In the forest, the killers try to kill Reacher and Tamara in Reacher Season 4 episode 7. But Springfield kills the killers. Reacher realizes that Sampson knew who was in that photo. Springfield tells Reacher that the guy knew it after he called him. He did some checking with old sources, figured out it was Ahlquist. So he sent Springfield here to talk to him.
Springfield showed up at Ahlquist’s building to see these guys load Reacher and Tamara into a van, so he followed. Springfield gets the keys from the killer’s body. Reacher asks Springfield to unlock them. He wants to have a talk with Ahlquist.
Shaun drives the car into an alley. He takes a gun. He takes Jacob out of the car. He unlocks him. He asks him to face him. Jacob faces Shaun. But Shaun asks Jacob to flee. Jacob thought Shaun was gonna kill him. Shaun asks Jacob what kind of cop he thinks he is? Jacob doesn’t know. Shaun says he’s the kind who almost turned the car around three times to actually bring Jacob in.
Jacob asks Shaun why didn’t he? Shaun says because of the guy whose ear Reacher ripped off. They thought he was on the job. Turns out, no one could find him in the system. Next thing they know, these CIA come to take him away, “tell them it never happened.” Real men in black style. And that one-eared guy, he had a tranquilizer gun and a key to Reacher’s cell.
Shaun asks Jacob where’s Ahlquist? Jacob says Dover. Shaun says it’s a little out of his jurisdiction, but if she needs help in Philly, tell her to call him. He’ll do what he can. He asks Jacob did he know how Tamara end up working with a clock-puncher like him? By insisting on doing the right thing. She’s a pain, but she’s the most stand-up police he knows. And he knew all that stuff they were saying about her on the news was garbage.
Jacob worries that Shaun is gonna get in trouble for this. Shaun says not if he can help it. He gives the gun to Jacob. He asks him to hit his forehead with the gun. The story will be he faked a seizure, he checked on him, he attacked, he headbutted him, knocked him loopy and then escaped. He got 15 years on him. They’ll believe that he got the jump on his old bone.
Jacob says maybe he also ran off with the gun as well. Shaun goes against it. He’s gonna be bad lucky enough over this without losing his piece. Jacob hits Shaun’s forehead. Shaun praises Jacob. Jacob asks Shaun to do him a favor. Check in on Russell Plum. GSW admitted to Penn Presby. Tell him he’s sorry he left him at the library. Jacob doesn’t know how to thank Shaun. Shaun asks the guy to leave. They’re not friends now. They’re not having a moment here. Jacob runs away.
Ahlquist drives on the road. He calls his man. He asks him if he completes his task. His car is hit by the van. Reacher gets off the van. He opens the car door. He tells Ahlquist that they never got to finish their talk.
Reacher takes Ahlquist out of the car. Ahlquist asks Reacher how did he find him? Reacher says he saw how many hard drives Ahlquist had to shred, so he waited outside his office till he was done and tailed him. Ahlquist tells Reacher that he can get him money. But Reacher says he wants answers. What’s in that photograph that’s so important he and everyone else are willing to kill for it? Remember how he said he was gonna make him talk?
Reacher tries to break Ahlquist’s fingers. Ahlquist is afraid of it. He tells Reacher that he’ll tell him anything he wants to know. The photograph contains the formula for a chemical weapon of mass destruction. Tamara says there’s no formula in the photograph. He says it’s there. She just cannot see it. After the ’95 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, the U.S. figured that chemical weapons would be the next WMD of choice for the world’s worst terrorists, so the CIA secretly contracted DARPA.
He was working there, an assistant, just out of grad school. They assigned him to a project, Operation Mongoose. They were supposed to create chemical weapons and then reverse engineer them to find antidotes and countermeasures. Springfield says Geneva Protocol and Chemical Weapons Convention outlawed them. Ahlquist says it was all off the books. An Indonesian Army general named Putra was trying to get the U.S. Special Forces to come and train his men for a while.
