Also by Lee Child

KILLING FLOOR

DIE TRYING

TRIPWIRE

THE VISITOR

ECHO BURNING

WITHOUT FAIL

PERSUADER

For more information on Lee Child and his books,
see his website at www.leechild.com

THE ENEMY

LEE CHILD

BANTAM PRESS

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Published 2004 by Bantam Press

a division of Transworld Publishers

The right of Lee Child to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book

are fictitious, and any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs 0593 051823 (cased)

0593 05202! (tpb)

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Dedicated to the memory of Addle King

THE ENEMY

ONE

S SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK. MAYBE THOSE WERE KEN Kramer's last words, like a final explosion of panic in his
mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the
abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he
knew it. He was where he shouldn't have been, with someone
he shouldn't have been with, carrying something he should
have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He
was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was
probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest
betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became
instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right.

Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There
are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and
clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They
predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all.
They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms
mean nothing to us. You just drop dead, is what they should say.
Ken Kramer certainly did. He just dropped dead, and he took
his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly
killed me too.

I waited.

It moved. It jumped ahead six degrees. Its motion was
mechanical and damped and precise. It bounced once and

quivered a little and came to rest.

A minute.

One down, one to go.

Sixty more seconds.

I kept on watching. The clock stayed still for a long, long
time. Then the hand jumped again. Another six degrees,
another minute, straight-up midnight, and 1989 was 1990.

I pushed my chair back and stood up behind the desk. The
phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy
new year. But it wasn't. It was a civilian cop calling because he
had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off' post.

'I need the Military Police duty officer,' he said.
I sat down again, behind the desk.
'You got him,' I said.

%Ve've got one of yours, dead.'

'One of mine?'

'A soldier,' he said.
'Where?'
'Motel, in town.'
'Dead how?'! asked.

'Heart attack, most likely,' the guy said.

I paused. Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the

desk, from December 31st to January 1st.
'Nothing suspicious?' I said.
'Don't see anything.'

'You seen heart attacks before?'

'Lots of them.'

'OK,' I said. 'Call post headquarters.' I gave him the number.
'Happy New Year,' I said.

'You don't need to come out?' he said.

k l0

arc as representanve o me general ,rnencan popmanon as you
can get. Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000
population per year, and in the absence of sustained combat
soldiers don't die any faster or slower than regular people. On
the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at
large, but they smoke more and drink more and eat worse and
stress harder and do all kinds of dangerous things in training.
So their life expectancy comes out about average. They die
at the same speed as everyone else. Do the math with the
death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two
dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents,
suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver
failure, kidney failure. Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas.
So I didn't need to go out. I'm a cop, not a mortician.

The clock moved. The hand jumped and bounced and settled.
Three minutes past midnight. The phone rang again. It was
someone calling to wish me a happy new year. It was the

sergeant in the office outside of mine.

'Happy New Year,' she said to me.

'You too,' I said. 'You couldn't stand up and put your head in
the door?'

'You couldn't put yours out the door?'
'I was on the phone.'
'Who was it?'

'Nobody,' I said. 'Just some grunt didn't make it to the new
decade.'

'You want coffee?'

'Sure,' I said. %Vhy not?'

I put the phone down again. At that point I had been in more
than six years, and army coffee was one of the things that made
me happy to stay in. It was the best in the world, no question.
So were the sergeants. This one was a mountain woman from
north Georgia. I had known her two days. She lived off post in a
trailer park somewhere in the North Carolina badlands. She
had a baby son. She had told me all about him. I had heard

because she brought me coffee. They don't like you, they don't
bring you coffee. They knife you in the back instead. My door
opened and she came in, carrying two mugs, one for her and
one for me.

'Happy New Year,' I said again.

She put the coffee down on my desk, both mugs.
'Will it be?' she said.
'Don't see why not,' I said.

'The Berlin Wall is halfway down. They showed it on the

television. They were having a big party out there.'

'I'm glad someone was, somewhere.'

'Lots of people. Big crowds. All singing and dancing.'

'I didn't see the news.'

'This all was six hours ago. The time difference.'
'They're probably still at it.'
'They had sledgehammers.'

'They're allowed. Their half is a free city. We spent forty-five
years keeping it that way.'

'Pretty soon we won't have an enemy any more.'

I tried the coffee. Hot, black, the best in the world.

%Ve won,' I said. 'Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?'
'Not if you depend on Uncle Sam's paycheck.'

She was dressed like me in standard woodland camouflage
battledress uniform. Her sleeves were neatly rolled. Her MP
brassard was exactly horizontal. I figured she had it safety
pinned in back where nobody could see. Her boots were
gleaming.

'You got any desert camos?' I asked her.

'Never been to the desert,' she said.

'They changed the pattern. They put big brown splotches on
it. Five years' research. Infantry guys are calling it chocolate
chip. It's not a good pattern. They'll have to change it back. But

it'll take them another five years to figure that out.'

'So?'

'If it takes them five years to revise a camo pattern, your kid
will be through college before they figure out force reduction.
So don't worry about it.'

'I never met him.'

She said nothing.

'The army hates change,' I said. 'And we'll always have
enemies.'

She said nothing. My phone rang again. She leaned forward
and answered it for me. Listened for about eleven seconds and
handed me the receiver.

'Colonel Garber, sir,' she said. 'He's in D.C.'

She took her mug and left the room. Colonel Garber was
ultimately my boss, and although he was a pleasant human
being it was unlikely he was calling eight minutes into New
Year's Day simply to be social. That wasn't his style. Some
brass does that stuff. They come over all cheery on the big
holidays, like they're really just one of the boys. But Leon
Garber wouldn't have dreamed of trying that, with anyone, and
least of all with me. Even if he had known I was going to be
there.

'Reacher here,' I said.

There was a long pause.

'I thought you were in Panama,' he said.

'I got orders,' I said.

'From Panama to Fort Bird? Why?'
'Not my place to ask.'
'When was this?'
'Two days ago.'

'That's a kick in the teeth,' he said. 'Isn't it?'

'Is it?'

'Panama was probably more exciting.'

'It was OK,'I said.

'And they got you working duty officer on New Year's Eve
already?'

'I volunteered,' I said. 'I'm trying to make people like me.'
'That's a hopeless task,' he said.

'A sergeant just brought me coffee.'

He paused. 'Someone just call you about a dead soldier in a
motel?'

'Eight minutes ago,' I said. 'I shuffled it off to headquarters.'

'And they shuffled it off to someone else and I just got pulled

out of a party to hear all about it.'

'Why?'

'Because the dead soldier in question is a two-star general.'

The phone went quiet.

'I didn't think to ask,' I said.

The phone stayed quiet.

'Generals are mortal,' I said. 'Same as anyone else.'

No reply.

'There was nothing suspicious,' I said. 'He croaked, is all.

Heart attack. Probably had gout. I didn't see a reason to get

excited.'

'It's a question of dignity,' Garber said. 'We can't leave a

two-star lying around belly-up in public without reacting. We

need a presence.'

'And that would be me?'

'I'd prefer someone else. But you're probably the highest

ranking sober MP in the world tonight. So yes, it would be you.'

'It'll take me an hour to get there.'

'He's not going anywhere. He's dead. And they haven't found

a sober medical examiner yet.'

'OK,' I said.

'Be respectful,' he said.

'OK,' I said again.

'Be polite,' he said. 'Off post, we're in their hands. It's a

civilian jurisdiction.'

Tm familiar with civilians,' I said. 'I met one, once.'

'But control the situation,' he said. 'You know, if it needs
controlling.'

'He probably died in bed,' I said. 'Like people do.'
'Call me,' he said. 'If you need to.'
%Vas it a good party?'

'Excellent. My daughter is visiting.'

He clicked off and I called the civilian dispatcher back and

got the name and the address of the motel. Then I left my coffee
on my desk and told my sergeant what was up and headed back
to my quarters to change. I figured a presence required Class A
greens, not woodland-pattern BDUs.

I took a Humvee from the MP motor pool and was logged out
through the main gate. I found the motel inside fifty minutes. It
was thirty miles due north of Fort Bird through dark undistinguished
North Carolina countryside that was equal parts
stip malls and scrubby forest and what I figured were dormant
sweet potato fields. It was all new to me. I had never served
there before. The roads were very quiet. Everyone was still
inside, partying. I hoped I would be back at Bird before they all
came out and started driving home. Although I really liked the
Humvee's chances, head-on against a civilian ride.

The motel was part of a knot of low commercial structures
clustered in the darkness near a big highway interchange.
There was a truck stop as a centrepiece. It had a greasy spoon
that was open on the holidays and a gas station big enough to
take eighteen-wheelers. There was a no-name cinder block
lounge bar with lots of neon and no windows. It had an Exotic
Dancers sign lit up in pink and a parking lot the size of a football
field. There were diesel spills and rainbow puddles all over it. I
could hear loud music coming out of the bar. There were cars
parked three-deep all around it. The whole area was glowing
sulphurous yellow from the street lights. The night air was
cold and there was fog drifting in layers. The motel itself
was directly across the street from the gas station. It was a
run-down swaybacked affair about twenty rooms long. It had
a lot of peeling paint. It looked empty. There was an office at
the left-hand end with a token vehicle porch and a buzzing
Coke machine.

First question: why would a two-star general use a place like
this? I was pretty sure there wouldn't have been a DoD inquiry
if he had checked into a Holiday Inn.

There were two town police cruisers parked at careless
angles outside the motel's last-but-one room. There was a small
plain sedan sandwiched between them. It was cold and misted
over. It was a base-model Ford, red, four cylinder. It had skinny
tyres and plastic hubcaps. A rental, for sure. I put the Humvee
next to the right-hand police cruiser and slid out into the chill. I
heard the music from across the street, louder. The last-but-one
room's lights were off and its door was open. I figured the cops
were trying to keep the interior temperature low. Trying to stop

the old guy from getting too ripe. I was anxious to take a look at
him. I was pretty sure I had never seen a dead general before.

Three cops stayed in their cars and one got out to meet me.
He was wearing tan uniform pants and a short leather jacket
zipped to his chin. No hat. The jacket had badges pinned to it
that told me his name was Stockton and his rank was deputy
chief. I didn't know him. I had never served there before. He
was grey, about fifty. He was medium height and a little soft and
heavy but the way he was reading the badges on my coat told

me he was probably a veteran, like a lot of cops are.

'Major,' he said, as a greeting.

I nodded. A veteran, for sure. A major gets a little gold
coloured oak leaf on the epaulette, one inch across, one on each
side. This guy was looking upward and sideways at mine, which
wasn't the clearest angle of view. But he knew what they were.
So he was familiar with rank designations. And I recognized his
voice. He was the guy who had called me, at five seconds past
midnight.

'I'm Rick Stockton,' he said. 'Deputy Chief.'

He was calm. He had seen heart attacks before.
Tm Jack Reacher,' I said. 'MP duty officer tonight.'
He recognized my voice in turn. Smiled.
'You decided to come out,' he said. 'After all.'
'You didn't tell me the DOA was a two-star.'
'Well, he is.'

'I've never seen a dead general,' I said.

'Not many people have,' he said, and the way he said it made

me think he had been an enlisted man.

'Army?' I asked.

'Marine Corps,' he said. 'First sergeant.'

'My old man was a Marine,' I said. I always make that point,
talking to Marines. It gives me some kind of genetic legitimacy.
Stops them from thinking of me as a pure army dogface. But I
keep it vague. I don't tell them my old man had made captain.

Enlisted men and officers don't automatically see eye to eye.
'Humvee,' he said.

He was looking at my ride.

'You like it?' he asked.

I nodded. Humvee was everyone's best attempt at saying

HMMWV, which stands tot Htgi¢ IVloOtltty JVlUlttpurpose vvneetea
Vehicle, which about says it all. Like the army generally, what
you're told is what you get.

'It works as advertised,' I said.

'Kind of wide,' he said. 'I wouldn't like to drive it in a city.'

'You'd have tanks in front of you,' I said. 'They'd be clearing
the way. I think that would be the basic plan.'

The music from the bar thudded on. Stockton said nothing.
'Let's look at the dead guy,' I said to him.

He led the way inside. Flicked a switch that lit up the interior
hallway. Then another that lit up the whole room. I saw a
standard motel layout. A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the
left and a bathroom on the right. Then a twelve-by-twenty
rectangle with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet,
and a queen bed the same depth as the bathroom. Low ceiling.
A wide window at the far end, draped, with an integrated
heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it. Most of
the things in the room were tired and shabby and coloured

brown. The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable.
There was a dead man on the bed.

He was naked, face down. He was white, maybe pushing
sixty, quite tall. He was built like a fading pro athlete. Like a
coach. He still had decent muscle, but he was growing love
handles the way old guys do, however fit they are. He had pale
hairless legs. He had old scars. He had wiry grey hair buzzed
close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of
his neck. He was a type. Any hundred people could have looked

at him and all hundred would have said army officer, for sure.
'He was found like this?' I asked.
'Yes,' Stockton said.

Second question: how? A guy takes a room for the night, he
expects privacy until the maid comes in the next morning, at
the very least.

'How?' I said.

'How what?'

'How. was he found? Did he call nine one one?'

'No.'

'So how?'

'You'll see.'

I paused. I didn't see anything yet.
'Did you roll him over?' I said.
'Yes. Then we rolled him back.'
'Mind if I take a look?'
'Be my guest.'

I stepped over next to the bed and slipped my left hand under
the dead guy's armpit and rolled him over. He was cold and a
little stiff. Rigor was just setting in. I got him settled flat on
his back and saw four things. First, his skin had a distinctive
grey pallor. Second, shock and pain were frozen on his face.
Third, he had grabbed his left arm with his right hand, up
near the bicep. And fourth, he was wearing a condom. His
blood pressure had collapsed long ago and his erection had
disappeared and the condom was hanging off, mostly empty,
like a translucent flap of pale skin. He had died before reaching
orgasm. That was clear.

'Heart attack,' Stockton said, behind me.

I nodded. The grey skin was a good indicator. So was the
evidence of shock and surprise and sudden pain in his upper
left arm.

'Massive,'! said.

'But before or after penetration?' Stockton said, with a smile
in his voice.

I looked at the pillow area. The bed was still completely
made. The dead guy was on top of the counterpane and the
counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a
head-shaped dent, and there were rucks where elbows and
heels had scrabbled and pushed lower down.

'She was underneath him when it happened,' I said. 'That's

for sure. She had to wrestle her way out.'

'Hell of a way for a man to go.'

I turned around. 'I can think of worse ways.'
Stockton just smiled at me.
vVhat?' I said.
He didn't answer.

'No sign of the woman?' I said.

'Hide nor hair,' he said. 'She ran for it.'
'The desk guy see her?'
Stockton just smiled again.

I looked at him. Then I understood. A low-rent dive near a
highway interchange with a truck stop and a strip bar, thirty
miles north of a military base.

'She was a hooker,' I said. 'That's how he was found. The
desk guy knew her. Saw her running out way too soon. Got
curious as to why and came in here to check.'

Stockton nodded. 'He called us right away. The lady in question
was long gone by then, of course. And he's denying she
was ever here in the first place. He's pretending this isn't that
kind of an establishment.'

'Your department had business here before?'

'Time to time,' he said. 'It is that kind of an establishment,
believe me.'

Control the situation, Garber had said.

'Heart attack, right?' I said. 'Nothing more.'

'Probably,' Stockton said. 'But we'll need an autopsy to know
for sure.'

The room was quiet. I could hear nothing except radio traffic
from the cop cars outside, and music from the bar across the
street. I turned back to the bed. Looked at the dead guy's face. I
didn't know him. I looked at his hands. He had a West Point
ring on his right and a wedding band on his left, wide, old,
probably nine carat. I looked at his chest. His dog tags were
hidden under his right arm, where he had reached across to
grab his left bicep. I lifted the arm with difficulty and pulled the
tags out. He had rubber silencers on them. I raised them until
the chain went tight against his neck. His name was Kramer
and he was a Catholic and his blood group was O.

'We could do the autopsy for you,' I said. 'Up at the Walter

Reed Army Medical Center.'
'Out of state?'
'He's a general.'

'You want to hush it up.'

I nodded. 'Sure I do. Wouldn't you?'

'Probably,' he said.

I let go of the dog tags and moved away from the bed and
checked the night stands and the built-in counter. Nothing
there. There was no phone in the room. A place like this, I
figured there would be a pay phone in the office. I moved past

Stockton and checked the bathroom. There was a privately
purchased black leather Dopp kit next to the sink, zipped
closed. It had the initials KRK embossed on it. I opened it up
and found a toothbrush and a razor and travel-sized tubes of
toothpaste and shaving soap. Nothing else. No medications. No
heart prescription. No pack of condoms.

I checked the closet. There was a Class A uniform in there,
neatly squared away on three separate hangers, with the pants
folded on the bar of the first and the coat next to it on the
second and the shirt on a third. The tie was still inside the shirt
collar. Centred above the hangers on the shelf was a field grade
officer's service cap. Gold braid all over it. On one side of the
cap was a folded white undershirt and on the other side was a
pair of folded white boxers.

There were two shoes side by side on the closet floor next to
a faded green canvas suit carrier which was propped neatly
against the back wall. The shoes were gleaming black and had
socks rolled tight inside them. The suit carrier was a privately
purchased item and had battered leather reinforcements at the
stress points. It wasn't very full.

'You'd get the results,' I said. 'Our pathologist would give you
a copy of the report with nothing added and nothing deleted.
You see anything you're not happy about, we could put the ball
right back in your court, no questions asked.'

Stockton said nothing, but I wasn't feeling any hostility
coming off him. Some town cops are OK. A big base like Bird
puts a lot of ripples into the surrounding civilian world. Therefore
MPs spend a lot of time with their civilian counterparts,
and sometimes it's a pain in the ass, and sometimes it isn't. I
had a feeling Stockton wasn't going to be a huge problem. He
was relaxed. Bottom line, he seemed a little lazy to me, and lazy
people are always happy to pass their burdens on to someone
else.

'How much?' I said.

'How much what?'

'How much would a whore cost here?'

'Twenty bucks would do it,' he said. 'There's nothing very
exotic available in this neck of the woods.'

'And the room?'

'Fifteen, probably.'

I rolled the corpse back onto its front. Wasn't easy. It

weighed two hundred pounds, at least.
'What do you think?' I asked.
'About what?'

'About Walter Reed doing the autopsy.'

There was silence for a moment. Stockton looked at the wall.
'That might be acceptable,' he said.

There was a knock at the open door. One of the cops from
the cars.

'Medical examiner just called in,' he said. 'He can't get here
for another two hours at least. It's New Year's Eve.'

I smiled. Acceptable was about to change to highly desirable. Two hours from now Stockton would need to be somewhere
else. A whole bunch of parties would be breaking up and the
roads would be mayhem. Two hours from now he would be
begging me to haul the old guy away. I said nothing and the cop
went back to wait in his car and Stockton moved all the way
into the room and stood facing the draped window with his
back to the corpse. I took the hanger with the uniform coat on it
and lifted it out of the closet and hung it on the bathroom door
frame where the hallway light fell on it.

Looking at a Class A coat is like reading a book or sitting
next to a guy in a bar and hearing his whole life story. This one
was the right size for the body on the bed and it had Kramer on
the name plate, which matched the dog tags. It had a Purple
Heart ribbon with two bronze oak leaf clusters to denote a
second and third award of the medal, which matched the scars.
It had two silver stars on the epaulettes, which confirmed he
was a major general. The branch insignia on the lapels denoted
Armor and the shoulder patch was from XII Corps. Apart
from that there were a bunch of unit awards and a whole salad
bowl of medal ribbons dating way back through Vietnam and
Korea, some of which he had probably earned the hard way,
and some of which he probably hadn't. Some of them were
foreign awards, whose display was authorized but not compulsory.
It was a very full coat, relatively old, well cared for,
standard issue, not privately tailored. Taken as a whole it told
me he was professionally vain, but not personally vain.

I went through the pockets. They were all empty, except for a
key to the rental car. It was attached to a key ring in the shape
of a figure 1, which was made out of clear plastic and contained
a slip of paper with Hertz printed in yellow at the top and a plate

number written by hand in black ballpoint underneath.

There was no wallet. No loose change.

I put the coat back in the closet and checked the pants.
Nothing in the pockets. I checked the shoes. Nothing in them
except the socks. I checked the hat. Nothing hidden underneath
it. I lifted the suit carrier out and opened it on the floor. It
contained a battledress uniform and an M43 field cap. A change
of socks and underwear and a pair of shined combat boots, plain
black leather. There was an empty compartment that I figured
was for the Dopp kit. Nothing else. Nothing at all. I closed it up
and put it back. Squatted down and looked under the bed. Saw
nothing.

'Anything we should worry about?' Stockton asked. I stood up. Shook my head.
'No,' I lied.

'Then you can have him,' he said. 'But I get a copy of the
report.'

'Agreed,' I said.

'Happy New Year,' he said.

He walked out to his car and I headed for my Humvee. I
called in a 10-5 ambulance requested and told my sergeant to
have it accompanied by a squad of two who could list and pack
all Kramer's personal property and bring it back to my office.
Then I sat there in the driver's seat and waited until Stockton's
guys were all gone. I watched them accelerate away into the fog
and then I went back inside the room and took the rental key
from Kramer's jacket. Came back out and used it to unlock the
Ford.

There was nothing in it except the stink of upholstery cleaner
and carbonless copies of the rental agreement. Kramer had
picked the car up at one thirty-two that afternoon at Dulles
airport near Washington D.C. He had used a private American
Express card and received a discount rate. The start-of-rental
mileage was 13215. Now the odometer was showing 13513,
which according to my arithmetic meant he had driven 298

miles, which was about right for a straight-line trip between
there and here.

I put the paper in my pocket and relocked the car. Checked
the trunk. It was completely empty.

I put the key in my pocket with the rental paper and headed
across the street to the bar. The music got louder with every
step I took. Ten yards away I could smell beer fumes and
cigarette smoke from the ventilators. I threaded through
parked vehicles and found the door. It was a stout wooden item
and it was closed against the cold. I pulled it open and was hit in
the face by a wall of sound and a blast of thick hot air. The place
was heaving. I could see five hundred people and black-painted
walls and purple spotlights and mirrorballs. I could see a pole
dancer on a stage in back. She was on all fours and naked apart
from a white cowboy hat. She was crawling around, picking up
dollar bills.

There was a big guy in a black T-shirt behind a register
inside the door. His face was in deep shadow. The edge of a
dim spotlight beam showed me he had a chest the size of an oil
drum. The music was deafening and the crowd was packed
shoulder-to-shoulder and wall-to-wall. I backed out and let the
door swing shut. Stood still for a moment in the cold air and
then walked away and crossed the street and headed for the
motel office.

It was a dismal place. It was lit with fluorescent tubes that
gave the air a greenish cast and it was noisy from the Coke
machine parked at its door. It had a pay phone on the wall and
worn linoleum on the floor and a waist-high counter boxed in
with the sort of fake wood panelling people use in their basements.
The clerk was on a high stool behind it. He was a white

guy of about twenty with long unwashed hair and a weak chin.
'Happy New Year,' I said.
He didn't reply.

'You take anything out of the dead guy's room?' I asked.
He shook his head. 'No.'
'Tell me again.'

'I didn't take anything.'

I nodded. I believed him.

'OK,' I said. 'When did he check in?'

'I don't know. I came on at ten. He was already here.'

I nodded again. Kramer was in the rental lot at Dulles at one
thirty-two and he hadn't driven enough miles to do much of
anything except come straight here, in which case he was
checking in around seven thirty. Maybe eight thirty, if he
stopped for dinner somewhere. Maybe nine, if he was an exceptionally
cautious driver.

'Did he use the pay phone at all?'

'It's busted.'

'So how did he get hold of the hooker?'

'What hooker?'

'The hooker he was poking when he died.'

'No hookers here.'

'Did he go over and get her from the lounge bar?'

'He was way the hell down the row. I didn't see what he
did.'

'You got a driver's licence?'

The guy paused. 'Why?'

'Simple question,' I said. 'Either you do or you don't.'
'I got a licence,' he said.
'Show me,' I said.

I was bigger than his Coke machine and all covered in badges
and ribbons and he did what he was told, like most skinny
twenty-year-olds do when I use that tone. He eased his butt up
off the stool and reached back and came out with a wallet from
his hip pocket. Flipped it open. His DL was behind a milky
plastic window. It had his photograph on it, and his name, and
his address.

'OK,' I said. 'Now I know where you live. I'll be back later
with some questions. If I don't find you here I'll come and find
you at home.'

He said nothing to me. I turned away and pushed out through
the door and went back to my Humvee to wait.

Forty minutes later a military meat wagon and another Humvee
showed up. I told my guys to grab everything including the
rental car but didn't wait around to watch them do it. I headed
back to base instead. I logged in and got back to my borrowed
office and told my sergeant to get me Garber on the phone. I

waited at my desk for the call to come through. It took less than
two minutes.

'What's the story?' he asked.

'His name was Kramer,' I said.

'I know that,' Garber said. 'I spoke to the police dispatcher
after I spoke to you. What happened to him?'

'Heart attack,' I said. 'During consensual sex with a
prostitute. In the kind of motel a fastidious cockroach would
take pains to avoid.'

There was a long silence.

'Shit,' Garber said. 'He was married.'

'Yes, I saw his wedding band. And his West Point ring.'
'Class of 'fifty-two,' Garber said. 'I checked.'
The phone went quiet.

'Shit,' he said again. 'Why do smart people pull stupid stunts
like this?'

I didn't answer, because I didn't know.

'We'll need to be discreet,' Garber said.

'Don't worry,' I said. 'The cover-up is already started. The
locals let me send him to Walter Reed.'

'Good,' he said. 'That's good.' Then he paused. 'From the
beginning, OK?'

'He was wearing XI! Corps patches,' I said. 'Means he
was based in Germany. He flew into Dulles yesterday. From
Frankfurt, probably. Civilian flight, for sure, because he was
wearing Class As, hoping for an upgrade. He would have worn
BDUs on a military flight. He rented a cheap car and drove two
hundred ninety-eight miles and checked into a fifteen-dollar
motel room and picked up a twenty-dollar hooker.'

'I know about the flight,' Garber said. 'I called XII Corps and

spoke with his staff. I told them he was dead.'

'When?'

'After I got off the phone with the dispatcher.'

'You tell them how or where he was dead?'

'I said a probable heart attack, nothing more, no details, no
location,, which is starting to look like a very good decision

llOW.'

'What about the flight?' I said.

'American Airlines, yesterday, Frankfurt to Dulles, arrived

thirteen hundred hours, with an onward connection nine
hundred hours today, Washington National to LAX. He was
going to an Armored Branch conference at Fort Irwin. He
was an Armored commander in Europe. An important one. Outside
chance of making Vice-Chief of Staff in a couple of years.
It's Armored's turn next, for Vice-Chief. Current guy is infantry,
and they like to rotate. So he stood a chance. But it ain't going
to happen for him now, is it?'

'Probably not,' I said. 'Being dead and all.'

Garber didn't answer that.

'How long was he over here for?' I said.

'He was due back in Germany inside a week.'
'What's his full name?'
'Kenneth Robert Kramer.'

'I bet you know his date of birth,' I said. 'And where he was
born.'

'So?'

'And his flight numbers and his seat assignments. And what
the government paid for the tickets. And whether or not he
requested a vegetarian meal. And what exact room Irwin VOQ

was planning on putting him in.'

'What's your point?'

'My point is, why don't I know all that stuff too?'

'Why would you?' Garber said. 'I've been working the phones
and you've been poking around in a motel.'

'You know what?' I said. 'Every time I go anywhere I've got a
wad of airplane tickets and travel warrants and reservations and
if I'm flying in from overseas I've got a passport. And if I'm
going to a conference I've got a briefcase full of all kinds of

other crap to carry them in.'

'What are you saying?'

'I'm saying there were things missing from the motel room.
Tickets, reservations, passport, itinerary. Collectively, the kind

of things a person would carry in a briefcase.'

Garber didn't respond.

'He had a suit carrier,' I said. 'Green canvas, brown leather
bindings. A buck gets ten he hada briefcase to match. His wife
probably chose them both. Probably got them mail-order from
L. L. Bean. Maybe for Christmas, ten years ago.'

'And the briefcase wasn't there?'

'He probably kept his wallet in it, too, when he was wearing
Class As. As many medal ribbons as this guy had, it makes the

inside pocket tight.'

'So?'

'I think the hooker saw where he put his wallet after he paid
her. Then they got down to business, and he croaked, and she
saw a little extra profit for herself. I think she stole his briefcase.'

Garber was quiet for a moment.

'Is this going to be a problem?' he asked.

'Depends what else was in the briefcase,' I said.

TWO

PUT THE PHONE DOWN AND SAW A NOTE MY SERGEANT HAD I.EKF
me: Your brother called. No message. I folded it once and
dropped it in the trash. Then I headed back to my quarters
and got three hours' sleep. Got up again fifty minutes before
first light. I was back at the motel just as dawn was breaking.
Morning didn't make the neighbourhood look any better. It was
depressed and abandoned for miles around. And quiet. Nothing
was stirring. Dawn on New Year's Day is as close as any
inhabited place gets to absolute stillness. The highway was
deserted. There was no traffic. None at all.

The diner at the truck stop was open but empty. The motel
office was empty. I walked down the row to the last-but-one
room. Kramer's room. The door was locked. I stood with my
back to it and pretended I was a hooker whose client had just
died. I had pushed his weight off me and dressed fast and
grabbed his briefcase and I was running away with it. What
would I do? I wasn't interested in the briefcase itself. I wanted
the cash in the wallet, and maybe the American Express card.
So I would rifle through and grab the cash and the card and
ditch the bag itself. But where would I do that?

Inside the room would have been best. But I hadn't done it

there, for some reason. Maybe I was panicking. Maybe I was
shocked and spooked and just wanted to get the hell out, fast.
So where else? I looked straight ahead at the lounge bar. That
was probably where I was going. That was probably where I
was based. But I wouldn't carry the briefcase in there. My
co-workers would notice, because I was already carrying a big
purse. Hookers always carry big purses. They've got a lot of
stuff to haul around. Condoms, massage oils, maybe a gun or a
knife, maybe a credit card machine. That's the easiest way to
spot a hooker. Look for someone dressed like she's going to a
ball, carrying a bag like she's going on vacation.

I looked to my left. Maybe I walked around behind the
motel. It would be quiet back there. All the windows faced that
way, but it was night and I could count on the drapes being
closed. I turned left and left again and came out behind the
bedrooms on a rectangle of scrubby weeds that ran the length
of the building and was about twenty feet deep. I imagined
walking fast and then stopping in deep shadow and going
through the bag by feel. I imagined finding what I wanted and
heaving the bag away into the darkness. I might have thrown it
thirty feet.

I stood where she might have stood and scoped out a quarter
circle. It gave me about a hundred and fifty square feet to check. The ground was stony and nearly frozen by overnight
frost. I found plenty of stuff. I found trash and used needles and
foil crack pipes and a Buick hubcap and a skateboard wheel.
But I didn't find a briefcase.

There was a wooden fence at the rear of the lot. It was about
six feet tall. I jacked myself up on it and looked over. Saw
another rectangle of weeds and stones. No briefcase. I got down
off the fence and walked onward and came up on the motel
office from the back. There was a window made of dirty pebbled
glass that I guessed let into the staff bathroom. Underneath it
were a dozen trashed air conditioners all stacked in a low pile.
They were rusty. They hadn't been moved in years. I walked on
and came around the corner and turned left into a weedy gravel
patch with a Dumpster on it. I opened the lid. It was three
quarters full of garbage. No briefcase.

I crossed the street and walked through the empty lot and

looked at the lounge bar. It was silent and locked up tight. Its
neon signs were all switched off and the little bent tubes looked
cold and dead. It had its own Dumpster, close by in the lot,
just sitting there like a parked vehicle. There was no briefcase in it.

I ducked inside the greasy spoon. It was still empty. I

checked the floor around the tables and the banquettes in the
booths. I looked on the floor behind the register. There was a
cardboard box back there with a couple of forlorn umbrellas in
it. But no briefcase. I checked the women's bathroom. No
women in it. No briefcase in it, either.

I looked at my watch and walked back to the lounge bar. I

would need to ask some face-to-face questions there. But it
wouldn't be open for business for another eight hours at least. I
turned around and looked across the street at the motel. There
was still nobody in the office. So I headed back to my Humvee
and got there in time to hear a 10-17 come in on the radio. Return to base. So I acknowledged and fired up the big diesel
and drove all the way back to Bird. There was no traffic and I
made it inside forty minutes. I saw Kramer's rental parked in
the motor pool lot. There was a new person at the desk outside
my borrowed office. A corporal. The day shift. He was a small
dark guy who looked like he was from Louisiana. French blood

in there, certainly. I know French blood when I see it.
'Your brother called again,' he said.
'Why?'

'No message.'

'What was the ten-seventeen for?'

'Colonel Garber requests a ten-nineteen.'

I smiled. You could live your whole life saying nothing but

lO-this and lO-that. Sometimes I felt like I already had. A 10-19
was a contact by phone or radio. Less serious than a 10-16,
which was a contact by secure landline. Colonel Garber requests
a 10-19 meant Garber wants you to call him, was all. Some MP
units get in the habit of speaking English, but clearly this one
hadn't yet.

I stepped into my office and saw Kramer's suit carrier

propped against the wall and a carton containing his shoes and
underwear and hat sitting next to it. His uniform was still on

three hangers. They were hung one in front of the other on my
coat rack. I walked past them to my borrowed desk and dialled
Garber's number. Listened to the purr of the ring tone and
wondered what my brother wanted. Wondered how he had
tracked me down. I had been in Panama sixty hours ago. Before
that I had been all over the place. So he had made a big effort to
find me. So maybe it was important. I picked up a pencil and

wrote Joe on a slip of paper. Then I underlined it, twice.

'Yes?' Leon Garber said in my ear.

'Reacher here,' I said. I looked at the clock on the wall. It
showed a little after nine in the morning. Kramer's onward
connection to LAX was already in the air.

'It was a heart attack,' Garber said. 'No question.'
'Walter Reed worked fast.'
'He was a general.'

'But a general with a bad heart.'

'Bad arteries, actually. Severe arteriosclerosis leading to fatal
ventricular fibrillation. That's what they're telling us. And I
believe them, too. Probably kicked in around the time the
whore took her bra off.'

'He wasn't carrying any pills.'

'It was probably undiagnosed. It's one of those things. You
feel fine, then you feel dead. No way it could be faked, anyway.
You could simulate fibrillation with an electric shock, I
guess, but you can't simulate forty years' worth of crap in the
arteries.'

'Were we worried about it being faked?'

'There could have been KGB interest,' Garber said. 'Kramer
and his tanks are the biggest single tactical problem the Red
Army is facing.'

'Right now the Red Army is facing the other way.'
'Kind of early to say whether that's permanent or not.' I didn't reply. The phone went quiet.

'I can't let anyone else touch this with a stick,' Garber said.
'Not just yet. Because of the circumstances. You understand

that, right?'

'So?'

'So you're going to have to do the widow thing,' Garber said. The ? Isn't she in Germany?'

'She's in Virginia. She's home for the holidays. They have a

house there.'

He gave me the address and I wrote it on the slip of paper,

directly underneath where I had underlined Joe.

'Anyone with her?' I asked.

'They don't have kids. So she's probably alone.'

'OK,' I said.

'She doesn't know yet,' Garber said. 'Took me a while to track

her down.'

'Want me to take a priest?'

'It isn't a combat death. You could take a female partner, I

guess. Mrs Kramer might be a hugger.'

'OK.'

'Spare her the details, obviously. He was en route to Irwin, is

all. Croaked in a layover hotel. We need to make that the official
line. Nobody except you and me knows any different yet, and
that's the way we're going to keep it. Except you can tell
whoever you partner with, I guess. Mrs Kramer might ask
questions, and you'll need to be on the same page. What about
the local cops? Are they going to leak?'

'The guy I saw was an ex-Marine. He knows the score.'

'Semper Fi,' Garber said.

'I didn't find the briefcase yet,' I said.

The phone went quiet again.

'Do the widow thing first,' Garber said. 'Then keep on looking

for it.'

I told the day-shift corporal to move Kramer's effects to my
quarters. I wanted to keep them safe and sound. The widow
would ask for them, eventually. And things can disappear, on a
big base like Bird, which can be embarrassing. Then I walked
over to the O Club and looked for MPs eating late breakfasts or
early lunches. They usually cluster well away from everybody
else, because everybody else hates them. I found a group of
four, two men and two women. They were all in woodland
pattern BDUs, standard on-post dress. One of the women was a
captain. She had her right arm in a sling. She was having
trouble eating. She would have trouble driving, too. The other
woman had a lieutenant's bar on each lapel and Summer on her

nametape. She looked to be about twenty-five years old and she
was short and slender. She had skin the same colour as the

mahogany table she was eating off.
'Lieutenant Summer,' I said.
'Sir?'

