Czytaj książkę: «Cleaning the Gold»

Dear Readers

We’re so thrilled to finally be able to share a short story with you that has been several years in the making!

We’ve been friends for nearly two decades now – and also fans of each other’s writing. Over the years, our conversations have often turned to the topic of what our series characters, Jack Reacher and Will Trent, would do if they met in real life. Would Will arrest Reacher for taking out some vigilante justice on a bad guy? Would Reacher break Will’s face or throw him down a well? The challenge was finding a way for them to work together. Both men have strong moral compasses, but they each reach true north in very different ways. Finding a case that would bring them into each other’s orbit was a very long conversation that finally resulted in a plot that we were both excited to work out on the page.

The result is Cleaning the Gold. We started off writing our own chapters separately but as the stories became intertwined things merged, so you won’t necessarily know who wrote what – and we really hope you enjoy it. No matter what, we think Jack and Will had a pretty good time navigating the beginning of a beautiful friendship …

Best wishes,

Karin Slaughter and Lee Child

1

Will Trent sat across from a closed office door listening to mumbled voices discussing the two DUIs and spotty work history on his employment application. The conversation did not seem to be going in his favor. Not good. Will needed this job. Otherwise his real job was screwed.

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The temperature outside had already passed the boiling point. Inside was not much better. His sweat had started to sweat in the dank, 1950s tomb of a government building. The low ceiling sagged even lower. The drywall was swollen from humidity. He watched a bead of perspiration drop from his nose and roll across the floor. A gutter ran down the middle of the linoleum from decades of Army boots trotting up and down the hallway.

Will shifted in the chair. His vertebrae had transformed into zip ties strangling his spinal column. The muscles in his legs were congealing. His body ached for two reasons. The first was from the send-off his girlfriend had given him the night before. And this morning at the aptly named park and ride. The second was because he’d spent the entire one-hour flight from Atlanta to Lexington with his knees punching into the seat in front of him, jammed between a toddler screaming at a paperclip and a flatulent senior citizen.

Only one of those reasons was worth the ache.

From behind the door, a voice bellowed, “I don’t give a good God damn what you think, Dave.”

Colonel Stephanie Lukather, the woman in charge of the United States Bullion Depository. An important command, but what did Will know? Most of his knowledge of the federal government’s gold reserves came courtesy of Wikipedia and Goldfinger.

The facility was adjacent to the Fort Knox Army base, located at the intersection of Bullion Boulevard and Gold Vault Road. The main door was twenty tons of drill and torch-resistant material measuring twenty-one inches thick. Around $350 billion in precious metals was stored inside. The US Mint Police guarded the facility and the US Army guarded them. The vault had been opened for public inspection just once, in September of 1974. Previously, in 1964, Pussy Galore had knocked out the entire base with her Flying Circus and a dirty bomb inside the vault had been disarmed with 0.07 seconds to spare.

The door finally swung open.

Major Dave Baldani gave Will a smirky look.

Will knew that look. It was the way a good guy put a bad guy in his place. He used it a lot in his day job as a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But Will wasn’t at Fort Knox as a cop. He was working undercover as an ex-Army captain who’d fallen down the rabbit hole of stupid decisions after two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

His ID was air-tight unless you could crack the Pentagon’s database. Jack Phineas Wolfe, honorably discharged in 2016. Two DUIs. Community service. Probation. Divorced. No kids. Overdrawn at the bank. Maxed out on his credit cards. Evicted from his last known place of residence. Car repo’d by the bank. Searching for honest work, or as close to honest as he could get.

“Hurry, boys.” Colonel Lukather was early fifties, lean and trim with her long blonde hair pinned up in a military style. She gave an impatient roll of her hand. “I’m waiting for you.”

Will had to duck his head to stand. The drop-ceiling was eighteen inches lower than it should’ve been. The dark paneled walls had buckled with age. Locked filing cabinets lined one side of the room. The colonel’s regulation metal desk was shoved against the other side. There were no windows. The air didn’t move. He could’ve been standing inside of a coffin.

Colonel Lukather pointed up at the low ceiling, explaining, “Brig Gen upstairs wanted a shower in his office. Shit rolls downhill. I don’t need a skylight, Wolfe. Sit.”