Now, Putra was sketchy, but Washington saw an opportunity to cut a deal. In exchange for training, Putra would allow the CIA to build a secret chemical weapons lab in the rainforest. Tamara asks Ahlquist did John Sampson know about this? He says no. They were told to keep it from Sampson and the guys under him. Sampson was a Boy Scout. If he’d known they were breaking international law, he’d have blown the whistle. He thought they were there doing malaria research.
The only Delta guy who knew what they were really doing was their commanding officer, Cahill. He helped them cover it up. Reacher figures that’s why Cahill was on the subway that night. Still trying to bury all this. When the clerk Merrick stole the Delta files, she must have tripped some alarm in the system. The Department of Defense sent some of their guys to follow her see where she was taking the stolen info. They picked up her trail a few blocks from work. They figured it was low-level stuff, since it was from Indonesia in ’98. They had no idea what that photo could unleash.
They called Sampson’s office as a courtesy. It was late. Cahill was the only one there. He knew, if those files were being targeted, there must haven been something incriminating in it. It didn’t take him long to realize what it was. He caught up with the Feds tailing Merrick, he cut them off, made them get into a fender bender on the highway so they lost her scent. Feds never saw him, and he kept on Anna’s tail. He was Delta. That kind of stuff was in his wheelhouse. He tracked her all the way to the subway. He was gonna take the drive from her as soon as he got her alone. Then everything went to hell.
Reacher figures when the cops came, Cahill slipped out and called to warn Ahlquist. Ahlquist says Cahill made two calls. One to him and one to Foster, the CIA officer who ran Operation Mongoose. Reacher knows Foster. He ripped his ear off. Tamara says calling Foster makes sense. Because Cahill wanted whatever was on that drive to never see the light of day, and Cahill figured that the CIA gave them the best chance of doing that quietly.
But why he called Ahlquist? Like he said, he was just an assistant. Ahlquist confesses that Cahill called because he was using what they learned in the jungle, and Cahill knew that. Tamara asks Ahlquist how did Cahill know? He says after he made billions off pesticides, when his company grew, his name was in the press a lot and Cahill recognized him from Indonesia. He reached out years ago, worried that he was gonna do something to expose Operation Mongoose. He told him that would be the last thing he’d let happen. What they created in that illegal operation was the basis for his whole business.
If that comes out, they’re all ruined. Tamara figures that’s why Ahlquist hired the mercenaries. He wanted to make sure the job got done. But if they had the same goal as the CIA. Suppress the drive. Why kill the CIA operatives in D.C.? He says his company’s done business in some of the world’s most dangerous places, and so they’ve had to hire some of the world’s most dangerous people. Sometimes, they’ve gone too far. He never wanted them to kill anyone. Except maybe those two women.
Springfield asks Ahlquist he knows who they really are? Ahlquist nods. his guys found out through some of their sources. The older one, who calls herself “Amisha,” used to be in Putra’s special forces unit. Worshiped him, from what he understands. The younger one, Lila, is her acolyte. Both extremely dangerous. He could call them international criminal opportunists. They usually work for hire, except, in this case, they saw an opportunity to make a lot of money and they took it.
Tamara says they’re back to the photo. Ahlquist reveals Sampson was documenting the training for Washington. Ahlquist guesses they’d gotten careless, but they were doing things that none of the soldiers there understood anyway. They looked down on them, thought they weren’t very smart. They probably should have been better with security.
Cahill would have destroyed the photo after, but when it was developed, he saw that the whiteboard with their formula on it was in the background, out of focus. And So, the photo, one of countless others, just became part of the official documentation of their time down there. Any sensitive information became completely illegible. Reacher asks Ahlquist illegible in the ’90s. Ahlquist says yes. Newly developed AI, when applied to image deconvolution can, essentially, digitally refocus the lens.
Springfield figures what was unclear yesterday is clear today. Tamara says let’s say they have the formula now. How hard is this stuff to make? Ahlquist says it’s impossible without the root biotoxin. Abrin. Seventy times more lethal than ricin. It’s hard to get potent samples in American, it’s relatively common in the Indonesian rainforests. They derived it from a plant called the rosary pea. Reacher realizes that something bad is going to happen. Because Lila has rosary peas. He saw them.