'Happy New Year,' I said.
'Sir, you too.'
'You busy today?'
'Sir, general duties.'

'OK, out front in thirty minutes, Class As. I need you to hug a
widow.'

I put my own Class As on again and called the motor pool for a
sedan. I didn't want to ride all the way to Virginia in a Humvee.
Too noisy, too uncomfortable. A private brought me a new
olive-green Chevrolet. I signed for it and drove it around to post
headquarters and waited.

Lieutenant Summer came out halfway through the twenty
eighth minute of her allotted thirty. She paused a second and
then walked towards the car. She looked good. She was very
short, but she moved easily, like a willowy person. She looked
like a six-foot catwalk model reduced in size to a tiny miniature.
I got out of the car and left the driver's door open. Met her on
the sidewalk. She was wearing an expert sharpshooter badge
with bars for rifle, small bore rifle, auto rifle, pistol, small bore
pistol, machine gun and sub-machine gun hanging on it. They
made a little ladder about two inches long. Longer than mine. I
only have rifle and pistol. She stopped dead in front of me and

came to attention and fired off a perfect salute.

'Sir, Lieutenant Summer reports,' she said.

'Take it easy,' I said. 'Informal mode of address, OK? Call me

Reacher, or nothing. And no saluting. I don't like it.'
She paused. Relaxed.
'OK,' she said.

I opened the passenger door and started to get in.

Tm driving?' she asked.

'I was up most of the night.'

Who died?'

'General Kramer,' I said. 'Big tank guy in Europe.'

She paused again. 'So why was he here? We're all infantry.'

'Passing through,' I said.

She got in on the other side and racked the driver's seat all

the way forward. Adjusted the mirror. I pushed the passenger

seat back and got as comfortable as I could.

'Where to?' she said.

'Green Valley, Virginia,' I said. 'It'll be about four hours, I

guess.'

'That's where the widow is?'

'Home for the holidays,' I said.

'And we're breaking the news? Like, Happy New Year, ma'am,

and by the way, your husband's dead?'

I nodded. 'Lucky us.' But I wasn't really worried. Generals'

wives are as tough as they come. Either they've spent thirty
years pushing their husbands up the greasy pole, or they've
endured thirty years of fallout as their husbands have climbed it
for themselves. Either way, there's not much left that can get to
them. They're tougher than the generals, most of the time.

Summer took her cap off and tossed it onto the back seat. Her

hair was very short. Almost shaved. She had a delicate skull and
nice cheekbones. Smooth skin. I liked the way she looked. And
she was a fast driver. That was for damn sure. She clipped her

belt and took off north like she was training for Nascar.

'Was it an accident?' she asked.

'Heart attack,' I said. 'His arteries were bad.'

'Where? Our VOQ?'

I shook my head. 'A crappy little motel in town. He died with

a twenty-dollar hooker wedged somewhere underneath him.'

'We're not telling the widow that part, right?'

'No, we're not. We're not telling anyone that part.'

'Why was he passing through?'

'He didn't come to Bird itself. He was transiting D.C.
Frankfurt to Dulles, then National to LAX twenty hours later.
He was going out to Irwin for a conference.'

'OK,' she said, and then she went very quiet. We drove on.

We got about level with the motel, but well to the west, heading

straight for the highway.

'Permission to speak freely?' she said.

'Please,' I said.

'Is this a test?'

'Why would it be a test?'

'You're from the llOth Special Unit, aren't you?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I am.'

'I have an application pending.'

'To the 110th?'

'Yes,' she said. 'So, is this a covert assessment?'

'Of what?'

'Of me,' she said. 'As a candidate.'

'I needed a woman partner. In case the widow is a hugger. I
picked you out at random. The captain with the busted arm
couldn't have driven the car. And it would be kind of inefficient
for us to wait until we had a dead general to conduct personnel

S
'

asses., ments.

'I guess,' she said. 'But I'm wondering if you're sitting there
waiting for me to ask the obvious questions.'

'I'd expect any MP with a pulse to ask the obvious questions,
whether or not they had a special unit transfer pending.'

'OK, I'm asking. General Kramer had a twenty-hour layover
in the D.C. area and he wanted to get his rocks off and he didn't
mind paying for the privilege. So why did he drive all the way

down here to do it? It's what, three hundred miles?'

'Two hundred and ninety-eight,' I said.

'And then he'd have to drive all the way back.'
'Clearly.'
'So why?'

'You tell me,' I said. 'Come up with something I haven't

thought of myself and I'll recommend you for the transfer.'
'You can't. You're not my CO.'

'Maybe I am,' I said. 'This week, anyway.'

'Why are you even here? Is something happening I should
know about?'

'I don't know why I'm here,' I said. 'I got orders. That's all I
know.'

'Are you really a major?'

'Last time I checked,' I said.

'I thought ll0th investigators were usually warrant officers.
Working plain clothes or undercover.'

'They usually are.'

'So why bring you here when they could send a warrant
officer and have him dress up as a major?'

'Good question,' I said. 'Maybe one day I'll find out.'

'May I ask what your orders were?'

'Temporary detached duty as Fort Bird's Provost Marshal's
executive officer.'

'The Provost Marshal isn't on post,' she said.

'I know,' I said. 'I found that out. He transferred out the same

day I transferred in. Some temporary thing.'
'So you're acting CO.'
'Like I said.'

'MP XO isn't a special unit job,' she said.

'I can fake it,' I said. 'I started out a regular MP, just like you.'
Summer said nothing. Just drove.

'Kramer,' I said. 'Why did he contemplate a six-hundred-mile
round trip? That's twelve hours' driving time out of his twenty.
Just to spend fifteen bucks on a room and twenty on a whore?'

'Why does it matter? A heart attack is a heart attack, right? I
mean, was there any question about it?'

I shook my head. 'Walter Reed already did the autopsy.'
'So it doesn't really matter where or when it happened.'
'His briefcase is missing.'
'I see,' she said.

I saw her thinking. Her lower eyelids flicked upward a
fraction.

'How do you know he had a briefcase?' she said.

'I don't. But did you ever see a general go to a conference
without one?'

'No,' she said. 'You think the hooker ran off with it?'
I nodded. 'That's my working hypothesis right now.'
'So, find the hooker.'
'Who was she?'

Her eyelids moved again.
'Doesn't make sense,' she said.
I nodded again. 'Exactly.'

'Four possible reasons Kramer didn't stay in the D.C. area.
One, he might have been travelling with fellow officers and
didn't want to embarrass himself in front of them by having a
hooker come to his room. They might have seen her in the

corridor or heard her through the walls. So he invented an
excuse and stayed in a different place. Two, even if he was
travelling alone he might have been on a DoD travel voucher
and he was paranoid about a desk clerk seeing the girl and
calling the Washington Post. That happens. So he preferred to
pay cash in some anonymous dive. Three, even if he wasn't on a
government ticket he might have been a well-known guest or
a familiar face in a big-city hotel. So likewise he was looking for
anonymity somewhere out of town. Or four, his sexual tastes
ran beyond what you can get from the D.C. Yellow Pages, so
he had to go where he knew for sure he could get what he

wanted.'

'But?'

'Problems one, two, and three could be answered by going
ten or fifteen miles, maybe less. Two hundred and ninety-eight
is completely excessive. And whereas I'm prepared to believe
there are tastes that can't be satisfied in D.C., I don't see how
they're more likely to be satisfied way out here in the North
Carolina boonies, and anyway I would guess such a thing would
cost a lot more than twenty bucks wherever you eventually
found it.'

'So why did he take the six-hundred-mile detour?'

She didn't answer. Just drove, and thought. I closed my eyes.

Kept them closed for about thirty-five miles.
'He knew the girl,' Summer said.
I opened my eyes. 'How?'

'Some men have favourites. Maybe he met her a long time
ago. Fell for her, in a way. It can happen like that. It can almost
be a love thing.'

'Where would he have met her?'

'Right there.'

'Bird is all infantry. He was Armored Branch.'

'Maybe they had joint exercises. You should check back.'

I said nothing. Armored and the infantry run joint exercises
all the time. But they run them where the tanks are, not where
the grunts are. Much easier to transport men across a continent
than tanks.

'Or maybe he met her at Irwin,' Summer said. 'In California.
Maybe she worked Irwin, but had to leave California for some

reason, but she liked working military bases, so she moved to
Bird.'

'What kind of a hooker would like working military bases?'
'The kind that's interested in money. Which is all of them,
presumably. Military bases support their local economies in all
kinds of ways.'

I said nothing.

'Or maybe she always worked Bird, but followed the infantry
to Irwin when they did a joint exercise out there one time.
Those things can last a month or two. No point in hanging

around at home with no customers.'

'Best guess?' I said.

'They met in California,' she said. 'Kramer will have spent
years at Irwin, on and off. Then she moved to North Carolina,
but he still liked her enough to make the detour whenever he
was in D.C.'

'She doesn't do anything special, not for twenty bucks.'
'Maybe he didn't need anything special.'
'We could ask the widow.'

Summer smiled. 'Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she made
damn sure he did. Hookers are good at that. They like repeat
customers best of all. It's much safer for them if they already
know the guy.'

I closed my eyes again.

'So?' Summer said. 'Did I come up with something you didn't
think of?'

'No,' I said.

I fell asleep before we were out of the state and woke up again
nearly four hours later when Summer took the Green Valley
ramp too fast. My head rolled to the right and hit the window.

'Sorry,' she said. 'You should check Kramer's phone records.
He must have called ahead, to make sure she was around. He

wouldn't have driven all that way on the off-chance.'
'Where would he have called from?'
'Germany,' she said. 'Before he left.'

'More likely he used a pay phone at Dulles. But we'll check.'
'We?'

'You can partner with me.'

She said nothing.
'Like a test,' I said.
'Is this important?'

'Probably not. But it might be. Depends what the conference
is about. Depends what paperwork he was taking to it. He
might have had the whole ETO order of battle in his case. Or
new tactics, assessment of shortcomings, all kinds of classified
stuff.'

'The Red Army is going to fold.'

I nodded. 'I'm more worried about red faces. Newspapers, or
television. Some reporter finds classified stuff on a trash pile
near a strip club, there'll be major embarrassment all around.'

'Maybe the widow will know. He might have discussed it with
her.'

'We can't ask her,' I said. 'As far as she's concerned he died
in his sleep with the blanket pulled up to his chin, and everything
else was kosher. Any worries we've got at this point stay

strictly between me, you, and Garber.'

'Garber?' she said.

The, you, and him,' I said.

I saw her smile. It was a trivial case, but working it with
Garber was a definite stroke of luck, for a person with a ll0th
Special Unit transfer pending.

Green Valley was a picture-perfect colonial town and the
Kramer house was a neat old place in an expensive part of it. It
was a Victorian confection with fish-scale tiles on the roof and
a bunch of turrets and porches all painted white, sitting on a
couple of acres of emerald lawn. There were stately evergreen
trees dotted about. They looked like someone had positioned
them with care, which they probably had, a hundred years ago.
We pulled up at the kerb and waited, just looking. I don't know
what Summer was thinking about, but I was scanning the scene
and filing it away under A for America. I have a Social Security
number and the same blue and silver passport as everyone else
but between my old man's Stateside tours and my own I can
only put together about five years' worth of actual.residence in
the continental U.S. So I know a bunch of basic elementary
school facts like state capitals and how many grand slams

Lou Gehrig hit and some basic high-school stuff like the
Constitutional amendments and the importance of Antietam, but
I don't know much about the price of milk or how to work a pay
phone or how different places look and smell. So I soak it up
when I can. And the Kramer house was worth soaking up. That
was for sure. A watery sun was shining on it. There was a faint
breeze and the smell of woodsmoke in the air and a kind
of intense cold-afternoon quiet all around us. It was the kind of
place you would have wanted your grandparents to live. You
could have visited in the fall and raked leaves and drunk apple
cider and then come back in the summer and loaded a ten
year-old station wagon with a canoe and headed for a lake
somewhere. It reminded me of the places in the picture books

they gave me in Manila and Guam and Seoul.
Until we got inside.
'Ready?' Summer said.

'Sure,' I said. 'Let's do it. Let's do the widow thing.'

She was quiet. I was sure she had done it before. I had too,
more than once. It was never fun. She pulled off the kerb and
headed for the driveway entrance. Drove slowly towards the
front door and eased to a stop ten feet from it. We opened our
doors together and slid out into the chill and straightened
our jackets. We left our hats in the car. That would be Mrs
Kramer's first clue, if she happened to be watching. A pair of
MPs at your door is never good news, and if they're bareheaded,
it's worse news.

This particular door was painted a dull antique red and it had
a glass storm screen in front of it. I rang the bell and we waited.
And waited. I started to think nobody was home. I rang the bell

again. The breeze was cold. It was stronger than it had looked.
'We should have called ahead,' Summer said.

'Can't,' I said. 'Can't say, please be there four hours from now
so we can deliver some very important news face to face. Too
much of a preview, wouldn't you say?'

'I came all this way and I've got nobody to hug.'

'Sounds like a country song. Then your truck breaks down
and your dog dies.'

I tried the bell again. No response.

'We should look for a vehicle,' Summer said.

We found one in a closed two-car garage standing separate
from the house. We could see it through the window. It was a
Mercury Grand Marquis, metallic green, as long as an ocean
liner. It was the perfect car for a general's wife. Not new, not
old, premium but not overpriced, suitable colour, American as
hell.

'Think this is hers?' Summer asked.

'Probably,' I said. 'Chances are they had a Ford until he made
lieutenant colonel. Then they moved up to a Mercury. They
were probably waiting for the third star before they thought

about a Lincoln.'

'Sad.'

'You think? Don't forget where he was last night.'

'So where is she? You think she went out walking?'

We turned around and felt the breeze on our backs and heard
a door bang at the rear of the house.

'She was out in the yard,' Summer said. 'Gardening, maybe.'

'Nobody gardens on New Year's Day,' I said. 'Not in this
hemisphere. There's nothing growing.'

But we walked around to the front anyway and tried the bell
again. Better to let her meet us formally, on her own terms. But
she didn't show. Then we heard the door again, at the back,

banging aimlessly. Like the breeze had gotten hold of it.

'We should check that out,' Summer said.

I nodded. A banging door has a sound all its own. It suggests
all kinds of things.

'Yes,' I said. 'We probably should.'

We walked around to the rear of the house, side by side, into
the wind. There was a flagstone path. It led us to a kitchen
door. It opened inward, and it must have had a spring on the
back to keep it closed. The spring must have been a little weak,
because the gusting breeze was overpowering it from time to
time and kicking the door open eight or nine inches. Then the
gust would die away and the spring would reassert itself and
the door would bang back into the frame. It did it three times as
we watched. It was able to do it because the lock was smashed.

It had been a good lock, made of steel. But the steel had been
stronger than the surrounding wood. Someone had used a
wrecking bar. It had been jerked hard, maybe twice, and the

lock had held but the wood had splintered. The door had
opened up and the lock had just fallen out of the wreckage. It
was right there on the flagstone path. The door had a crescent
shaped bite out of it. Splinters of wood had been blown here and
there and piled by the wind.

'What now?' Summer said.

There was no security system. No intruder alarm. No pads,
no wires. No automatic call to the nearest police precinct. No
way of telling if the bad guys were long gone, or if they were
still inside.

'What now?' Summer said again.

We were unarmed. No weapons, on a formal visit in Class A
uniform.

'Go cover the front,' I said. 'In case anyone comes out.'

She moved away without a word and I gave her a minute to
get in position. Then I pushed the door with my elbow and
stepped inside the kitchen. Closed the door behind me and

leaned on it to keep it shut. Then I stood still and listened.
There was no sound. No sound at all.

The kitchen smelled faintly of cooked vegetables and stewed
coffee. It was big. It was halfway between tidy and untidy. A
well-used space. There was a door on the other side of the
room. On my right. It was open. I could see a small triangle of
polished oak floor. A hallway. I moved very slowly. Crept
forward and to the right to line up my view. The door banged
again behind me. I saw more of the hallway. I figured it ran
straight to the front entrance. Off of it to the left was a closed
door. Probably a dining room. Off of it to the right was a den or
a study. Its door was open. I could see a desk and a chair and
dark wood bookcases. I took a cautious step. Moved a little more.

I saw a dead woman on the hallway floor.

THREE

HE DEAD WOMAN HAD LONG GREY HAIR. SHE WAS WEARING AN
elaborate white flannel nightgown. She was on her side.
Her feet were near the study door. Her arms and legs
had sprawled in a way that made it look like she was running.
There was a shotgun half underneath her. One side of her head
was caved in. I could see blood and brains matted in her hair.
More blood had pooled on the oak. It was dark and sticky.

I stepped into the hallway and stopped an arm's length from
her. I squatted down and reached for her wrist. Her skin was
very cold. There was no pulse.

I stayed down. Listened. Heard nothing. I craned over and
looked at her head. She had been hit with something hard
and heavy. Just a single blow, but a serious one. The wound
was in the shape of a trench. Nearly an inch wide, maybe four
inches long. It had come from the left side, and above. She had
been facing the back of the house. Facing the kitchen. I glanced
around and dropped her wrist and stood up and stepped into
the den: A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. I stood on it
and imagined I was hearing quiet tense footsteps coming down
the hallway, towards me. Imagined I was still holding the
wrecking bar I had used to force the lock. Imagined swinging it

when my target stepped into view, on her way past the open
doorway.

I looked down. There was a stripe of blood and hair on the
carpet. The wrecking bar had been wiped on it.

Nothing else in the room was disturbed. It was an impersonal
space. It looked like it was there because they had heard a
family house should have a study. Not because they actually
needed one. The desk was not set up for working. There
were photographs in silver frames all over it. But fewer than I
would have expected, from a long marriage. There was one that
showed the dead man from the motel and the dead woman
from the hallway standing together with the Mount Rushmore
faces blurry in the background. General and Mrs Kramer, on
vacation. He was much taller than she was. He looked strong
and vigorous. She looked petite in comparison.

There was another framed photograph showing Kramer
himself in uniform. The picture was a few years old. He was
standing at the top of the steps, about to climb into a C-130
transport plane. It was a colour photograph. His uniform was
green, the airplane was brown. He was smiling and waving.
Off to assume his one-star command, I guessed. There was a
second picture, almost identical, a little newer. Kramer, at the
top of a set of airplane steps, turning back, smiling and waving.
Off to assume his two-star command, probably. In both pictures
he was waving with his right hand. In both pictures his left held
the same canvas suit carrier I had seen in the motel room
closet. And above it, in both pictures, tucked up under his arm,
was a matching canvas briefcase.

I stepped out to the hallway again. Listened hard. Heard
nothing. I could have searched the house, but I didn't need to. I
was pretty sure there was nobody in it and I knew there was
nothing I needed to find. So I took a last look at the Kramer
widow. I could see the soles of her feet. She hadn't been a
widow for long. Maybe an hour, maybe three. I figured the
blood on the floor was about twelve hours old. But it was
impossible to be precise. That would have to wait until the
doctors arrived.

I retreated through the kitchen and went back outside and
walked around to find Summer. Sent her inside to take a look. It
was quicker than a verbal explanation. She came out again
four minutes later, looking calm and composed. Score one for
Summer, I thought.

'You like coincidences?' she said.

I said nothing.

'We have to go to D.C.,' she said. 'To Walter Reed. We have

to make them double-check Kramer's autopsy.'

I said nothing.

'This makes his death automatically suspicious. I mean, what
are the chances? It's one in forty or fifty thousand that an
individual soldier will die on any given day, but to have his wife
die on the same day? For her to be a homicide victim on the
same day?'

'Wasn't the same day,' I said. 'Wasn't even the same year.'
She nodded. 'OK, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. But
that just makes my point. It's inconceivable that Walter Reed
had a pathologist scheduled to work last night. So they
had to drag one in, specially. And from where? From a party,
probably.'

I smiled, briefly. 'So you want us to go up there and say, hey,
are you sure your doc could see straight last night? Sure he
wasn't too juiced up to spot the difference between a heart
attack and a homicide?'

'We have to check,' she said. 'I don't like coincidences.'
'What do you think happened in there?'

'Intruder,' she said. 'Mrs Kramer was woken up by the noise
at the door, got out of bed, grabbed a shotgun she kept near at
hand, came downstairs, headed for the kitchen. She was a brave
lady.'

I nodded. Generals' wives, tough as they come.

'But she was slow,' Summer said. 'The intruder was already
all the way into the study and was able to get her from the side.
With the crowbar he had used on the door. As she walked past.
He was taller than she was, maybe by a foot, probably right
handed.'

I said nothing.

'So are we going to Walter Reed?'

'I think we have to,' I said. 'We'll go as soon as we've finished
here.'

We called the Green Valley cops from a wall phone we found
in the kitchen. Then we called Garber and gave him the news.
He said he would meet us at the hospital. Then we waited.
Summer watched the front of the house, and I watched the
back. Nothing happened. The cops came within seven minutes.
They made a tight little convoy, two marked cruisers, a detective's
car, an ambulance. They had lights and sirens going. We
heard them a mile away. They howled into the driveway and
then shut down. Summer and I stepped back in the sudden
silence and they all swarmed past us. We had no role. A
general's wife is a civilian, and the house was inside a civilian
jurisdiction. Normally I wouldn't let such fine distinctions get in
my way, but the place had already told me what I needed to
know. So I was prepared to stand back and earn some Brownie
points by doing it by the book. Brownie points might come in
useful later.

A patrolman watched us for twenty long minutes while the
other cops poked around inside. Then a detective in a suit came
out to take our statements. We told him about Kramer's heart
attack, the widow trip, the banging door. His name was Clark
and he had no problem with anything we had to say. His
problem was the same as Summer's. Both Kramers had died
miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he
didn't like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started
to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North
Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer's body away was
going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the
military's hands. It was going to set up a conflict.

We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at
Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was
another seventy miles. Another hour and ten. Maybe less, the
way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again

and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.
'I saw the briefcase in the photographs,' she said. 'Did you?'
'Yes,' I said.

'Does it upset you to see dead people?'

'No,' I said.

'Why not?'

'I don't know. You?'
'It upsets me a little.'
I said nothing.

'You think it was a coincidence?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'I don't believe in coincidences.'

'So you think the post-mortem missed something?'

'No,' I said again. 'I think the post-mortem was probably
accurate.'

'So why are we driving all the way to D.C.?'

'Because I need to apologize to the pathologist. I dropped
him in it by sending him Kramer's body. Now he's going to
have wall-to-wall civilians bugging him for a month. That will
piss him off big time.'

But the pathologist was a her, not a him, and she had such a
sunny disposition that I doubted anything could piss her off for
long. We met with her in the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center's reception area, four o'clock in the afternoon, New
Year's Day. It looked like any other hospital lobby. There were
holiday decorations hanging from the ceilings. They already
looked a little tired. Garber had arrived before us. He was
sitting on a plastic chair. He was a small man and didn't seem
uncomfortable. But he was quiet. He didn't introduce himself to
Summer. She stood next to him. I leaned on the wall. The
doctor faced us with a sheaf of notes in her hand, like she was
lecturing a small group of keen students. Her name badge read
Sam McGowan, and she was young and dark, and brisk, and
open.

'General Kramer died of natural causes,' she said. 'Heart
attack, last night, after eleven, before midnight. There's
no possibility of doubt. I'm happy to be audited if you want,
but it would be a complete waste of time. His toxicology
was absolutely clear. The evidence of ventricular fibrillation
is indisputable and his arterial plaque was monumental. So
forensically, your only tentative question might be whether
by coincidence someone electrically stimulated fibrillation in a
man almost certain to suffer it anyway within minutes or hours
or days or weeks.'

'How would it be done?' Summer asked.

McGowan shrugged. 'The skin would have to be wet over a
large area. The guy would have to be in a bathtub, basically.
Then if you applied wall current to the water, you'd probably get
fibrillation without burn marks. But the guy wasn't in a bathtub,

and there's no evidence he ever had been.'

'What if his skin wasn't wet?'

'Then I'd have seen burn injuries. And I didn't, and I went
over every inch of him with a magnifying glass. No burns, no
hypodermic marks, no nothing.'

'What about shock, or surprise, or fear?'

The doctor shrugged again. 'Possible, but we know what he
was doing, don't we? That kind of sudden sexual excitement is a
classic trigger.'

Nobody spoke.

'Natural causes, folks,' McGowan said. 'Just a big old heart
attack. Every pathologist in the world could take a look at
him and there would be one hundred per cent agreement. I
absolutely guarantee it.'

'OK,' Garber said. 'Thanks, doc.'

'I apologize,' I said. 'You're going to have to repeat all that to

about two dozen civilian cops, every day for a couple of weeks.'
She smiled. 'I'll print up an official statement.'

Then she looked at each of us in turn in case we had more
questions. We didn't, so she smiled once more and swept away
through a door. It sucked shut behind her and the ceiling
decorations rustled and stilled and the reception area went
quiet.

We didn't speak for a moment.

'OK,' Garber said. 'That's it. No controversy with Kramer

himself, and his wife is a civilian crime. It's out of our hands.'
'Did you know Kramer?' I asked him.
Garber shook his head. 'Only by reputation.'
'Which was?'

'Arrogant. He was Armored Branch. The Abrams tank is the
best toy in the army. Those guys rule the world, and they know it.'

'Know anything about the wife?'

He made a face. 'She spent way too much time at home in

Virginia, is what I hear. She was rich, from an old Virginia
family. I mean, she did her duty. She spent time on post in
Germany, only when you add it up, it really wasn't a hell of a lot
of time. Like now, XII Corps told me she was home for the
holidays, which sounds OK, but actually she came home for
Thanksgiving and wasn't expected back until the spring. So the
Kramers weren't real close, by all accounts. No kids, no shared
interests.'

'Which might explain the hooker,' I said. 'If they lived
separate lives.'

'I guess,' Garber said. 'I get the feeling it was a marriage,
you know, but it was more window-dressing than anything
real.'

'What was her name?' Summer asked.

Garber turned to look at her.

'Mrs Kramer,' he said. 'That's all the name we need to know.'
Summer looked away.

'Who was Kramer travelling to Irwin with?' I asked.

'Two of his guys,' Garber said. 'A one-star general and a
colonel, Vassell and Coomer. They were a real triumvirate.

Kramer, Vassell, and Coomer. The corporate face of Armor.'
He stood up and stretched.

'Start at midnight,' I said to him. 'Tell me everything you did.'
'Why?'

'Because I don't like coincidences. And neither do you.'

'I didn't do anything.'

'Everybody did something,' I said. 'Except Kramer.'

He looked straight at me.

'I watched the ball drop,' he said. 'Then I had another drink.
I kissed my daughter. I kissed a whole bunch of people, as I

recall. Then I sang "Auld Lang Syne".'

'And then?'

'My office got me on the phone. Told me they'd found out by
circnitous means that we had a dead two-star down in North
Carolina. Told me the Fort Bird MP duty officer had palmed it

off. So I called there, and I got you.'

'And then?'

'You set out to do your thing and I called the town cops and
got Kramer's name. Looked him up and found he was a XII

Corps guy. So I called Germany and reported the death, but I

kept the details to myself. I told you this already.'

'And then?'

'Then nothing. I waited for your report.'
'OK,' I said.
'OK what?'
'OK, sir?'

'Bullshit,' he said. 'What are you thinking?'

'The briefcase,' I said. 'I still want to find it.'

'So keep looking for it,' he said. 'Until I find Vassell and
Coomer. They can tell us whether there was anything in it
worth worrying about.'

'You can't find them?'

He shook his head.

'No,' he said. 'They checked out of their hotel, but they didn't
fly to California. Nobody seems to know where the hell they

are.

Garber left to drive himself back to town and Summer and I
climbed into the car and headed south again. It was cold, and it
was getting dark. I offered to take the wheel, but Summer
wouldn't let me. Driving seemed to be her main hobby.

'Colonel Garber seemed tense,' she said. She sounded dis

appointed, like an actress who had failed an audition.
'He was feeling guilty,' I said.
'Why?'

'Because he killed Mrs Kramer.'

She just stared at me. She was doing about ninety, looking at
me, sideways.

'In a manner of speaking,' I said.

'How?'

'This was no coincidence.'

'That's not what the doctor told us.'

'Kramer died of natural causes. That's what the doctor told
us. But something about that event led directly to Mrs Kramer
becoming a homicide victim. And Garber set all that in motion.
By notifying XII Corps. He put the word out, and within about
two hours the widow was dead, too.'

'So what's going on?'

'I have absolutely no idea,' I said.

'And what about Vassell and Coomer?' she said. 'They were a
threesome. Kramer's dead, his wife is dead, and the other two
are missing?'

'You heard the man. It's out of our hands.'
'You're not going to do anything?'
'I'm going to look for a hooker.'

We set off on the most direct route we could find, straight back
to the motel and the lounge bar. There was no real choice. First
the Beltway, and then 1-95. Traffic was light. It was still New
Year's Day. The world outside our windows looked dark and
quiet, cold and sleepy. Lights were coming on everywhere.
Summer drove as fast as she dared, which was plenty fast. What
might have taken Kramer six hours was going to take us
less than five. We stopped for gas early, and we bought stale
sandwiches that had been made in the previous calendar year.
We forced them down as we hustled south. Then I spent twenty
minutes watching Summer. She had small neat hands. She had
them resting lightly on the wheel. She didn't blink much. Her
lips were slightly parted and every minute or so she would run

her tongue across her teeth.
'Talk to me,' I said.
'About what?'

'About anything,' I said. 'Tell me the story of your life.'
'Why?'

'Because I'm tired,' I said. 'To keep me awake.'
'Not very interesting.'
'Try me,' I said.

So she shrugged and started at the beginning, which was
outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of the sixties.
She had nothing bad to say about it, but she gave me the
impression that she knew even then there were better ways to
grow up than poor and black in Alabama at that time. She had
brothers and sisters. She had always been small, but she was
nimble,, and she parlayed a talent for gymnastics and dancing
and jumping rope into a way of getting noticed at school. She
was good at the book work too and had assembled a patchwork
of minor scholarships and moved out of state to a college in

Georgia. She had joined the ROTC and in her junior year the
scholarships ran out and the military picked up the tab in
exchange for five years' future service. She was now halfway
through it. She had aced MP school. She sounded comfortable.
By that point the military had been integrated for forty years
and she said she found it to be the most colour-blind place in
America. But she was also a little frustrated about her own
individual progress. I got the impression her application to the
110th was make or break for her. If she got it, she was in for

life, like me. If she didn't, she was out after five.

'Now tell me about your life,' she said.

'Mine?' I said. Mine was different in every way imaginable.
Colour, gender, geography, family circumstances. 'I was born in
Berlin. Back then, you stayed in the hospital seven days, so I
was one week old when I went into the military. I grew up on
every base we've got. I went to West Point. I'm still in the

military. I always will be. That's it, really.'

'You got family?'

I recalled the note from my sergeant: Your brother called. No
message.

'A mother and a brother,' I said.
'Ever been married?'
'No. You?'

'No,' she said. 'Seeing anyone?'
'Not right now.' The either.'

We drove on, a mile, and another.

'Can you imagine a life outside the service?' she asked.

'Is there one?'

'I grew up out there. I might be going back.'

'You civilians are a mystery to me,' I said.

Summer parked outside Kramer's room, I guessed for
authenticity's sake, a little less than five hours after we left
Walter Reed. She seemed satisfied with her average speed. She
shut the motor down and smiled.

'I'll take the lounge bar,' I said."You speak to the kid in the
motel office. Do the good cop thing. Tell him the bad cop is
right behind you.'

We slid out into the cold and the dark. The fog was back.
The street lights burned through it. I felt cramped and airless.
I stretched and yawned and then straightened my coat and
watched Summer head past the Coke machine. Her skin flared
red as she stepped through its glow. I crossed the road and
headed for the bar.

The lot was as full as it had been the night before. Cars and
trucks were parked all around the building. The ventilators
were working hard again. I could see smoke and smell beer in
the air. I could hear music thumping away. The neon was
bright.

I pulled the door and stepped into the noise. The crowd
was wall-to-wall again. The same spotlights were burning.
There was a different girl naked on the stage. There was the
same barrel-chested guy half in shadow behind the register. I
couldn't see his face, but I knew he was looking at my lapels.
Where Kramer had worn Armored's crossed cavalry sabres
with a charging tank over them, I had the Military Police's
crossed flintlock pistols, gold and shiny. Not the most popular
sight, in a place like that.

'Cover charge,' the guy at the register said.

It was hard to hear him. The music was very loud.
'How much?' I said.
'Hundred dollars,' he said.
'I don't think so.'

'OK, two hundred dollars.'

'Hilarious,' I said.

'I don't like cops in here.'
'Can't think why,' I said.
'Look at me.'

I looked at him. There was nothing much to see. The edge of
a downlighter beam lit up a big stomach and a big chest and
thick, short, tattooed forearms. And hands the size and shape of
frozen chickens with heavy silver rings on most of the fingers.
But the guy's shoulders and his face were in deep shadow
above them. Like he was half hidden by a curtain. I was talking
to a guy I couldn't see.

'You're not welcome here,' he said.

'I'll get over it. I'm not an unduly sensitive person.'

'You're not listening,' he said. 'This is my place and I don't
want you in it.'

'I'll be quick.'

'Lave FLOW.'

'No.'

'Look at me.'

He leaned forward into the light. Slowly. The dowFLlighter
beam rode up his chest. Up his neck. Onto his face. It was an
incredible face. It had started out ugly and it had gotten much
worse. He had straight razor scars all over it. They crisscrossed
it like a lattice. They were deep aFLd white and old.
His nose had been busted and badly reset and busted again
and badly reset again, many times over. He had brows thick
with scar tissue. Two small eyes were staring out at me from
under them. He was maybe forty. Maybe five-ten, maybe three
hundred pounds. He looked like a gladiator who had survived
twenty years, deep inside the catacombs.

I smiled. 'This thing with the face is supposed to impress me?

With the dramatic lighting and all?'

'It should tell you something.'

'It tells me you lost a lot of fights. You want to lose another,

that's fine with me.'

He said nothing.

'Or I could put this place off-limits to every enlisted man at

Bird. I could see what that does to your bar profits.'

He said nothing.

'But I don't want to do that,' I said. 'No reason to penalize my

guys, just because you're all asshole.'

He said nothing.

'So I guess I'll ignore you.'

He sat back. The shadow slid back into place, like a curtain.
'I'll see you later,' he said, from out of the darkness. 'Somewhere,
sometime. That's for sure. That's a promise. You can
count on that.'

'Now I'm scared,' I said. I moved on and pressed into the
crowd. I made it through a packed bottleneck and into the main
part of the building. It was much bigger inside than it had
looked. It was a large low square, full of noise and people.
There were dozens of separate areas. Speakers everywhere.

Loud music. Flashing lights. There were plenty of civilians
in there. Plenty of military, too. I could spot them by their
haircuts, and their clothes. Off-duty soldiers always dress
distinctively. They try to look like everybody else, and they fail.
They're always a little clean and out of date. They were all
looking at me as I passed them by. They weren't pleased to see
me. I looked for a sergeant. Looked for a few lines around
the eyes. I saw four likely candidates, six feet back from the
edge of the main stage. Three of them saw me and turned
away. The fourth saw me and paused for a second and then
turned towards me. Like he knew he had been selected. He
was a compact guy maybe five years older than me. Special
Forces, probably. There were plenty of them at Bird, and he
had the look. He was having a good time. That was clear.
He had a smile on his face and a bottle in his hand. Cold
beer, dewy with moisture. He raised it, like a toast, like an
invitation to approach. So I went up close to him and spoke in
his ear.

'Spread the word for me,' I said. 'This is nothing official.

Nothing to do with our guys. Something else entirely.'

'Like what?' he said.

'Lost property,' I said. 'Nothing important. Everything's

COOl.'

He said nothing.

'Special Forces?'! said.

He nodded. 'Lost property?'

'No big deal,' I said. 'Just something that went missing across
the street.'

He thought about it and then he raised his bottle again and
clinked it against where mine would have been if I had bought
one. It was a clear display of acceptance. Like a mime, in all the
noise. But even so a thin stream of men started up, shuffling
towards the exit. Maybe twenty grunts left during my first two
minutes in the room. MPs have that effect. No wonder the guy
with the face didn't want me in there.

A waitress came up to me. She was wearing a black T-shirt
cut off about four inches below the neck and black shorts cut off about four inches below the waist and black shoes with very
high heels. Nothing else. She stood there and looked at me

until I ordered something. I asked for a Bud, and I paid about
eight times its value. Took a couple of sips, and then went
looking for whores.

They found me first. I guess they wanted me out of sight
before I emptied the place completely. Before I reduced their
customer base to zero. Two of them came straight at me. One
was a platinum blonde. The other was a brunette. Both were
wearing tiny tight sheath dresses that sparkled with all kinds of
synthetic fibres. The blonde got in front of the brunette and
headed her off. Came clattering straight towards me, awkward
in absurd clear plastic heels. The brunette wheeled away and
headed for the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to. He
waved her off with what looked like an expression of genuine
distaste. The blonde kept on track and came right up next to me
and leaned on my arm. Stretched up tall until I could feel her
breath in my ear.