Will took one of the chairs across from her. Baldani remained standing about two inches from Will’s shoulder—another good guy/bad guy trick.

Lukather said, “Wolfe, you’ve been in some trouble since you FTA’d.”

Will didn’t hear a question, so he didn’t give an answer.

Lukather rested her hand on his file, waiting for the ensuing silence to wear him down.

Will didn’t wear.

The clock on the wall gave a sharp tock.

Baldani let out a long, smoker’s wheeze of a sigh.

“Dave, looks like we’ve got ourselves a genuine Captain Jack here.” Lukather opened the file and pretended to read the information for the first time. “Stationed in BFE. Fifth in your class at John Wayne School. Stacked up your chest candy in the Sandbox. Earned your Triple Threat. Quite the gung-ho mo-fo. You certainly win the big dick contest in the room.”

Will hadn’t had time to study any Army jargon, so he was clueless except for the last bit, which seemed accurate.

“Then—” A page was turned in the file. Lukather’s finger trailed down Jack Wolfe’s background check. “Two DUIs. Bad divorce. Bad credit. What makes you think I should pay you fifteen dollars an hour and put you up in one of my hotels for the privilege of working on my base for the next few days?”

Will shrugged with one shoulder in the same eat-shit way perps did when he was interrogating them. “Up to you.”

Baldani shifted on his feet, clearly annoyed.

Lukather looked up from the paperwork. Maybe she gave Will credit for honesty, because she didn’t tell him to get the hell out of her office. “Do you know what the job is?”

“Janitorial?” Will shrugged again, solely to piss off Baldani. “The posting mentioned something about cleaning.”

She said, “Not your usual butts and elbows. What do you know about gold?”

Another shrug. “I could use some.”

“All right, shitbrain.” Baldani had reached his limit. “Check the attitude. You’re talking to a full bird colonel.”

Will turned his chin two degrees, ignoring him, but not ignoring him.

Baldani’s fists clenched, which was stupid because the minute he raised his arms, Will could punch the guy’s nutsac into his asshole.

“That’s enough, boys.” Lukather closed Jack Wolfe’s file. The employment decision had been made, but she didn’t choose to share it. Instead, she told Will, “Gold is a naturally occurring chemical element with the atomic number 79. It is classed as a soft metal, so it can easily be scratched or damaged. The oil on your hands can corrode or tarnish the finish, diminishing the value. When handling, it’s recommended that you wear lint-free, cotton gloves. Masks are required because the moisture from your breath or saliva can leave spots that can’t be removed.”

Will waited for the rest of the speech.

“Executive Order 6102, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, outlawed the private ownership of gold coins, bullion and gold certificates, which forced citizens to sell those items to the Federal Reserve. In 1936, the Treasury Department began construction of the Gold Vault, eventually transferring via a heavily armored train convoy the majority of the gold reserves to our facility. We currently have deep-stored in sealed vaults north of 147.3 million troy ounces, primarily in the form of 12.4-kilogram gold bars that range from .900 to .999 purity. The rest of the nation’s reserve is held by West Point and Denver.”

Will raised his eat-shit shoulder again. “And?”

“By order of Congress, the vaults are examined annually by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Eyeballs only. It would take months to check the serial numbers of each individual gold bar against the inventory. Which is what brings us to the here and now, Captain Wolfe. TS/Ultra 42-12 under the 1978 Compartmentalization of Treasury’s Governing Acts requires that each item of gold be manually inspected every ten years. We are at our current ten-year mark in that process, and we find ourselves with days to go and one man down.”

Will retired the shoulder shrug. He rubbed his jaw, trying to tamp down the invisible teenage Will that was jumping around like a meth-head on a pogo stick. He had hoped that the undercover job could take him inside the facility, but this was inside the vaults. With the gold. They were talking Oddjob territory.

He had to get clarification. “You want me to handle the gold?”

“You’re basically a maid,” Baldani said. “You clean the gold. That’s what the Act really stands for. CTG. Cleaning the gold.”

Lukather supplied, “It takes us exactly nine months to get through the full inventory, and I happen to be ahead of schedule right now, which is a very good thing. We work twenty-four-seven, with two teams of six in the daylight hours, two more teams of six from balls to eight. For security reasons, no team gets more than two weeks inside the vaults, and we use outside personnel—preferably former Army—so no one on base gets too familiar with the comings and goings. As I said, we’re damn close to the finish line, but day shift needs another cog in the machine.”