It flashes back. Lila tells Reacher that her mother gave her this bracelet when she was 16. Two seeds in each box. They always together.
At present, Reacher asks Ahlquist if the formula was secret, how did Lila and Amisha know about the seeds before they got the photo? Ahlquist says they used Putra’s soldiers to gather them, so he guesses they must haven known the seeds were somehow integral. Tamara thinks that was stupid. He says they were free labor. Reacher mentions they have the seeds. He asks Ahlquist what do they need to make the weapon? Ahlquist says chemicals available at any supply shop. But it’s how they process them with the seeds that makes it so lethal. Springfield figures they could be making this stuff right now. Ahlquist guesses they could have already made it.
In the warehouse, Lila lets the guy taste the toxins. He’s dead. In the countryside, Springfield says toxins are extremely effective when deployed against a single target. He mentions Ahlquist said that he was researching weapons that could be used in mass attacks. No one’s ever figured out how to effectively deliver chemical toxins over a widespread outdoor area. Ahlquist says they did. When aerosolized, this stuff hangs in the air like a fog, and it’s light enough to move on air currents.
Reacher figures it spreads quickly. Ahlquist tells Reacher that he sends a suicide bomber with that stuff trapped to him into Times Square, he’ll kill everyone within a ten-block radius. Most in seconds. Tamara mentions he said the whole project was meant to keep thing like this from happening. He says they were trying to create their worst case scenario, the thing they feared the most, and then work backwards to find a way to neutralize it. Reacher figures there’s an antidote. Ahlquist says they never got that far. Project was scrapped when Putra somehow found out what they were doing down there, and he stole the weapon. Slaughtered an entire village because its leaders allied with Putra’s political enemies. The U.S. covered it all up. It was a bad look, even if it wasn’t their intention.
Tamara guesses Lila and Amisha are gonna sell it to God-knows-who. Ahlquist claims that their goal was defense. It wasn’t offense. He was postgrad. He was working off student loans. He was just doing what he was told. Reacher points out that Ahlquist used the formula to make himself rich. Ahlquist says he modified it. His pesticides are only deadly on bollworms. He prevent famine. People eat because of him. Reacher tells Ahlquist that people died because of him. He protecting his own and his bank account.
Ahlquist asks Reacher what did they lose? A government clerk? A football player? A few mid-level CIA agents? Saving the world comes with costs. Tamara asks Reacher what do they do with the jerk? Even if they get the drive from Lila and Amisha, they can still track him down and get the recipe from him. Ahlquist says he’s not gonna tell them anything.
Reacher mentions Ahlquist spilled his guts after a few broken fingers. He has seen what these women do to people. He’ll talk. Reacher kills Ahlquist. Springfield reminds Reacher that he’s the head of security for a man who might be the next president of the United States of American. He cannot do something like that in front of him. Reacher says saving the world comes with costs. Tamara thinks what he did is right.
In the warehouse, Lila gives her bracelet to the guy. She asks him to make enough to kill thousands. In the evening, Jacob walks alone the street. He encounters two cops. He worries that he will be caught. He gets a call from someone. He runs into the alley to pick up the phone.
Reacher and Tamara are in the van. Tamara gets a call from Jacob. She asks him about Russell. He doesn’t know. The cops at the hospital ID’d him, and he had to run. Last time he saw the guy, he didn’t look good. She asks him is he fine? He says no. He just found out Lila’s auctioning off the drive on the dark web at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. Russell put those feelers out to his contacts on some message board looking for info on the drive.
Jacob has got Russell’s phone, and one of his journalist buddies got back to him. This guy found an auction notice on the dark web, and from the chatter he picked up, it looks like most of the world’s leading jerks will be bidding. So, any luck finding out exactly what’s for sale? Reacher figures the formula for a chemical WMD. Jacob tells Reacher and Tamara that might be worse than they think. The auction notice mentions a proof of concept demonstration.