'Happy New Year,' she said.

'You too,' I said.

'I haven't seen you in here before,' she said, like I was the
only thing missing from her life. Her accent wasn't local. She
wasn't from the Carolinas. She wasn't from California, either.
Georgia or Alabama, probably.

'You new in town?' she asked, loud, because of the music.

I smiled. I had been in more whorehouses than I cared to
count. All MPs have. Every single one is the same, and every
single one is different. They all have different protocols. But the are you new in town question was a standard opening gambit. It
invited me to start the negotiations. It insulated her from a
solicitation charge.

'What's the deal here?' I asked her.

She smiled shyly, like she had never been asked such a
thing before. Then she told me I could watch her on stage in
exchange for dollar tips, or I could spend ten to get a private
show in a back room. She explained the private show could
involve touching, and to make sure I was paying attention she
ran her hand up the inside of my thigh.

I could see how a guy could be tempted. She was cute. She
looked to be about twenty. Except for her eyes. Her eyes looked
like a fifty-year-old's.

'What about something more?' I said. 'Someplace else we
could go?'

'We can talk about that during the private show.'

She took me by the hand and led me past their dressing-room
door and through a velvet curtain into a dim room behind the
stage. It wasn't small. It was maybe thirty feet by twenty. It had
an upholstered bench running around the whole perimeter. It
wasn't especially private, either. There were about six guys in
there, each of them with a naked woman on his lap. The blonde
girl led me to a space on the bench and sat me down. She
waited until I came out with my wallet and paid her ten bucks.
Then she draped herself over me and snuggled in tight. The
way she sat made it impossible for me not to put my hand on

her thigh. Her skin was warm and smooth.

'So where can we go?' I asked.

'You're in a hurry,' she said. She moved around and eased the
hem of her dress up over her hips. She wasn't wearing anything
under it.

'Where are you from?' I asked her.
'Atlanta,' she said.
'What's your name?'

'Sin,' she said. 'Spelled S, i, n.'

I was fairly certain that was a professional alias.

'What's yours?' she said.

'Reacher,' I said. There was no point adopting an alias of my
own. I was fresh from the widow visit, still in Class As, with my
name plate big and obvious on my right jacket pocket.

'That's a nice name,' she said, automatically. I was fairly
certain she said it to everybody. Quasimodo, Hitler, Stalin, Pol
Pot, that's a nice name. She moved her hand. Started with
the top button of my jacket and undid it all the way down.
Smoothed her fingers inside across my chest, under my tie, on
top of my shirt.

'There's a motel across the street,' I said.
She nodded against my shoulder.
'I know there is,' she said.

'I'm looking for whoever went over there last night with a
soldier.

'Are you kidding?'

She pushed against my chest. 'Are you here to have fun, or
ask questions?'

'Questions,' I said.

She stopped moving. Said nothing.

'I'm looking for whoever went over to the motel last night,
with a soldier.'

'Get real,' she said. 'We all go over to the motel with soldiers.
There's practically a groove worn in the pavement. Look carefully,
and you can see it.'

'I'm looking for someone who came back a little sooner than
normal, maybe.'

She said nothing.

'Maybe she was a little spooked.'

She said nothing.

'Maybe she met the guy there,' I said. 'Maybe she got a call
earlier in the day.'

She eased her butt up off my knee and pulled her dress down
as far as it would go, which wasn't very far. Then she traced her
fingertips across my lapel badge.

'We don't answer questions,' she said.

'Why not?'

I saw her glance at the velvet curtain. Like she was looking
through it and all the way across the big square room to the
register by the door.

'Him?' I said. 'I'll make sure he isn't a problem.'

'He doesn't like us to talk to cops.'

'It's important,' I said. 'The guy was an important soldier.'
'You all think you're important.'

'kay of the girls here from California?'

'Five or six, maybe.'

'Any of them used to work Fort Irwin?'

'I don't know.'

'So here's the deal,' I said. 'I'm going to the bar. I'm going to
get another beer. I'm going to spend ten minutes drinking it.
You bring me the girl who had the problem last night. Or you
show me where I can find her. Tell her there's no real problem.
Tell her nobody will get in trouble. I think you'll find she
understands that.'

'Or?'

'Or I'll roust everybody out of here and I'll burn the place to

the ground. Then you can all find jobs somewhere else.'

She glanced at the velvet curtain again.

'Don't worry about the fat guy,' I said. 'Any pissing and

moaning out of him, I'll bust his nose again.'

She just sat still. Didn't move at all.

'It's important,' I said again. 'We fix this now, nobody gets in

trouble. We don't, then someone winds up with a big problem.'
'I don't know,' she said.

'Spread the word,' I said. 'Ten minutes.'

I bumped her off my lap and watched her disappear through
the curtain. Followed her a minute later and fought my way to
the bar. I left my jacket hanging open. I thought it made me
look off-duty. I didn't want to ruin everybody's evening.

I spent twelve minutes drinking another overpriced domestic
beer. I watched the waitresses and the hookers work the room.
I saw the big guy with the face moving through the press
of people, looking here, looking there, checking on things. I
waited. My new blonde friend didn't show. And I couldn't see
her anywhere. The place was very crowded. And it was dark.
The music was thumping away. There were strobes and black
lights and the whole scene was confusion. The ventilation fans
were roaring but the air was hot and foul. I was tired and I was
getting a headache. I slid off my stool and tried a circuit of
the whole place. Couldn't find the blonde anywhere. I went
around again. Didn't find her. The Special Forces sergeant I
had spoken to before stopped me halfway through my third
circuit.

'Looking for your girlfriend?' he said.

I nodded. He pointed at the dressing-room door.

'I think you just caused her some trouble,' he said.

'What kind of trouble?'

He said nothing. Just held up his left palm and smacked his
right fist into it.

'And you didn't do anything?' I said.

He shrugged.

'You're the cop,' he said. 'Not me.'

The dressing-room door was a plain plywood rectangle
painted black. I didn't knock. I figured the women who used the
room weren't shy. I just pulled it open and stepped inside.
There were regular light bulbs burning in there, and piles of
clothes and the stink of perfume. There were vanity tables with
theatre mirrors. There was an old sofa, red velvet. Sin was
sitting on it, crying. She had a vivid red outline of a hand on her
left cheek. Her right eye was swollen shut. I figured it for a
double slap, first forehand, then backhand. Two heavy blows.
She was pretty shaken. Her left shoe was off. I could see needle
marks between her toes. Addicts in the skin trades often inject
there. It rarely shows. Models, hookers, actresses.

I didn't ask if she was OK. That would have been a stupid
question. She was going to live, but she wasn't going to work
for a week. Not until the eye went black and then turned yellow
enough to hide with make-up. I just stood there until she saw

me, through the eye that was still open.
'Get out,' she said.
She looked away.
'Bastard,' she said.

'You find the girl yet?' I said.

She looked straight at me.

'There was no girl,' she said. 'I asked all around. I asked
everybody. And that's what I heard back. Nobody had a
problem last night. Nobody at all.'

I paused a beat. 'Anyone not here who should be?'

'We're all here,' she said. 'We've all got Christmas to pay
for.'

I didn't speak.

'You got me slapped for nothing,' she said.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for your trouble.'
'Get out,' she said again, not looking at me.
'OK,' I said.
'Bastard,' she said.

I left her sitting there and forced my way back through the
crowd around the stage. Through the crowd around the bar.
Through the bottleneck entrance, to the doorway. The guy with
the face was right there in the shadows again, behind the
register. I guessed where his head was in the darkness and

swung my open right hand and slapped him on the ear, hard

enough to rock him sideways.

'You,' I said. 'Outside.'

I didn't wait for him. Just pushed my way out into the night.
There was a bunched-up crowd of people in the lot. All military.
The ones who had trickled out when I came in. They were
standing around in the cold, leaning on cars, drinking beer
from the long-neck bottles they had carried out with them.
They weren't going to be a problem. They would have to be
very drunk indeed to mix it up with an MP. But they weren't
going to be any help, either. I wasn't one of them. I was on
my own.

The door burst open behind me. The big guy came out. He
had a couple of locals with him. They looked like farmers. We
all stepped into a pool of yellow light from a fixture on a pole.
We all stood in a rough circle. We all faced each other. Our
breath turned to vapour in the air. Nobody spoke. No preamble
was required. I guessed that parking lot had seen plenty of
fights. I guessed this one would be no different from all the
others. It would finish up just the same, with a winner and a
loser.

I slipped out of my jacket and hung it on the nearest car's
door mirror. It was a ten-year-old Plymouth, good paint, good
chrome. An enthusiast's ride. I saw the Special Forces sergeant
I had spoken to come out into the lot. He looked at me for a
second and then stepped away into the shadows and stood
with his men by the cars. I took my watch off and turned away
and dropped it in my jacket pocket. Then I turned back. Studied
my opponent. I wanted to mess him up bad. I wanted Sin to
know I had stood up for her. But there was no percentage in
going for his face. That was already messed up bad. I couldn't
make it much worse. And I wanted to put him out of action
for a spell. I didn't want him coming around and taking his
frustration out on the girls, just because he couldn't get back at me.

He was barrel-chested and overweight, so I figured I
might not have to use my hands at all. Except on the farmers,
maybe, if they piled in. Which I hoped wouldn't happen. No
need to start a big conflict. On the other hand, it was their call.

Everybody has a choice in life. They could hang back, or they
could choose up sides.

I was maybe seven inches taller than the guy with the face,
but maybe seventy pounds lighter. And ten years younger. I
watched him run the numbers. Watched him conclude that on
balance he would be OK. I guessed he figured himself for a real
junkyard dog. Figured me for an upstanding representative of
Uncle Sam. Maybe the Class As made him think I was going to
act like an officer and a gentleman. Somewhat proper, some

what inhibited.

His mistake.

He came at me, swinging. Big chest, short arms, not much
reach at all. I arched around the punch and let him skitter away.
He came back at me. I swatted his hand away and tapped him in
the face with my elbow. Not hard. I just wanted to stop his
momentum and get him standing still right in front of me, just
for a moment.

He put all his weight on his back foot and lined up a straight
drive aimed for my face. It was going to be a big blow. It would
have hurt me if it had landed. But before he let it go I stepped in
and smashed my right heel into his right kneecap. The knee is
a fragile joint. Ask any athlete. He had three hundred pounds
bearing down on it and he got two hundred thirty driving
straight through it. His patella shattered and his leg folded
backwards. Exactly like a regular knee joint, but in reverse. He
went down forward and the top of his boot came up to meet the
front of his thigh. He screamed, real loud. I stepped back and
smiled. He shoots, he scores.

I stepped back in and looked at the guy's knee, carefully. It
was messed up, but good. Broken bone, ripped ligaments, torn
cartilage. I thought about kicking it again, but I really didn't
need to. He was in line for a visit to the cane store, as soon as
they let him out of the orthopaedic ward. He was going to be
choosing a lifetime supply. Wood, aluminum, short, long, his
pick.

'I'll come back and do the other one,' I said, 'if anything
happens that I don't want to happen.'

I don't think he heard me. He was writhing around in an oily
puddle, panting and whimpering, trying to get his knee in a

position where it would stop killing him. He was shit out of luck
there. He was going to have to wait for surgery.

The farmers were busy choosing up sides. Both of them were
pretty dumb. But one of them was dumber than the other.
Slower. He was flexing his big red hands. I stepped in and
headbutted him full in the face, to help with the decision
making process. He went down, head-to-toe with the big
guy, and his pal beat a fast retreat behind the nearest pickup
truck. I lifted my jacket off the Plymouth's door mirror
and shrugged back into it. Took my watch out of my pocket.
Strapped it back on my wrist. The soldiers drank their beer and
looked at me, nothing in their faces. They were neither pleased
nor disappointed. They had invested nothing in the outcome.
Whether it was me or the other guys on the floor was all the
same to them.

I saw Lieutenant Summer on the fringe of the crowd.
Threaded my way through cars and people towards her. She
looked tense. She was breathing hard. I guessed she had been
watching. I guessed she had been ready to jump in and help me
out.

'What happened?' she said.

'The fat guy hit a woman who was asking questions for me.
His pal didn't run away fast enough.'

She glanced at them and then back at me. 'What did the
woman say?'

'She said nobody had a problem last night.'

'The kid in the motel still denies there was a hooker with
Kramer. He's pretty definite about it.'

I heard Sin say: You got me slapped for nothing. Bastard.

'So what made him go looking in the room?'

Summer made a face. 'That was my big question, obviously.'
'Did he have an answer?'

'Not at first. Then he said it was because he heard a vehicle

leaving in a hurry.'

'What vehicle?'

'He said it was a big engine, revving hard, taking off fast, like

a panic situation.'

'Did he see it?'

Summer just shook her head.

'Makes no sense,' I said. 'A vehicle implies a call girl, and I
doubt if they have many call girls here. And why would Kramer
need a call girl anyway, with all those other hookers right there
in the bar?'

Summer was still shaking her head. "I%e kid says the vehicle
had a very distinctive sound. Very loud. And diesel, not gasoline.

He says he heard the exact same sound again a little later on.'
'When?'

'When you left in your Humvee.'

'What?'

Summer looked right at me. 'He says he checked Kramer's
room because he heard a military vehicle peeling out of the lot
in a panic.'

FOUR

E WENT BACK ACROSS THE ROAD TO THE MOTEL AND MADE the kid tell the story all over again. He was surly and
he wasn't talkative, but he made a good witness.
Unhelpful people often do. They're not trying to please you.
They're not trying to impress you. They're not making all kinds
of stuff up, trying to tell you what you want to hear.

He said he was sitting in the office, alone, doing nothing, and
at about eleven twenty-five in the evening he heard a vehicle
door slam and then a big turbo-diesel start up. He described
sounds that must have been a gearbox slamming into reverse
and a four-wheel-drive transfer case locking up. Then there was
tyre noise and engine noise and gravel noise and something
very large and heavy sped away in a big hurry. He said he got

off his stool and went outside to look. Didn't see the vehicle.
'Why did you check the room?' I asked him.
He shrugged. 'I thought maybe it was on fire.'
'On fire?'

'People do stuff like that, in a place like this. They set the
room on fire. And then high-tail out. For kicks. Or something. I
don't know. It was unusual.'

'How did you know which room to check?'

He went very quiet at that point. Summer pressed him for an
answer. Then I did. We did the good cop, bad cop thing.
Eventually he admitted it was the only room rented for the
whole night. All the others were renting by the hour, and were
being serviced by foot traffic from across the street, not by
vehicles. He said that was how he had been so sure there was
never a hooker in Kramer's room. It was his responsibility to
check them in and out. He took the money and issued the keys.
Kept track of the comings and the goings. So he always knew
for sure who was where. It was a part of his function. A part he

was supposed to keep very quiet about.

'I'll lose my job now,' he said.

He got worried to the point of tears and Summer had to
calm him down. Then he told us he had found Kramer's body
and called the cops and cleared all the hourly renters out for
safety's sake. Then Deputy Chief Stockton had shown up within
about fifteen minutes. Then I had shown up, and when I left
some time later he recognized the same" vehicle sounds he had
heard before. Same engine noise, same drivetrain noises, same
tyre whine. He was convincing. He had already admitted that
hookers used the place all the time, so he had no more reason
to lie. And Humvees were still relatively new. Still relatively
rare. And they made a distinctive noise. So I believed him. We
left him there on his stool and stepped outside into the cold red
glow of the Coke machine.

'No hooker,' Summer said. 'A woman from the base instead.'
'A woman officer,' I said. 'Maybe fairly senior. Someone with
permanent access to her own Humvee. Nobody signs out a pool
vehicle for an assignation like that. And she's got his briefcase.
She must have.'

'She'll be easy to find. She'll be in the gate log, time out, time
in.'

'I might have even passed her on the road. If she left here at
eleven twenty-five she wasn't back at Bird before about twelve
fifteen. I was leaving around then.'

'If she went straight back to the post.'

'Yes,' I said. 'If.'

'Did you see another Humvee?'

'Don't think so,' I said.

'Who do you think she is?'

I shrugged. 'Like we figured about the phantom hooker.
Someone he met somewhere. Irwin, probably, but it could have
been anywhere.'

I stared across at the gas station. Watched cars go by on the
road.

'Vassell and Coomer might know her,' Summer said. 'You

know, if it was a long term thing between her and Kramer.'
'Yes, they might.'

'Where do you think they are?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'But I'm sure I'll find them if I need
them.'

I didn't find them. They found me. They were waiting for me in
my borrowed office when we got back. Summer dropped me
at my door and went to park the car. I walked past the outer
desk. The night shift sergeant was back. The mountain woman,
with the baby son and the paycheck worries. She gestured at
the inner door in a way that told me someone was in there.

Someone that ranked a lot higher than either of us.

'Got coffee?' I said.

'The machine is on,' she said.

I took some with me. My coat was still unbuttoned. My hair
was a mess. I looked exactly like a guy who had been brawling
in a parking lot. I walked straight to the desk. Put my coffee
down. There were two guys in upright visitor chairs against the
wall, facing me. They were both in woodland BDUs. One of
them had a brigadier general's star on his collar and the other
had a colonel's eagle. The general had Vassell on his name tape
and the colonel had Coomer. Vassell was bald and Coomer
wore eyeglasses and they were both pompous enough and old
enough and short and soft and pink enough to look vaguely
ridiculous in BDUs. They looked like Rotary Club members on
their way to a fancy dress ball. First impression, I didn't like
them very much.

I sat down in my chair and saw two slips of paper stacked
square in the centre of the blotter. The first was a note that
said: Your brother called again. Urgent. This time there was a
phone number with it. It had a 202 area code. Washington D.C.

'Don't you salute senior officers?' Vassell said, from his chair.
The second note said: Col. Garber called. Green Valley PD
calculates Mrs K died approx. 0200. I folded both notes separately
and tucked them side by side under the base of my
telephone. Adjusted them so I could see exactly half of each
one. Looked up in time to see Vassell glaring at me. His naked
scalp was going red.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'What was the question?'

'Don't you salute senior officers when you enter a room?'
'If they're in my chain of command,' I said. 'You're not.'
'I don't consider that an answer,' he said.

'Look it up,' I said. 'I'm with the 110th Special Unit. We're
separate. Structurally we're parallel to the rest of the army. We
have to be, if you think about it. We can't police you if we're in
your chain of command ourselves.'

'I'm not here to be policed, son,' he said.

'So why are you here? It's kind of late for a social visit.'

'I'm here to ask some questions.'

'Ask away,' I said. 'Then I'll ask some of my own. And you

know what the difference will be?'

He said nothing.

'I'll be answering out of courtesy,' I said. 'You'll be answering
because the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires you

to.'

He said nothing. Just glared at me. Then he glanced at
Coomer. Coomer looked back at him, and then at me.

5Ve're here about General Kramer,' he said. 'We're his senior
staff.'

'I know who you are,' I said.
'Tell us about the general.'
'He's dead,'! said.

'We're aware of that. We'd like to know the circumstances.'
'He had a heart attack.'
'Where?'

'Inside his chest cavity.'

Vassell glowered.

5Vhere did he die?' Coomer said.

'I can't tell you that,' I said. 'It's germane to an ongoing
inquiry.'

'In what way?' Vassell said.

'In a confidential way.'

'It was around here somewhere,' he said. 'That much is
already common knowledge.'

'Well, there you go,' I said. 'What's the conference at Irwin
about?'

'What?'

'The conference at Irwin,' l said again. 'Where you were all
headed.'

'What about it?'

'I need to know the agenda.'

Vassell looked at Coomer and Coomer opened his mouth to
start telling me something when my phone rang. It was my
desk sergeant. She had Summer out there with her. She was
unsure whether to send her in. I told her to go right ahead. So
there was a tap on the door and Summer came in. I introduced
her all around and she pulled a spare chair over to my desk and
sat down, alongside me, facing them. Two against two. I pulled
the second note out from under the telephone and passed it
to her: Green Valley PD calculates Mrs K died approx. 0200. She unfolded it and read it and refolded it and passed it back to
me. I put it back under the phone. Then I asked Vassell and
Coomer about the Irwin agenda again, and watched their
attitudes change. They didn't get any more helpful. It was more
of a sideways move than an improvement. But because there
was now a woman in the room they dialled down the overt
hostility and replaced it with smug patronizing civility. They
came from that kind of a background and that kind of a
generation. They hated MPs and I was sure they hated women
officers, but all of a sudden they felt they had to be polite.

'It was going to be purely routine,' Coomer said. 'Just a
regular pow-wow. Nothing of any great importance.'

'Which explains why you didn't actually go,' I said.

'Naturally. It seemed much more appropriate to remain here.
You know, in the circumstances.'

'How did you find out about Kramer?'
'XII Corps called us.'
'From Germany?'

'That's where XII Corps is, son,' Vassell said.

'Where did you stay last night?'
'In a hotel,' Coomer said.
'Which one?'

'The Jefferson. In D.C.'

'Private or on a DoD ticket?'

'That hotel is authorized for senior officers.'
'Why didn't General Kramer stay there?'
'Because he made alternative arrangements.'
'When?'

'When what?' Coomer said.

'When did he make these alternative arrangements?'

'Some days ago.'

'So it wasn't a spur of the moment thing?'

'No, it wasn't.'

'Do you know what those arrangements were?'

'Obviously not,' Vassell said. 'Or we wouldn't be asking you

where he died.'

'You didn't think he was maybe visiting with his wife?' :.:
'Was he?'

'No,' I said. 'Why do you need to know where he died?'
There was a long pause. Their attitudes changed again. The
smugness fell away and they replaced it with a kind of winsome
frankness. .:]

'We don't really need to know,' Vassell said. He leaned

forward and glanced at Summer like he wished she wasn't
there. Like he wanted this new intimacy to be purely man-to
man with me. 'And we have no specific information or direct
knowledge at all, but we're worried that General Kramer's
private arrangements could lead to the potential for embarrass

ment, in light of the circumstances.'

'How well did you know him?'

'On a professional level, very well indeed. On a personal level,

about as well as anyone knows his brother officer. Which is to

say, perhaps not well enough.'

'But you suspect in general terms what his arrangements

might have been.'

'Yes,' he said. 'We have our suspicions.'

'So it wasn't a surprise to you that he didn't bunk at the hotel.'

'No,' he said. 'It wasn't.'

'And it wasn't a surprise when I told you he wasn't visiting
with his wife.'

'Not entirely, no.'

'So you suspected roughly what he might be doing, but you
didn't know where.'

Vassell nodded his head. 'Roughly.'

'Did you know with whom he might have been doing it?'
Vassell shook his head.

'We have no specific information,' he said.

'OK,' I said. 'Doesn't really matter. I'm sure you know the
army well enough to realize that if we discover a potential for

embarrassment, we'll cover it up.'

There was a long pause.

'Have all traces been removed?' Coomer asked. 'From
wherever it was?'

I nodded. 'We took his stuff.'

'Good.'

'I need the Irwin conference agenda,' I said.
There was another pause.
'There wasn't one,' Vassell said.

'I'm sure there was,' I said. 'This is the army. It's not the

Actors' Studio. We don't do free improvisation sessions.'
There was a pause.

'There was nothing on paper,' Coomer said. 'I told you, major,
it was no big deal.'

'How did you spend your day today?'
'Chasing rumours about the general.'
'How did you get down here from D.C.?'

'We have a car and a driver on loan from the Pentagon.'
'You checked out of the Jefferson.'
'Yes, we did.'

'So your bags are in the Pentagon car.'
'Yes, they are.'
'Where is the car?'

'Waiting outside your post headquarters.'

'It's not my post headquarters,' I said. 'I'm here on temporary
detachment.'

I turned to Summer and told her to go fetch their briefcases
from the car. They got all outraged, but they knew they couldn't

stop me doing it. Civilian notions about unreasonable search
and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army
post main gate. I watched their eyes while Summer was gone.
They were annoyed, but they weren't worried. So either they
were telling the truth about the Irwin conference or they had
already ditched the relevant paperwork. But I went through
the motions anyway. Summer got back carrying two identical
briefcases. They were exactly like the one Kramer had in his
silver-framed photographs. Staffers kiss up in all kinds of ways.

I searched through them on my desk. I found passports,

plane tickets, travel vouchers and itineraries in both of them.

But no agendas for Fort Irwin.

'Sorry for the inconvenience,' I said.

'Happy now, son?' Vassell said.

'Kramer's wife is dead, too,' I said. 'Did you know that?'

I watched them carefully, and I saw that they didn't know.

They stared at me and stared at each other and started to get

pale and upset.

'How?' Vassell said.

'When?' Coomer said.

'Last night,' I said. 'She was a homicide victim.'

'Where?'

'In her house. There was an intruder.'

'Do we know who it was?'

'No, we don't. It's not our case. It's a civilian jurisdiction.'

'What was it? A burglary?'

'It maybe started out that way.'

They said nothing more. Summer and I walked them out to

the sidewalk in front of post headquarters and watched them
climb into their Pentagon car. It was a Mercury Grand Marquis,
a couple of model-years newer than Mrs Kramer's big old boat,
and black rather than green. Their driver was a tall guy in
BDUs. He had subdued-order badges on and I couldn't make
out his name or his rank in the dark. But he didn't look like an
enlisted man. He U-turned smoothly across the empty road and
drove Vassell and Coomer away. We watched his tail lights
disappear north, through the main gate, and away into the
darkness beyond.

'What do you think?' Summer said.

'I think they're full of shit,' I said.

'Important shit or regular flag-rank shit?'

'They're lying,' I said. 'They're uptight, they're lying, and
they're stupid. Why am I worried about Kramer's briefcase?'

'Sensitive paperwork,' she said. 'Whatever he was carrying to
California.'

I nodded. 'They just defined it for me. It's the conference
agenda itself.'

'You're sure there was one?'

'There's always an agenda. And it's always on paper. There's
a paper agenda for everything. You want to change the dog food
in the K-9 kennels, you need forty-seven separate meetings with
forty-seven separate paper agendas. So there was one for Irwin,
that's for damn sure. It was completely stupid to say there
wasn't. If they've got something to hide, they should have just
said it's too secret for me to see.'

'Maybe the conference really wasn't important.'
'That's bullshit, too. It was very important.'
'Why?'

'Because a two-star general was going. And a one-star. And
because it was New Year's Eve, Summer. Who flies on New
Year's Eve and spends the night in a lousy stopover hotel? And
this year in Germany was a big deal. The Wall is coming down.
We won, after forty-five years. The parties must have been
incredible. Who would miss them for something unimportant?
To have gotten those guys on a plane on New Year's Eve, this
Irwin thing had to be some kind of a very big deal.'

'They were upset about Mrs Kramer. More than about
Kramer himself.'

I nodded. 'Maybe they liked her.'

'They must have liked Kramer too.'

'No, he's just a tactical problem for them. It's an unsentimental
business, up there at their level. They hitched themselves to
him, and now he's dead, and they're worrying about where that
leaves them.'

'Ready for promotion, maybe.'

'Maybe,' I said. 'But if Kramer turns out to be an embarrassment,
they could go down with him.'

'Then they should be reassured. You promised them a coverup.'

There was something prim in her voice. Like she was

suggesting I shouldn't have promised them any such thing.

3Ve protect the army, Summer,' I said. 'Like family. That's

what we're for.' Then I paused. 'But did you notice they didn't
shut up after that? They should have taken the hint. Coverup
requested, cover-up promised. Asked and answered, mission
accomplished.'

'They wanted to know where his stuff was.'

'Yes,' I said. 'They did. And you know what that means? It

means they're looking for Kramer's briefcase too. Because of
the agenda. Kramer's copy is the only one still outside of their
direct control. They came down here to check if I had it.'

Summer looked in the direction their car had gone. I could

still smell its exhaust in the air. An acid tang from the catalyst.

'How do civilian medics work?' I asked her. 'Suppose you're

ml'yl wife,call nineand oneI go one.'d°wn with a heart attack? What do you do?'

'And then what happens?'

'The ambulance shows up. Takes you to the emergency

room.'

'And let's say I'm DOA when I get there. Where would you

be?'

'I would have ridden to the hospital with you.'

'And where would my briefcase be?'

'At home,' she said. 'Wherever you left it.' Then she paused.

'What? You think someone went to Mrs Kramer's house last

night looking for the briefcase?'

'It's a plausible sequence,' I said. 'Someone hears that he's

dead from a heart attack, assumes he was pronounced in the
ambulance or the emergency room, assumes whoever he was
with would have accompanied him, goes down there expecting

to find an empty house with a briefcase in it.'

'But he was never there.'

'It was a reasonable first try.'

'You think it was Vassell and Coomer?'

I said nothing.

'That's crazy,' Summer said. 'They don't look the type.'

'Don't let looks fool you. They're Armored Branch. They've
trained all their lives to roll right over anything that gets in
their way. But I don't think the timing works for them. Let's say
Garber called XII Corps in Germany at twelve fifteen, earliest.
Then let's say XII Corps called the hotel back here in the States
at twelve thirty, earliest. Green Valley is seventy minutes from
D.C. and Mrs Kramer died at two o'clock. That would have
given them a twenty-minute margin to react, maximum. They
were just in from the airport, so they didn't have a car with
them, and it would have taken time to get hold of one. And they
certainly didn't have a crowbar with them. Nobody travels with
a crowbar in their luggage, just in case. And I doubt if the

Home Depot was open, after midnight on New Year's Eve.'
'So someone else is out there looking?'

'We need to find that agenda,' I said. 'We need to nail this
thing down.'

I sent Summer away to do three things: first, list all female
personnel at Fort Bird with access to their own Humvees, and
second, list any of them who might have met Kramer at Fort
Irwin in California, and third, contact the Jefferson Hotel in
D.C. and get Vassell and Coomer's exact check-in and checkout
times, plus details of all their incoming and outgoing phone
calls. I went back to my office and filed the note from Garber
and spread the note from my brother on the blotter and dialled

the number. He picked up on the first ring.
'Hey, Joe,' I said.
'Jack?'
'What?'

'I got a call.'

'Who from?'

'Mom's doctor,' he said.
'About what?'
'She's dying.'

FIVE

HUNG liP WITH JOE AND CAI.LED GARBER ." OFFICE. HE WASN'T IN.

So I left a message detailing my travel plans and saying I
would be out for seventy-two hours. I didn't give a reason.
Then I hung up again and sat at my desk, numb. Five minutes
later Summer came in. She had a sheaf of motor pool paper with
her. I guess she planned on compiling her Humvee list there
and then, right in front of me.

'I have to go to Paris,' I said.

'Paris, Texas?' she said. 'Or Paris, Kentucky, or Paris,
Tennessee?'

'Paris, France,'! said.

'Why?'

'My mother is sick.'

'Your mother lives in France?'
'Paris,' I said.
'Why?'

'Because she's French.'
'Is it serious?'
'Being French?'

'No, whatever she's sick with.'

I shrugged. 'I don't really know. But I think so.'

'I'm very sorry.'

'I need a car,' I said. 'I need to get to Dulles, right now.'

Tll drive you,' she said. 'I like driving.'

She left the paperwork on my desk and went to retrieve the
Chevrolet we had used before. I went to my quarters and packed
an army duffel with one of everything from my closet. Then I put
on my long coat. It was cold, and I didn't expect Europe was
going to be any warmer. Not in early January. Summer brought
the car to my door. She kept it at thirty until we were off
post. Then she lit it up like a rocket and headed north. She was
quiet for a spell. She was thinking. Her eyelids were moving.

'We should tell the Green Valley cops,' she said. 'If we think
Mrs Kramer was killed because of the briefcase.'

I shook my head. 'Telling them won't bring her back. And if
she was killed because of the briefcase we'll find whoever did it
from our end.'

'What do you want me to do while you're gone?'

'Work the lists,' I said. 'Check the gate log. Find the woman,
find the briefcase, put the agenda in a very safe place. Then
check on who Vassell and Coomer called from the hotel. Maybe

they sent an errand boy out into the night.'
'You think that's possible?'
'Anything's possible.'

'But they didn't know where Kramer was.'
'That's why they tried the wrong place.'
'Who would they have sent?'

'Bound to be someone who has their interests close to his
heart.'

'OK,' she said.

'And find out who was driving them just now.'

'OK,' she said.

We didn't speak again, all the way to Dulles.

I met my brother Joe in the line at the Air France ticket desk.
He had booked seats for both of us on the first morning flight.
Now he was lining up to pay for them. I hadn't seen him for
more than three years. The last time we had been together was
at our father's funeral. Since then we had gone our separate
ways.

'Good morning, little brother,' he said.

He was wearing an overcoat and a suit and a tie, and he
looked pretty good in them. He was two years older than me,
and he always had been, and he always would be. As a kid I used to study him and think, that's how I'll look when I grow
up. Now I found myself doing it again. From a distance we
could have been mistaken for each other. Standing side by side
it was obvious that he was an inch taller and a little slighter than
me. But mostly it was obvious that he was a little older than me.
It looked like we had started out together, but he had seen the

future first, and it had aged him, and worn him down.
'How are you, Joe?' I said.
'Can't complain.'
'Busy?'

'Like you wouldn't believe.'

I nodded and said nothing. Truth is, I didn't know exactly
what he did for a living. He had probably told me. It wasn't a
national secret or anything. It was something to do with the
Treasury Department. He had probably told me all the details
and I probably hadn't listened. Now it seemed too late to ask.

'You were in Panama,' he said. 'Operation Just Cause, right?'
'Operation Just Because,' I said. 'That's what we called it.'
'Just because what?'

'Just because we could. Just because we all had to have
something to do. Just because we've got a new Commander in

Chief who wants to look tough.'

'Is it going well?'

'It's like Notre Dame against the Tumble Tots. How else is it
going to go?'

'You got Noriega yet?'

'Not yet.'

'So why did they post you back here?'

'We took twenty-seven thousand guys,' I said. 'It wasn't down
to me personally.'

He smiled briefly and then got that narrow-eyed look I
remembered from childhood. It meant he was figuring out
some pedantic and convoluted line of reasoning. But we got to
the head of the line before he had time to tell me about it. He
took out his credit card and paid for the flights. Maybe he

expected me to pay him back for mine, maybe he didn't. He
didn't make it clear either way.

'Let's get coffee now,' he said.

He was probably the only other human on the planet who
liked coffee as much as I did. He started drinking it when he
was six. I copied him immediately. I was four. Neither of us has
stopped since. The Reacher brothers' need for caffeine makes
heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it
sideline.

We found a place with a W-shaped counter snaking through
it. It was three-quarters empty. It was harshly lit with fluorescent
tubes and the vinyl on the stools was sticky. We sat side by
side and rested our forearms on the counter in the universal
pose of early-morning travellers everywhere. A guy in an apron
put mugs in front of us without asking. Then he filled them with
coffee from a flask. The coffee smelled fresh. The place was
changing over from the all-night service to the breakfast menu.
I could hear eggs frying.

'What happened in Panama?' Joe asked.
'To me?'I said. 'Nothing.'
'What were your orders there?'
'Supervision.'
'Of what?'

'Of the process,' I said. 'The Noriega thing is supposed to look
judicial. He's supposed to stand trial here in the States. So we're
supposed to grab him up with some kind of formality. Some

way that will look acceptable when we get him in a courtroom.'
'You were going to read him his Miranda rights?'

'Not exactly. But it had to be better than some cowboy thing.'
'Did you screw up?'
'I don't think so.'
'Who replaced you?'
'Some other guy.'
'Rank?'
'Same,' I said.
'A rising star?'

I sipped my coffee. Shook my head. 'I never met him before.
But he seemed like a bit of an asshole to me.'

Joe nodded and picked up his mug. Said nothing.

'What?' I said.

'Bird's not a small post,' he said. 'But it's not real big, either,
right? What are you working on?'

'Right now? Some two-star died and I can't find his briefcase.'
'Homicide?'

I shook my head. 'Heart attack.'
'When?'
'Last night.'

'After you got there?'

I said nothing.

'You sure you didn't screw up?' Joe said.

'I don't think so,' I said again.

'So why did they pull you out? One day you're supervising the
Noriega process, and the next day you're in North Carolina with
nothing to do? And you'd still have nothing to do if the general
hadn't died.'

'I got orders,' I said. 'You know how it is. You have to assume

they know what they're doing.'
'Who signed the orders?'
'I don't know.'

'You should find out. Find out who wanted you at Bird badly
enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an
asshole. And you should find out why.'

The guy in the apron refilled our mugs. Shoved plastic menus
in front of us.

'Eggs,' Joe said. 'Over well, bacon, toast.'

'Pancakes,' I said. 'Egg on the top, bacon on the side, plenty
of syrup.'

The guy took the menus back and went away and Joe turned
around on his stool and sat back-to with his legs stretched way
out into the aisle.

'What exactly did her doctor say?' I asked him.

He shrugged. 'Not very much. No details, no diagnosis. No
real information. European doctors aren't very good with bad
news. They hedge around it all the time. Plus, there's a privacy
issue, obviously.'

