“What’s this for?” Penney asked.
“Be quiet,” Reacher said.
They were two cars away from the checkpoint. Three highway patrolmen in rain capes were directing traffic into a corral formed by parked cruisers. Their light bars were flashing bright in the shiny dark.
“What?” Penney said again.
Reacher said nothing. Just stopped where the cop told him and wound his window down. The night air blew in, cold and wet. The cop bent down. Reacher handed him his military ID. The cop played his flashlight over it and handed it back.
“Who’s your passenger?” he asked.
“My prisoner,” Reacher said. He handed over the arrest warrant.
“He got ID?” the cop asked.
Reacher leaned over and slipped the wallet out from inside Penney’s jacket, two-fingered like a pickpocket. Flipped it open and passed it through the window. A second cop stood in Reacher’s headlight beams and copied the plate number onto a clipboard. Stepped around the hood and joined the first guy.
“Captain Reacher of the military police,” the first cop said.
The second cop wrote it down.
“With a prisoner name of Edward Hendricks,” the first cop said.
The second cop wrote it down.
“Thank you, sir,” the first cop said. “You drive safe, now.”
Reacher eased out from between the cruisers. Accelerated away into the rain. A mile later, he stopped again on the shoulder. Leaned over and unlocked Penney’s handcuffs. Put them back in his pocket. Penney rubbed his wrists.
“I thought you were going to turn me in,” he said.
Reacher shook his head. “Looked better for me that way. I wanted a prisoner in the car for everybody to see.”
Reacher handed the wallet back.
“Keep it,” he said.
“Really?”
“Edward Hendricks,” Reacher said. “That’s who you are now. It’s clean ID, and it’ll work. Think of it like a veteran’s benefit. One soldier to another.”
Edward Hendricks looked at him and nodded and opened his door. Got out into the rain and turned up the collar of his leather jacket and started walking north. Reacher watched him until he was out of sight and then pulled away and took the next turn west. Turned north and stopped again where the road was lonely and ran close to the ocean. There was a wide gravel shoulder and a low barrier and a steep cliff with the Pacific tide boiling and foaming fifty feet below it.
He got out of the car and opened the trunk and grasped the lapels of the jacket he had told Penney about. Took a deep breath and heaved. The corpse was heavy. Reacher wrestled it up out of the trunk and jacked it onto his shoulder and staggered with it to the barrier. Bent his knees and dropped it over the edge. The rocky cliff caught it and it spun and the arms and legs flailed limply. Then it hit the surf with a faint splash and was gone.
James Grippando
It’s no accident that five of James Grippando’s ten thrillers are legal thrillers featuring Jack Swyteck, an explosive criminal defense lawyer. Grippando is a lawyer himself, though fortunately with far fewer demons than Jack. What’s it like to be Jack? Simply imagine that your father is Florida’s governor, your best friend was once on death row and your love life could fill an entire chapter in Cupid’s Rules of Love and War (Idiot’s Edition). Throw in an indictment for murder and a litany of lesser charges, and you’ll begin to get the picture.
Readers of the Swyteck series know that Jack is a self-described half-Cuban boy trapped in the body of a gringo. That’s a glib way of saying that Jack’s Cuban-born mother died in childbirth, and Jack was raised by his father and stepmother, with no link whatsoever to his Cuban heritage. Grippando is not Cuban, but he considers himself an “honorary Cuban” of sorts. His best friend since college was Cuban born and that family dubbed him their otro hijo, other son. Quite remarkable, considering that Grippando grew up in rural Illinois and spoke only “classroom” Spanish. When he first arrived in Florida, he had no idea that Cubans made better rice than the Chinese, or that a jolt of Cuban coffee was as much a part of midafternoon in Miami as thunderclouds over the Everglades. He’d yet to learn that if you ask a nice Cuban girl on a date, the entire family would be waiting at the front door to meet you when you picked her up. In short, Grippando—like Jack Swyteck—was the gringo who found himself immersed in Cuban culture.
In Hear No Evil, the fourth book in the Swyteck series, Jack Swyteck travels back to Cuba to discover his roots. Naturally, he runs into a mess of trouble, all stemming from a murder on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Grippando prides himself on his research, and threw himself into all things Cuban when researching the thriller. At the time it was impossible to speak to anyone about the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay without the problem of the detainees dominating the conversation. It was then that Grippando came across a forty-year-old plan—Operation Northwoods—which, in the hands of someone with an extremely devious mind, could cause a mountain of trouble.
So was born this story.
In Operation Northwoods, Jack and his colorful sidekick, Theo Knight, find themselves in the heat of a controversy after an explosion at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—an explosion that rocks the world.
Operation Northwoods
6:20 a.m., Miami, Florida
Jack Swyteck swatted the alarm clock, but even the subtle green glow of liquid-crystal digits was an assault on his eyes. The ringing continued. He raked his hand across the nightstand, grabbed the telephone and answered in a voice that dripped with a hangover. It was Theo.
“Theo who?” said Jack.
“Theo Knight, moron.”
Jack’s brain was obviously still asleep. Theo was Jack’s best friend and “investigator,” for lack of a better term. Whatever Jack needed, Theo found, whether it was the last prop plane out of Africa or an explanation for a naked corpse in Jack’s bathtub. Jack never stopped wondering how Theo came up with these things. Sometimes he asked; more often, he simply didn’t want to know. Theirs was not exactly a textbook friendship, the Ivy League son of a governor meets the black high-school dropout from Liberty City. But they got on just fine for two guys who’d met on death row, Jack the lawyer and Theo the inmate. Jack’s persistence had delayed Theo’s date with the electric chair long enough for DNA evidence to come into vogue and prove him innocent. It wasn’t the original plan, but Jack ended up a part of Theo’s new life, sometimes going along for the ride, other times just watching with amazement as Theo made up for lost time.
“Dude, turn on your TV,” said Theo. “CNN.”
There was an urgency in Theo’s voice, and Jack was too disoriented to mount an argument. He found the remote and switched on the set, watching from the foot of his bed.
A grainy image filled the screen, like bad footage from one of those media helicopters covering a police