And cops found chemistry supplies in that old restaurant. Reacher thinks it makes sense. He doesn’t spend billions on a weapon unless he knows it’ll deliver. Tamara figures they must’ve already made the stuff if they set the auction. That’s why they forced Anna to delete the file after she stole it. If there’s only one copy of the formula, that makes it even more valuable. If the auction’s tomorrow, they’re gonna kill people tonight to prove it works.
Jacob wonders cannot they just delay the auction? Reacher says not if some of the buyers made it clear they don’t want it delayed. And the last thing Lila and Amisha need right now is to look weak. They promised a sale, they’ll deliver a sale. They just didn’t expect Jacob’s sister to fubar their whole operation. He asks Tamara to search online, see if there’s anything going on in Philly that’ll make a suitable target.
Jacob asks Reacher how does he know the attack will be here? Reacher says it’s the sixth largest city in America. They’ll rack up a huge death toll. And it’s where they were gonna meet Anna. They had the chemistry equipment standing by. It’s much less risky to make a weapon and use it locally than it’s to transport something so deadly somewhere else. Especially now that the cops, them, the mercs and the CIA are all looking for them. They’ll keep their exposure to a minimum. They’ll make it in Philly and they’ll set it off in Philly.
Tamara asks Reacher what the hell is she looking for? He says something outdoors that shows how well the poison works in open air. Jacob says Citizens Bank Park? Reacher says no. He caught the last Phillies game before a road trip. Tamara says The Philadelphia Orchestra Plays Movie Scores at the Mann Center. Outdoor venue, seats 14,000. Nothing else going on tonight. He says that’s the one. She’ll call it in. He mentions they’re wanted by the Feds and Philly PD. Who’s gonna believe them?
Jacob remembers Shaun. He had him in custody and he let him go. Tamara asks Jacob why the hell’d he do that? He tells her that because of her. He’ll listen if she calls him. He asks her and Reacher to come pick him up.
At the Mann Center, the cops are standing by. Tamara says it’s pretty chilly for a summer night. Looks like a storm’s coming. Jacob learns that Amisha knew the whiteboard formula was out of focus because she took the photo. And when technology advanced enough, she realized that she could now make the formula legible. Reacher says but the photo was stored in the old files at Delta Force HQ in Fort Liberty, North Carolina. Breaking in would be impossible. But when Congress decides to digitize old government files, Amisha saw her chance. They moved the files off base to a government facility that isn’t as secure. Amisha does her research, figures out which clerk has weaknesses they could exploit. Like a single mother with a son. A million things had to fall into place for Jacob to lose them.
Shaun arrives. He complains that this was a bust. Cops and dogs in every corner of this place. They searched everyone who went in, delayed the show. Reacher tells Shaun that they didn’t intend to do that. Shaun mentions what happened to Ahlquist. He saw the news. Ahlquist died in an accident this afternoon. Thrown from his car, broke his neck. He asks Reacher if he did it. Reacher says he hits a deer.
Jacob asks Shaun did he go to the hospital to see Russell? Shaun says Russell is still in surgery. He’ll check on his way home. He asks the three to leave before they’re recognized. He drives away.
Tamara doesn’t understand it. This checked all the boxes. Outdoors, huge crowd, in Philly. Jacob reminds Reacher that they should go. There’s gonna be a ton of traffic coming through here soon. Reacher realizes that they’re gonna attack the highway. Tamara asks him based on what? He says auction’s at 10:00 a.m. They aren’t hitting here, so what’s their next best chance at killing thousands outdoors? Morning rush hour. Bad traffic starts around 7:30. Get people bidding on their weapons at the same time 24-hour news channels are broadcasting live coverage of the death they can cause.
Jacob asks Reacher how do they attack a highway? Tamara says retrofit a refrigerated truck so the exhaust system shoots toxins out the back. Travels right into the vent system of every car packed in bumper-to-bumper for miles. Reacher says rent a crop duster and buzz the interstate. what’s around here? 95? Tamara says 95, Roosevelt Boulevard, the Schuylkill. Everything’s jammed in the morning. Every car will become a coffin. Jacob wonders who’s gonna listen to them? They just used up their goodwill with the only cop in the city who would, and they cannot shut down interstates on their own. Reacher says the federal government might be able to.