'But we're headed over there for a reason.'

He nodded. 'He suggested we might want to come. And then
he hinted that sooner might be better than later.'

'What is she saying?'

'That it's all a lot of fuss about nothing. But that we're always
welcome to visit.'

W'c finished our breakfast and I paid for it. Then Joe gave
me my ticket, like a transaction. I was sure he earned more
than me, but probably not enough to make an airline ticket
proportional to a plate of eggs and bacon with toast on the side.
But I took the deal. We got off our stools and got our bearings

and headed for the check-in counter.
'Take your coat off,' he said.
'Why?'

'I want the clerk to see your medal ribbons,' he said. 'Military
action going on overseas, we might get an upgrade.'

'It's Air France,' I said. 'France isn't even a military member
of NATO.'

'The check-in clerk will be American,' he said. 'Try it.'

I shrugged out of my coat. Folded it over my arm and walked

sideways so the left of my chest stuck out forward.

'OK now?' I said.

'Perfect,' he said, and smiled.

I smiled back. Left-to-right on the top row I wear the Silver
Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of
Merit. Second row has the Soldier's Medal, the Bronze
Star, and my Purple Heart. The bottom two rows are the junk
awards. I won all of the good stuff purely by accident and none of it means very much to me. Using it to get an upgrade out of
an airline clerk is about what it's good for. But Joe liked the top
two rows. He served five years in Military Intelligence and
didn't get past the junk.

We made it to the head of the line and he put his passport
and ticket on the counter along with a Treasury Department ID.
Then he stepped behind my shoulder. I put my own passport
and ticket down. He nudged me in the back. I turned a little
sideways and looked at the clerk.

'Can you find us something with legroom?' I asked him.

He was a small man, middle-aged, tired. He looked up at us.
Together we measured almost thirteen feet tall and weighed
about four hundred fifty pounds. He studied the Treasury ID

and looked at my uniform and pattered on his keyboard and

came up with a forced smile.

'We'll seat you gentlemen up front,' he said.

Joe nudged me in the back again and I knew he was smiling.

We were in the last row of the first-class cabin. We were talking,
but we were avoiding the obvious subject. We talked about
music, and then politics. We had another breakfast. We drank

coffee. Air France makes pretty good coffee in first class.

'Who was the general?' Joe asked.

'Guy called Kramer,' I said. 'An Armored commander in

Europe.'

'Armored? So why was he at Bird?'

'He wasn't on the post. He was at a motel thirty miles away.
Rendezvous with a woman. We think she ran away with his
briefcase.'

'Civilian?'

I shook my head. 'We think she was an officer from Bird.

He was supposed to be overnighting in D.C. on his way to

California for a conference.'

'That's a three-hundred-mile detour.'
'Two hundred and ninety-eight.'
'But you don't know who she is.'

'She's fairly senior. She drove her own Humvee out to the

motel.'

He nodded. 'She has to be fairly senior. Kramer's known her

for a good spell, to make it worth driving a five-hundred-ninety

six-mile round-trip detour.'

I smiled. Anyone else would have said a six-hundred-mile

detour. But not my brother. Like me he has no middle name.

But it should be Pedantic. Joe Pedantic Reacher.

'Bird is still all infantry, right?' he said. 'Some Rangers, some

Delta, but mostly grunts, as I recall. So have you got many

senior women?'

'There's a Psy-Ops school now,' I said. 'Half the instructors

are women.'

'Rank?'

'Some captains, some majors, a couple of light colonels.'

'What was in the briefcase?'

'The agenda for the California conference,' I said. 'Kramer's

staffers are pretending there isn't one.'
'There's always an agenda,' Joe said.
'I know.'

'Check the majors and the light colonels,' he said. 'That
would be my advice.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'And find out who wanted you at Bird,' he said. 'And why.
This Kramer thing wasn't the reason. We know that for sure.
Kramer was alive and well when your orders were cut.'

We read day-old copies of Le Matin and Le Monde. About
halfway through the flight we started talking in French. We
were pretty rusty, but we got by. Once learned, never forgotten.
He asked me about girlfriends. I guess he figured it was an
appropriate subject for discussion in the French language. I told
him I had been seeing a girl in Korea but since then I had been
moved to the Philippines and then Panama and now to North
Carolina so I didn't expect to see her again. I told him about
Lieutenant Summer. He seemed interested in her. He told me
he wasn't seeing anyone.

Then he switched back to English and asked when I had last
been in Germany.

'Six months ago,' I said.

'It's the end of an era,' he said. 'Germany will reunify. France
will renew its nuclear testing because a reunified Germany will
bring back bad memories. Then it will propose a common
currency for the EC as a way of keeping the new Germany
inside the tent. Ten years from now Poland will be in NATO and
the USSR won't exist any more. There'll be some rump nation.

Maybe it will be in NATO too.'

'Maybe,' I said.

'So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will

be different in the future.'

'Probably.'

vVhat are you going to do?'

'When?'

He turned in his seat and looked at me. 'There's going to be
force reduction, Jack. You should face it. They're not going to

keep a million-man army going, not when the other guy has
fallen apart.'

'He hasn't fallen apart yet.'

'But he will. It'll be over within a year. Gorbachev won't last.
There'll be a coup. The old communists will make one last play,
but it won't stick. Then the reformers will be back for ever.
Yeltsin, probably. He's OK. So in D.C. the temptation to save
money will be irresistible. It'll be like a hundred Christmases
coming all at once. Never forget your Commander in Chief is
primarily a politician.'

I thought back to the sergeant with the baby son.

'It'll happen slowly,' I said.

Joe shook his head. 'It'll happen faster than you think.' We'll always have enemies,' I said.

'No question,' he said. 'But they'll be different kinds of
enemies. They won't have ten thousand tanks lined up across

the plains of Germany.'

I said nothing.

'You should find out why you're at Bird,' Joe said. 'Either
nothing much is happening there, and therefore you're on the
way down, or something is happening there, and they want you

around to deal with it, in which case you're on the way up.'

I said nothing.

'You need to know either way,' he said. 'Force reduction
is coming, and you need to know if you're up or down right
now.'

'They'll always need cops,' I said. 'They bring it down to a

two-man army, one of them better be an MP.'
'You should make a plan,' he said.
'I never make plans.'
'You need to.'

I traced my fingertips across the ribbons on my chest.

'They got me a seat in the front of the plane,' I said. 'Maybe
they'll keep me in a job.'

'Maybe they will,' Joe said. 'But even if they do, will it be a job
you want? Everything's going to get horribly second-rate.'

I noticed his shirt cuffs. They were clean and crisp and
secured by discreet cufflinks made from silver and black onyx.
His tie was a plain sombre item made from silk. He had shaved

carefully. The bottom of his sideburn was cut exactly square.
He was a man horrified by anything less than the best.

'A job's a job,' I said. 'I'm not choosy.'

We slept the rest of the way. We were woken by the pilot on the
PA telling us we were about to start our descent into RoissyCharles
de Gaulle. Local time was already eight o'clock in the
evening. Nearly the whole of the second day of the new decade
had disappeared like a mirage, as we slid through one Atlantic
time zone after another.

We changed some money and hiked over to the taxi line. It
was a mile long, full of people and luggage. It was hardly
moving. So we found a navette instead, which is what
the French call an airport shuttle bus. We had to stand all the
way through the dreary northern suburbs and into the centre
of Paris. We got out at the Place de l'Opra at nine in the
evening. Paris was dark and damp and cold and quiet. Cafes
and restaurants had warm lights burning behind closed doors
and fogged windows. The streets were wet and lined with small
parked cars. The cars were all misted over with night-time dew.
We walked together south and west and crossed the Seine at
the Pont de la Concorde. Turned west again along the Quai
d'Orsay. The river was dark and sluggish. Nothing was moving

on it. The streets were empty. Nobody was out and about.
'Should we get flowers?' I said.

'Too late,' Joe said. 'Everything's closed.'

We turned left at the Place de la Rsistance and walked into
the Avenue Rapp, side by side. We saw the Eiffel Tower on our
right as we crossed the Rue de l'Universit. It was lit up in
gold. Our heels sounded like rifle shots on the silent sidewalk.
Then we arrived at my mother's building. It was a modest six
storey stone apartment house trapped between two gaudier
Belle Epoque facades. Joe took his hand out of his pocket and
unlocked the street door.

'You have a key?' I said.

He nodded. 'I've always had a key.'

Inside the street door was a cobbled alley that led through to
the centre courtyard. The concierge's room was on the left.
Beyond it was a small alcove with a small slow elevator. We

rode it up to the fifth floor. Stepped out into a high wide
hallway. It was dimly lit. It had dark decorative tiles on the
floor. The right-hand apartment had tall oak double doors with a
discreet brass plaque engraved: M. & Mme Girard. The left
hand doors were painted off-white and labelled: Mme Reacher.

We knocked and waited.

SIX

E HEARD SLOW SHUFFIJNG STEPS INSIDE THE APARTMENT AND a long moment later my mother opened the door. 'Bonsoir, maman,' Joe said.
I just stared at her.

She was very thin and very grey and very stooped and she
looked about a hundred years older than the last time I had
seen her. She had a long heavy plaster cast on her left leg and
she was leaning on an aluminum walker. Her hands were
gripping it hard and I could see bones and veins and tendons
standing out. She was trembling. Her skin looked translucent.
Only her eyes were the same as I remembered them. They
were blue and merry and filled with amusement.

j e, she said. 'And Reacher.'

She always called me by my last name. Nobody remembered
why. Maybe I had started it, as a kid. Maybe she had continued
it, the way families do.

'My boys,' she said. 'Just look at the two of you.'

She Spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a
happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and
frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her
aluminum walker.

'What happened?' I said.

'Come inside,' she said. 'Make yourselves at home.'

She turned the walker around with short clumsy movements and shuffled back through the hallway. She was panting
and wheezing. I stepped in after her. Joe closed the door and
followed me. The hallway was narrow and tall and was followed
by a living room with wood floors and white sofas and white
walls and framed mirrors. My mother made her way to a sofa
and backed up to it slowly and dropped herself into it. She
seemed to disappear in its depth.

'What happened?' I asked again.

She wouldn't answer. She just waved the enquiry away with
an impatient movement of her hand. Joe and I sat down, side by
side.

'You're going to have to tell us,' I said.

'We came all this way,' Joe said.

'I thought you were just visiting,' she said.

'No, you didn't,' I said.

She stared at a spot on the wall.
'It's nothing,' she said.
'Doesn't look like nothing.'
'Well, it was just bad timing.'
'In what way?'

'I got unlucky,' she said.

'How?'

'I was hit by a car,' she said. 'It broke my leg.'

'Where? When?'

'Two weeks ago,' she said. 'Right outside my door, here on
the Avenue. It was raining, I had an umbrella, it was shading my
eyes, I stepped out, and the driver saw me and braked, but the pavd was wet and the car slid right into me, very slowly, like
slow motion, but I was transfixed and I couldn't move. I felt it
hit my knee, very gently, like a kiss, but it snapped a bone. It
hurt like hell.'

I saw in my mind the guy in the parking lot outside the nude

bar near Bird, writhing around in an oily puddle.
'Why didn't you tell us?' Joe asked.
She didn't answer.

'But it'll mend, right?' he asked.

'Of course,' she said. 'It's trivial.'
Joe just looked at me.
'What else?' I said.

She kept on looking at the wall. Did the dismissive thing with
hel" hand again.

'What else?' Joe asked.

She looked at me, and then she looked at him.

'They gave me an X-ray,' she said. 'I'm an old woman, according
to them. According to them, old women who break bones
are at risk from pneumonia. Because we're laid up and immobile

and our lungs can fill and get infected.'

'And?'

She said nothing.

'Have you got pneumonia?' I said.

'No.'

'So what happened?'

'They found out. With the X-ray.'
'Found what out?'
'That I have cancer.'

Nobody spoke for a long time.

'But you already knew,' I said.

She smiled at me, like she always did.
'Yes, darling,' she said. 'I already knew.'
'For how long?'

'For a year,' she said.

Nobody spoke.

'What sort of cancer?' Joe said.
'Every sort there is, now.'
'Is it treatable?'

She just shook her head.

'Was it treatable?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'I didn't ask.'

'What were the symptoms?'

'I had stomach aches. I had no appetite.'

'Then it spread?'

'NowI hurt all over. It's in my bones. And this stupid leg
doesn't help.'

'Why didn't you tell us?'

She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate.

'What was to tell?' she said.

'Why didn't you go to the doctor?'
She didn't answer for a time.
'I'm tired,' she said.

'Of what?' Joe said. 'Life?'

She smiled. 'No, Joe, I mean I'm tired. It's late and I need to
go to bed, is what I mean. We'll talk some more tomorrow. I
promise. Don't let's have a lot of fuss now.'

We let her go to bed. We had to. We had no choice. She was
the most stubborn woman imaginable. We found stuff to eat
in her kitchen. She had laid in provisions for us. That was
clear. Her refrigerator was stocked with the kind of things that
wouldn't interest a woman with no appetite. We ate pfit and
cheese and made coffee and sat at her table to drink it. The
Avenue Rapp was still and silent and deserted, five floors below
her window.

'What do you think?' Joe asked me.

'I think she's dying,' I said. 'That's why we came, after all.'
'Can we make her get treatment?'

'It's too late. It would be a waste of time. And we can't make
her do anything. When could anyone make her do what she
didn't want to?'

'Why doesn't she want to?'

'I don't know.'

He just looked at me.
'She's a fatalist,' I said.
'She's only sixty years old.'

I nodded. She had been thirty when I was born, and forty
eight when I stopped living wherever we called home. I hadn't
noticed her age at all. At forty-eight she had looked younger
than I did when I was twenty-eight. I had last seen her a year
and a half ago. I had stopped by Paris for two days, en route
from Germany to the Middle East. She had been fine. She had
looked great. She was about two years into widowhood then,
and like with a lot of people the two-year threshold had been
like turning a corner. She had looked like a person with a lot of
life left.

'Why didn't she tell us?' Joe said.

'I don't know.'

'I wish she had.'

'Shit happens,' I said.

Joe just nodded.

She had made up her guest room with clean fresh sheets and
towels and she had put flowers in bone china vases on the night
stands. It was a small fragrant room full of two twin beds. I
pictured her struggling around with her walker, fighting with
duvets, folding corners, smoothing things out.

Joe and I didn't talk. I hung my uniform in the closet and
washed up in the bathroom. Set the clock in my head for seven
the next morning and got into bed and lay there looking at the
ceiling for an hour. Then I went to sleep.

I woke at exactly seven. Joe was already up. Maybe he hadn't
slept at all. Maybe he was accustomed to a more regular lifestyle
than I was. Maybe the jet lag bothered him more. I
showered and took fatigue pants and a T-shirt from my duffel
and put them on. Found Joe in the kitchen. He had coffee
going.

'Mom's still asleep,' he said. 'Medication, probably.'

'I'll go get breakfast,' I said.

I put my coat on and walked a block to a patisserie I knew on
the Rue Saint Dominique. I bought croissants and pain au
chocolat and carried the waxed bag home. My mother was still
in her room when I got back.

'She's committing suicide,' Joe said. 'We can't let her.'

I said nothing.

'What?' he said. 'If she picked up a gun and held it to her
head, wouldn't you stop her?'

I shrugged. 'She already put the gun to her head. She pulled
the trigger a year ago. We're too late. She made sure we would

be.'

'Why?'

'We have to wait for her to tell us.'

She told us during a conversation that lasted most of the day. It
proceeded in bits and pieces. We started over breakfast. She
came out of her room, all showered and dressed and looking

about as good as a terminal cancer patient with a broken leg
and an aluminum walker can. She made fresh coffee and put the
croissants I had bought on good china and served us quite
formally at the table. The way she took charge spooled us all
backwards in time. Joe and I shrank back to skinny kids and
she bloomed into the matriarch she had once been. A military
wife and mother has a pretty hard time, and some handle it, and
some don't. She always had. Wherever we had lived had been
home. She had seen to that.

'I was born three hundred metres from here,' she said. 'On
the Avenue Bosquet. I could see Les Invalides and the Ecole
Militaire from my window. I was ten when the Germans came to
Paris. I thought that was the end of the world. I was fourteen

when they left. I thought that was the beginning of a new one.'
Joe and I said nothing.

'Every day since then has been a bonus,' she said. 'I met your
father, I had you boys, I travelled the world. I don't think there's

a country I haven't been to.'

We said nothing.

'I'm French,' she said. 'You're American. There's a world
of difference. An American gets sick, she's outraged. How
dare that happen to her? She must have the fault corrected
immediately, at once. But French people understand that first
you live, and then you die. It's not an outrage. It's something
that's been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen,
don't you see? If people didn't die, the world would be an
awfully crowded place by now.'

'It's about when you die,' Joe said.

My mother nodded.

'Yes, it is,' she said. 'You die when it's your time.'

'That's too passive.'

'No, it's realistic, Joe. It's about picking your battles. Sure, of
course you cure the little things. If you're in an accident,
you get yourself patched up. But some battles can't be won.
Don't think I didn't consider this whole thing very carefully. I
read books. I spoke to friends. The success rates after the
symptoms have already shown themselves are very poor. Five
year survival, ten per cent, twenty per cent, who needs it? And
that's after truly horrible treatments.'

It's about when you die. We spent the morning going back and
forth on Joe's central question. We talked it through, from one
direction, then from another. But the conclusion was always the
same. Some battles can't be won. And it was a moot point,
ayway. It was a discussion that should have happened a year
ago. It was no longer appropriate.

Joe and I ate lunch. My mother didn't. I waited for Joe
to ask the next obvious question. It was just hanging there.
Eventually, he got to it. Joe Reacher, thirty-two years of age, six
feet six inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, a West
Point graduate, some kind of a Treasury Department bigshot,
placed his palms flat on the table and looked into his mother's
eyes.

'Won't you miss us, Morn?' he asked.

'Wrong question,' she said. 'I'll be dead. I won't be missing
anything. It's you that will be missing me. Like you miss your
father. Like I miss him. Like I miss my father, and my mother,

and my grandparents. It's a part of life, missing the dead.'

We said nothing.

'You're really asking me a different question,' she said.
'You're asking, how can I abandon you? You're asking, aren't I
concerned with your affairs any more? Don't I want to see what

happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you?'

We said nothing.

'I understand,' she said. 'Truly, I do. I asked myself the same
questions. It's like walking out of a movie. Being made to walk
out of a movie that you're really enjoying. That's what worried
me about it. I would never know how it turned out. I would
never know what happened to you boys in the end, with your
lives. I hated that part. But then I realized, obviously I'll walk
out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives for ever.
I'll never know how it turns out for you. I'll never know what
happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the
best of circumstances. I realized that. Then it didn't seem to
matter so much. It will always be an arbitrary date. It will

always leave me wanting more.'
We sat quiet for a spell.
'How long?' Joe asked.
'Not long,' she said.

We said nothing.

'You don't need me any more,' she said. 'You're all grown up.
My job is done. That's natural, and that's good. That's life. So let
me go.'

By six in the evening we were all talked out. Nobody had
spoken for an hour. Then my mother sat up straight in her
chair.

'Let's go out to dinner,' she said. 'Let's go to Polidor, on Rue
Monsieur le Prince.'

We called a cab and rode it to the Od6on. Then we walked.

My mother wanted to. She was bundled up in a coat and she
was hanging on our arms and moving slow and awkward, but I
think she enjoyed the air. Rue Monsieur le Prince cuts the
corner between the Boulevard Saint Germain and the Boulevard
Saint Michel, in the Sixime. It may be the most Parisian
street in the whole of the city. Narrow, diverse, slightly seedy,
flanked by tall plaster faqades, bustling. Polidor is a famous old
restaurant. It makes you feel all kinds of people have eaten
there. Gourmets, spies, painters, fugitives, cops, robbers.

We all ordered the same three courses. Chkvre chaud, porc

aux pruneaux, dames blanches. We ordered a fine red wine. But
my mother ate nothing and drank nothing. She just watched
us. There was pain showing in her face. Joe and I ate, selfconsciously.
She talked, exclusively about the past. But
there was no sadness. She relived good times. She laughed.
She rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe's forehead and
scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she
always did. I rolled up my sleeve like I always did and showed
her where he had stuck me with a chisel in revenge, and she
scolded him equally. She talked about things we had made her
in school. She talked about birthday parties we had thrown, on
grim faraway bases in the heat, or the cold. She talked about
our father, about meeting him in Korea, about marrying him in
Holland, about his awkward manner, about the two bunches
of flowers he had bought her in all their thirty-three years

together, one when Joe was born, and one when I was.
'Why didn't you tell us a year ago?' Joe asked.
'You know why,' she said.

'Because we would have argued,' I said.

She nodded.

'It was a decision that belonged to me,' she said.

We had coffee and Joe and I smoked cigarettes. Then th,
brought the bill and we asked him to call a cab for us. We
back to the Avenue Rapp in silence. We all went to bed
saying much.

I woke early on the fourth day of the new decade. Heard
the kitchen, talking French. I went in there and found
a woman. She was young and brisk. She had short neat hair
luminous eyes. She told me she was my mother's private
provided under the terms of an old insurance policy. She
me she normally came in seven days a week, but had is
the day before at my mother's request. She told me my
had wanted a day alone with her sons. I asked the girl hov'lq
each visit lasted. She said she stayed as long as she
needed. She told me the old insurance policy would covert
twenty-four hours a day, as and when it became
which she thought might be very soon.

The girl with the luminous eyes left and I went back to
bedroom and showered and packed my bag. Joe came io
watched me do it.

'You leaving?' he said.

'We both are. You know that.'

'We should stay.'

'We came. That's what she wanted. Now she wants us t0F
'You think?'

I nodded. 'Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying

She wants to be left in peace now.'

'You can do that?'

'It's what she wants. We owe it to her.'

I got breakfast items in the Rue Saint Dominique again
we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three
us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was
like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a
leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was

We said nothing.

'You don't need me any more,' she said. 'You're all grown up.

My job is done. That's natural, and that's good. That's life. So let

me go.'

By six in the evening we were all talked out. Nobody had
spoken for an hour. Then my mother sat up straight in her
chair.

'Let's go out to dinner,' she said. 'Let's go to Polidor, on Rue
Monsieur le Prince.'

We called a cab and rode it to the Odon. Then we walked.
My mother wanted to. She was bundled up in a coat and she
was hanging on our arms and moving slow and awkward, but I
think she enjoyed the air. Rue Monsieur le Prince cuts the
corner between the Boulevard Saint Germain and the Boulevard
Saint Michel, in the Sixi&me. It may be the most Parisian
street in the whole of the city. Narrow, diverse, slightly seedy,
flanked by tall plaster fa.ades, bustling. Polidor is a famous old
restaurant. It makes you feel all kinds of people have eaten
there. Gourmets, spies, painters, fugitives, cops, robbers.

We all ordered the same three courses. Chbvre chaud, porc
aux pruneaux, dames blanches. We ordered a fine red wine. But
my mother ate nothing and drank nothing. She just watched
us. There was pain showing in her face. Joe and I ate, self
consciously. She talked, exclusively about the past. But
there was no sadness. She relived good times. She laughed.
She rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe's forehead and
scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she always did. I rolled up my sleeve like I always did and showed
her where he had stuck me with a chisel in revenge, and she
scolded him equally. She talked about things we had made her
in school. She talked about birthday parties we had thrown, on
grim faraway bases in the heat, or the cold. She talked about
our father, about meeting him in Korea, about marrying him in
Holland, about his awkward manner, about the two bunches
of flowers he had bought her in all their thirty-three years

together, one when Joe was born, and one when I was.
'Why didn't you tell us a year ago?' Joe asked.
'You know why,' she said.

'Because we would have argued,' I said.

She nodded.

'It was a decision that belonged to me,' she said.

We had coffee and Joe and I smoked cigarettes. Then the waiter
brought the bill and we asked him to call a cab for us. We rode
back to the Avenue Rapp in silence. We all went to bed without
saying much.

I woke early on the fourth day of the new decade. Heard Joe in
the kitchen, talking French. I went in there and found him with
a woman. She was young and brisk. She had short neat hair and
luminous eyes. She told me she was my mother's private nurse,
provided under the terms of an old insurance policy. She told
me she normally came in seven days a week, but had missed
the day before at my mother's request. She told me my mother
had wanted a day alone with her sons. I asked the girl how long
each visit lasted. She said she stayed as long as she was
needed. She told me the old insurance policy would cover up to
twenty-four hours a day, as and when it became necessary,
which she thought might be very soon.

The girl with the luminous eyes left and I went back to the
bedroom and showered and packed my bag. Joe came in and
watched me do it.

'You leaving?' he said.

'We both are. You know that.'

'We should stay.'

'We came. That's what she wanted. Now she wants us to go.'
'You think?'

I nodded. 'Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying goodbye.

She wants to be left in peace now.'

'You can do that?'

'It's what she wants. We owe it to her.'

I got breakfast items in the Rue Saint Dominique again and
we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three of
us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was acting
like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a broken
leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was how

she wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed
things to each other, politely. It was a civilized meal. Like we
used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.

Then she revisited another old family ritual. She did something
she had done ten thousand times before, all through our
lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of
our own. She struggled up out of her chair and stepped over
and put her hands on Joe's shoulders, from behind. Then she
bent and kissed his cheek.

'What don't you need to do?' she asked him.

He didn't answer. He never did. Our silence was part of the
ritual.

'You don't need to solve all the world's problems, Joe. Only
some of them. There are enough to go around.'

She kissed his cheek again. Then she kept one hand on the
back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved
herself over behind me. I could hear her ragged breathing. She
kissed my cheek. Then like she used to all those years before
she put her hands on my shoulders. Measured them, side to
side. She was a small woman, fascinated by the way her baby
had grown into a giant.

'You've got the strength of two normal boys,' she said.
Then came my own personal question.

'What are you going to do with this strength?' she asked me.
I didn't answer. I never did.

'You're going to do the right thing,' she said.

Then she bent down and kissed me on the cheek again.

I thought: was that the last time?

We left thirty minutes later. We hugged long and hard at the
door and we told her we loved her, and she told us she loved us
too and she always had. We left her standing there and went
down in the tiny elevator and set out on the long walk back
to the Op6ra to get the airport bus. Our eyes were full of tears
and we didn't talk at all. My medals meant nothing to the
check-in girl at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. She sat us in the back
of the plane. About halfway through the flight I picked up Le
Monde and saw that Noriega had been found in Panama City. A
week ago I had lived and breathed that mission. Now I barely

remembered it. I put the paper down and tried to look ahead.
Tried to remember where I was supposed to be going, and what
I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I had no real
recollection. No sense of what was going to happen. If I had, I
would have stayed in Paris.

SEVEN

OING WEST THE TIME CHANGES LENGTHENEI) THE DAY INSTEAD of shortening it. They paid us back the hours we had
lost two days before. We landed at Dulles at two in the
afternoon. I said goodbye to Joe and he found the cab line and
headed into the city. I went looking for buses and was arrested
before I found any.

Who guards the guards? Who arrests an MP? In my case it
was a trio of warrant officers working directly for the Provost
Marshal General's oce. There were two W3s and a W4. The
W4 showed me his credentials and his orders and then the W3s
showed me their Berettas and their handcuffs and the W4 gave
me a choice: either behave myself or get knocked on my ass. I
smiled, briefly. I approved of his performance. He carried himself
well. I doubted if I would have done it any different, or any
better.

'Are you armed, major?' he said.

'No,' I said.

I would have been worried for the army if he had believed
me. Some W4s would have. They would have been intimidated
by the sensitivities involved. Arresting a superior officer
from your own corps is tough duty. But this particular W4 did

everything right. He heard me say no and nodded to his W3s
and they moved in to pat me down about as fast as if I had said yes, with a nuclear warhead. One of them did the body search
and the other went through my duffel. They were both very
thorough. Took them a good few minutes before they were
satisfied.

'Do I need to put the cuffs on you?' the W4 asked.

I shook my head. "Where's the car?'

He didn't answer. The W3s formed up one on either side and
slightly behind me. The W4 walked in front. We crossed the
sidewalk and passed by the bay where the buses were waiting
and headed for an official-vehicle-only lane. There was an olive
green sedan parked there. This was their time of maximum
danger. A determined man would be tensing up at that point,
ready to make his break. They knew it, and they formed up a
little tighter. They were a good team. Three against one, they
reduced the odds to maybe fifty-fifty. But I let them put me in
the car. Afterwards, I wondered what would have happened if I
had run for it. Sometimes, I found myself wishing that I had.

The car was a Chevrolet Caprice. It had been white before
the army sprayed it green. I saw the original colour inside the
door frame. It had vinyl seats and manual windows. Civilian
police specification. I slid across the rear bench and settled in
the corner behind the front passenger seat. One of the W3s
crammed in next to me and the other got behind the wheel.
The W4 sat next to him up front. Nobody spoke.

We headed east towards the city on the main highway. I was
probably five minutes behind Joe in his taxi. We turned south
and east and drove through Tysons Corner. At that point I knew
for sure where we were going. A couple of miles later we picked
up signs to Rock Creek. Rock Creek was a small town twenty
some miles due north of Fort Belvoir and forty-some north and
east of the Marine place at Quantico. It was as close as I got to a
permanent duty station. It housed the 110th Special Unit headquarters.
So I knew where we were headed. But I had no idea
why.

110th headquarters was basically an office and supply facility.
There were no cells. No secure holding facilities. They locked
me up in an interview room. Just dumped my bag on the table

and locked the door and left me there. It was a room I had
locked guys in before. So I knew how it was done. One of the
W3s would be on station in the corridor outside. Maybe both of
them would be. So I just tilted the plain wooden chair back and
put my feet on the table and waited.

I waited an hour. I was uncomfortable and hungry and
dehydrated from the plane. I figured if they knew all of that
they'd have kept me waiting two hours. Or more. As it was
they came back after sixty minutes. The W4 led the way and
gestured with his chin that I should stand up and follow him out
the door. The W3s fell in behind me. They walked me up two
flights of stairs. Led me left and right through plain grey
passageways. At that point I knew for sure where we were
going. We were going to Leon Garber's office. But I didn't know
why.

They stopped me outside his door. It had reeded glass with CO painted on it in gold. I had been through it many times.
But never while in custody. The W4 knocked and waited and
opened the door and stepped back to let me walk inside. He
closed the door behind me and stayed on the other side of it,
out in the corridor with his guys.

Behind Garber's desk was a man I had never seen before. He
was a colonel. He was in BDUs. His tapes said: Willard, U.S. Army. He had iron-grey hair parted in a schoolboy style. It
needed a trim. He had steel-rimmed eyeglasses and the kind of
grey pouchy face that must have looked old when he was
twenty. He was short and relatively squat and the way his
shoulders failed to fill his BDUs told me he spent no time at all
in the gym. He had a problem sitting still. He was rocking to
his left and plucking at his pants where they went tight over his
right knee. Before I had been in the room ten seconds he had
adjusted his position three times. Maybe he had haemorrhoids.
Maybe he was nervous. He had soft hands. Ragged nails. No
wedding band. Divorced, for sure. He looked the type. No wife
would let him walk about with hair like that. And no wife could
have stood all that rocking and twitching. Not for very long.

I should have come smartly to attention and saluted and
announced: Sir, Major Reacher reports. That would have been
the standard army etiquette. But I was damned if I was going to

100

do that. I just took a long lazy look around and came to rest
standing easy in front of the desk.

'I need explanations,' the guy called Willard said.
He moved in his chair again.
'Who are you?' I said.
'You can see who I am.'

'I can see you're a colonel in the U.S. Army named Willard.
But I can't explain anything to you before I know whether or
not you're in my chain of command.'

'I am your chain of command, son. What does it say on my
door?'

'Commanding officer,' I said.

'And where are we?'

'Rock Creek, Virginia,' I said.

'OK, asked and answered,' he said.

'You're new,' I said. 'We haven't met.'

'I assumed this command forty-eight hours ago. And now

we've met. And now I need explanations.'

'Of what?'

'You were UA, for a start,' he said.
'Unauthorized absence?' I said. 'When?'
'The last seventy-two hours.'
'Incorrect,' I said.
'How so?'

'My absence was authorized by Colonel Garber.'

'It was not.'

'I called this office,' I said.
'When?'
'Before I left.'

'Did you receive his authorization?'

I paused. 'I left a message. Are you saying he denied authorization?'

'He wasn't here. He got orders for Korea some hours earlier.'
'Korea?'

'He got the MP command there.'

'That's a brigadier general's job.'

'He's acting. The promotion will no doubt be confirmed in the
fall.'

I said nothing.

101

'Garber's gone,' Willard said. 'I'm here. The military merry
go-round continues. Get used to it.'

The room went quiet. Willard smiled at me. Not a pleasant
smile. It was close to a sneer. The rug was out from under my
feet, and he was watching me hit the ground.

'It was good of you to leave your travel plans,' he said. 'It
made today easier.'

'You think the arrest was appropriate for UA?' I said.

'You don't?'

'It was a simple miscommunication.'

'You left your assigned post without authorization, major.
Those are the facts. Just because you had a vague expectation
that authorization might be granted doesn't alter them. This is
the army. We don't act in advance of orders or permissions.
We wait until they are properly received and confirmed. The

alternative would be anarchy and chaos.'
I said nothing.
'Where did you go?'

I pictured my mother, leaning on her aluminum walker. I
pictured my brother's face, as he watched me pack.

'I took a short vacation,' I said. 'I went to the beach.'

'The arrest wasn't for the UA,' Willard said. 'It was because

you wore Class As on the evening of New Year's Day.'
'That's an offence now?'
'You wore your nameplate.'
I said nothing.

'You put two civilians in the hospital. While wearing your
nameplate.'

I stared at him. Thought hard. I didn't believe the fat guy and
the farmer had dropped a dime on me. Not possible. They were
stupid, but they weren't that stupid. They knew I knew where I
could find them.

'Who says so?' I asked.

'You had a big audience in that parking lot.'
'One of ours?'
Willard nodded.
'Who?' I said.

'No need for you to know.'

I kept quiet.

102

'You got anything to say?' Willard asked me.

I thought: He won't testify at the court martial. That's for damn

sure. That's what I've got to say.

'Nothing to say,' I said.

'What do you think I should do with you?'

I said nothing.

'What do you think I should do?'

You should figure out the difference between a hard ass and a

dumb ass, pal. You should figure it out real quick.

'Your choice,' I said. 'Your decision.'

He nodded. 'I also have reports from General Vassell and

Colonel Coomer.'

'Saying what?'

'Saying you acted in a disrespectful manner towards them.'
'Then those reports are incorrect.'
'Like the UA was incorrect?'
I said nothing.

'Stand at attention,' Willard said.

I looked at him. Counted one thousand. Two thousand. Three

thousand. Then I came to attention.

'That was slow,' he said.

'I'm not looking to win a drill competition,' I said.

'What was your interest in Vassell and Coomer?'

'An agenda for an Armored Branch conference is missing. I
need to know if it contained classified information.'

'There was no agenda,' Willard said. 'Vassell and Coomer
have made that perfectly clear. To me, and to you. To ask is
permissible. You have that right, technically. But to wilfully
disbelieve a senior officer's direct answer is disrespectful. It's
close to harassment.'

'Sir, I do this stuff for a living. I believe there was an agenda.'
Now Willard said nothing.

'May I ask what was your previous command?' I said.
He shifted in his chair.
'Intelligence,' he said.

'Field agent?' I asked. 'Or desk jockey?'

He didn't answer. Desk jockey.

'Did you have conferences without agendas?' I asked.

He looked straight at me.

103

'Direct orders, major,' he said. 'One, terminate your interest
in Vassell and Coomer. Forthwith, and immediately. Two,
terminate your interest in General Kramer. We don't want
flags raised on that matter, not in the circumstances. Three,
terminate Lieutenant Summer's involvement in special unit
affairs. Forthwith, and immediately. She's a junior-grade MP
and after reading her file as far as I'm concerned she always will
be. Four, do not attempt to make further contact with the local
civilians you injured. And five, do not attempt to identify the

eyewitness against you in that matter.'

I said nothing.

'Do you understand your orders?' he said.

'I'd like them in writing,' I said.

'Verbal will do,' he said. 'Do you understand your orders?'
'Yes,'! said.
'Dismissed.'

I counted one thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Then
I saluted and turned around. I made it all the way to the door
before he fired his parting shot.

'They tell me you're a big star, Reacher,' he said. 'So right
now you need to decide whether you keep on being a big
star, or whether you let yourself become an arrogant smart-ass
son of a bitch. And you need to remember that nobody likes
arrogant smart-ass sons of bitches. And you need to remember
we're coming to a point where it's going to matter whether

people like you or not. It's going to matter a lot.'

I said nothing.

'Do I make myself clear, major?'

'Crystal,' I said.

I got my hand on the door handle.

'One last thing,' he said. 'I'm going to sit on the brutality
complaint. For as long as I possibly can. Out of respect for your
record. You're very lucky that it came up internally. But I want
you to remember that it's here, and it stays active.'

