a deep breath and find the right wave to jump from. She paddled, feeling her arms strain. Her elbows bent, fighting the current. The water splashed her face. Her eyes blinked involuntarily every time, and she forced them back open and stared ahead.

She got to a comfortable place and stopped paddling. The waves splashed in over her, and she held her breath and held onto her board with each pass. She came out of the other side and was ready for her wave. It barreled toward her. She grabbed the board, turned back to the shore, and paddled. Her hands pounded into the water and her feet kicked and kicked. Her left knee started to throb from the old injury. She continued to kick and kick.