Not a Drill: A Jack Reacher Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

politically. And very active.”
    “How active is very active?”
    “It’s what she does. Like a job. Henry runs the bike shop on his own most of the time.”
    “So she’s in more than a couple of databases. A couple hundred, at least.”
    “Red-flagged in most of them, probably. I mean, she’s not Che Guevara or Chairman Mao, but computer memory is very cheap these days, and they have to fill it up with something. She’s in the top million, I’m sure. And I’m equally sure they have preprogrammed responses ready. The screens will light up like a Christmas tree and she’ll be hauled off to Egypt or Syria. She’ll be in the system. They might let her come home in a year or so, all weird and slightly off. If she lives through it.”
    Reacher said, “It might not be a missile. It might be some boring black box full of coded data. Maybe it fell off a satellite, not an airplane. No possible use to anyone else. Which makes the idea of a retrieval party insane to them. They’re not going to be chasing shadows. If they see Henry and Suzanne coming around the corner, dressed like hikers, walking like hikers, and sounding like hikers, then they’re going to call them hikers. They’re going to give them a drink of water and send them on their way.”
    “You can’t be sure of that.”
    “It’s one of a number of possibilities.”
    “What are all the others?”
    “I guess some of them could come uncomfortably close to the kind of thing you’re worried about.”
    “How many of them?”
    “Practically all of them, really. Bottom line is she’s a foreign national with a history in the middle of a national-security lockdown.”
    Helen said, “We have to go get them out.”

    Resistance was futile. Reacher knew that right away. He was a realistic man. A Stoic, in the original meaning of the name. A guy who accepted circumstances for what they were, and didn’t seek to change them. He asked, “How fast do they walk?”
    Helen said, “Not very. They’re communing, not commuting. They’re stepping off the path and making footprints in the virgin earth. They’re looking at everything. They’re listening to the birds and the wind in the trees. We should be able to catch up to them.”
    “Better to get ahead of them.”
    “How?”

    They started in the diner’s kitchen, where the bewildered day guy gave up two machete-like weapons. Cleavers, possibly, for cutting meat. Then they hustled down to the kayakdock and rented a slim two-place vessel. It was bright orange in color. It had waterproof fabric around the seat holes. To tie around the rower’s waist, Reacher figured. Like wearing the boat like a pair of pants. To stop water getting in. Which he thought was overkill, on a fine day in August, on an inland body of water about as placid as a millpond.
    Reacher took the back seat. It was a tight fit. Helen looked better, in the front. The rental guy let go of a rope and they paddled away, chaotic at first, then getting better. Much better. All about building up a rhythm. Long, steady, propulsive strokes. Like swimming. But faster than swimming. Faster than walking, too. Certainly faster than communing, and putting prints in the virgin earth, and listening to birds. Maybe twice as fast. Maybe more. Which was good. The lake turned like a crooked come-on finger, which gave them a natural outflanking maneuver, at first running parallel to the trail, and then cutting up and in, all the way to the far end of the finger, right to where the nail would be, which would be as near the trail as they could hope to get. Because after the turn the lake dug into the woods, just like Maine itself dug into Canada. Like a blade. Like a knife wound. The far tip might dump them just a couple hundred yards from the path itself. A quarter mile, maximum. The primeval part of the forest was not wide at that location. Because of the water. Like a bay. Like a river estuary.
    They paddled on. Not a sprint. A middle-distance race. The mile,