I left Rock Creek just before five in the afternoon. Caught a
bus into Washington D.C. and another one south down 1-95.
Then I removed my lapel insignia and hitched the final thirty
miles to Bird. It works a little faster that way. Most of the local

104

traffic is enlisted men, or retired enlisted men, or their families,
and most of them are suspicious of MPs. So experience had
taught me things went better if you kept your badges in your pocket.

I got a ride and got out two hundred yards short of Bird's
main gate, a few minutes past eleven in the evening, January
4th, after a little more than six hours on the road. North
Carolina was pitch dark and cold. Very cold, so I jogged the two
hundred yards to heat myself up. I was out of breath when I got
to the gate. I was logged in and I ran down to my office. It was
warm inside. The night watch sergeant with the baby son
was on duty. She had coffee going. She gave me a cup and I
walked into my office and found a note from Summer waiting
for me on my desk. The note was clipped to a slim green file.
The file had three lists in it. The women-with-Humvees list, the
women-from-Irwin list, and the main gate log for New Year's
Eve. The first two lists were relatively short. The gate log was a
riot. People had been in and out all night long, partying. But
only one name was common to all three compilations: Lt/Col.
Andrea Norton. Summer had circled the name in all three
locations. Her note said: Call me about Norton. Hope your mom
was OK.

I found the old message slip with Joe's telephone number on
it and called him first.

'You holding up?' I asked him.

'We should have stayed,' he said.

'She gave the nurse one day off,' I said. 'One day was what
she wanted.'

'We should have stayed anyway.'

'She doesn't want spectators,' I said.

He didn't answer. The phone was hot and silent against my
ear.

'I've got a question,' I said. 'When you were at the Pentagon,
did you know an asshole called Willard?'

He stayed quiet for a long moment, changing gears, searching
his memory. He had been out of Intelligence for some time.

'Squat little man?' he said. 'Couldn't sit still? Always shuffling
around on his chair, fussing with his pants? He was a desk guy. A major, I think.'

105

'He's a full colonel now,' I said. 'He just got assigned to the
110th. He's my CO at Rock Creek.'

'MI to the 110th? That makes sense.'

'Makes no sense to me.'

'It's the new theory,' Joe said. 'They're copying private-sector
doctrine. They think know-nothings are good because they're
not invested in the status quo. They think they bring fresh
perspectives.'

'Anything I should know about this guy?'

'You called him an asshole, so it sounds like you already
know about him. He was smart, but he was an asshole, for sure.
Vicious, petty, very corporate, good at office politics, exclusively
interested in number one, excellent ass-kisser, always knew

which way the wind was blowing.'

I said nothing.

'Hopeless with women,' Joe said. 'I remember that.'

I said nothing.

'He's a perfect example,' Joe said. 'Like we discussed. He was
on the Soviet desk. He monitored their tank production and fuel
consumption, as I recall. I think he worked out some kind of an
algorithm that told us what kind of training Soviet armour was
doing based on how much fuel they were eating. He was hot for
a year or so. But now I guess he's seen the future. He got
himself out while the getting was good. You should do the

same. At least you should think about it. Like we discussed.'

I said nothing.

'Meanwhile watch your step,' Joe said. 'I wouldn't want
Willard for a boss.'

'I'll be OK,' I said.

'We should have stayed in Paris,' he said, and hung up.

I found Summer in the O Club bar. She had a beer on the go
and was leaning on the wall with a couple of W2s. She moved
away from them when she saw me.

'Garber's gone to Korea,' I said. 'We got a new guy.'

"Who?'

'A colonel called Willard. From Intelligence.'

'So how is he qualified?'

'He isn't qualified. He's an asshole.'

106

'Doesn't that piss you off?'

I shrugged. 'He's telling us to stay away from the Kramer
thing.'

'Are we going to?'

'He's telling me to stop talking to you. He says he's going to
turn down your application.'

She went very quiet. Looked away.

'Shit,' she said.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I know you wanted it.'

She looked back at me.

'Is he serious about the Kramer thing?' she asked.

I nodded. 'He's serious about everything. He had me arrested

at the airport, to make all his various points.'

'Arrested?'

I nodded again. 'Someone ratted me out for those guys in the

parking lot.'
'Who?'

'One of the grunts in the audience.'
'One of ours? Who?'
'I don't know.'
'That's cold.'

I nodded. 'Never happened to me before.'

She went quiet again.

'How was your morn?' she said.

'She broke her leg,' I said. 'No big deal.'

'They can get pneumonia.'

I nodded again. 'She had the X-ray. No pneumonia.'

Her lower eyelids moved upward.

'Can I ask the obvious question?' she said.

'Is there one?'

'Aggravated battery against civilians is a big deal. And
apparently there's a report and an eyewitness, good enough to

get you arrested.'

'So?'

'So why are you still walking around?'

'Willard's sitting on it.'

'But why would he, if he's an asshole?'

'Out of respect for my record. That's what he said.'

'Did you believe him?'

107

I shook my head.

'There must be something wrong with the complaint,' I said.

'An asshole like Willard would use it if he could, that's for sure.

He doesn't care about my record.'

'Can't be something wrong with the complaint. A military

witness is the best kind they can get. He'll testify to whatever
they tell him to. It's like Willard would be writing the complaint
himself.'

I said nothing.

'And why are you here at all?' she asked.

I heard Joe say: You should find out who wanted you at Bird

badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an

asshole.

'I don't know why I'm here,' I said. 'I don't know anything.

Tell me about Lieutenant Colonel Norton.'

'We're off the case.'

'So just tell me for interest's sake.'

'It isn't her. She's got an alibi. She was at a party in a bar off

post. All night long. About a hundred people were there with

her.'

'Who is she?'

'Psy-Ops instructor. She's a psychosexual Ph.D. who
specializes in attacking an enemy's internal emotional security

concerning his feelings of masculinity.'

'She sounds like a fun lady.'

'She was invited to a party in a bar. Someone thinks she's a

fun lady.'

'Did you check who drove Vassell and Coomer down here?'
Summer nodded. 'Our gate guys list him as a Major Marshall.
I looked him up, and he's a XII Corps staffer on temporary
detached duty at the Pentagon. Some kind of a blue-eyed boy.
He's been over here since November.'

'Did you check phone calls out of the D.C. hotel?'

She nodded again.

'There weren't any,' she said. 'Vassell's room took one incoming
call at twelve twenty-eight in the morning. I'm assuming
that was XII Corps calling from Germany. Neither of them made
any outgoing calls.'

'None at all?'

108

'Not a one.

'Are you sure?'

'Totally. It's an electronic switchboard. Dial nine for an outside
line, and the computer records it automatically. It has to,
for the bill.'

Dead end.

'OK,' I said. 'Forget the whole thing.'

'Really?'

'Orders are orders,' I said. 'The alternative is anarchy and
chaos.'

I went back to my office and called Rock Creek. I figured
Willard would be long gone. He was the type of guy who keeps
bankers' hours his whole life. I got hold of a company clerk and
asked him to find a copy of the original order moving me from
Panama to Bird. It was five minutes before he came back on the
line. I spent them reading Summer's lists. They were full of
names that meant nothing to me.

'I've got the order here now, sir,' the guy on the phone said.
'Who signed it?'I asked him.
'Colonel Garber, sir.'

'Thank you,' I said, and put the phone down. Then I sat for
ten minutes wondering why people were lying to me. Then I
forgot all about that question, because my phone rang again
and a young MP private on routine base patrol told me we had a
homicide victim in the woods. It sounded like a real bad one.
My guy had to pause twice to throw up before he got to the end
of his report.

109

EIGHT

OST RURAI. ARMY POSTS ARE PRETTY BIG. EVEN IF THE BUILT
infrastructure is compact, there is often a huge
acreage of spare land reserved around it. This was
my first tour at Fort Bird, but I guessed it would be no
exception. It would be like a small neat town surrounded by
a county-sized horseshoe-shaped government-owned tract of
poor sandy earth with low hills and shallow valleys and a thin
covering of trees and scrub. Over the post's long life the trees
would have imitated the grey ashes of the Ardennes and the
mighty firs of Central Europe and the swaying palms of
the Middle East. Whole generations of infantry training theory
would have come and gone there. There would be old trenches
and foxholes and firing pits. There would be bermed rifle
ranges and barbed-wire obstacles and isolated huts where
psychiatrists would challenge masculine emotional security.
There would be concrete bunkers and exact replicas of
government offices where Special Forces would train to rescue
hostages. There would be cross-country running routes where
out-of-shape boot camp inductees would tire and stagger and
where some of them would collapse and die. The whole thing
would be ringed by miles of ancient rusty wire and claimed for

110

the DoD for ever by warning notices fixed to every third fence
post.

I called a bunch of specialists and went out to the motor pool
and found a Humvee that had a working flashlight in the clip on
the dash. Then I fired it up and followed the private's directions
south and west of the inhabited areas until I was on a rough
sandy track leading straight out into the hinterland. The darkness
was absolute. I drove more than a mile and then I saw
another Humvee's headlights in the distance. The private's
vehicle was parked at a sharp angle about twenty feet off the
road and its high beams were shining into the trees and casting
long evil shadows deep into the woods. The private himself was
leaning up against its hood. His head was bowed and he was
looking down at the ground.

First question: how does a guy on motor patrol in the dark
spot a corpse hidden way the hell out here, deep in the trees?

I parked next to him and took the flashlight out of the clip
and slid out into the cold and immediately understood how.
There was a trail of clothing starting in the centre of the track.
Right on the crown of the camber was a single boot. It was a
standard-issue black leather combat boot, old, worn, not very
well shined. West of it was a sock, a yard away. Then another
boot, another sock, a BDU jacket, an olive drab undershirt. The
clothes were all spaced out in a line, like a grotesque parody of
the domestic fantasy where you get home and find abandoned
lingerie items leading you up the stairs to the bedroom. Except
that the jacket and the undershirt were stained dark with blood.

I checked the condition of the ground at the edge of the
track. It was rock hard and frosted over. I wasn't going to
compromise the scene. I wasn't going to blur any footprints,
because there weren't going to be any footprints. So I took a
deep breath and followed the trail of clothes to its conclusion.
When I got there I understood why my guy had thrown up
twice. At his age I might have thrown up three times.

The corpse was face down in the frozen leaf litter at the base
of a tree. Naked. Medium height, compact. It was a white guy,
but he was mostly covered in blood. There were bone-deep
knife cuts all over his arms and shoulders. From behind I could
see that his face looked beaten and swollen. His cheeks were

111

protruding. His dog tags were missing. There was a slim leather
belt cinched tight around his neck. It had a brass buckle and
the long tail looped away from his head. There was some kind
of thick pink-white liquid pooled on his back. He had a broken
tree limb rammed up his ass. Below it the ground was black
with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find
that his genitals had been removed.

I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the
road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring
down at the ground.

'Where are we exactly?' I asked him.

'Sir?'

'No question we're still on the base?'

He nodded. 'We're a mile inside the fence line. In every
direction.'

'OK,' I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property.
'We'll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so.
Clear?'

'Sir,' he said.

'You're doing a good job,' I said.

'You think?'

'You're still on your feet,' I said.

I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her
what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant
Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then
I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two
Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had
called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to
stand by. There was no burning urgency.

Summer got on the radio within five minutes.

'Dead guy in the woods,' I told her. 'I want you to find that

Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about.'

'Lieutenant Colonel Norton?'

'I want you to bring her out here.'

'Willard said you can't work with me.'

'He said I can't involve you in special unit stuff. This is
regular police business.'

'Why do you want Norton there?'

'I want to meet her.'

112

She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics
and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We
kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the
heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and
fo-med horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene
people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not
to touch it and not to leave the track.

We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no
sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought
about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch
offices the U.S. Army had to offer. Not the most glamorous, but
probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP
command out there was a feather in anyone's cap. It meant he
would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than
he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes
were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on
the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten
minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different
perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got
nowhere with it.

Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was
driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in
BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat.
She stopped the truck in the centre of the track with her
headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde
got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of
headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out
of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She
had a light colonel's oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a
little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had
the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a
model.

'How can I help you, major?' she said. She sounded like she
was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged
outside in the middle of the night.

'Something I need you to see,' I said.

'Why?'

'Maybe you'll have a professional opinion.'

'Why me?'

113

'Because you're here in North Carolina. It would take me

hours to get someone from somewhere else.'
'What kind of someone do you need?'
'Someone in your line of work.'

'I'm aware that I work in a classroom,' she said. 'I don't need

constant reminders.'

'What?'

'It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea
Norton that she's just a bookish academic, while everybody else
is out there busy with the real thing.'

'I wouldn't know about that. I'm new here. I just want first

impressions from someone in your line of work, is all.'
'You're not trying to make a point?'
'I'm trying to get some help.'
She made a face. 'OK.'

I offered her my flashlight. 'Follow the trail of clothes to the
end. Please don't touch anything. Just fix your first impressions
in your mind. Then I'd like to talk to you about them.'

She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off.
She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP
private's headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods.
Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the
range of the headlights' illumination and I saw her flashlight
beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness.
Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint
reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the
distance, high in the air.

She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight
beam sweeping back towards us. She came out of the woods,
retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale.

She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.

'My office,' she said. 'In one hour.'

She got back in Summer's Humvee and Summer backed up
and turned and accelerated away into the dark.

'OK, guys, go to work,' I said. I sat in my truck and watched
drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground
and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around
me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base
mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by,

114

first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance
backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet
draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on
them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were
filled and labelled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree
trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.

I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through
the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry
and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick
structure with green doors and windows that might have
housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It
was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to
where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence
all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway
and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went
inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a
door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass
had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stencilled on it. I
knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and
it smelled feminine. I didn't salute again. I figured we were past
that point.

Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it
covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that
she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the
floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten
notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk

lamp and its colour was reflected upward into her hair.

'Hello,' she said.

I sat down in her visitor's chair.

'Who was he?' she asked.

'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't think we'll get a visual ID. He
was too badly beaten. We'll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If
he's got any left in there.'

'Why did you want me to look at him?'
'I told you why. I wanted your opinion.'
'Why did you think I would have an opinion?'

'Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would
understand.'

115

'I'm not a criminal profiler.'

'I don't want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to
know if I'm starting out in the right direction.'

She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.

'The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual,' she
said. 'Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full

awareness of it on the part of his attackers.'

I nodded.

'There was genital amputation,' she said.

'You checked?'

'I moved him a little,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know you asked
me not to.'

I looked at her. She hadn't been wearing gloves. She was a
tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.

'Don't worry about it,' I said.

'My guess is you'll find his testicles and his penis in his
mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much
simply from a beating. It's an obvious symbolic statement, from
the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the

deviant organs, simulating oral sex.'

I nodded.

'Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags,' she said.
'Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as

removing the deviant from the army.'

I nodded.

'The foreign object insertion speaks for itself,' she said. 'In
the anus.'

I nodded.

'And then there's the fluid on his back,' she said.

'Yogurt,' I said.

'Probably strawberry,' she said. 'Or maybe raspberry. It's the
old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?'

'He groans a bit,' I said. 'And then he throws yogurt on his
lover's back.'

'Yes,' she said. She didn't smile. And she watched me, to see
if I would.

WVhat about the cuts and the beating?' I said.

'Hate,' she said.

116

'And the belt around the neck?'

She shrugged. 'It's suggestive of an auto-erotic technique.
Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during
orgasm.

I nodded.
'OK,' I said.
'OK what?'

'Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion
based on them?'

'Do you?' she asked.
'Yes,' I said.
'You first.'

'I think it's bogus.'

'Why?'

'Too much going on,' I said. 'There were six things there.
The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the
yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three.
It's like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going

ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard.'

Norton said nothing.

'Too much,' I said again. 'Like shooting someone, then
strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him,
then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It's like they
were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues.'

She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool
of light. Maybe assessing me.

'I have my doubts about the belt,' she said. 'Auto-eroticism
isn't exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms
physiologically, gay or not.'

'The whole thing was faked,' I said.

She nodded, finally.

'I agree with you,' she said. 'You're a smart guy.'

'For a cop?'

She didn't smile. 'But we know as officers that to permit
homosexuals to serve is illegal. So we better be sure we're not

letting a defence of the army cloud our judgement.'
'It's my job to protect the army,' I said.
'Exactly,' Norton said.

I shrugged. 'But I'm not taking a position. I'm not saying this

117

guy definitely wasn't gay. Maybe he was. I really don't care. And
maybe his attackers knew, maybe they didn't. I'm saying either
way, that's not why they killed him. But they wanted it to look
like the reason. But they weren't really feeling it. They were
feeling something else. So they larded on the clues, in a rather

self-conscious way.'

Then I paused.

'In a rather academic way,' I said.

She stiffened.

'An academic way?' she said.

'Do you guys teach anything about this kind of stuff in
class?'

'We don't teach people how to kill,' she said.

'That's not what I asked.'

She nodded. "We talk about it. We have to. Cutting off your
enemy's dick is as basic as it gets. It's happened all through
history. Happened all through Vietnam. Afghan women have
been doing it to captured Soviet soldiers for the last ten years.
We talk about what it symbolizes, what it communicates, and
the fear it creates. There are whole books about the fear of
grotesque wounds. It's always a message to the target population.
We talk about violation with foreign objects. We talk about
the deliberate display of violated bodies. The trail of abandoned
clothing is a classic touch.'

'Do you talk about yogurt?'

She shook her head. 'But that's a very old joke.'

'And the asphyxiation thing?'

'Not on the Psy-Ops courses. But most of the people here can
read magazines. Or they can watch porn on videotape.'

'Do you talk about questioning an enemy's sexuality?'

'Of course we do. Impugning an enemy's sexuality is the
whole point of our course. His sexual orientation, his virility, his
capability, his capacity. It's a core tactic. It always has been,
everywhere, throughout history. It's designed to work both

ways. It diminishes him, and it builds us up by comparison.'

I said nothing.

She looked right at me. 'Are you asking me if I recognized
the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods?'

'I guess I am,' I said.

118

'You didn't really want my opinion, did you?' she said. 'That

was all preamble. You already knew what you were seeing.'

I nodded. 'I'm a smart guy, for a cop.'

'The answer is no,' she said. 'I did not recognize the fruits of

our lessons, out there in the woods. Not specifically.'
'But possibly?'
'Anything's possible.'

'Did you meet General Kramer when you were at Fort Irwin?'
I asked.

'Once or twice,' she said. 'Why?'
'When did you last see him?'
'I don't remember,' she said.
'Not recently?'

'No,' she said. 'Not recently. Why?'
'How did you meet him?'
'Professionally,' she said.

'You teach your stuff to Armored Branch?'

'Irwin isn't exclusively Armored Branch,' she said. 'It's the
National Training Center too, don't forget. People used to come

to us there. Now we go to them.'

I said nothing.

'Does it surprise you we taught Armored people?'

I shrugged again. 'A little, I guess. If I was riding around in a
seventy-ton tank, I don't suppose I'd feel a need for any more of
a psychological edge.'

She still didn't smile. 'We taught them. As I recall General
Kramer didn't like it if the infantry was getting things his

people weren't. It was an intense rivalry.'

'Who do you teach now?'

'Delta Force,' she said. 'Exclusively.'

'Thank you for your help,' I said.

'I didn't recognize anything tonight that we would take
responsibility for.'

'Not specifically.'

'It was psychologically generic,' she said.

'OK,"I said.

'And I resent being asked.'

'OK,' I said again. 'Goodnight, ma'am.'

I got up out of the chair and headed for the door.

119

'What was the real reason?' she asked. 'If the display we saw
was bogus?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I'm not that smart.'

I stopped in my outer office and the sergeant with the baby son
gave me coffee. Then I went into my inner office and found
Summer waiting for me there. She had come to collect her lists,
because the Kramer case was closed.

'Did you check the other women?' I asked her. 'Apart from
Norton?'

She nodded. 'They all have alibis. It's the best night of the

year for alibis. Nobody spends New Year's Eve alone.'

'I did,' I said.

She said nothing back. I butted the papers into a neat stack
and put them back inside their folder and unclipped the note off
the front. Hope your rnom was OK. I dropped the note in my
drawer and handed the file to her.

'What did Norton tell you?' she asked.

'She agreed with me that it was homicide dressed up to look
like gay-bashing. I asked her if any of the symbols came from
Psy-Ops classes and she didn't really say yes or no. She said

they were psychologically generic. She resented being asked.'
'So what now?'

I yawned. I was tired. 'We'll work it like we work any of them.
We don't even know who the victim is yet. I guess we'll find out
tomorrow. On deck at seven, OK?'

'OK,' she said, and headed for my door, carrying her file.

'I called Rock Creek,' I said. 'Asked a clerk to find their copy

of the order bringing me here from Panama.'

'And?'

'He said it's got Garber's signature on it.'

'But?'

'That's not possible. Garber got me on the phone on New

Year's Eve and was surprised I was here.'

'Why would a clerk lie?'

'I don't think a clerk would. I think the signature is a forgery.'
'Is that conceivable?'

'It's the only explanation. Garber couldn't have forgotten he'd
transferred me here forty-eight hours previously.'

120

'So what's this all about?'

'I have no idea. Someone somewhere is playing chess. My
brother told me I should find out who wants me here bad
enough to pull me out of Panama and replace me with an
asshole. So I tried to find out. And now I'm thinking maybe we
should be asking the same question about Garber. Who wants
him out of Rock Creek bad enough to replace him with an
asshole?'

'But Korea has to be a genuine merit promotion, doesn't it?'
'Garber deserves it, no question,' I said. 'Except it's too early.
It's a one-star job. DoD has to bring it to the Senate. That
process happens in the fall, not in January. This was a panic
move, spur of the moment.'

'But that would be pointless chess,' Summer said. 'Why bring
you in and pull him out? The two moves neutralize each other.'

'So maybe there are two people playing. Like a tug of war.
Good guy, bad guy. Win one, lose one.'

'But the bad guy could have won both, easily. He could have
discharged you. Or sent you to prison. He's got the civilian

complaint to work with.'

I said nothing.

'It doesn't add up,' Summer said. 'Whoever's playing on your
side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to
keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table.
Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn't proceed against
you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that
means?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I do.'

She looked straight at me.

'It means you're seen as more important than Garber,' she

said. 'Garber's gone, and you're still here.'
Then she looked away and went quiet.
'Permission to speak freely, lieutenant,' I said.
She looked back at me.

'You're not more important than Garber,' she said. 'You can't
be.'

I yawned again.

'No argument from me,' I said. 'Not on that particular subject.
This is not about a choice between me and Garber.'

121

She paused. Then she nodded.

'No,' she said. 'It isn't. This is about a choice between Fort
Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important.
What's happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive
than what's happening at special unit headquarters.'

'Agreed,' I said. 'But what the hell is happening here?'

122

NINE

TOOK THE FIRST TENTATIVE STEP TOWARDS FINDING OUT AT ONE minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird's
mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn't eaten
breakfast. There aren't many hard and fast rules involved in
military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and
improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: you don't
eat before you walk into an army post-mortem.

So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It
was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It
listed all the recovered uniform items and described them
in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and
temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by
dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the
pictures told me what I needed to know.

I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost
Marshal's office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy
might have been missed already, and we might have been able
to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with
all its ducks in a row.

I walked out into the morning cold.

123

The mortuary had been purpose-built during the Eisenhower
administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren't
looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn't the
civilian world. We knew last night's victim hadn't slipped on a
banana skin. I didn't much care which particular injury had
been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate
time of death, and who he was.

There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to

the left, the centre, and the right. If you went left, you found the
offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight
ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.

There were two dished metal tables set in the middle of the

room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains
below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging
on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel
carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other
carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying
ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was
glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet
with the smell of formaldehyde.

The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table

was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an
assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing
back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the
process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were
filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse's
legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked
blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt
and blood was gone.

I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on

his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut
around the centre of his forehead and peeled the skin of his
face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled
down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and
his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his
brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull
and popped the top off like a lid.

'What's the story?' I asked him.

'We got fingerprints,' he said.

124

'I faxed them in,' Summer said. 'We'll know today.'

'Cause of death?'

'Blunt trauma,' the doctor said. 'To the back of the head.
Three heavy blows, with something like a tyre iron, I should
think. All this dramatic stuff is post-mortem. Pure window
dressing.'

'Any defensive injuries?'

'Not a thing,' the doctor said. 'This was a surprise attack. Out

of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle.'

'How many assailants?'

'I'm not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all
delivered by the same individual. I can't tell if there were others

standing around and watching.'

'Best guess?'

'I'm a scientist, not a guesser.'

'One assailant only,' Summer said. 'Just a feeling.'

I nodded.

'Time of death?' I asked.

'Hard to be sure,' the doctor said. 'Nine or ten last night,
probably. But don't take that to the bank.'

I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after
dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery.
Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and

then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.
'Was he killed at the scene?' I asked.
The pathologist nodded.

'Or very close to it,' he said. 'No medical signs to suggest
otherwise.'

'OK,' I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying

on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.
'In his mouth?' I said.

The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.
'What kind of a knife?'
'Probably a K-bar,' he said.

'Great,' I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of
millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as
medals.

'The knife was used by a right-handed person,' the doctor
said.

125

'And the tyre iron?'
'Same.'
'OK,' I said.

'The fluid was yogurt,' the doctor said.
'Strawberry or raspberry?'
'I didn't do a taste test.'

Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid
photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one
was as-discovered. The guy's hair was relatively long and dirty
and matted with blood and I couldn't make out much detail. The
second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was
with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the

hair completely shaved away, with a razor.

'How about a crowbar?' I asked.

'Possible,' the doctor said. 'Maybe better than a tyre iron. I

took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I'll tell

you yes or no.

I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was

very clean. It was grey and white and pink. It smelled faintly of
soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odours. The groin
was a mess. Like a butcher's shop. The knife cuts on the arms
and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle
and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The
blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An
eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the
guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I
had feared he would be.

'I thought there would be more swelling and bruising,' I said.

The pathologist glanced at me.

'I told you,' he said. 'All the drama was after he was dead.

No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no
swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was
just leaking out by gravity. If he'd been alive when they cut him,
it would have been running like a river.'

He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy's

brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He
tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a
sponge. Then he pulled the guy's face back into place. Poked
and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took

126

his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken
to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights
above him.

I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton's Psy-Ops
school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self
contained in what had been a prison back before the army
collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in
Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose.
There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked
like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted
back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks
and their up-armoured Humvees and maybe even a couple of
fast-response helicopters.

The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to
the adjutant's office. Seven thirty in the morning, and it was
already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant
was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of
Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay
home and do the housework.

'You got anyone missing?' I asked him.

He looked away, which told me something more.

'I assume you know I do,' he said. 'Otherwise why would you
be here?'

'You got a name for me?'

'A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something.'
'This is not about an arrest,' I said.
'So what's it about?'

'Does this guy get arrested a lot?'
'No. He's a fine soldier.'
'What's his name?'

The captain didn't answer. Just leaned down and opened a
drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta
files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public
consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was
a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career
summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone: He was an
unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an
infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger

127

company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five
years older than me. He was a Sergeant First Class. There were
no theatre details and no mention of awards or decorations.

The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a

colour photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and

just left on the mortuary slab.

'Where is he?' the captain asked. 'What happened?'
'Someone killed him,' I said.
'What?'
'Homicide,' I said.
'When?'

'Last night. Nine or ten o'clock.'

'Where?'

'Edge of the woods.'

'What woods?'

'Our woods. On post.'

'Jesus Christ. Why?'

I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.
'I don't know why,' I said. 'Yet.'

'Jesus Christ,' he said again. %Vho did it?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Yet.'

'Jesus Christ,' the guy said, for the third time.

'Next of kin?' I asked.

The captain paused. Breathed out.

'I think he has a mother somewhere,' he said. 'I'll let you

know.'

'Don't let me know,' I said. 'You'll be the one making the

call.'

He said nothing.

'Did Carbone have enemies here?' I asked.
'None that I knew about.'
'Any points of friction?'
'Like what?'

'Any lifestyle issues?'

He stared at me. 'What are you saying?'

'Was he gay?'

What? Of course not.'

I said nothing.

'You're saying Carbone was a fag?' the captain whispered.

128

I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the
strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at
the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and
her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand
ad a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay
man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment
in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the
brunette hooker away.

'I don't know what Carbone was,' I said.

'Then keep your damn mouth shut,' his captain said. 'Sir.'

I took Carbone's file with me back to the mortuary and
collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We
sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs
and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced
through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.

'The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing,' she said. 'He

thinks it's obvious.'
'He's wrong.'
'Carbone's not married.'

'Neither am I,' I said. 'Neither are you. Are you gay?'

'No.'

'There you go.'

'But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I
mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might
have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards
all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about
gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn't work if it's
not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five

minutes looks stupid, not clever.'

'Your best guess?'

'He was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn't the reason.'
I nodded.

'It wasn't the reason,' I said. 'Let's say he was gay. He was in
sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the
eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing,
getting better, he's getting better at hiding it, going out to strip
joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a
sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or

129

eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and

new people got to know him.'
'So what was the reason?' 'No idea.'

'Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his

motel.'

I nodded again. 'Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place.'
'You think this is why you're here? Carbone?'
'It's possible. Depends on what he represents.'

I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications
and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumour was
spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me,
looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys.
Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of
them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a
beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot.
They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the
baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a
swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been
alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She
looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I
ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and

sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.

'Is it true about Carbone?' one of the older two said.

'He was killed,' I said. 'Don't know who, don't know why.'

'When?'

'Last night, nine or ten o'clock.'
'Where?'
'Here.'

'This is a closed post.'

I nodded. 'The perp wasn't a member of the general public.'
'We heard he was messed up good.'
'Pretty good.'

'When are you going to know who it was?'
'Soon, I hope.'
'You got leads?'
'Nothing specific.'

'When you know, are we going to know too?'

130

'You want to?' 'You bet your ass.'
'Why?'

'You know why,' the guy said.

I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the
world's most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the
woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go
straight to someone's office, eight in the morning, champing at
the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them
again and thought, this particular perp could be in a shitload of
trouble. All I'd have to do is drop a name.

'I need to ask you some cop questions,' I said. I asked them
all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there
been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook
their heads and answered every question in the negative.

'.aything else?' I asked. 'Anything that put him at risk?'
'Like what?' one of the older two asked back, quietly.
'Like anything,' I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.
'No,' they all said.

'Got any theories?' I asked.

'Look at the Rangers,' the young one said. 'Find someone
who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to
prove.'

Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final
comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not
plausible. Delta sergeants don't go out in the woods with people
they don't know and get hit on the back of the head. They train
long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even
impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it
would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If
two Rangers had gone out there with him, we'd have found
two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found
defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn't have gone
down easily.

So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I
pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he
had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere,
his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I

131

pictured a tyre iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under
a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again.
And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down.
Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn't get
surprised very often.

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the

asshole in Garber's office, up in Rock Creek.

'Where are you?' he asked.

'In my office,' I said. 'How else would I be answering my
phone?'

'Stay there,' he said. 'Don't go anywhere, don't do anything,
don't call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there

quietly and wait.'

'For what?'

'I'm on my way down.'

He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.

I stayed there. I didn't go anywhere, I didn't do anything, I
didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn't told me to die of thirst.

After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the
young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with
the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered
my orders. Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call
anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing
something, which would contravene the don't do anything part
of the command. But then, breathing was doing something,
technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my
beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was
losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided

that component of the order was purely rhetorical.

'Help you, sergeant?' I said.

'I think Carbone was gay,' the sergeant said.
'You think he was?'
'OK, he was.'
"Who else knew?'
'All of us.'
'And?'

'And nothing. I thought you should know, is all.'

132

'You think it has a bearing?'

He shook his head. 'We were comfortable with it. And whoever
killed him wasn't one of us. It wasn't anyone in the unit.
That's not possible. We don't do stuff like that. Outside the unit,

nobody knew. Therefore it wasn't a factor.'

'So why tell me?'

'Because you're bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready

for it. I didn't want it to be a surprise.'

'Because?'

'Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it's not a factor.'

I said nothing.

'It would trash his memory,' the sergeant said. 'And that's
wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay

shouldn't be a crime.'

'I agree,' I said.

'The army needs to change.'

'The army hates change.'

'They say it damages unit cohesion,' he said. 'They should
have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right
there in it.'

'I can't keep it quiet,' I said. 'Maybe I would if I could. But
the way the crime scene looked, everyone's going to get the
message.'

'What? It was like a sex crime? You didn't say that before.'
'I was trying to keep it quiet,' I said.
'But nobody knew. Not outside the unit.'

'Someone must have,' I said. 'Or else the perp is in your unit.'
'That's not possible. No way, no how.'

'One thing or the other has got to be possible,' I said. 'Was he

seeing anyone on the outside?'

'No, never.'

'So he was celibate for sixteen years?'

The guy paused a beat.

'I guess I don't really know,' he said.

'Someone knew,' I said. 'But actually I don't think it was a
factor: I think someone just tried to make it look like it was.
Maybe we can make that clear, at least.'

The sergeant shook his head. 'It'll be the only thing anyone
remembers about him.'

133

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'I'm not gay,' he said.

'I don't really care either way.'

'I've got a wife and a kid.'

He left me with that information and I went back to obeying
Willard's orders.

I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered
at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing
snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his
attacker's skin under Carbone's fingernails. All of that was
easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the
attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which
the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that
they won't fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile
mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in
terms of wear and tear standards for military twill and poplin.
The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North
Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month,
and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a
surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around
and claw and kick at his assailant.

So there was no material information. But we had some
advantages. We had a fixed pool of possible suspects. It was a
closed base, and the army is pretty good at recording who was
where, at all times. We could start with yards of print-out paper
and go through each name, on a simple binary basis, possible
or not possible. Then we could collate all the possibles and go
to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means,
motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn't signify
much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list
unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody
in the army was physically capable of swinging a tyre iron
or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim's head.
It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry
requirement.

So it would end up with motive, which is where it had started
for me. What was the reason?

134

I sat for another hour. Didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything,
didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me more coffee. I
mentioned that she might call Lieutenant Summer for me and
suggest she stop by.

Summer showed up within five minutes. I had a whole raft of
things to tell her, but she had anticipated every one of them.
She had ordered a list of all base personnel, plus a copy of the
gate log so we could add and subtract names as appropriate.
She had arranged for Carbone's quarters to be sealed, pending
a search. She had arranged an intelwiew with his CO to develop

a better picture of his personal and professional life.
'Excellent,' I said.

'What's this thing with Willard?' she asked.

'A pissing contest, probably,' I said. 'Important case like this,
he wants to come down and direct things personally. To remind
me I'm under a cloud.'

But I was wrong.

Willard finally showed after a total of exactly four hours. I heard
his voice in the outer office. I was pretty sure my sergeant
wasn't offering him coffee. She had better instincts than that.
My door opened and he came in. He didn't look at me. Just
closed the door behind him and turned around and sat down in
my visitor's chair. Immediately started up with the shuffling
thing. He was going at it hard and plucking at the knees of his
pants like they were burning his skin.

'Yesterday,' he said. 'I want a complete record of your move

ments. I want to hear it from your own lips.'
'You're down here to ask me questions?'
'Yes,' he said.
I shrugged.

'I was on a plane until two,' I said. 'I was with you until five.'
'And then?'

'I got back here at eleven.'

'Six hours? I did it in four.'

'You drove, presumably. I took two buses and hitched a ride.'
'After that?'

'I spoke to my brother on the phone,' I said.

'I remember your brother,' Willard said. 'I worked with him.'

135

I nodded. 'He mentioned that.'

'And then what?'

'I spoke to Lieutenant Summer,' I said. 'Socially.'

'And then?'

'Carbone's body was discovered about midnight.'

He nodded and twitched and shuffled and looked uncomfortable.

'Did you keep your bus tickets?' he said.

'I doubt it,' I said.

He smiled. 'Remember who gave you a ride to the post?'

'I doubt it. Why?'

'Because I might need to know. To prove I didn't make a
mistake.'

I said nothing.

'You made mistakes,' he said.

'Did I?'

He nodded. 'I can't decide whether you're an idiot or whether

you're doing this on purpose.'

'Doing what?'

'Are you trying to embarrass the army?'

'What?'

'What's the big picture here, major?' he said.

'You tell me, colonel.'

'The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes
coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we've
got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the

cut. And you know what?'

'What?'

'The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The air force has
got all those glamorous airplanes. The haw has got submarines
and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we're
stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile.

The army is boring, Reacher. That's the view in Washington.'
'So?'

'This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ's sake. An elite unit has got perverts in
it? You think the army needs forpeople to know that? At a
time like this? You should have written him up as a training
accident.'

136

'That wouldn't have been true.'

'Who cares?'

'He wasn't killed because of his orientation.'

'Of course he was.'

'I do this stuff for a living,' I said. 'And I say he wasn't.'

He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.

'OK,' he said. 'We'll come back to that. Who else but you saw
the body?'