Will considered her words. She hadn’t actually offered him the job, but she’d read him into an ultra-top-secret program, which was as good as. Now would not be the time to appear too eager. “What does it take?”

“Hard work,” Baldani said, managing to convey with his snarly tone that he doubted Will had it in him.

Lukather said, “Dave’s not wrong. The glamor wears off in half an hour. From then on, it’s back-breaking work. You’re obviously still in fighting shape, Wolfe. Lost your yut-cut, but I still see the soldier in you.” She sat back in her chair, openly appraising him. “What’re you, six-four, two-ten?”

Will had been one-eighty-five since high school, but he nodded.

“Dave thinks you’re trouble, but I like a little bit of trouble.” She grinned openly at Will. “Besides, the last guy Dave recommended bugged out when he broke his first sweat. Are you that kind of pussy, Captain?”

Will shook his head. “I don’t have a lot of quit in me.”

“I bet you don’t.” She winked away something in her eye. “I like having a hard-working man underneath me. Are you a hard, working man, Wolfe?”

Will wasn’t a stranger to manual labor. “I get the job done.”

“I bet you do, soldier.” She gave a deep, throaty laugh. “Baldani, slot him in. Hooah.”

Baldani looked like he wanted to argue, but Lukather looked like the kind of woman you couldn’t argue with, and not just because of the birds on her shoulders.

Baldani grumbled, “Let’s go, asswipe.”

The asswipe earned Baldani the pleasure of watching Will take his time getting out of the chair. To rub it in, he made a show of ducking under the low ceiling, mostly because Baldani had a foot of clearance. The major looked up at Will with a specific kind of fury in his eyes. Small Man’s Hysteria, Will’s girlfriend called it, and she should know because she was taller than Baldani, too.

In the hallway, the major didn’t walk so much as toss his boots out in front of him. He was fit for a tubby guy, probably spending equal amounts of time at the bar and the gym. His hair was cut Beetle Bailey tight to his head, which didn’t do a lot to hide the bald spot at the crown. Baldani caught Will’s eyes on the sunburned patch of scalp. He covered it with his hand, pretending to wipe away sweat. He threw a look at Will, then threw it again when Will chuckled.

“Don’t think for a second Lukather’s sweet on you,” Baldani warned. “She’d sit on a door knob if it pinched her nipple.”

Will decided to really fuck with the guy. “Who wouldn’t?”

Outside, the sun sliced into his face like a razor. Will could hear gunfire in the distance. Then an explosion. Then more gunfire, which really made him wish he had a gun and/or something to blow up.

There was a reason Will was a cop.

Baldani climbed into a blue Impala with mud stalactites hanging from the undercarriage. The air conditioning was set on stun by the time Will got in. He experienced that familiar sensation of sweat dripping down his back while his nose ran from the cold. Baldani swung the car around. The radio was already up loud, but Baldani twisted the knob higher because nothing proved you were a badass like blowing out a subwoofer with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Will summoned his Wikipedia knowledge as the car squealed out of the parking lot. The post sprawled over 100,000 acres spanning three different counties. Nearly 13,000 people lived here with thousands more rotating in for training or support. There were hotels and fast-food restaurants and mini-malls and a bowling alley and a medical complex and family housing and K-12 schools. For every 100 females over the age of eighteen, there were 190.3 males, which might explain why Baldani was wound so tight.

Or maybe the guy was just a dick.

Off the main road, Will spotted more office buildings than he could count. The Army’s Human Resources Command called the base home, which Will gathered meant this was where paperwork came to die. Still, he was on an active Army base with a high level of security. Just getting past the main gate had taken two hours of waiting and a great deal of sweating over his various forms of Jack Phineas Wolfe fake-but-not-fake government-issued IDs.

The Gold Vault came into view at the end of a long road. The white granite building was fairly innocuous-looking, a typical art deco structure from the 1930s, the kind of thing that was more beautiful than it should’ve been because the Great Depression had put a chunk of the country out of work and people took their time making things when they had the luxury of a living wage.

