Tom Clancy Duty and Honor Read Online Free PDF

suitcase to the closet.
    This room was special-operator tidy. A place for everything and everything in its place. Functional, efficient, anonymous. It gave him nothing.
    “Maybe . . .” Jack murmured.
    He picked up the phone and dialed the main desk.
    “Motel Six, how may I help you?”
    “Hi, I’m in room 142,” Jack said. “Can you get me a copy of my charges up to this point? My office manager needs it.”
    “Certainly, sir. I can e-mail it—”
    “Hard copy would be better, actually. Just slip it under the door. I’m going to jump in the shower.”
    “Give me five minutes.”
    “One more thing,” Jack replied. “When do you show me checking out?”
    “Uh . . . hang on . . . Day after tomorrow, sir.”
    Jack thanked him and hung up.
    The desk clerk was as good as his word. A few minutes later a lone sheet of paper wormed its way beneath the door. He waited for the footsteps to fade back down the hallway, then retrieved the bill. In the occupant information section, there was no address. How did his attacker manage that? Jack wondered. The vast majority of hotels wouldn’t book a reservation without an address. There were ways around this, but they took finesse.
    In the payment section, all but the last four digits of the credit card were X’d out.
    But there was a name.
    Eric Weber.
    —
    E ven assuming the name was real, Weber was common, as was Eric, and without an address Jack had no way of narrowing his search. He put a pin in it and turned to his next task.
    He left the room, and to kill some time he browsed through a couple used-book stores. After nightfall, he headed west toward Telegraph Road and turned off. He found a BP gas station across the road from the Supermercado and parked on the side of the building.
    From his rucksack he took a gray hoodie and baseball cap. He donned both, then locked his car and walked to Lenore, then west across Telegraph to the grocery store. The parking lot was half full of cars, with shoppers, mostly Latinos and some whites, coming and going through the automatic doors. The sound of rickety shopping cart wheels echoed across the pavement. The automatic doors hissed open and shut.
    It was seven forty-five, fifteen minutes before the store’s shift change.
    Jack couldn’t help but glance at the guardrail on the far side of the parking lot. No cars were parked there. He stood in the near-darkness for a few moments and scanned the front of the store for surveillance cameras. Though there were plenty of them inside, little mirrored bubbles jutting from the ceiling, out here he saw none.
    Jack pulled the cap down close to his eyebrows, then walked to the entrance and posted himself beside it. To each passerby he gave his rehearsed and, he hoped, well-acted spiel: He was looking for his homeless brother, someone said they’d seen him around here, followed by a description ofhis attacker. Most walked past him, either without responding or with some muttered excuse or a flat “No.” Occasionally a shopper would stop, listen for a moment, then sadly shake his or her head and wish him luck.
    At 7:55, a familiar face appeared, one of the regular cashiers, a short early-twenties woman with large black eyes. She’d checked him out a few times but was shy and rarely looked him in the eye.
    “Hi, excuse me,” Jack said. “I’m looking for my brother. He’s missing.”
    “I’m sorry,” she murmured, stepping around Jack and heading for the door. “I need to—”
    “Tall, skinny, maybe wearing a dark hoodie. He’s homeless. We’re worried about him. Please.”
    The cashier slowed, then stopped and turned. She backed farther into the light coming through the front windows, putting some distance between them. A local, he guessed. She gave no sign she recognized him.
    “How tall?” she asked.
    “Six-five or so.”
    The woman hesitated, then said, “Wait. There was a guy. I seen him a few times in the last week. He was panhandling, asking for change. I