'My guys,' I said. 'Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an
opinion from. Plus the pathologist.'

He nodded. 'You deal with your guys. I'll tell Psy-Ops and the
doctor.'

'Tell them what?'

'That we're writing it up as a training accident. They'll under

stand. No harm, no foul. No investigation.'

'You're kidding.'

'You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That

Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?'

'The sergeants want an investigation.'

'I'm pretty sure their CO won't. Believe me. You can take that
as gospel.'

'You'll have to give me a direct order,' I said. 'Words of one
syllable.'

'Watch my lips,' he said. 'Do not investigate the fag. Write a
situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A
night manoeuvre, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and

fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order.'
'I'll need it in writing,' I said.
'Grow up,' he said.

We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other
across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I
clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a
straight right to the centre of his chest. I figured I could stop
his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a
training, accident. I could say he had been practising getting in
and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum
on the corner of the desk.

'What was the time of death?' he asked.

137

'Nine or ten last night,' I said.

'And you were off post until eleven?'
'Asked and answered,' I said.
'Can you prove that?'

I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged
me in.

'Do I have to?'I said.

He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.

'Next item,' he said. 'You claim the but>bandit wasn't killed

because he was a butt-bandit. What's your evidence?'
'The crime scene was overdone,' I said.
'To obscure the real motive?'

I nodded. 'That's my judgement.'

'What was the real motive?'

'I don't know. That would have required an investigation.'

'Let's speculate,' Willard said. 'Let's assume the hypothetical
perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me

how.'

'The usual way,' I said. 'By preventing some future action on
Sergeant Carbone's part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant

Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of.'

'To silence him, in other words.'

'To dead-end something,' I said. 'That would be my guess.'
'And you do this stuff for a living.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I do.'

'How would you have located this person?'

'By conducting an investigation.'

Willard nodded. 'And when you found this person, hypothetically,
assuming you were able to, what would you have done?'

'I would have taken him into custody,' I said. Protective
custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone's squadron buddies in my
mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.

'And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on post
at the time?'

I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with
reams of print-out paper even as we spoke.

'Verified via strength lists and gate logs,' I said.

'Facts,' Willard said. 'I would have thought that facts would be
very important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This

138

post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung
with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them
with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn't it
occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through
the main gate? Doesn't it occur to you that someone recorded
as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?'

'Unlikely,' I said. 'It would have given him a walk of well over
two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all
night.'

'The patrols might have missed a trained man.'

'Unlikely,' I said again. 'And how would he have rendez

voused with Sergeant Carbone?'

'Prearranged location.'

'It wasn't a location,' I said. 'It was just a spot near the track.'
'Map reference, then.'

'But'Unlikely"possible?'I said, for the third time.

'Anything's possible.'

'So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him,
then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around

to the main gate, and then signed in?'

'Anything's possible,' I said again.

'What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing
him and signing in?'

'I don't know. I would have to work out the distance he
walked.'

'Maybe he ran.'

'Maybe he did.'

'In which case he would have been out of breath when he

passed the gate.'

I said nothing.

'Best guess,' Willard said. 'How much time?'

'An hour or two.'

He nodded. 'So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer

could have been logging in at eleven?'

'Possible,' I said.

'And the motive would have been to dead-end something.'

I nodded. Said nothing.

'And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey,

139

thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain

with the vague claim that you took a slow route.'

I said nothing.

'And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in
terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours
between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two

hours that you can't account for.'

I said nothing. He smiled.

'And you arrived at the gate out of breath,' he said. 'I
checked.'

I didn't reply.

'But what would have been your motive?' he said. 'I assume
you didn't know Carbone well. I assume you don't move in the
same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you
don't.'

'You're wasting your time,' I said. 'And you're making a big
mistake. Because you really don't want to make an enemy out of
me.'

'Don't I?'

'No,' I said. 'You really don't.'

'What do you need dead-ended?' he asked me.

I said nothing.

'Here's an interesting fact,' Willard said. 'Sergeant First Class
Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint
against you.'

He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from
his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk.
There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a
place and a time. The date was January 2nd, the place was Fort
Bird's Provost Marshal's office, and the time was 0845. Then
came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some
of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving
Military Police major named Reacher strike the first civilian
with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent
to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the
face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks
were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defence. Then came a
signature with Carbone's name and number typed below it. I

140

recognized the number from Carbone's file. I looked up at the
slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind,
slipping out of the lounge bar door into the parking lot, looking
at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men
leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked
down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper
inside.

'Delta Force looks after its own,' Willard said. 'We all know
that. I guess it's part of their mystique. So what are they going
to do now? One of their own is beaten to death after lodging a
complaint against a smart-ass MP major, and the smart-ass MP
major in question needs to save his career, and he can't exactly

account for his time on the night it went down?'

I said nothing.

'The Delta CO's office gets its own copy,' Willard said.
'Standard procedure with disciplinary complaints. Multiple
copies all over the place. So the news will leak very soon. Then
they'll be asking questions. So what shall I tell them? I could
tell them you're definitely not a suspect. Or I could suggest you
definitely are a suspect, but there's some type of technicality in
the way that means I can't touch you. I could see how their

sense of right and wrong deals with that kind of injustice.'

I said nothing.

'It's the only complaint Carbone ever made,' he said. 'In a
sixteen-year career. I checked that, too. And it stands to reason.
A guy like that has to keep his head down. But Delta as a whole
will see some significance in it. Carbone comes up over the
parapet for the first time in his life, they're going to think you
boys had some previous history. They'll think it was a grudge

match. Won't make them like you any better.'

I said nothing.

'So what should I do?' Willard said. 'Should I go over there
and drop some hints about awkward legal technicalities? Or
shall we trade? I keep Delta off your back, and you start toeing
the line?'

I said. nothing.

'I don't really think you killed him,' he said. 'Not even
you would go that far. But I wouldn't have minded if you
had. Fags in the army deserve to be killed. They're here under

141

false pretences. You would have chosen the wrong reason, is
all.'

'It's an empty threat,' I said. 'You never told me he lodged the
complaint. You didn't show it to me yesterday. You never gave

me a name.'

'Their sergeants' mess won't buy that for a second. You're a
special unit investigator. You do this stuff for a living. Easy
enough for you to weasel a name out of all the paperwork they
think we do.'

I said nothing.

'Wake up, major,' Willard said. 'Get with the programme.
Garber's gone. We're going to do things my way now.'

'You're making a mistake,' I said. 'Making an enemy out of

He shook his head. 'I don't agree. I'm not making a mistake.
And I'm not making an enemy out of you. I'm bringing this unit
into line, is all. You'll thank me, later. All of you. The world is

changing. I can see the big picture.'

I said nothing.

'Help the army,' he said. 'And help yourself at the same time.'
I said nothing.

'Do we have a deal?' he said.

I didn't reply. He winked at me.

'I think we have a deal,' he said. 'You're not that dumb.'

He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door
behind him. I sat there and watched the stiff vinyl cushion on
my visitor's chair regain its shape. It happened slowly, with
quiet hissing sounds as air leaked back into it.

142

TEN

HE WORLD IS CHANGING. I HAD ALWAYS BEEN A LONER, BUT AT that point I started to feel lonely. And I had always been
a cynic, but at that point I began to feel hopelessly naive.
Both of my families were disappearing out from under me, one
because of simple relentless chronology, and the other because
its reliable old values seemed suddenly to be evaporating. I felt
like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the
rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like
I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on
the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I
realized everyone else had been speaking a different language
entirely. The world was changing. And I didn't want it to.

Summer came back three minutes later. I guessed she had
been hiding around a corner, waiting for Willard to leave. She
had folds of printer paper under her arm, and big news in her
eyes.

'Vassell and Coomer were here again last night,' she said.

'They're listed on the gate log.'

'Sit down,' I said.

She paused, surprised, and then she sat where Willard had.

143

'I'm toxic,' I said. 'You shotdd walk away from me right now.'
'What do you mean?'

'We were right,' I said. 'Fort Bird is a very embarrassing
place. First Kramer, then Carbone. Willard is closing both cases

down, to spare the army's blushes.'

'He can't close Carbone down.'

'Training accident,' I said. 'He tripped and fell and hit his
head.'

'What?'

'He's using it as a test for me. Am I with the programme or
not?'

'Are you?'

I didn't answer.

'They're illegal orders,' Summer said. 'They have to be.'
'Are you prepared to challenge them?'

She didn't reply. The only practical way to challenge illegal
orders was to disobey them and then take your chances
with the resulting general court martial, which would inevitably
become a mano a mano struggle with a guy way higher on the
food chain, in front of a presiding judge who was well aware of
the army's preference that orders should never be questioned.

'So nothing ever happened,' I said. 'Bring all your paperwork

here and forget you ever heard of me or Kramer or Carbone.'
She said nothing.

'And speak to the guys who were there last night. Tell them
to forget what they saw.'

She looked down at the floor.

'Then go back to the O Club and wait for your next assignment.'

She looked up at me.

'Are you serious?' she said.

'Totally,' I said. 'I'm giving you a direct order.'

She stared at me. 'You're not the man I thought you were.'

I nodded.

'I agree,' I said. 'I'm not.'

She walked out and I gave her a minute to get clear and then I
picked up the folded paper she had left behind. There was a lot
of it. I found the page I wanted, and I stared at it.

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Because I don't like coincidences.

Vassell and Coomer had entered Bird by the main gate at six
forty-five in the evening of the night Carbone had died. They
had left again at ten o'clock. Three and a quarter hours, right

across Carbone's time of death.

Or, right across dinner time.

I picked up the phone and called the O Club dining room. A
mess sergeant told me the NCO in charge would call me back.
Then I called my own sergeant and asked her to find out who
was my opposite number at Fort Irwin, and to get him on the
line. She Came in four minutes later with a mug of coffee for me.

'He's all tied up,' she said. 'Could be half an hour. His name is
Franz.'

'Can't be,' I said. 'Franz is in Panama. I talked to him there
face to face.'

'Major Calvin Franz,' she said. 'That's what they told me.'
'Call them back,' I said. 'Double check.'

She left my coffee on my desk and went back out to her
phone. Came in again after another four minutes and confirmed
that her information had been correct.

'Major Calvin Franz,' she said again. 'He's been there since
December twenty-ninth.'

I looked down at my calendar. January 5th.

'And you've been here since December twenty-ninth,' she
said.

I looked straight at her.

'Call some more posts,' I said. 'The big ones only. Start with
Fort Benning, and work through the alphabet. Get me the
names of their MP XOs, and find out how long they've been
there.'

She nodded and went back out. The NCO from the dining
room called me back. I asked him about Vassell and Coomer.
He confirmed they had eaten dinner in the O Club. Vassell had

gone with the halibut, and Coomer had opted for the steak.
'Did they eat on their own?' I asked.

'No, sir, they were with an assortment of senior officers,' the
guy said.

'Was it a date?'

'No, sir, we had the impression it was impromptu. It was an

145

odd collection of people. I think they all hooked up in the bar,

over aperitifs. Certainly we had no reservation for the group.'
'How long were they there?'

'They were seated before seven thirty, and they got up just
before ten o'clock.'

'Nobody left and came back?'

'No, sir, they were under our eye throughout.'

'All the time?'

'We paid close attention to them, sir. It was a question of the
general's rank, really.'

I hung up. Then I called the main gate. Asked who had
actually eyeballed Vassell and Coomer in and out. They gave
me a sergeant's name. I told them to find the guy and have him

call me back.

I waited.

The guy from the gate was the first to get back to me.
He confirmed he had been on duty all through the previous
evening, and he confirmed he had personally witnessed Vassell

and Coomer arrive at six forty-five and leave again at ten.
'Car?' I asked.

'Big black sedan, sir,' he said. 'A Pentagon staff car.'
'Grand Marquis?' I asked.
'I'm pretty sure, sir.'
'Was there a driver?'

'The colonel was driving,' the guy said. 'Colonel Coomer, that

is. General Vassell was in the front passenger seat.'
'Just the two of them in the car?'
'Affirmative, sir.'
'Are you sure?'

'That's definite, sir. No question about it. At night we use
flashlights. Black sedan, DoD plates, two officers in the front,
proper IDs displayed, rear seat vacant.'

'OK, thanks,' I said, and hung up. The phone rang again
immediately. It was Calvin Franz, in California.

'Reacher?' he said. 'What the hell are you doing there?'
'I could ask you the exact same question.'
The phone went quiet for a beat:

'No idea what the hell I'm doing here,' he said. 'Irwin's all
quiet. It usually is, they tell me. Weather's nice, though.'

146

'Did you check your orders?'

'Sure,' he said. 'Didn't you? Most fun I've had since Grenada,
and now I'm staring at the sands of the Mojave? Seems to have
been Garber's personal brainwave. I thought I must have upset
him. Now I'm not so sure what's going on. Unlikely that we
both upset him.'

What exactly were your orders?' I said.
'Temporary XO for the Provost Marshal.'
'Is he there right now?'

'No, actually. He got a temporary detachment the same day I
got in.'

'So you're acting COP'
'Looks that way,' he said. The too.'

'What's going on?'

'No idea,' I said. 'If I ever find out, I'll tell you. But first I need
to ask you a question. I came across a bird colonel and a
one-star over here, supposed to be heading out to you for an
Armored conference on New Year's Day. Vassell and Coomer.
Did they ever show?'

'That conference was cancelled,' Franz said. 'We heard
their two-star bought the farm somewhere. Guy called Kramer.
They seemed to think there was no point going ahead without
him. Either that, or they can't think at all without him.
Or they're all too busy fighting over who's going to get his
command.'

'So Vassell and Coomer never came to California?'

'They never came to Irwin,' Franz said. 'That's for sure. Can't
speak for California. It's a big state.'

'Who else was supposed to attend?'

'Armored's inner circle. Some are based here. Some showed

and went away again. Some never showed at all.'
'Did you hear anything about the agenda?'
'I wouldn't expect to. Was it important?'

'I don't know. Vassell and Coomer said there wasn't one.'
'There's always an agenda.'
'That's what I figured.'
'I'll keep my ears open.'

'Happy New Year,' I said. Then I put the phone down and sat

147

quiet. Thought hard. Calvin Franz was one of the good guys.
Actually, he was one of the best guys. Tough, fair, as competent
as the day was long. Nothing ever knocked him off his stride. I
had been happy enough to leave Panama, knowing that he was
still there. But he wasn't still there. I wasn't there, and he wasn't
there. So who the hell was?

I finished my coffee and carried my mug outside and put it

back next to the machine. My sergeant was on the phone. She
had a page of scribbled notes in front of her. She held up a
finger like she had big news. Then she went back to writing. I
went back to my desk. She came in five minutes later with her
scribbled page. Thirteen lines, three columns. The third column
was made up of numbers. Dates, probably.

'I got as far as Fort Rucker,' she said. 'Then I stopped.

Because there's a very obvious pattern developing.'

'Tell me,' I said.

She reeled off thirteen posts, alphabetically. Then she reeled

off the names of their MP executive officers. I knew all thirteen
names, including Franz's and my own. Then she reeled off the
dates they had been transferred in. Every date was exactly

the same. Every date was December 29th. Eight days ago.

'Say the names again,' I told her.

She read them again. I nodded. Inside the arcane little world

of military law enforcement, if you wanted to pick an all-star
squad, and if you thought long and hard about it all through the
night, those thirteen names were what you would have come up
with. No doubt about it. They made up a major league, heavy
duty baker's dozen. There would have been about ten other
obvious guys in the mix, but I had no doubt at all that a couple
of them would be right there on posts farther along in the
alphabet, and the other eight or so in significant places around
the globe. And I had no doubt at all that all of them had been
there just eight days. Our heavy hitters. I wouldn't have wanted
to say how high or how low I ranked among them individually,
but collectively, down there at the field level, we were the
army's top cops, no question about it.

"Weird,' I said. And it was weird.To shuffle that many specific
individuals around on the same day took some kind of will
and planning, and to do it during Just Cause took some kind of

148

an urgent motive. The room seemed to go quiet, like I was
straining to hear the other shoe fall.

'I'm going over to the Delta station,' I said.

I drove myself in a Humvee because I didn't want to walk. I
didn't know if the asshole Willard was off the post yet, and I didn't want to cross his path again. The sentry let me into the
old prison and I went straight to the adjutant's office. He was
still at his desk, looking a little more tired than when I had seen
him in the early morning.

'It was a training accident,' I said.

He nodded. 'So I heard.'

'What kind of training was he doing?' I asked.
'Night manoeuvres,' the guy said.
'Alone?'

'Escape and evasion, then.'

'On post?'

'OK, he was jogging. Burning off the holiday calories. Whatever.'

'I need this to sound kosher,' I said. 'My name's going to be
on the report.'

The captain nodded. 'Then forget the jogging. I don't think
Carbone was a runner. He was more of a gym rat. A lot of them
are.'

'A lot of who are?'

He looked straight at me.

'Delta guys,' he said.

'Did he have a specialization?'

'They're all generalists. They're all good at everything.'
'Not radio, not medic?'

'They all do radio. And they're all medics. It's a safeguard.
If they're captured individually, they can claim to be the
company medic. Might save them from a bullet. And they can

demonstrate the expertise, if they're tested.'
'Any medical training take place at night?'
The captain shook his head. 'Not specifically.'
'Could he have been out testing comms gear?'

'He could have been out road testing a vehicle,' the captain
said. 'He was good with mechanical things. I guess as much as

149

anyone he looked after the unit's trucks. That was probably as

close as he got to a specialization.'

'OK,' I said. 'Maybe he blew a tyre, and his truck fell off the

jack and crushed his head?'

'Works for me,' the captain said.

'Uneven terrain, maybe a soft spot under the jack, the whole

thing would be unstable.'

'Works for me,' the captain said again.
'I'll say my guys towed the truck back.'
'OK.'

'What kind of truck was it?'
'Any kind you like.'
'Your CO around?' I said.
'He's away. For the holidays.'
'Who is he?'

'You won't know him.'

'Try me.'

'Colonel Brubaker,' the captain said.

'David Brubaker?' I said. 'I know him.' Which was partially

true. I knew him by reputation. He was a real hairy-assed
Special Forces evangelist. According to him the rest of us could
fold our tents and go home and the whole world could hide
behind his hand-picked units. Maybe some helicopter battalions
could stay in harness, to ferry his people around. Maybe a
single Pentagon office could stay open, to procure the weapons
he wanted.

'When will he be back?' I said.
'Sometime tomorrow.'
'Did you call him?'

The captain shook his head. 'He won't want to be involved.

And he won't want to talk to you. But I'll get him to reissue
some operational safety procedures, as soon as we find out what
kind of an accident it was.'

'Crushed by a truck,' I said. 'That's what it was. That should

make him happy. Vehicular safety is a shorter section than

weapons safety.'

'In what?'

'In the field manual.'

The captain smiled.

150

'Brubaker doesn't use the field manual,' he said.
'I want to see Carbone's quarters,' I said.
'Why?'

'Because I need to sanitize them. If I'm going to sign off on a
trLck accident, I don't want any loose ends around.'

Carbone had bunked the same way as his unit as a whole, on
his own in one of the old cells. It was a six-by-eight space made
of painted concrete and it had its own sink and toilet. It had a
standard army cot and a footlocker and a shelf on the wall as
long as the bed. All in all, it was pretty good accommodations
for a sergeant. There were plenty around the world who would
have traded in the blink of an eye.

Summer had had police tape stuck across the doorway. I
pulled it down and balled it up and put it in my pocket. Stepped
inside the room.

Special Forces Detachment D is very different from the
rest of the army in its approach to discipline and uniformity.
Relationships between the ranks are very casual. Nobody
even remembers how to salute. Tidiness is not prized. Uniform
is not compulsory. If a guy feels comfortable in a previous
issue fatigue jacket that he's had for years, he wears it. If
he likes New Balance running shoes better than GI combat
boots, he wears them. If the army buys four hundred thousand
Beretta sidearms, but the Delta guy likes SIGs better, he uses a
SIG.

So Carbone had no closet full of clean and pressed uniforms.
There were no serried ranks of undershirts, crisp and
laundered, folded ready for use. There were no gleaming boots
under his bed. His clothing was all piled on the first three
quarters of the long shelf above his cot. There wasn't much of
it. It was all basically olive green, but apart from that it wasn't
stuff that a current quartermaster would recognize. There were
some old pieces of the army's original extended cold-weather
clothing system. There were some faded pieces of standard
BDUs.Nothing was marked with unit or regimental insignia.
There was a green bandanna. There were some old green
T-shirts, washed so many times they were nearly transparent.
There was a neatly rolled ALICE harness next to the T-shirts.

151

ALICE stands for All-Purpose Lightweight Carrying Equipment,
which is what the army calls a nylon belt that you hang things
from.

The final quarter of the shelf's length held a collection of
books, and a small colour photograph in a brass frame. The
photograph was of an older woman that looked a little like
Carbone himself. His mother, without a doubt. I remembered
his tattoo, sliced across by the K-bar. An eagle, holding a scroll
with Mother on it. I remembered my mother, shooing us away

into the tiny elevator after we had hugged her goodbye.

I moved on to Carbone's books.

There were five paperbacks and one tall thin hardcover. I
ran my finger along the paperbacks. I didn't recognize any of
the titles or any of the authors. They all had cracked concave
spines and yellow-edged pages. They all seemed to be adventure
stories involving prototype airplanes or lost submarines.
The lone hardcover was a souvenir publication from a Rolling
Stones concert tour. Judging by the style of the print on the
spine it was about ten years old.

I lifted his mattress up off the cot springs and checked under
it. Nothing there. I checked the toilet tank and under the sink.
Nothing doing. I moved on to the footlocker. First thing I saw
after opening it was a brown leather jacket folded across the
top. Underneath the jacket were two white button-down shirts
and two pairs of blue jeans. The cotton items were worn and
soft and the jacket was neither cheap nor expensive. Together
they made up a soldier's typical Saturday-night outfit. Shit,
shave and shower, throw on the civilian duds, pile into someone's
car, hit a couple of bars, have some fun.

Underneath the jeans was a wallet. It was small, and
made out of brown leather that almost matched the jacket.
Like the clothes above it, it was set up for a typical Saturday
night's requirements. There were forty-three dollars in cash in
it, sufficient for enough rounds of beers to get the fun started.
There was a military ID card and a North Carolina driver's
licence in it, in case the fun concluded inside an MP jeep or a
civilian black-and-white. There was an unopened condom, in
case the fun got serious.

There was a photograph of a girl, behind a plastic window.

152

Maybe a sister, maybe a cousin, maybe a friend. Maybe nobody. Camouflage, for sure.

Underneath the wallet was a shoe box half full of six-by-four
prints. They were all amateur snapshots of groups of soldiers.
Carbone himself was in some of them. Small groups of
men were standing and posing, like chorus lines, arms around
each other's shoulders. Some shots were under a blazing
sun and the men were shirtless, wearing beanie hats, squinting
and smiling. Some were in jungles. Some were in wrecked
and snowy streets. All showed the same tight camaraderie.
Comrades in arms, off duty, still alive, and happy about it.

There was nothing else in Carbone's six-by-eight cell.
Nothing significant, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing explanatory.
Nothing that revealed his history, his nature, his
passions, or his interests. He had lived his life in secret,
buttoned down, like his Saturday-night shirts.

I walked back to my Humvee. Turned a corner and came face to
face with the young sergeant with the beard and the tan. He

was in my way, and he wasn't about to move.
'You made a fool out of me,' he said.
'Did I?'

'About Carbone. Letting me talk the way I did. Company

clerk just showed us some interesting paperwork.'

'So?'

'So we're thinking now.'

'Don't tire yourselves out,' I said.

'Think this is funny? You won't think it's funny if we find out
it was you.'

'It wasn't.'

'Says you.'

I nodded. 'Says me. Now get out of my way.'

'Or?'
'Or I'll kick your ass.'

He stepped up close. 'Think you could kick my ass?'

I didn't move. 'You're wondering whether I kicked Carbone's

ass. And he was probably twice the soldier you are.'
'You won't even see it coming,' he said.
I said nothing.

153

'Believe me,' he said.

I looked away. I believed him. If Delta put a hit on me, I
wouldn't see it coming. That was for sure. Weeks from now or
months from now or years from now I would walk into a dark
alley somewhere and a shadow would step out and a K-bar
would slip between my ribs or my neck would snap with a loud crack that would echo off the bricks around me, and that would
be the end of it.

'You've got a week,' the guy said.

'To do what?'

'To show us it wasn't you.'

I said nothing.

'Your choice,' the guy said. 'Show us, or make those seven
days count. Make sure you cover all your lifetime ambitions.
Don't start a long book.'

154

ELEVEN

DROVE THE HUMVEE BACK TO MY OFFICE. LEFT IT PARKED RIGHT outside my door. The sergeant with the baby son had gone.
The small dark corporal who I thought was from Louisiana
was there in her place. The coffee pot was cold and empty.
There were two message slips on my desk. The first was: Major
Franz called. Please call him back. The second said: Detective
Clark returned your call. I dialled Franz in California first.

'Reacher?' he said. 'I asked about the Armored agenda.'
'And?'

'There wasn't one. That's their story, and they're sticking to

it.'

'But?'

'We both know that's bullshit. There's always an agenda.'
'So did you get anywhere?'

'Not really,' he said. 'But I can prove an incoming secure
fax from Germany late on December thirtieth, and I can
prove significant Xeroxing activity on the thirty-first, in the
afternoon. And then there was some shredding and burning on
New Year's Day, after the Kramer news broke. I spoke to the
incinerator guy. One burn bag, full of paper shreds, maybe
enough for about sixty sheets.'

155

'How secure is their secure fax line?'

'How secure do you want it to be?'
'Extremely secure. Because the only way I can make sense

out of this is if the agenda was really secret. I mean, really secret. And if it was really secret, would they have put it on
paper in the first place?'

'They're XII Corps, Reacher. They've been living on the front

line for forty years. All they've got is secrets.'

'How many people were scheduled to attend the conference?'
'I spoke to the mess. There were fifteen bag lunches booked.'
'Sixty pages, fifteen people, that's a four-page agenda, then.'
'Looks that way. But they went up in smoke.'

'Not the original that was faxed from Germany,' I said.

'They'll have burned that one over there.'

'No, my guess is Kramer was hand-carrying it when he died.'
'So where is it now?'
'Nobody knows. It got away.'
'Is it worth chasing?'

'Nobody knows,' I said again. 'Except the guy who wrote it,

and he's dead. And Vassell and Coomer. They must have seen

it. They probably helped with it.'

'Vassell and Coomer went back to Germany. This morning.

it.'First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about

'You ever met this new guy Willard?' I asked him.

'No.'

'Try not to. He's an asshole.'

'Thanks for the warning. What did we do to deserve him?'

'I have no idea,' I said. We hung up and I dialled the Virginia

number and asked for Detective Clark. I got put on hold. Then I
heard a click and a second's worth of squad room sounds and a

voice came on the line.

'Clark,' it said.

'Reacher,' I said. 'U.S. Army, down at Fort Bird. Did you want

me?'

'You wanted me, as I recall,' Clark said. 'You wanted a
progress report. But there isn't any progress. We're looking at
a brick wall here. We're looking for help, actually.'

'Nothing I can do. It's your case.'

156

'I wish it wasn't,' he said.

'What have you got?'

'Lots of nothing. The perp was in and out without maybe
touching a thing. Gloves, obviously. There was a light frost on
the ground. We've got some residual grit from the driveway and

the path, but we're not even close to a footprint.'

'Neighbours see anything?'

'Most of them were out, or drunk. It was New Year's Eve. I've
had people up and down the street canvassing, but nothing's
jumping out at me. There were some cars around, but there
would be anyway, on New Year's Eve, with folks heading back
and forth to parties.'

'Any tyre tracks on the driveway?'
'None that mean anything.'
I said nothing.

'The victim was killed with a crowbar,' Clark said. 'Probably

the same tool as was used on the door.'

'I figured that,' I said.

'After the attack the perp wiped it on the rug and then
washed it clean in the kitchen sink. We found stuff in the pipe.

No prints on the faucet. Gloves, again.'

I said nothing.

'Something else we haven't got,' Clark said. 'There's nothing

much to say your general ever really lived there.'

'Why?'

'We gave it the full-court press, forensically. We printed the
whole place, we took hair and fibre from everywhere including
the sink and shower traps, like I said. Everything belonged to
the victim except a couple of stray prints. Bingo, we thought,
but the database brought them back as the husband's. And the
ratio of hers to his suggests he was hardly there over the last
five years or so. Is that usual?'

'He'll have stayed on post a lot,' I said. 'But he should have
been home for the holidays every year. The story here is that
the marriage wasn't so great.'

'People like that should just go ahead and get divorced,'
Clark said. 'I mean, that's not a dealbreaker even for a general,
right?'

'Not that I've heard,' I said. 'Not any more.'

157

Then he went quiet for a minute. He was thinking.

'How bad was the marriage?' he asked. 'Bad enough that we

should be looking at the husband for the doer?'

'The timing doesn't work,' I said. 'He was dead when it
happened.'

'Was there money involved?'

'Nice house,' I said. 'Probably hers.'

'So what about a paid hit, maybe set up way ahead of time?'

Now he was really clutching at straws.

'He'd have arranged it for when he was away in Germany.'

Clark said nothing to that.

'Who called you for this progress report?' I asked him.
'You did,' he said. 'An hour ago.'
'I don't recall doing that.'

'Not you personally,' he said. 'Your people. It was the little

black chick I met at the scene. Your lieutenant. I was too busy
to talk. She gave me a number, but I left it somewhere. So I
called back on the number you gave me originally. Did I do
wrong?'

'No,' I said. 'You did fine. Sorry we can't help you.'

We hung up. I sat quiet for a moment and then I buzzed my

corporal.

'Ask Lieutenant Summer to come see me,' I said.

Summer showed up inside ten minutes. She was in BDUs and
between her face and her body language I could see she was
feeling a little nervous of me and a little contemptuous of me all
at the same time. I let her sit down and then I launched right
into it.

'Detective Clark called back,' I said.

She said nothing.

'You disobeyed my direct order,' I said.
She said nothing.
'Why?' I asked.

'Why did you give me the order?'

'Why do you think?'

'Because you're toeing Willard's line.'

'He's the CO,' I said. 'It's a good line to toe.'

'I don't agree.'

158

'You're in the army now, Summer. You don't obey orders just
because you agree with them.'

'We don't cover things up just because we're told to, either.'
'We do,' I said. 5Ve do that all the time. We always have.'
'Well, we shouldn't.'

'Who made you Chief of Staff?'

'It's unfair to Carbone and Mrs Kramer,' she said. 'They're
innocent victims.'

I paused. 'Why did you start with Mrs Kramer? You see her
as more important than Carbone?'

Summer shook her head. 'I didn't start with Mrs Kramer. I
got to her second. I had already started on Carbone. I went
through the personnel lists and the gate log and marked who

was here at the time and who wasn't.'
'You gave me that paperwork.'
'I copied it first.'
'You're an idiot,' I said.

'Why? Because I'm not chicken?'
'How old are you?'
'Twenty-five.'

'OK,' I said. 'So next year you'll be twenty-six. You'll
be a twenty-six-year-old black woman with a dishonourable
discharge from the only career you've ever had. Meanwhile the
civilian job market will be flooded because of force reduction
and you'll be competing with people with chests full of medals
and pockets full of testimonials. So what are you going to do?

Starve? Go work up at the strip club with Sin?'

She said nothing.

'You should have left it to me,' I said.

'You weren't doing anything.'

'I'm glad you thought so,' I said. 'That was the plan.'
'What?'

'I'm going to take Willard on,' I said. 'It's going to be him or
me.'

She said nothing.

'I work for the army,' I said. 'Not for Willard. I believe in the
army. I don't believe in Willard. I'm not going to let him trash
everything.'

She said nothing.

159

'I told him not to make an enemy out of me. But he didn't
listen.'

'Big step,' she said.

'One that you already took,' I said.

'Why did you cut me out?'

'Because if I blow it I don't want to take anyone down with

me.'

'You were protecting me.'

I nodded.

'Well don't,' she said. 'I can think for myself.'

I said nothing.

'How old are you?' she asked.

'Twenty-nine,' I said.

'So next year you'll be thirty. You'll be a thirty-year-old
white man with a dishonourable discharge from the only
job you've ever had. And whereas I'm young enough to start
over, you're not. You're institutionalized, you've got no social
skills, you've never been in the civilian world, and you're good
for nothing. So maybe it should be you lying in the weeds, not

me.

I said nothing.

'You should have talked it over,' she said.

'It's a personal choice,' I said.

'I already made my personal choice,' she said. 'Seems like
you know that now. Seems like Detective Clark accidentally
ratted me out.'

'That's exactly what I mean,' I said. 'One stray phone call and
you could be out on the street. This is a high-stakes game.'

'And I'm right here in it with you, Reacher. So bring me up to
speed.'

Five minutes later she knew what I knew. All questions, no
answers.

'Garber's signature was a forgery,' she said.

I nodded.

'So what about Carbone's, on the complaint? Is that forged
too?'

'Maybe,' I said. I took the copy that Willard had given me out
of my desk drawer. Smoothed it out on the blotter and passed it

160

across to her. She folded it neatly and put it in her inside
pocket.

'I'll get the writing checked,' she said. 'Easier for me than

yOU, now.'

'Nothing's easy for either of us now,' I said. 'You need to be
very clear about that. So you need to be very clear about what
you're doing.'

'I'm clear,' she said. 'Bring it on.'

I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small
smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had
grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning
and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back
against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent
progress, of a sort, in her life.

'Thank you,' I said. 'For being on my side.'

'I'm not on your side,' she said. 'You're on mine.'

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal,
calling from his desk outside my door.

'North Carolina State Police on the line,' he said. 'They want
a duty officer. You want to take it?'

'Not really,' I said. 'But I guess I better.'

There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then
a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an 1-95
patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on
the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that
identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S.
Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it
was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had
been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase
was currently being held, in case I was interested in having
someone sent out to pick it up.

161

TWELVE

UMMER I)ROVE. WE TOOK THE HUMVEE I HAD LEFT ON THE KERB.
We didn't want to take time to sign out a sedan. It
cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks
that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast
isn't one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle
was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tyres were
whining loud. It was four o'clock on a dull day and it was
starting to go dark.

We drove north to Kramer's motel and turned east through
the cloverleaf and then north on 1-95 itself. We covered fifteen
miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right
State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was
a long low one-storey brick structure with a forest of tall radio
masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick
was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out
yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started
out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were
stainless steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North
Carolina State Police all along its length.

We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors.
Smnmer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and

162

then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors
and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built
for function and floored with linoleum which was shined every
night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of
slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and
smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.

There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were
in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us
through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He
didn't ask for ID or enquire why we were there. He didn't
speculate as to why General Kramer hadn't shown up himself.
He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at
Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came
back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an
evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store's
name printed across it in red.

The briefcase itself matched Kramer's suit carrier in every
way. Same colour, same design, same age, same level of wear
and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There
was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport.
There was a paperclipped itinerary three sheets thick. There
was a hardcover book.

There was no conference agenda.

I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter.
Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not
surprised.

'Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?' I asked.

The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer,
not me.

'I put it in the bag myself,' he said. 'I wanted to keep it clean.

I wasn't sure how soon someone would get here.'

'Where exactly was it found?' I asked him.

He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a
thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile
marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip
on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina's
portion of 1-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five
inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where
it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia.

163

The guy's finger hovered for a second and then came down,

decisively.

'Here,' he said. 'Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest

area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now.'

'Any way of knowing how long it had been there?'

'Not really,' he said. 'We're not out there specifically looking

for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month.'

'So how was it found?'

'Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking

from his car to the car he had stopped.'

'When was this exactly?'

'Today,' the guy said. 'Start of the second watch. Not long

after noon.'

'It wasn't there a month,' I said.
'When did he lose it?'
'New Year's Eve,'! said.
'Where?'

'It was stolen from where he was staying.'

'Where was he staying?'

'A motel about thirty miles south of here.'
'So the bad guys were coming back north.'
'I guess,' I said.

The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then

picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was
a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light
and stared at it from every angle.

'January,' he said. 'We've got a little night dew right now.

And it's cold enough that we're worried about ice. So we've
got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway
shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very
deteriorated. It's got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas.
But not very much. It hasn't been out there since New Year's
Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours,
I'd say. One night, not more.'

'Can you be certain?' Summer asked.

He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.
'Just a guess,' he said.
'OK,' I said. 'Thanks.'
'You'll have to sign for it.'

164

I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it towards
me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right
breast pocket, but I figured he hadn't paid much attention to it.
He had spent most of his time looking at Summer's pockets. So
I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and
picked up the briefcase and turned away.

'Funny sort of burglary,' the desk guy said. 'There's an Amex
card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents.'

I didn't reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the
Humvee.

Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all
three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median.
She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and
straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left
back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of
thing a Humvee was good for.