Will had seen the vault from the highway and thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It didn’t seem right that something like that was out in the open. Then he’d clocked the razor wire and rows of electric fences and warning signs and Jeeps zigzagging around what was probably ten football fields’ worth of claymore mines. There were no snipers on the roof, but by the time a would-be thief made his way across the wide-open fields surrounding the structure, there could be at least two hundred men aiming down on him.

Baldani pulled to a stop beside a low, one-story security building just inside the open gates. Though open was misleading. The heavy iron gates were swung back, but twelve bollards stuck up from the pavement. Rows of tire spikes jutted into the air like crocodile teeth.

Baldani told Will, “Time to bend over and cough, Wolfie.”

The car door was opened by a guard who looked like bags of Sakrete had been packed inside of his shirt. Will looked around, shielding his eyes from the sun. The last time he’d been surrounded by this many heavily-armed men, he was raiding a warehouse at the Port of Savannah under a joint operation with the FBI, DEA and ATF.

Baldani tossed his keys, cigarette lighter and ID onto a tray that was put through an X-ray machine, but that was the end of his examination. He leaned against the fence and lit a cigarette as he waited for Will to be processed. Getting on to the base had been difficult, but the scrutiny at the vault was like … getting into Fort Knox.

Will counted ten guards with M4s slung around their necks, the big-boy upgrade to the civilian AR-15. Their belts completed the look with Sig Sauer P-320s, pepper spray, Tasers and telescoping metal batons. They moved quickly, efficiently, pushing and pulling Will down a conveyor belt of scrutiny. A burly German Shepherd shoved his nose into Will’s crotch. A teenager with a laptop raided Will’s wallet and scanned various fake IDs into the system. Will’s boots were put through the X-ray machine. He had to take off his belt and hold up his arms as a wand checked him for metal, then he was still patted down and asked to show his Chapstick and keys. Then a second guy patted him down again. Then a third ran a small piece of paper over Will’s hands and stuck it into a machine to check for bomb-making residue.

The Impala was getting a similar once-over. Another guard ran a mirror underneath the car, knocking off the stalactites. A Belgian Shepherd was given free rein. Seats were pulled up. Floor mats and visors were flipped. The glove box was opened. The engine and trunk were checked. Someone ran a Geiger counter around the periphery. Someone else checked for explosive residue.

Will was already sweating from the heat, but a kind of flop-sweat dripped from his scalp when he was told to give a fingerprint scan. Would his Jack Phineas Wolfe cover hold up to this level of interrogation, or would Will end up getting shot where he stood?

Now was not the best time to be asking this question.

None of the guards looked old enough to legally buy alcohol. One of them still had peach fuzz on his chin. Another could’ve passed for Groot going through puberty. They all had the same bored look in their eyes that could easily lead to a trigger being pulled, a baton being slung, and Will being airlifted to the hospital or driven to the morgue.

His heart jackknifed against his ribs when the teenager with the laptop stepped back into Will’s personal space. The kid had Jack Wolfe’s driver’s license, VA health insurance card, social security card and for some reason, his Costco card.

“Look into this.” Another guard was holding up a pair of heavy, black goggles. A springy cord ran from the top and plugged into a tablet.

Will pressed his face into the goggles. He saw nothing but black, then a line crossed his vision that gave him the sensation of eyeballing a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.

The sun blinded him when the goggles were pulled away.

“Retina scan,” Baldani offered. The half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. He looked like he was enjoying Will’s discomfort which, fair enough, was exactly what Will would’ve been doing in his place.

“Sir?” The kid with the laptop was back up in Will’s business. He was looking at Will’s IDs, then looking at Will, then looking at the IDs. His laptop made a beeping sound, but he kept his eyes on Will. Will stared back. He watched sweat roll down the side of the kid’s shaved head. The soldier was eighteen if he was a day, his body cut the way you were cut if every second of your free time was spent either working out or trying to get laid.

The laptop beeped again, but the kid did not look at the screen.

Will broke first. He looked down at the screen. He looked back at the kid. He looked down at the screen.

The kid yelled, “Alpha! Mike! Foxtrot!”

Will waited to get shot in the face or shoved face-down onto the asphalt.

Baldani smirked as he flicked away his cigarette. “Adios. Mother. Fucker.”

The bollards dropped. The spikes were drawn back. The ten guards peeled away. Will took the deepest, most cleansing breath of his life.