"Alice, everything set?" Jack walked past the front entrance carrying a motel sign.
"All done. I planted fake reviews on several travel sites, dating back ten years. No one's going to suspect a thing," Alice replied, closing her laptop and quickly stepping out of the room.
Jack handed the weathered sign to Reacher, who was standing on a ladder. Jubal, perched even higher, helped the two of them mount the neon "Hailey's Inn" sign onto the exterior wall.
To avoid civilian casualties and throw off Langston's suspicion, they had decided to disguise the Most Wanted Task Force's building as a run-down roadside motel.
The area was isolated, with no other buildings nearby—no risk of harming civilians in a firefight, and no need to deploy police for crowd control.
In the age of information, all Alice had to do was register a fake address on a few mapping apps and flood the listings with terrible reviews. That way, Langston would buy into the illusion, and no real tourists would show up by accident.
The task force base had always operated in secrecy—no one outside knew it was an FBI facility.
They painted parking lines on the large front lot, strung up temporary fairy lights, and added the half-broken neon sign. The backyard, which Jack had turned into a vegetable garden, added to the motel's authenticity in a strange, convincing way.
"All good?" Aubrey, freshly returned from Colorado, called up from below.
"Okay, give it a try," Jubal shouted back.
As Aubrey flipped the switch, the lights came on. The neon sign buzzed, a few letters flickered, some just the right amount of broken.
"Perfect," Danny said with a satisfied nod from a distance.
Hannah and JJ stepped out from inside. Their faces still had smudges of paint from their work setting up a fake motel front desk, putting up partitions to separate the dining area from Jack's large kitchen, and graffitiing the stairwell wall to look like a rundown public space.
Marlo Burns and her daughter followed behind. The girl was around twelve or thirteen, her chubby cheeks still holding traces of baby fat.
"Hey, sweetheart. Everything will be fine. I'll be there soon, I promise," Marlo said, kissing her daughter's cheek before turning with hope in her eyes toward Danny.
Just then, an unmarked NYPD car pulled into the freshly painted lot. Three people got out—Jack recognized two of them: Danny's younger brother James Reagan and his partner Jenny.
The third was a stocky, pale-skinned bald man with a hard face—Jack didn't know him, but it was obvious he was also a cop.
"This is Gaetano Rasso," Danny introduced. "These two are my brother and his partner Jenny. The three of them will escort your daughter to my father's house. It's probably the safest place in all of New York."
Danny knelt in front of the girl and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. "They've got good internet there too. My sister's daughter is a little older than you—they'll take good care of you."
Watching the emotional farewell between mother and daughter, Reacher leaned toward Jack and muttered, "The NYPD Commissioner's home? Don't you think that's a bit much?"
"You could look at it as Commissioner Reagan trying to redeem the NYPD's reputation in your eyes," Jack replied. "After all, Langston and his men were once part of it."
As the unmarked car pulled away, Jack nodded toward Danny. "What's Gaetano Rasso's story?"
Danny gave a long-suffering sigh. "His father was also NYPD—an honest cop who was killed in a gang shootout over thirty years ago.
Back then, the department was a mess. Rasso's father refused to take dirty money and was ostracized. He died without even his partner by his side.
Just before coming here, Rasso personally arrested his own superior officer—one of the guys who tipped Langston off about your location. Internal Affairs found $600,000 in cash at his house."
"Sounds like working for Langston paid way better than the department," O'Donnell joked as he walked over.
"Yeah, this was never an easy job," Danny shrugged. "And hey, your Army pensions aren't much better—you guys have to moonlight as private eyes to pay the bills."
Having said that, the ex-Marine—who had nothing but pride and sacrifice to show for his years of service—whistled and walked off, leaving the ex-Army MPs to glare daggers at him.
Compared to the idle U.S. Army, Marines got the worst gear, took the hardest hits, but had far more real combat experience. That left honor and sacrifice as their last badge of pride.
"No matter how mad you get, don't wreck this building—or you'll be working for me for the rest of your life," Jack called out over his shoulder as he went to prep his gear.
——
"You guys really think Langston's people won't wait until tomorrow? That they'll come to this motel tonight to kill Marlo Burns?" Aubrey asked, lying prone next to Jack as a spotter.
Earlier, Marlo had called Langston from a landline and arranged to meet him in Central Park the following day at noon.
The number she used was listed in the NYPD database as belonging to a rundown motel called "Hailey's Inn"—the very disguise they'd just set up at the task force base.
Now, Jack lay under camo netting on a rooftop 300–400 meters away, peering through the night vision scope of a Barrett M82A1, scanning the traffic around the area.
Reacher was with his team on the second floor of the building. Jubal, in disguise, was slumped at the front desk pretending to be asleep. The rest of the task force was fully armed and positioned nearby in ambush.
Whether or not Langston himself showed up, the job of taking down the attackers belonged to Reacher and his team. The FBI was there only as backup.
"Central Park's too crowded during the day. They wouldn't risk it unless absolutely necessary. And that bald cop—Gaetano Rasso—his boss told Langston about this place just before being arrested. Langston and his crew will come," Jack said confidently.
Marlo's phone script had been carefully crafted with Reacher to lure Langston out.
Just before 11 p.m., a black sedan silently pulled into the lot in front of "Hailey's Inn." Four heavyset men stepped out, including the driver, their jackets bulging ominously.
With practiced coordination, two of them waited outside while the other two entered the front door.
Aubrey watched through binoculars and muttered, "These guys look seasoned. I'd bet money they're ex-cops."
Inside the fake motel, Jubal—pretending to sleep behind the desk—was just "woken up." Seeing two gun barrels pointed at him, he immediately snapped into character.
"These two—mother and daughter—are they staying here?" a white man in his forties asked, flashing a photo.
"Upstairs. First room. Please, don't kill me," Jubal said in a panicked voice. Seeing their guns had no suppressors, he relaxed slightly and quietly let go of the shotgun trigger hidden beneath the counter, raising his hands and pleading with a tear-streaked expression.
______
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