'Try this,' she said. 'Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird
at ten o'clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or
D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car
window.'

'They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at
Bird.'

'So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should
check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the
Humvee list was there.'

'They were all alibied.'

'Only superficially. New Year's Eve parties are pretty chaotic.'

I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening
was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.

'Sixty miles,' I said. 'The case was found sixty miles north of
Bird. That's an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and

ditched the case faster than that.'

Summer said nothing.

'And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They
would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have
been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty
conspicuous.'

'Maybe there really wasn't an agenda.'

165

'It would be the first time in military history.'

'Then maybe it really wasn't important.'

'They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and
colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That
might be the first time in military history too. That was an

important conference, Summer, believe me.'

She said nothing.

'Do that U-turn thing again,' I said. 'Across the median. Then
go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.'

The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I
had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway
eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The
buildings were shared by both sets of travellers. Therefore they
had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had
dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There
were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then
the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was
the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready
for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe
one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting.
People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than
chancing something farther on, even though that might have
put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms.
Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.

There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility's main
entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food
stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the
doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking
out.

'Too public,' Summer said. 'This is going nowhere.'

I nodded again. 'I'd forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn't for Mrs
Kramer.'

'Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.'

'That feels like we're giving up.'

We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off
roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got
as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and

166

settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left.
There was a vague sunset in the west, to my right. The road
looked damp. Summer didn't seem very worried about the
possibility of ice.

I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched
the dome light on and searched Kramer's briefcase,
thoroughly. I didn't expect to find anything, and I wasn't proved
wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He
looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the
motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of
Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ,
respectively. He hadn't been anywhere else. He was a true
specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively
on the world's last great tank arena and its command
structure.

The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they
should be. Frankfurt to Dul]es, and Washington National to
Los Angeles, both round trip. They were all coach class and
government rate, booked three days before the first departure
date.

The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly.
There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred
the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a
reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin's Visiting Officers'
Quarters, which he had never reached.

His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty
seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card
was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He
had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back
then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must
have been a sophisticated guy, financially.

There was a Virginia driver's licence. He had been using
Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he
avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID
card. There was a photograph of Mrs Kramer, behind a plastic
window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had
seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old.
She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that

167

showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had
faded with age.

There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant
checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of
paper. I wasn't surprised. Generals are often neat, organized
people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic
talent too. I guessed Kramer's office and desk and quarters
would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything
he needed and nothing he didn't.

The hardcover book was an academic monograph from
a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk
happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany's last grand
offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an
open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world
has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer
himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn't surprised by his
choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have
feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action
was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and
T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust
all those years ago.

There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred
paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was
the sort of guy who emptied his case and turned it upside down
and shook it every time he packed for a trip. I put everything
back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the
floor by my feet.

'Speak to the dining-room guy,' I said. 'When we get back.
Find out who was at the table with Vassell and Coomer.'

'OK,' Summer said. She drove on.

We got back to Bird in time for dinner. We ate in the O Club bar
with a bunch of fellow MPs. If Willard had spies among them,
they would have seen nothing except a couple of tired people
doing not very much of anything. But Summer slipped away
between courses and came back with news in her eyes. I ate my
dessert and drank my coffee slowly enough that nobody could
think I had urgent business anywhere. Then I stood up and
wandered out. Waited in the cold on the sidewalk. Summer

168

came out five minutes later. I smiled. It felt like we were
conducting a clandestine affair.

'Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,' she said.
'Who?' I asked.

'Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.'
'The Psy-Ops person?'
'The very same.'

'She was at a party on New Year's Eve.'

Summer made a face. 'You know what those parties are like.
A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise,
confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could
have slipped away.'

'Where was the bar?'

'Thirty minutes from the motel.'

'Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.'
'That's possible.'

'Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing
"Auld Lang Syne"? Whoever was standing next to her should be
able to say for sure.'

'People say she was there. But she could have made it back
by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty
five. She'd have been back with five minutes to spare. It could
have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the
woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts
over.'

I said nothing.

'She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her
phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a
diary. She didn't want the scandal. But once she was through
with it, she didn't need the rest of the stuff any more. She'd
have been happy to hand it back when asked.'

'How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?'

'Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.'

'Not logical,' I said. 'If people knew about Kramer and
Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?'

'OK, maybe they didn't know. Maybe it was just there on the
list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was
something that people thought was over.'

I nodded. 'What can we get from her?'

169

'We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged
to take possession of the briefcase last night. That would prove
they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs
Kramer.'

'They made no calls from the hofel, and they didn't have time
to get down there themselves. So I don't see how we can put
them in the frame. What else can we get?'

'We can be certain about what happened to the agenda.
We can know that Vassell and Coomer got it back. Then at
least the army can relax because we'll know for sure it isn't
going to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to
find.'

I nodded. Said nothing.

'And maybe Norton saw it,' Summer said. 'Maybe she read it.

Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about.'
'That's tempting.'
'It sure is.'

'Can we just walk in and ask her?'

'You're from the 110th. You can ask anyone anything.'
'I have to stay under Willard's radar.'
'She doesn't know he warned you off.'

'She does. He spoke to her after the Carbone thing.'

'I think we have to talk to her.'

'Difficult kind of a talk to have,' I said. 'She's likely to get
offended.'

'Only if we do it wrong.'

'What are the chances of doing it right?'

'We might be able to manipulate the situation. There'll be an
embarrassment factor. She won't want it broadcast.'

'We can't push her to the point where she calls Willard.'
'You scared of him?'

'I'm scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically. Doesn't

help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska.'

'Your call.'

I was quiet for a long moment. Thought back to Kramer's
hardcover book. This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of
the Battle of Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the
Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep
on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the

170

war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for
a second, we would be overrun again.

'OK,' I said. 'Let's do it.'

We found Andrea Norton in the 0 Club lounge and I asked her
if she would spare us a minute in her office. I could see she was
puzzled as to why. I told her it was a confidential matter. She
stayed puzzled. Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed
case, and she couldn't see what else we would have to talk to
her about. But she agreed. She told us she would meet us there
in thirty minutes.

Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list
of who was on post and who wasn't at Carbone's time of death.
She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large
concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank and
number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost
every name had a check mark next to it.

'What are the marks?' I asked her. 'Here or not here?'
'Here,' she said.

I nodded. I was afraid of that. I rifled through the concertina
with my thumb.

'How many?' I asked.

'Nearly twelve hundred.'

I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult
about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole
perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect
pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S.
military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that
require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources.
And they require everybody's total co-operation. They can't be
handled behind a CO's back, in secret, by two people acting
alone.

'Impossible,' I said.

'Nothing's impossible,' Summer said.
'We have to go at it a different way.'
'How?'

'What did he take to the scene?'

'Nothing.'

171

'Wrong,' I said. 'He took himself.'

Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges
of her paper. The stack thickened and then thinned back down

as the air sighed out from between the pages.
'Pick a name,' she said.
'He took a K-bar,' I said.

'Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.'
'He took a tyre iron or a crowbar.'
She nodded.

'And he took yogurt,' I said.

She said nothing.

'Four things,' I said. 'Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and
yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?'

'His refrigerator in his quarters,' Summer said. 'Or one of the
mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary,
or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off
post.'

I pictured a man, breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating,
a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together
in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in
the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot,
hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket,
slipping the crowbar under his coat.

'We should look for the container,' I said.

Summer said nothing.

'He'll have ditched it,' I said. 'Not close to the scene, but not
far from it either.'

'Will it help us?'

'It'll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best
before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was
bought.'

Then I paused.

'And it might have prints on it,' I said.

'He'll have worn gloves.'

I shook my head. 'I've seen people opening yogurt containers.
But I've never seen anyone do it with gloves on. There's a foil
closure. With a tiny little tab to pull.'

'We're on a hundred thousand acres here.'

I nodded. Square one. Normally a couple of phone calls would

172

get me all the grunts on the post lined up a yarcl apart on their
knees, crawling slowly across the terrain like a giant human
comb, staring down at the ground and parting every blade of
grass by hand. And then doing it again the next day, and the
nxt, until one of them found what we were looking for. With
manpower like the army has, you can find a needle in a haystack.
You can find both halves of a broken needle. You can find

the tiny chip of chrome that flaked off the break.
Summer looked at the clock on the wall.
'Our thirty minutes are up,' she said.

We used the Humvee to get over to Psy-Ops and parked in a
slot that was probably reserved for someone else. It was nine
o'clock. Summer killed the motor and we opened the doors and
slipped out into the cold.

I took Kramer's briefcase with me.

We walked through the old tiled corridors and came to
Norton's door. Her light was on. I knocked and we went in.
Norton was behind her desk. All her textbooks were back on
her shelves. There were no legal pads on view. No pens or
pencils. Her desktop was clear. The pool of light from her lamp
was a perfect circle on the empty wood.

She had three visitor chairs. She waved us towards them.
Summer sat on the right. I sat on the left. I propped Kramer's
briefcase on the centre chair, facing Norton, like a ghost at the
feast. She didn't look at it.

'How can I help you?' she said.

I made a point of adjusting the briefcase's position so that it
was completely upright on the chair.

'Tell us about the dinner party last night,' I said.

'What dinner party?'

'You ate with some Armored staffers who were visiting.'
She nodded.

'Vassell and Coomer,' she said. 'So?'
'They worked for General Kramer.'
She nodded again. 'So I believe.'
'Tell us about the meal.'
'The food?'

'The atmosphere,' I said. 'The conversation. The mood.'

173

'It was just dinner in the O Club,' she said.
'Someone gave Vassell and Coomer a briefcase.'
'Did they? What, like a present?'
I said nothing.

'I don't remember that,' Norton said. 'When?'
'During dinner,' I said. 'Or as they were leaving.'
Nobody spoke.

'A briefcase?' Norton said.

'Was it you?' Summer asked.

Norton looked at her, blankly. She was either genuinely

puzzled, or she was a superb actress. 'Was it me what?'

'Who gave them the briefcase.'

'Why would I give them a briefcase? I hardly knew them.'
'How well did you know them?'

'I met them once or twice, years ago.'

'At Irwin?'

'I believe so.'

'Why did you eat with them?'

'I was in the bar. They asked me. It would have been rude to
decline.'

'Did you know they were coming?' I asked.

'No,' she said. 'I had no idea. I was surprised they weren't in
Germany.'

'So you knew them well enough to know where they're
based.'

'Kramer was an Armored Branch commander in Europe.
They were his staffers. I wouldn't expect to find them based in Hawaii.'

Nobody spoke. I watched Norton's eyes. She hadn't looked at
Kramer's briefcase longer than about half a second. Just long
enough to figure I was some guy -who carried a briefcase, and
then to forget all about it.

'What's going on here?' she said.
I didn't answer.
'Tell me.'

I pointed to the briefcase. 'This is General Kramer's. He lost
it on New Year's Eve and it showed up again today. We're trying
to figure out where it's been.'

'Where did he lose it?'

174

Summer moved in her chair.

'In a motel,' she said. 'During a sexual assignation with a
woman from this post. The woman was driving a Humvee.
Therefore we're looking for women who knew Kramer, and who
have permanent access to Humvees, and who were off post on

New Year's Eve, and who were at dinner last night.'
'I was the only woman at dinner last night.'
Silence.

Summer nodded. 'We know that. And we promise we can
keep the whole thing quiet, but first we need you to confirm
who you gave the briefcase to.'

The room stayed quiet. Norton looked at Summer like
she had told a joke with a punch line she didn't quite understand.

'You think I was sleeping with General Kramer?' she said.
Summer said nothing.

'Well, I wasn't,' Norton said. 'God forbid.'

Nobody spoke.

'I don't know whether to laugh or cry,' she said. 'I'm seriously
conflicted. That's a completely absurd accusation. I'm astonished
you made it.'

Nobody spoke for a long time. Norton smiled, like the main
component of her reaction was amusement. Not anger. She
closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was
erasing the conversation from her memory.

'Is there something missing from the briefcase?' she asked

I didn't answer.

'Help me out here,' she said. 'Please. I'm trying to see the
point of this extraordinary visit. Is there something missing
from the briefcase?'

'Vassell and Coomer say not.'

'But?'

'I don't believe them.'

'You probably should. They're senior officers.'

I said nothing.

'What does your new CO say?'

'He doesn't want it pursued. He's worried about embarrass

m(nt.'

175

'You should be guided by him.'

'I'm an investigator. I have to ask questions.'

'The army is a family,' she said. 'We're all on the same side.'

'Did Vassell or Coomer leave with this briefcase last night?' I
said.

Norton closed her eyes again. At first I thought she was just
exasperated, but then I realized she was picturing last night's
scene, at the O Club coat check.

'No,' she said. 'Neither one of them left with that briefcase.'
'Are you absolutely sure?'
'I'm totally certain.'

'What was their mood during dinner?'

She opened her eyes.

'They were relaxed,' she said. 'Like they were passing an
empty evening.'

'Did they say why they were at Bird again?'
'General Kramer's funeral was yesterday, at noon.'
'I didn't know that.'

'I believe Walter Reed released the body and the Pentagon
handled the details.'

'Where was the funeral?'

'Arlington Cemetery,' she said. 'Where else?'
'That's three hundred miles away.'
'Approximately. As the crow flies.'

'So why did they come down here for dinner?'
'They didn't tell me,' she said.
I said nothing.

'Anything else?' she asked.

I shook my head.

'A motel?' she said. 'Do I look like the kind of woman who

would agree to meet a man in a motel?'
I didn't answer.
'Dismissed,' she said.

I stood up. Summer did the same. I took Kramer's briefcase
from the centre chair and walked out of the room. Summer
followed behind me.

'Did you believe her?' Summer asked me.

We were sitting in the Humvee outside the Psy-Ops building.

176

The engine was idling and the heater was blowing hot stale air
that smelled of diesel.

'Totally,' I said. 'As soon as she didn't look at the briefcase.
She'd have gotten very flustered if she'd ever seen it before.
And I certainly believed her about the motel. It would cost you a

suite at the Ritz to get in her pants.'
'So what did we learn?'
'Nothing,' I said. 'Nothing at all.'

'No, we learned that Bird is a very attractive place, apparently.
Vassell and Coomer keep coming all the way down here, for
no very obvious reason.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

'And that Norton thinks we're a family.'
'Officers,' I said. 'What do you expect?'
'You're an officer. I'm an officer.'
I nodded.

'I was at West Point for four years,' I said. 'I should know
better. I should have changed my name and come back in as a
private. Three promotions, I'd be an E-4 specialist by now.

Maybe even an E-5 sergeant. I wish I was.'

'What now?'

I checked my watch. It was close to ten o'clock.

'Sleep,' I said. 'First light, we go out looking for a yogurt
container.'

177

THIRTEEN

HAD NEVER EATEN YOGURT MYSELF BUT I HAD SEEN SOME AND MY impression was that individual portions came in small pots
about two inches wide, which meant you could fit about
three hundred of them in a square yard. Which meant you
could fit nearly a million and a half of them in an acre. Which
meant you could hide 150 billion of them inside Fort Bird's
perimeter wire. Which meant that looking for one would be
like looking for a single anthrax spore in Yankee Stadium. I did
the calculation while I showered and dressed in the pre-dawn
darkness.

Then I sat on my bed and waited for some light in the sky.
No point in going out there and missing the one-in-150-billion
chance because it was too dark to see properly. But as I sat I
started to figure we could narrow the odds by being intelligent
about where exactly we looked. The guy with the yogurt
obviously made it back from A to B. We knew where A was. A
was where Carbone had been killed. And there was a limited
choice of places for B. B was either a random hole in the
perimeter wire or somewhere among the main post buildings.
So if we were smart, we could cut the billions to millions, and
find the thing in a hundred years instead of a thousand.

178

Unless it was already licked clean inside some starving
raccoon's den.

I met Summer in the MP motor pool. She was bright and full
of energy but we didn't talk. There was nothing to say, except
that the task we had set for ourselves was impossible. And I
guessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud. So we
didn't speak. We just picked a Humvee at random and headed
out. I drove, for a change, the same three-minute journey I had
driven thirty-some hours before.

According to the Humvee's trip meter we travelled exactly a
mile and a half and according to its compass we travelled south
and west, and then we arrived at the crime scene. There were
still tatters of MP tape on some of the trees. We parked ten
yards off the track and got out. I climbed up on the hood and
sat on the roof above the windshield. Gazed west and north,
and then turned around and gazed east and south. The air was
cold. There was a breeze. The landscape was brown and dead

and immense. The dawn sun was weak and pale.
'Which way did he go?' I called.
'North and east,' Summer called back.
She sounded pretty sure about it.
'Why?' I called.

She climbed up on the hood and sat next to me.
'He had a vehicle,' she said.
'Why?'

'Because we didn't find one left out here, and I doubt if they
walked.'

'Why?'

'Because if they'd walked, it would have happened closer to
where they started. This is at least a thirty-minute walk from anywhere. I don't see the bad guy concealing a tyre iron or a
crowbar for thirty solid minutes, not walking side by side.
Under a coat, it would make him move like a robot. Carbone
would have twigged. So they drove. In the bad guy's vehicle. He
had the weapon under a jacket or something on the back seat.

Maybe.the knife and the yogurt too.'

'Where did they start?'

'Doesn't matter. Only thing that matters to us now is where
the bad guy went afterwards. And if he was in a vehicle, he

179

didn't drive outward towards the wire. We can assume there are
no vehicle-size holes in it. Man-size maybe, or deer-size, but

nothing big enough to drive a truck or a car through.'

'OK,' I said.

'So he headed back to the post. He can't have gone anywhere
else. Can't just drive a vehicle into the middle of nowhere. He
drove back along the track and parked his vehicle and went
about his business.'

I nodded. Looked at the western horizon ahead of me. Turned
and looked north and east, back along the track. Back towards
the post. A mile and a half of track. I pictured the aerodynamics
of an empty yogurt container. Lightweight plastic, cup-shaped, a torn foil closure flapping like an air brake. I pictured throwing
one, hard. It would sail and stall in the air. It would travel ten
feet, tops. A mile and a half of track, ten feet of shoulder, on the
left, on the driver's side. I felt millions shrink to thousands.
Then I felt them expand all the way back up to billions.

'Good news and bad news,' I said. 'I think you're right, so
you've cut the search area down by about ninety-nine per cent.

Maybe more. Which is good.'

'But?'

'If he was in a vehicle, did he throw it out at all?'

Summer was silent.

'He could have just dropped it on the floor,' I said. 'Or
chucked it in the back.'

'Not if it was a pool vehicle.'

'So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he

parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.'
'Maybe. It's a fifty-fifty situation.'
'Seventy-thirty at best,' I said.
'We should look anyway.'

I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield's
header rail and vaulted down to the ground.

It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February
would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere
climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin
and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth
was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the

180

colour of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The
landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good
background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be
bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a
raspberry flavour. Whatever, it would be a helpful colour. It
wouldn't be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in
a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we
would find it.

We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the
crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and
set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from
the track's right-hand edge. I walked five feet to her right. If we
both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with
two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which
is exactly where the container should have landed, according to
my aerodynamic theory.

We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and
settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the
other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have
looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed
into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath
me. I wasn't seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of
grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like some

thing that shouldn't be there would leap right out at me.
We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.
'Swap?' Summer said.

We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons
of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept
scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside
the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of
stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another
ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused
and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was
chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were
close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I
figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were
poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling
the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he
knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the

181

middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with
any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed
out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his
window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down

and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.
'Did he have blood on him?' I said.

'A little, maybe,' Summer said, on my right.

I didn't look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.

'On his gloves,' she said. 'Maybe on his shoes.'

'Less than he might have expected,' I said. 'Unless he was a

doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.'
'So?'

'So he didn't use a pool car. He expected blood and didn't
want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was
going to drive the next day.'

'So like you said, with his own car, he'll have thrown it in the
back. So we aren't going to find anything out here.'

I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.

We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing.
Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one
single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper,
no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post
commander's enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped
with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred
yards in front of us.

'I want to backtrack,' I said. 'I want to do the middle part
again.'

'OK,' she said. 'About face.'

She turned and we switched positions. We decided we
would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way
around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would
walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our
perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I
was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple
trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in
either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed
her eyes were good for detail.

We walked back, slow and steady.

182

Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up
station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind
was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I
put my hands in my pockets.

Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I
walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in
the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head
as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a
2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was
a hair better than 2.4 acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out
of a hundred thousand. Odds of 40,000 to one, approximately.
Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery
ticket. But not much better.

We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We
saw nothing.

Then I saw something.

It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a
yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because
it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight
plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being
thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my
brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed
basis.

And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.
Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain
whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that
had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It
was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. "Fhe
modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said no snakes
here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on
a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.

There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt?
Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff
brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or
rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the
roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have
travelled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid,
not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military
equipment is curved.

183

I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.

It was a crowbar.

A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood
and hair.

I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must
have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner
than I expected and out of breath.

'Do we have an evidence bag?' I asked.

'It's not evidence,' she said. 'Training accidents don't need
evidence.'

'I'm not planning on taking it to court,' I said. 'I just don't
want to touch it, is all. Don't want my prints on it. That might
give Willard ideas.'

She checked the back of the truck.

'No evidence bags,' she said.

I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate
evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibres, so as not to
confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass
chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to
be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could
get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on
the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story
came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he
could get.

'We could bring a specialist out here,' Summer said. She was
standing right behind me. I could sense her there.

'Can't involve anyone else,' I said. 'I didn't even want to
involve you.'

She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed

stalks of grass out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.
'Don't touch it,' I said.
'Wasn't planning to,' she said.

We looked at it together, close up. It was a hand-held
wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like
a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was painted gloss
black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars. It was
shaped a little like an alto saxophone. The main shaft was about
three feet long, slightly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on

184

one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital
letter J. Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready
for levering nails out of planks of wood. Its design was stream

lined and evolved, and simple, and brutal.

'Hardly used,' Summer said.

'Never used,' I said. 'Not for construction, anyway.'

I stood up.

'We don't need to print it,' I said. 'We can assume the guy was

wearing gloves when he swung it.'

Summer stood up next to me.

'We don't need to type the blood either,' she said. 'We can

assume it's Carbone's.'

I said nothing.

'We could just leave it here,' Summer said.

'No,' I said. %Ve can't do that.'

I bent down and untied my right boot. Pulled the lace all the
way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together. That gave
me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diameter. I draped it
over my right palm and dragged the free end across the dead
stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar's tip. Then I closed
my fist and lifted the heavy steel weight carefully out of the

grass. I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish.

'Let's go,' I said.

I limped around to the front passenger seat with the crowbar
swinging gently in midair and my boot half off. I sat close to
the transmission tunnel and steadied the crowbar against the
floor just enough to stop it touching my legs as the vehicle
moved.

'Where toP' Summer asked.

'The mortuary,' I said.

I was hoping the pathologist and his staff would be out eating
breakfast, but they weren't. They were all in the building,
working. The pathologist himself caught us in the lobby. He
was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand. He looked
at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my
boot lace. Took him half of a second to understand what it was,
and the other half to realize it put us all in a very awkward
situation.

185

'We could come back later,' I said. When you're not here.
'No,' he said. 'We'll go to my office.'

He led the way. I watched him walk. He was a small dark man
with short legs, brisk, competent, a little older than me. He
seemed nice enough. And I guessed he wasn't stupid. Very few
medics are. They have all kinds of complicated stuff to learn,
before they get to be where they want to be. And I guessed he
wasn't unethical. Very few medics were that either, in my
experience. They're scientists at heart, and scientists generally
retain a good-faith interest in facts and the truth. Or at least
they retain some kind of innate curiosity. All of which was good,
because this guy's attitude was going to be crucial. He could
stay out of our way, or he could sell us out with a single phone
call.

His office was a plain square room full of original-issue
grey steel desks and file cabinets. It was crowded. There
were framed diplomas on the walls. There were shelves full of
books and manuals. No specimen jars. No weird stuff pickled in
formaldehyde. It could have been an army lawyer's offce, except
the diplomas were from medical schools, not law schools.

He sat down in his rolling chair. Placed his file on his
desk. Summer closed his door and leaned on it. I stood in the
middle of the floor, with the crowbar hanging in space. We all
looked at each other. Waited to see who would make the
opening bid.

'Carbone was a training accident,' the doctor said, like he was

moving his first pawn two squares forward.

I nodded.

'No question,' I said, like I was moving my own pawn.

'I'm glad we've got that straight,' he said.

But he said it in a voice that meant: can you believe this shit?
I heard Summer breathe out, because we had an ally. But we
had an ally who wanted distance. We had an ally who wanted to
hide behind an elaborate charade. And I didn't altogether blame
him. He owed years of service in exchange for his medical
school tuition. Therefore he was cautious. Therefore he was an
ally whose wishes we had to respect.

'Carbone fell and hit his head,' I said. 'It's a closed case. Pure
accident, very unfortunate for all concerned.'

186 I

'But?'

I held the crowbar a little higher.

'I think this is what he hit his head on,' I said.

'Three times?'

'Maybe he bounced. Maybe there were dead twigs under the
leaves, made the ground a little springy, like a trampoline.'

The doctor nodded. 'Terrain can be like that, this time of
year.'

'Lethal,' I said.

I lowered the crowbar again. Waited.

'Why did you bring it here?' the doctor asked.

'There might be an issue of contributory negligence,' I said.
'Whoever left it lying around for Carbone to fall on might need a
reprimand.'

The doctor nodded again. 'Littering is a grave offence.'
'In this man's army,' I said.
'What do you want me to do?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'We're here to help you out, is all. With it
being a closed case, we figured you wouldn't want to clutter
your place up with those plaster casts you made. Of the wound

site. We figured we could haul them to the trash for you.'

The doctor nodded for a third time.

'You could do that,' he said. 'It would save me a trip.'

He paused for a long moment. Then he cleared the file away
from in front of him and opened some drawers and laid sheets
of clean white paper on the desktop and arranged half a dozen
glass microscope slides on the paper.

'That thing looks heavy,' he said to me.

'It is,' I said.

'Maybe you should put it down. Take the weight off your
shoulder.'

'Is that medical advice?'

'You don't want ligament damage.'
'Where should I put it down?'
'Any flat surface you can find.'

I stepped forward and laid the crowbar gently on his desk, on
top of the paper and the glass slides. Unhooked my boot lace
and picked the knot out of it. Squatted down and threaded it
back through all the eyelets. Tightened it up and tied it off. I

187

looked up in time to see the doctor move a microscope slide. He
picked it up and scraped it against the end of the crowbar where
it was matted with blood and hair.

'Damn,' he said. 'I got this slide all dirty. Very careless of

me.'

He made the exact same error with five more slides.
'Are we interested in fingerprints?' he said.
I shook my head. "We're assuming gloves.'

'We should check, I think. Contributory negligence is a
serious matter.'

He opened another drawer and peeled a latex glove out of a
box and snapped it on his hand. It made a tiny cloud of talcum
dust. Then he picked the crowbar up and carried it out of the
room.

He came back less than ten minutes later. He still had his glove
on. The crowbar was washed clean. The black paint gleamed. It

looked indistinguishable from new.

'No prints,' he said.

He put the crowbar down on his chair and pulled a file drawer

and came out with a plain brown cardboard box. Opened it
up and took out two chalk-white plaster casts. Both were about
six inches long and both had Carbone handwritten in black
ink on the underside. One was a positive, formed by pressing
wet plaster into the wound. The other was a negative, formed
by moulding more plaster over the positive. The negative
showed the shape of the wound the weapon had made,
and therefore the positive showed the shape of the weapon
itself.

The doctor put the positive on the chair next to the crowbar.

Lined them up, parallel. The cast was about six inches long. It
was white and a little pitted from the moulding process but
was otherwise identical to the smooth black iron. Absolutely
identical. Same section, same thickness, same contours.

Then the doctor put the negative on the desk. It was a little

bigger than the positive, and a little messier. It was an exact
replica of the back of Carbone's shattered head. The doctor
picked up the crowbar. Hefted it in his hand. Lined it up,
speculatively. Brought it down, very slowly, one, for the first

188

blow, then two for the second. Then three for the last. He
touched it to the plaster. The third and final wound was the best
defined. It was a clear three-quarter-inch trench in the plaster,
and the crowbar fitted it perfectly.

'I'll check the blood and the hair,' the doctor said. 'Not that
we don't already know what the results will be.'

He lifted the crowbar out the plaster and tried it again. It
went in again, precisely, and deep. He lifted it out and balanced
it across his open palms, like he was weighing it. Then he
grasped it by the straighter end and swung it, like a batter
going after a high fastball. He swung it again, harder, a
compact, violent stroke. It looked big in his hands. Big, and a
little heavy for him. A little out of control.

'Very strong man,' he said. 'Vicious swing. Big tall guy,
right-handed, physically very fit. But that describes a lot of
people on this post, I guess.'

'There was no guy,' I said. 'Carbone fell and hit his head.'

The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his
palms again.

'It's handsome, in its way,' he said. 'Does that sound strange?' I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was
everything it needed to be and nothing it didn't. Like a Colt
Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach.

He slid it inside a long steel drawer. The metals scraped one
on the other and then boomed faintly when he let it go and
dropped it the final inch.

'I'll keep it here,' he said. 'If you like. Safer that way.'

'OK,' I said.

He closed the drawer.

'Are you right-handed?' he asked me.

'Yes,' I said. 'I am.'

'Colonel Willard told me you did it,' he said. 'But I didn't

believe him.'

'Why not?'

'You were very surprised when you saw who it was. When I
put his .face back on. You had a definite physical reaction.

People can't fake that sort of thing.'

'Did you tell Willard that?'

The doctor nodded. 'He found it inconvenient. But it didn't

189

really deflect him. And I'm sure he's already developed a theory to explain it away.'

'I'll watch my back,'! said.

'Some Delta sergeants came to see me too. There are
rumours starting. I think you should watch your back very carefully.'

'I plan to,' I said.

'Very carefully,' the doctor said.

Summer and I got back in the Humvee. She fired it up and put it

in gear and sat with her foot on the brake.

'Quartermaster,' I said.

'It wasn't military issue,' she said.

'It looked expensive,' I said. 'Expensive enough for the

Pentagon, maybe.'

'It would have been green.'

I nodded. 'Probably. But we should still check. Sooner or

later we're going to need all our ducks in a row.'

She took her foot off the brake and headed for the quartermaster
building. She had been at Bird much longer than me
and she knew where everything was. She parked again in front
of the usual type of warehouse. I knew there would be a long
counter inside with massive off-limits storage areas behind it.
There would be huge bales of clothing, tyres, blankets, mess
kits, entrenching tools, equipment of every kind.

We went in and found a young guy in new BDUs behind the

counter. He was a cheerful corn-fed country boy. He looked like
he was working in his dad's hardware store, and he looked
like it was his life's ambition. He was enthusiastic. I told him we
were interested in construction equipment. He opened a manual
the size of eight phone books. Found the correct section. I
asked him to find listings for crowbars. He licked his forefinger
and turned pages and found two entries. Prybar, general issue,
long, claw on one end and then crowbar; general issue, short,
claw on both ends. I asked him to show us an example of the
latter.

He went away and disappeared among the tall stacks. We

waited. Breathed in the unique quartermaster smell of old dust

and new rubber and damp cotton twill. He came back after five

190

long minutes with a GI crowbar. Laid it down on the counter in
front of us. It landed with a heavy thump. Summer had been
right. It was painted olive green. And it was a completely
different item from the one we had just left in the pathologist's
office. Different section, six inches shorter, slightly thinner,
slightly different curves. It looked carefully designed. It was
probably a perfect example of the way the army does things.
Years ago it had probably been the ninety-ninth item on someone's
re-equipment agenda. A subcommittee would have been
formed, with expert input from survivors of the old construction
battalions. A specification would have been drawn up
concerning length and weight and durability. Metal fatigue
would have been investigated. Arenas of likely use would have
been considered. Brittleness in the frozen winters of northern
Europe would have been evaluated. Malleability in the severe
heat of the equator would have been taken into account.
Detailed drawings would have been made. Then tenders would
have gone out. Mills all over Pennsylvania and Alabama
would have priced the job. Prototypes would have been forged.
They would have been tested, exhaustively. One and only one
winner would have been approved. Paint would have been
supplied, and the thickness and uniformity of its application
would have been specified and carefully monitored. Then the
whole business would have been completely forgotten. But
the product of all those long months of deliberation was still

coming through, thousands of units a year, needed or not.
'Thanks, soldier,' I said.

'You need to take it?' the kid asked.

'Just needed to see it,' I said.

We went back to my office. It was mid-morning, a dull day, and
I felt aimless. So far, the new decade wasn't doing much for
me. I wasn't a huge fan of the 1990s yet, at that point, six days
in.

'Are you going to write the accident report?' Summer asked.
'For Willard? Not yet.'
'He'll expect it today.'

I nodded. 'I know. But I'm going to make him ask, one more
time.'

191

'Why?'

'I guess because it's a fascinating experience. Like watching

maggots writhing around in something that died.'

'What died?'

'My enthusiasm for getting out of bed in the morning.'
'One bad apple,' she said. 'Doesn't mean much.'
'Maybe,' I said. 'If it is just one.'
She said nothing.

'Crowbars,' I said. 'We've got two separate cases with crowbars,
and I don't like coincidences. But I can't see how they can
be connected. There's no way to join them up. Carbone was a
million miles from Mrs Kramer, in every way imaginable. They
were in completely different worlds.'

'Vassell and Coomer join them up,' she said. 'They had an
interest in something that could have been in Mrs Kramer's
house, and they were here at Bird the night Carbone was
killed.'

I nodded. 'That's what's driving me crazy. It's a perfect connection,
except it isn't. They took one call in D.C., they were too
far from Green Valley to do anything to Mrs Kramer themselves,
and they didn't call anyone from the hotel. Then they
were here the night Carbone died, but they were in the O Club
with a dozen witnesses the whole time, eating steak and fish.'

'First time they were here, they had a driver. Major Marshall,
remember? But the second time, they were on their own. That
feels a little clandestine to me. Like they were here for a secret
reason.'

'Nothing very secret about hanging around in the O Club bar
and then eating in the O Club dining room. They weren't out of
sight for a minute, all night long.'

'But why didn't they have their driver? Why come on their
own? I assume Marshall was at the funeral with them. But they
chose to drive more than three hundred miles by themselves?
And more than three hundred back?'

'Maybe Marshall was unavailable,' I said.

'He's their blue-eyed boy,' she said. 'He's available when they
say so.'

'Why did they come here at all? It's a very long way for a very
average dinner.'

192

'They came for the briefcase, Reacher. Norton's wrong. She

must be. Someone gave it to them. They left with it.'

'I don't think Norton's wrong. She convinced me.'

'Then maybe they picked it up in the parking lot. Norton
wouldn't have seen that. I assume she didn't go out there in the
cold and wave them off. But they left with it, for sure. Why else
would they be happy to fly back to Germany?'

'Maybe they just gave up on it. They were due back in
Germany anyway. They couldn't stay here for ever. They've got

Kramer's command to fight over.'

Summer said nothing.

'Whatever,' I said. 'There's no possible connection.'

'It's a random universe.'

I nodded. 'So they stay on the back burner. Carbone stays on
the front.'

'Are we going back out to look for the yogurt pot?'

I shook my head. 'It's in the guy's car, or in his trash.'
'Could have been useful.'

'We'll work with the crowbar instead. It's brand new. It was

probably bought just as recently as the yogurt was.'

'We have no resources.'

'Detective Clark up in Green Valley will do it for us. He's
already looking for his crowbar, presumably. He'll be canvassing
hardware stores. We'll ask him to widen his radius and
stretch his time frame.'

'That's a lot of extra work for him.'

I nodded. 'We'll have to offer him something. We'll have to
string him along. We'll tell him we're working on something

that might help him.'

'Like what?'

I smiled. 'We could fake it. We could give him Andrea
Norton's name. We could show her exactly what kind of a
family we are.'

I called Detective Clark. I didn't give him Andrea Norton's
name..I told him a few lies instead. I told him I recalled
the damage to Mrs Kramer's door, and the damage to her
head, and that I figured a crowbar was involved, and I told him
that as it happened we had a rash of break-ins at military

193

installations all up and down the Eastern seaboard that also
seemed to involve crowbars, and I asked him if we could
piggy-back on the legwork he was undoubtedly already doing
in terms of tracing the Green Valley weapon. He paused at
that point, and I filled the silence by telling him that military
quartermasters currently had no crowbars on general issue and
therefore I was convinced our bad guys had used a civilian
source of supply. I gave him some guff about not wanting to
duplicate his efforts because we had a more promising line of
inquiry to spend our time on. He paused again at that point, like
cops everywhere, waiting to hear the proffered quid pro quo. I
told him that as soon as we had a name or a profile or a
description he would have it too, just as fast as stuff can travel
down a fax line. He perked up then. He was a desperate man,
staring at a brick wall. He asked what exactly I wanted. I told
him it would be helpful to us if he could expand his canvass
to a three-hundred-mile radius around Green Valley, and
check hardware store purchases during a window that started
late on New Year's Eve and extended through, say, January
4th.