At the dinner, Reacher calls Sampson. Sampson heard what Reacher did. He tells him that he doesn’t approve of the way he does business. Reacher says they have reason to believe the toxin Ahlquist told them about is gonna be used on a Philadelphia freeway during rush hour tomorrow morning. The women calling themselves Lila and Amisha Hoth have scheduled a dark web auction of the chemical formula at 10:00 a.m. local time. They want a successful strike before then to drive bidding.
Sampson says he’ll call Homeland. He walks to his wife. He asks him has she seen Springfield? She says the guy headed down to the service entrance a few minutes ago. Security there isn’t answering on the walkie, and he gets angry. Sampson is surprised that no one from security. She guesses security left because the dinner is over. But he thinks it’s not why they’re not answering. He asks her to get back to the hotel. He doesn’t have time to explain it.
Sampson calls Sampson. He tells him that their target is him. He’s at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. Outdoor fundraiser, lots of people. Reacher says not as many as they’d kill during morning rush hour. Why would they attack a smaller charity event? Sampson says because it’s his wife’s charity event. They know he’ll be here. He didn’t tell him this before. Because it wasn’t relevant, but when he said Delta hunted down and took out General Putra, he was the one who pulled the trigger.
The woman who calling herself Amisha saw he do it. She idolized Putra. If she needs to pick a place in Philly to demonstrate her weapon, why not an event that also exacts some revenge? Get paid, get payback. It’s a nice bonus for her. No reason she wouldn’t choose Sampson’s event. Tamara tells Reacher that Penn’s Landing’s not far.
Sampson gets a call from Springfield. Springfield tells his boss that they have a problem. Sampson guesses guard at the service entrance is dead. Springfield says throat slit. Elspeth shows up. Springfield asks Sampson does he want him to send Elspeth home? Sampson says he already did. Springfield says negative. She’s approaching him right now. Sampson asks Springfield to get his wife out of here.
Sampson tells Reacher that they got a murdered security guard here. This is happening now. Jacob says evacuate the venue. Reacher says they see people running out, they’ll trigger the weapon early. Right now they don’t know they know. Their best chance is to neutralize the attack. Tamara asks him how? They don’t even know how they’re gonna aerosol the toxin. He says yes, they do. Ahlquist already told them.
He said a suicide bomber would take out Times Square. Should be more than enough for Penn’s Landing. Jacob thinks Lila and Amisha aren’t gonna sacrifice themselves. They’re in this to get rich, not die. But if they have terrorist contacts to sell the weapons to, maybe they got one of those groups to loan them a zealot. They get proof the toxin works and credit for the attack. Jacob remembers when they got the jump drive from his mailbox, Russell said something about Lila flying in someone from the country of Djibouti.
SEE ALSO: Reacher Season 4 Episode 6 Recap
Sampson asks Jacob did they get a look at the guy? Jacob says no. Reacher tells Sampson that they don’t need a photo. He was Delta. Assume he knows The List? Run it down. Number one: inappropriate clothes. Big, baggy, to hide explosives. Number two: uneven movement because of the weight of the device or due to being drugged. Number three: carrying a bag, a knapsack, briefcase. Number four: clenched fist around the detonation device. Number five: nervous behavior, jumpy. Number six: mumbling to themselves, possibly praying. Number seven: odd breathing patterns. Number eight: only looking straight ahead so he doesn’t have to see who he’s about to kill. Number nine: intense focus. Number ten: walking with directed purpose. Tamara tells Sampson that they’re going to arrive. But he tells her that it’s too late. Because he found the guy.
It flashes back. Amisha and Lila meet the guy in the warehouse. Amisha tells the guy that they cannot thank him enough for his selflessness and will forever be in his debt. At present, Reacher arrives at Penn’s Landing. Sampson rushes to the guy. He jumps into the sea with him. The toxin explodes. Reacher fails to save Sampson. He looks at the sea.