'What's your promising line of inquiry?' he asked.

'There might be a military connection with Mrs Kramer. We
might be able to give you the guy on a plate all tied up with a
bow.'

'I'd really like that.'

'Co-operation,' I said. 'Makes the world go around.'

'Sure does,' he said.

He sounded happy. He bought the whole bill of goods. He
promised to expand his search and copy me in. I hung up the
phone and it rang again immediately. I picked it up and heard a
woman's voice. It sounded warm and intimate and southern. It
asked me to 10-33 a 10-16 from the MP XO at Fort Jackson,
which meant please stand by to take a secure landline call from
your opposite number in South Carolina. I waited with the phone
by my ear and heard empty electronic hiss for a moment. Then
there was a loud click and my oppo in South Carolina came on
and told me I should know that Colonel David C. Brubaker, Fort
Bird's Special Forces CO, had been found that morning with
two bullets in his head in an alley in a crummy district of

194

Columbia, which was South Carolina's capital city, and which
was all of two hundred miles from the North Carolina golf
course hotel where he had been spending his holiday furlough
with his wife. And according to the local paramedics he had
b-,en dead for a day or two.

195

FOURTEEN

Y OPPO AT JACKSON WAS A GUY CALl.El) SANCHEZ. I KNEW
him fairly well, and I liked him better. He was smart,
and he was good. I put the call on the speaker to
include Summer and we talked briefly about jurisdiction, but
without much enthusiasm. Jurisdiction was always a grey area,
and we all knew we were beaten from the get-go. Brubaker had
been on vacation, he had been in civilian clothes, he had been
in a city alley, and therefore the Columbia PD was claiming
him. There was nothing we could do about it. And the Columbia
PD had notified the FBI, because Brubaker's last known whereabouts
were the North Carolina golf hotel, which added a
possible interstate dimension to the situation, and interstate
homicide was the Bureau's bag. And also because an army
officer is technically a federal employee, and killing federal
employees is a separate offence, which would give them
another charge to throw at the perp if by any miracle they ever
found him. Neither Sanchez nor I nor Summer cared a whole
hell of a lot about the difference between state courts and
federal courts, but we all knew if the FBI was involved the case
was well beyond our grasp. We agreed the very best we could
hope for was that we might eventually see some of the relevant

196

documentation, strictly for informational purposes only, and
strictly as a courtesy. Summer made a face and turned away. I
took the phone off the speaker and picked it up and spoke to
Sanchez one on one again.

'Got a feeling?' I asked him.

'Someone he knew,' Sanchez said. 'Not easy to surprise a

Delta soldier as good as Brubaker was, in an alley.'

'Weapon?'

'Paramedics figured it for a nine-millimetre handgun. And
they should know. They see plenty of GSWs. Apparently they
do a lot of cleaning up every Friday and Saturday night, in that
part of town.'

'Why was he there?'

'No idea. Rendezvous, presumably. With someone he knew.'
'Got a feeling about when?'

'The body's stone cold, the skin is a little green, and rigor is
all gone. They're saying twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Safe
bet would be to split the difference. Let's call it the middle of
the night before last. Maybe three or four a.m. City garbage

truck found him at ten this morning. Weekly trash collection.'
'Where were you on December twenty-eighth?'
'Korea. You?'
'Panama.'

'Why did they move us?'

'I keep thinking we're about to find out,' I said.

'Something weird is going on,' Sanchez said. 'I checked,
because I was curious, and there are more than twenty of us in
the same boat, worldwide. And Garber's signature is on all the
orders, but I don't think it's legit.'

'I'm certain it isn't legit,' I said. 'Anything happening down
there before this Brubaker situation?'

'Not a thing. Quietest week I ever spent.'

We hung up. I sat still for a long moment. Seemed to me that
Columbia in South Carolina was about two hundred miles from
Fort Bird. Drive southwest on the highway, cross the state line,
find I:20 heading west, drive some more, and you were there.
About two hundred miles. The night before last was the night
we found Carbone's body. I had left Andrea Norton's office just
before two o'clock in the morning. She could alibi me up until

197

that point. Then I had been in the mortuary at seven o'clock, for
the post-mortem. The pathologist could confirm that. So I had
two unconnected alibi bookends. But 0200 until 0700 still gave
me a possible five-hour window, with Brubaker's likely time of
death right there in the middle of it. Could I have driven two

hundred miles there and two hundred miles back in five hours?
'What?' Summer said.

'The Delta guys have already got me in the frame for
Carbone. Now I'm wondering whether they're going to be
coming at me for Brubaker, too. How does four hundred miles
in five hours sound to you?'

'I could probably do it,' she said. 'Average of eighty miles an
hour all the way. Depends on what car I was using, of course,
and road construction, and traffic, and weather, and cops. It's

definitely possible.'

'Terrific.'

'But it's marginal.'

'It better be marginal. Killing Brubaker will be like killing
God, to them.'

'You going over there to break the news?'

I nodded. 'I think I have to. It's a question of respect. But you
inform the post commander for me, OK?'

The Special Forces adjutant was an asshole, but he was human,
too. He got very still and went very pale when I told him about
Brubaker and there was clearly more to it than an anticipation
of mere bureaucratic hassle. From what I had heard Brubaker
was stern and distant and authoritarian, but he was a real father
figure, to his men individually and to his unit as a whole. And to
his unit as a concept. Special Forces generally and Delta in
particular hadn't always been popular inside the Pentagon and
on Capitol Hill. The army hates change and it takes a long time
to get used to things. The idea of a ragtag bunch of hunter
killers had been a hard sell at the outset, and Brubaker had
been one of the guys doing the selling, and he had never let up
since. His death was going to hit Special Forces the way the
death of a president would hit the nation as a whole.

'Carbone was bad enough,' the adjutant said. 'But this is
unbelievable. Is there a connection?'

198

I looked at him.

'Why would there be a connection?' I said. 'Carbone was a
training accident.'

He said nothing.

'Why was Brubaker at a hotel?'

'Because he likes to play golf. He's got a house near Bragg

from way back, but he doesn't like the golf there.'
'Where was the hotel?'
'Outside of Raleigh.'
'Did he go there a lot?'
'Every chance he got.'
'Does his wife play golf?'

The adjutant nodded. 'They play together.'

Then he paused.

'Played,' he said, and then he went quiet and looked away
fr¢)m me. I pictured Brubaker in my mind. I had never met him,
but I knew guys just like him. One day they're talking about
how to angle a claymore mine so the little ball bearings explode
outward at exactly the right angle to rip the enemy's spines
out of their backs with maximum efficiency. Next day they're
wearing pastel shirts with small crocodiles on the breast,
playing golf with their wives, maybe holding hands and smiling
as they ride together along the fairways in their little electric
carts. I knew plenty of guys like that. My own father had been
one. Not that he had ever played golf. He watched birds. He
had been in most countries in the world, and he had seen a lot
of birds.

I stood up.

'Call me if you need me,' I said. 'You know, if there's anything
I can do.'

The adjutant nodded.

'Thanks for the visit,' he said. 'Better than a phone call.'

I went back to my office. Summer wasn't there. I wasted more
than an hour with her personnel lists. I made a short-cut
decision and took the pathologist out of the mix. I took Summer
out. I took Andrea Norton out. Then I took all the women out.
The medical evidence was pretty clear about the attacker's
height and strength. I took the O Club dining-room staff out.
199

Their NCO had said they were all hard at work, fussing over
their guests. I took the cooks out, and the bar staff, and the MP
gate guards. I took out anyone listed as hospitalized and non
ambulatory. I took myself out. I took Carbone out, because it
wasn't suicide.

Then I counted the remaining check marks, and wrote the
number 973 on a slip of paper. That was our suspect pool. I
stared into space. My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Sanchez
again, down at Fort Jackson.

'Columbia PD just called me,' he said. 'They're sharing their

initial findings.'
'And?'

'Their medical examiner doesn't entirely agree with me. Time
of death wasn't three or four in the morning. It was one twenty

three a.m., the night before last.'

'That's very precise.'

'Bullet caught his wristwatch.'

'A broken watch? Can't necessarily rely on that.'

'No, it's firm enough. They did a lot of other tests. Wrong
season for measurable insect activity, which would have helped,
but the stomach contents were exactly right for five or six hours

after he ate a heavy dinner.'

'What does his wife say?'

'He disappeared at eight that night, after a heavy dinner. Got

up from the table and never came back.'

'What did she do about it?'

'Nothing,' Sanchez said. 'He was Special Forces. Their whole
marriage, he'll have been disappearing with no warning, the
middle of dinner, the middle of the night, days or weeks at a
time, never able to say where or why afterwards. She was used
to it.'

'Did he get a phone call or something?'

'She assumes he did, at some point. She's not really sure. She
was in the spa before dinner. They'd just played twenty-seven
holes.'

'Can you call her yourself? She'll talk to you faster than
civilian cops.'

'I could try, I suppose.'

'Anything else?' I said.

200

'The GSWs were nine millimetre,' he said. 'Two rounds fired,
both of them through and through, neat entry wounds, bad exit
wounds.'

'Full metal jackets,' I said.

'Contact shots,' he said. 'There were powder burns. And

soot.'

I paused. I couldn't picture it. Two rounds fired? Contact
shots? So one of the bullets goes in, comes out, loops all the way
around, comes back and drops down and smashes his wristwatch?

'Did he have his hands on his head?'

'He was shot from behind, Reacher. A double tap, to the back
of the skull. Bang bang, thank you and goodnight. The second
round must have gone through his head and caught his watch.

Downward trajectory. Tall shooter.'

I said nothing.

'Right,' Sanchez said. 'How likely is all that? Did you know
him?'

'Never met him,' I said.

'He was way above average. He was a real pro. And he was a
thinker. Any angle, any advantage, any wrinkle, he knew it and
he was ready to use it.'

'But he got himself shot in the back of the head?'

'He knew the guy, definitely. Had to. Why else would he turn

his back, in the middle of the night, in an alley?'
'You looking at people from Jackson?'
'That's a lot of people.'
'Tell me about it.'

'Did he have enemies at Bird?'

'Not that I've heard,' I said. 'He had enemies up the chain
of command.'

'Those pussies don't meet people in alleys in the middle of
the night.'

'Where was the alley?'

'Not in a quiet part of town.'

'So did anyone hear anything?'

'Nobody,' Sanchez said. 'Columbia PD ran a canvass and
came up empty.'

'That's weird.'

201

'They're civilians. What else would they be?'

He went quiet.

'You met Willard yet?' I asked him.

'He's on his way here right now. Seems to be a real hands-on
type of asshole.'

'What was the alley like?'

'Whores and crack dealers. Nothing that the Columbia city
fathers are likely to put in their tourism brochures.'

'Willard hates embarrassment,' I said. 'He's going to be
nervous about image.'

'Columbia's image? What does he care?'

'The army's image,' I said. 'He won't want Brubaker put next
to whores and crack dealers. Not an elite colonel. He figures
this Soviet stuff is going to shake things up. He figures we need
good PR right now. He figures he can see the big picture.'

'The big picture is I can't get near this case anyway. So what
kind of pull does he have with the Columbia PD and the FBI?

Because that's what it's going to take.'
'Just be ready for trouble,' I said.
'Are we in for seven lean years?'
'Not that long.'
'Why not?'

'Just a feeling,' I said.

'You happy with me handling liaison down here? Or should
I get them to call you direct? Brubaker is your dead guy,
technically.'

'You do it,' I said. 'I've got other things to do.'

We hung up and I went back to Summer's lists. Nine hundred
seventy-three. Nine hundred seventy-two innocent, one guilty.
But which one?

Summer came back inside another hour. She walked in and
gave me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a weapons
requisition that Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone had
made four months ago. It was for a Heckler & Koch P7 handgun.
Maybe he had liked the H&K sub-machine guns Delta was
using, and therefore he wanted the P7 for his personal sidearm.
He had asked for it to be chambered for the standard
nine-millimetre Parabellum cartridge. He had asked for the

202

13-round magazine, and three spares. It was a perfectly
standard requisition form, and a perfectly reasonable request. I
was sure it had been granted. There would have been no
political sensitivities. H&K was a German outfit and Germany
was a NATO country, last time I checked. There would
have been no compatibility issues, either. Nine-millimetre
Parabellums were standard NATO loads. The U.S. Army had no
shortage of them. We had warehouses crammed full of them.
We could have filled 13-round magazines with them a million

times over, every day for the rest of history.

'So?' I said.

'Look at the signature on it,' Summer said. She took my copy
of Carbone's complaint out of her inside pocket and handed it
over. I spread it out on my desk, side by side with the requisi

tion form. Looked from one to the other.
The two signatures were identical.
'We're not handwriting experts,' I said.

'We don't need to be. They're the same, Reacher. Believe

it.'

I nodded. Both signatures read C. Carbone, and the
four capital letter Cs were very distinctive. They were fast,
elongated, curling flourishes. The lower-case e on the end of
each sample was distinctive too. It made a small round shape,
and then the tail of the letter whipped way out to the right
of the page, well beyond the name itself, horizontally, and
exuberantly. The a-r-b-o-n in the middle was fast and fluid
and linear. As a whole it was a bold, proud, legible, self
confident signature, developed no doubt by long years of
signing checks and bar bills and leases and car papers. No
signature was impossible to forge, of course, but I figured this
one would have been a real challenge. A challenge that I
guessed would have been impossible to meet, between mid

night and 0845 on a North Carolina army post.

'OK,' I said. 'The complaint is genuine.'

I left it on the desk. Summer reversed it and read it through,

although she must have read it plenty of times already.

'It's cold,' she said. 'It's like a knife in the back.'

'It's weird,' I said. 'That's what it is. I never met this guy
before. I'm absolutely sure of that. And he was Delta. Not

2O3

too many gentle pacifist souls over there. Why would he be
offended? It wasn't his leg I broke.'

'Maybe it was personal. Maybe the fat guy was his friend.'

I shook my head. 'He'd have stepped in. He'd have stopped
the fight.'

'It's the only complaint he ever made in a sixteen-year career.'
'You been talking to people?'

'All kinds of people. Right here, and by phone far and wide.'
'Were you careful?'

'Very. And it's the only complaint you ever had made against
you.'

'You checked that too?'

She nodded. 'All the way back to when God's dog was a
puppy.'

'You wanted to know what kind of a guy you're dealing with
here?'

'No, I wanted to be able to show the Delta guys you don't

have a history. With Carbone or with anyone else.'

'You're protecting me now?'

'Someone's going to have to. I was just over there, and they're
plenty mad.'

I nodded. Brubaker.

'I'm sure they are,' I said. I pictured their lonely prison
barracks, first designed to keep people in, then used to keep
strangers out, now serving to keep their unity boiling like a
pressure cooker. I pictured Brubaker's office, wherever it was,
quiet and deserted. I pictured Carbone's cell, standing empty.

'So where was Carbone's new P7?' I said. 'I didn't find it in his
quarters.'

'In their armoury,' Summer said. 'Cleaned, oiled, and loaded.
They check their personal weapons in and out. They've got a
cage inside their hangar. You should see that place. It's like
Santa's grotto. Special armoured Humvees wall to wall, trucks,
explosives, grenade launchers, claymores, night vision stuff.
They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by themselves.'

'That's very reassuring,' I said.

'Sorry,' she said.

'Why did he file the complaint?'

204

'I don't know,' she said.

I pictured Carbone in the strip club, New Year's night. I had
walked in and I had seen a group of four men I took to be
sergeants. The swirl of the crowd had turned three of them
away from me and one of them towards me in a completely
random dynamic. I hadn't known who was going to be there,
they hadn't known I was going to show up. I had never met any
of them before. The encounter was as close to pure chance as it
was possible to get. Yet Carbone had tagged me for the kind of
tame mayhem he must have seen a thousand times before. The
kind of tame mayhem he must have joined in with a hundred
times before. Show me an enlisted man who claims never to

have fought a civilian in a bar, and I'll show you a liar.
'Are you Catholic?' I asked.
'No, why?' Summer said.

'I wondered if you knew any Latin.'

'It's not just Catholics who know Latin. I went to school.'
'OK, cui bono?' I said.

'Who benefits? What, from the complaint?'

'It's always a good guide to motive,' I said. 'You can explain

most things with it. History, politics, everything.'

'Like, follow the money?'

'Approximately,' I said. 'Except I don't think there's money
involved here. But there must have been some benefit for
Carbone. Otherwise why would he do it?'

'Could have been a moral thing. Maybe he was driven to do

it.'

'Not if it was his first complaint in sixteen years. He must
have seen far worse. I only broke one leg and one nose. It was
no kind of a big deal. This is the army, Summer. I assume he

hadn't been confusing it with a gardening club all these years.'
'I don't know,' she said again.

I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it.

'That's our suspect pool,' I said.

'He was in the bar until eight o'clock,' she said. 'I checked

that, too. He left alone. Nobody saw him again after that.'
'Anyone say anything about his mood?'

'Delta guys don't have moods. Too much danger of appearing
human.'

2O5

'Had he been drinking?'

'One beer.'

'So he just walked out of the mess at eight, no nerves, no
worries?'

'Apparently so.'

'He knew the guy he was meeting,' I said.

Summer said nothing.

'Sanchez called again while you were out,' I said. 'Colonel
Brubaker was shot in the back of the head. A double-tap, close
in, from behind.'

'So he knew the guy he was meeting, too.'

'Very likely,' I said. 'One twenty-three in the morning. Bullet
caught his watch. Between three and a half and four and a half
hours after Carbone.'

'That puts you in the clear with Delta. You were still here at
one twenty-three.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I was. With Norton.'
'I'll spread the word.'
'They won't believe you.'

'Do you think there's a connection between Carbone and
Brubaker?'

'Common sense says there has to be. But I don't see how.
And I don't see why. I mean, sure, they were both Delta
soldiers. But Carbone was here and Brubaker was there, and
Brubaker was a high-profile mover and shaker, and Carbone
was a nobody who kept himself to himself. Maybe because he
thought he had to.'

'You think we'll ever have gays in the military?'
'We've already got gays in the military. We always have had.
World War Two, the western allies had fourteen million men in
uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a
million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last

time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.'
'It's a hell of a step,' she said.

'They took the same step when they let black soldiers in. And
women. Everyone pissed and moaned about that, too. Bad for
morale, bad for unit cohesion. It was crap then and it's crap
now. Right? You're here and you're doing OK.'

'Are you a Catholic?'

206

I shook my head. 'My mother taught us the Latin. She cared
about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother

Joe.'

'You should call her.'

'Why?'

'To see how her leg is.'

'Maybe later,' I said.

I went back to the personnel lists and Summer went out and
came back in with a map of the eastern United States. She taped
it flat to the wall below the clock and marked our location at
Fort Bird with a red push pin. Then she marked Columbia,
South Carolina, where Brubaker had been found. Then she
marked Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been playing
golf with his wife. I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk
drawer and she checked the map's scale and started calculating
times and distances.

'Bear in mind most of us don't drive as fast as you do,' I said.
'None of you drive as fast as I do,' she said.

She measured four and a half inches between Raleigh and
Columbia and called it five to allow for the way U.S.1 snaked
slightly. She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box.

'Two hundred miles,' she said. 'So if Brubaker left Raleigh
after dinner, he could have been in Columbia by midnight,
easily. An hour or so before he died.'

Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and
Columbia. She came up with a hundred and fifty miles, less
than I had originally guessed.

'Three hours,' she said. 'To be comfortable.'

Then she looked at me.

'It could have been the same guy,' she said. 'If Carbone was
killed at nine or ten, the same guy could have been in Columbia
at midnight or one, ready for Brubaker.'
She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin.

'Carbone,' she said.

Then-she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the
Columbia pin.

'Brubaker,' she said. 'It's a definite sequence.'

'It's a definite guess,' I said.

207

She didn't reply.

'Do we know that Brubaker drove down from Raleigh?' I said.
'We can assume he did.'

'We should check with Sanchez,' I said. 'See if they found his
car anywhere. See if his wife says he took it with him in the first
place.'

'OK,' she said. She went out to my sergeant's desk to make
the call. Left me with the interminable personnel lists. She came
back in ten minutes later.

'He took his car,' she said. 'His wife told Sanchez they had
two cars up at the hotel. His and hers. They always did it that
way because he was always rushing off somewhere and she was
always concerned about getting stuck.'

'What kind of car?' I said. I figured she would have asked.
'Chevy Impala SS.'
'Nice car.'

'He left after dinner and his wife's assumption was that he
was driving back here to Bird. That would have been normal.
But the car hasn't turned up anyplace yet. At least not according

to the Columbia PD and the FBI.'

'OK,' I said.

'Sanchez thinks they're holding out on him, like they know
something we don't.'

'That would be normal, too.'

'He's pressing them. But it's difficult.'

'It always is.'

'He'll call us,' she said. 'As soon as he gets anywhere.'

We got a call thirty minutes later. But not from Sanchez. Not
about Brubaker or Carbone. The call was from Detective Clark,

in Green Valley, Virginia. It was about Mrs Kramer's case.
'Got something,' he said.

He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a
blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded
reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all
the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three
hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile
a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He
had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning

208

right in the centre of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar
sales would be slow in winter. Major remodelling happens
from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down
for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had
expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he
had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas
period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had
bought chainsaws, to keep their woodburning stoves going.
Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had
been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.

So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases.
Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that
involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow
down a location. He didn't find anything that matched his
parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer,
he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville,
Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street.
According to the owner the front window had been kicked in
sometime in the early hours of New Year's Day. Because it was
a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far
as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been
stolen was a single crowbar.

Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a push
pin through the centre of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was
a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it
completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley.
The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. 'They
were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of
separation.

'Look at this,' Summer said.

I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was
on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green
Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn't really go
anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in
Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put
her middle finger on Sperryville and her index finger on Green
Valley.

'Vassell and Coomer,' she said. 'They left D.C., they stole the

209

crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs Kramer's house in
Green Valley.'

'Except they didn't,' I said. 'They were just in from the
airport. They didn't have a car. And they didn't call for one. You

checked the phone records yourself.'

She said nothing.

'Plus they're lard-ass staff officers,' I said. 'They wouldn't
know how to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it.'

She took her hand off the map. I stepped back to my desk and

sat down again and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile.
'We need to concentrate on Carbone,' I said.

'Then we need a new plan,' she said. 'Detective Clark is going
to stop looking for crowbars now. He's found the one he's
interested in.'

I nodded. 'Back to traditional time-honoured methods of investigation.'

'Which are?'

'I don't really know. I went to West Point. I didn't go to MP
school.'

My phone rang. I picked it up. The same warm southern
voice I had heard before went through the same 10-33, 10-16 from Jackson routine I had heard before. I acknowledged and hit
the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and
waited. The room filled with electronic hum. Then there was a
click.

'Reacher?' Sanchez said.

'And Lieutenant Summer,' I said. 'We're on the speaker.'
'Anyone else in the room?'
'No,' I said.
'Door closed?'
'Yes. What's up?'

'Columbia PD came through again, is what. They're feeding
me stuff bit by bit. And they're having themselves a real good

time doing it. They're gloating like crazy.'

'Why?'

'Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that's why.
Three dime bags of brown. And a big wad of cash money.
They're saying it was a drug deal that went bad.'

210

FIFTEEN

WAS BORN IN 1960, WHICH MADE ME SEVEN I)URING THE
Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective
involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official
involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American
military's collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple
Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase.
Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time
to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among
different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put
me high on the list of U.S. users in terms of lifetime volume
consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who
bought, not sold.

But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I
had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the
drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends
up with a dead guy on the floor, there's nothing in the dead
guy's pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there
be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his
dope intact and the buyer's cash. If the dead guy was the seller,
then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money
walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a

211

nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little
rummaging around.

'It's bullshit, Sanchez,' I said. 'It's faked.'
'Of course it is. I know that.'
'Did you make that point?'

'Did I need to? They're civilians, but they ain't stupid.'

'So why are they gloating?'

'Because it gives them a free pass. If they can't close the case,
they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not
them.'

'They found any witnesses yet?'

'Not a one.'

'Shots were fired,' I said. 'Someone must have heard something.'

'Not according to the cops.'
'Willard is going to freak,' I said.
'That's the least of our problems.'
'Are you alibied?' The ? Do I need to be?'

'Willard's going to be looking for leverage. He's going to use
anything he can invent to get you to toe the line.'

Sanchez didn't answer right away. Some kind of electronic
circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud
to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.

'I think I'm fireproof here,' he said. 'It's the Columbia PD

making the accusations, not me.'
'Just take care,' I said.
'Bet on it,' he said.

I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was

tense and her lower lids were moving.

'What?' I said.

'You sure it was faked?' she said.

'Had to be,' I said.

'OK,' she said. 'Good.' She was still standing next to the map.
She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin,
index finger on the Columbia pin. 'We agree that it was faked.
We're sure of it. So there's a pattern now. The drugs and
the money in Brubaker's pocket are the exact same thing as the
branch up Carbone's ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate

212

misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It's a definite
MO. It's not just a guess any more. The same guy did both. He
killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down
to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It's a clear sequence.
Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks.'

I looked at her standing there. Her small brown hand was
stretched like a starfish. She had clear polish on her nails. Her
eyes were bright.

'Why would he ditch the crowbar?' I said. 'After Carbone but
before Brubaker?'

'Because he preferred a handgun,' she said. 'Like anyone
normal would. But he knew he couldn't use one here. Too
noisy. A mile from the main post, late in the evening, we'd have
all come running. But in a bad part of a big city, nobody was

going to think twice. Which is how it turned out, apparently.'
'Could he have been sure of that?'

'No,' she said. 'Not entirely sure. He set up the rendezvous,
so he knew where he was going. But he couldn't be exactly
certain about what he would find when he got there. So I
guess he would have liked to keep a back-up weapon. But the
crowbar was all covered with Carbone's blood and hair by
then. There was no opportunity to clean it. He was in a hurry.
The ground was frozen. No patch of soft grass to wipe it on.
So he couldn't see having it in the car with him. Maybe he
was worried about a traffic stop on the way south. So he ditched it.'

I nodded. Ultimately, the crowbar was disposable. A handgun
was a more reliable weapon against a fit and wary opponent.
Especially in the tight confines of a city alley, as opposed to the
kind of dark and wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone
down. I yawned. Closed my eyes. The wide-open spaces where he
had taken Carbone down. I opened my eyes again.

'He killed Carbone here,' I repeated. 'And then he jumped in

his car and drove to Columbia and killed Brubaker there.'
'Yes,' Summer said.

'But you figured he was already in a car,' I said.

'Yes,' she said again. 'I did.'

'You figured he drove out on the track with Carbone, hit him
in the head, arranged the scene, and then drove back here to

213

the post. Your reasoning was pretty good. And where we found

the crowbar kind of confirmed it.'

'Thank you,' she said.

'And then we figured he parked his car and went about his
business.'

'Correct,' she said.

'But he can't have parked his car and gone about his business.
Because now we're saying he drove straight to Columbia,
South Carolina, instead. To meet with Brubaker. Three-hour

drive. He was in a hurry. Not much time to waste.'

'Correct,' she said again.

'So he didn't park his car,' I said. 'He didn't even touch the
brake. He drove straight out the main gate instead. There's
no other way off the post. He drove straight out the main
gate, Summer, immediately after he killed Carbone, somewhere
around nine or ten o'clock.'

'Check the gate log,' she said. 'There's a copy right there on
the desk.'

We checked the gate log together. Operation Just Cause in
Panama had moved all domestic installations up one level on
the DefCon scale and therefore all closed posts were recording
entrances and exits in detail in bound ledgers that had pre
printed page numbers in the top right-hand corner. We had a
good clear Xerox of the page for January 4th. I was confident
it was genuine. I was confident it was complete. And I was
confident it was accurate. The Military Police has numerous
failings, but snafus with basic paperwork aren't any of them.

Summer took the page from me and taped it to the wall next
to the map. We stood side by side and looked at it. It was ruled
into six columns. There were spaces for date, time in, time out,

plate number, occupants, and reason.

'Traffic was light,' Summer said.

I said nothing. I was in no position to know whether nineteen
entries represented light traffic or not. I wasn't used to Bird and
it had been a long time since I had pulled gate duty anywhere
else. But certainly it seemed quiet compared to the multiple
pages I had seen for New Year's Eve.

'Mostly people reporting back for duty,' Summer said.

214

I nodded. Fourteen lines had entries in the time in column
but no corresponding entries in the time out column. That
meant fourteen people had come in and stayed in. Back to
work, after time away from the post for the holidays. Or after
time away from the post for other reasons. I was right there
among them: 1-4-90, 2302, Reacher, J., Mjr, RTB. January 4th
1990, two minutes past eleven in the evening, Major J. Reacher,
returning to base. From Paris, via Garber's old office in Rock
Creek. My vehicle plate number was listed as" Pedestrian. My
sergeant was there, coming in from her off-post address to work
the night shift. She had arrived at nine thirty, driving some

thing with North Carolina plates.
Fourteen in, to stay in.
Only five exits.

Three of them were routine food deliveries. Big trucks,
probably. An army post gets through a lot of food. Lots of
hungry mouths to feed. Three trucks in a day seemed about
right to me. Each of them was timed inward at some point
during the early afternoon and then timed outward again a
plausible hour or so later. The last time out was just before
three o'clock.

Then there was a seven-hour gap.

The last-but-one recorded exit was Vassell and Coomer themselves,
on their way out after their O Club dinner. They had
passed through the gate at 2201. They had previously been
timed in at 1845. At that point their Department of Defense
plate number had been written down and their names and ranks
had been entered. Their reason had been stated as courtesy
visit.

Five exits. Four down.

One to go.

The only other person to have left Fort Bird on the fourth of
January was logged as: 1-4-90, 2211, Trifonov, S., Sgt. There
was a North Carolina passenger vehicle plate number written in
the relevant space. There was no time in recorded. There was
nothing in the reason column. Therefore a sergeant called
Trifonov had been on post all day or all week and then he had
left at eleven minutes past ten in the evening. No reason
had been recorded because there was no directive to enquire as

215

to why a soldier was leaving. The assumption was that he was
going out for a drink or a meal or for some other form of
entertainment. Reason was a question the gate guards asked of
people trying to get in, not trying to get out.

We checked again, just to be absolutely sure. We came up
with the same result. Apart from General Vassell and Colonel
Coomer in their self-driven Mercury Grand Marquis, and then a
sergeant called Trifonov in some other kind of car, nobody had
passed through the gate in an outward direction in a vehicle or
on foot at any time on the fourth of January, apart from three
food trucks in the early part of the afternoon.

'OK,' Summer said. 'Sergeant Trifonov. Whoever he is. He's
the one.'

'Has to be,' I said.

I called the main gate. Got the same guy I had spoken to
before, when I was checking on Vassell and Coomer earlier. I
recognized his voice. I asked him to search forward through his
log, starting from the page number immediately following the
one we were looking at. Asked him to check exactly when a
sergeant named Trifonov had returned to Bird. Told him it
could be any time after about four thirty in the morning on
January 5th. There was a moment's delay. I could hear the guy
turning the stiff parchment pages in the ledger. He was doing it
slowly, paying close attention.

'Sir, five o'clock in the morning precisely,' the guy said.
'January fifth, 0500, Sergeant Trifonov, returning to base.' I

heard another page turn. 'He left at 2211 the previous evening.'
'Remember anything about him?'

'He left about ten minutes after those Armored staffers you
were asking me about before. He was in a hurry, as I recall.
Didn't wait for the barrier to go all the way up. He squeezed
right underneath it.'

'What kind of car?'

'A Corvette, I think. Not a new one. But it looked pretty good.'
'Were you still on duty when he got back?'
'Yes, sir, I was.'

'Remember anything about that?'

'Nothing that stands out. I spoke to him, obviously. He has a
foreign accent.'

216

'What was he wearing?'

'Civilian stuff. A leather jacket, I think. I assumed he had
been off duty.'

'Is he on the post now?'

I heard pages turning again. I imagined a finger, tracing
slowly down all the lines written after 0500 on the morning of
the fifth.

'We haven't logged him out again, sir,' the guy said. 'Not as of

right now. So he must be on post somewhere.'

'OK,' I said. 'Thanks, soldier.'

I hung up. Summer looked at me.

'He got back at 0500,' I said. 'Three and a half hours after
Brubaker's watch stopped.'

'Three-hour drive,' she said.
'And he's here now.'
'Who is he?'

I called post headquarters. Asked the question. They told
me who he was. I put the phone down and looked straight at
Summer.

'He's Delta,' I said. 'He was a defector from Bulgaria.
They brought him in as an instructor. He knows stuff our guys
don't.'

I got up from my desk and stepped over to the map on the wall.
Put my own fingers on the push pins. Little finger on Fort
Bird, index finger on Columbia. It was like I was validating a
theory by touch alone. A hundred and fifty miles. Three hours
and twelve minutes to get there, three hours and thirty-seven
minutes to get back. I did the math in my head. An average
speed of forty-seven miles an hour going, and forty-one coming
back. At night, on empty roads, in a Chevrolet Corvette. He
could have done it with the parking brake on.

'Should we have him picked up?' Summer said.

I shook my head.

'No,' I said. 'I'll do it myself. I'll go over there.'

'Is that smart?'

'Probably not. But I don't want those guys to think they got to
me.'

She paused.

217

'I'll come with you,' she said.
'OK,' I said.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to
the minute since Trifonov arrived back on post. The weather
was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and
evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found
a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front
seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove.
She parked at Delta's prison gate. The sentry let us through on
foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I
found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer
stopped beside me.

'You going in there?' she said.
'Just for a minute.'
'Alone?'

I nodded. 'Then we're going to their armoury.'
'Not smart,' she said. 'I should come in with you.'
'Why?'

She hesitated. 'As a witness, I guess.'

'To what?'

'To whatever they do to you.'
I smiled, briefly.
'Terrific,' I said.

I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded.
The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot
of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward.
People stood where they were. Stock still. Then they turned to
face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd.
Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their
shoulders, left and right. I bunped back, in the silence. I stand
six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I
can hold my own in a shoving competition.

I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same
thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned towards
me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way
through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense
breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump
of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The

218

young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path.
He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he
leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its
contents on the linoleum tile.

'You spilled my drink,' he said.

I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his
eyes.

'Lick it up,' I said.

We stood face to face for a second. Then I moved on past
him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But
I wasn't about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a
bottle shatter against a table behind me.

I didn't hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far
wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned
around and started back. The return journey was no different.
The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster
through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its
advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people
were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a
little.

I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I
started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other
people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance
like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped
at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room,
slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three
thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and

stepped out into the cold fresh air.

Summer wasn't there.

I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a
service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the

bar. I figured she had been watching my back.

She looked at me.

'Now you know,' she said.

'Know what?'

'How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.'

She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their
armoury was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete

219

and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn't
been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There
were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and
they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks
of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I
guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job,
up at the Pentagon.

'Over here,' Summer said.

She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It
had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane
fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open
with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue.
Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the
writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn't salute. Didn't come
to attention. But he didn't turn away, either. He just stood there
and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper
etiquette as Delta ever got.

'Help you?' he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a
customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of
every description. I saw five different sub-machine gun models.
There were some M-16s, Als and A2s. There were handguns.
Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were
stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They

were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a log book.
'You check them in and check them out?' I asked.

'Like valet parking,' the guy said. 'Post regulations won't
allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.' He
was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the
same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for
Carbone's new P7.

'What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?' I asked.
'Trifonov? He favours the Steyr GB.'
'Show me.'

He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black
Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and
well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he
dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the
gun through the plastic.

220

'Nine millimetre,' Summer said.

I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr
Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the
Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named
Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an
unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had
many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was
a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded,
which wasn't. You could take it apart and put it back together in
twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart
gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using
the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get
the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real
world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled.
They don't all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec
weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won't
cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in
your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything
that came its way. If I was a Special Forces soldier taking
dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of
partisans I was hanging with, I'd use a Steyr. I would want to be
sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out
of ten.

Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind
the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the
butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were
sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one
round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen
shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He
had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine,

and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.

'Got a phone?' I said.

The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar,
twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my
sergeant's desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal.
The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer,
putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek
to work.

'Get me Sanchez at Jackson,' I said.

221

I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
'What?' Sanchez said.

'Did they find the shell cases?' I said.

'No,' he said. 'The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.'
'Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.'
'You found the guy?'

'I'm holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less
two fired.'

'Who is he?'

'I'll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.'
'One of ours?'
'Sad, but true.'
Sanchez said nothing.

'Did they find the bullets?' I said.

'No,' he said.

'Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go?
They'll be buried in the brick somewhere.'

'Then they won't do us any good. They'll be flattened beyond
recognition.'

'They were jacketed,' I said. 'They won't have broken up. We
could weigh them, at least.'

'They haven't found them.'
'Are they looking?'
'I don't know.'

'They dug up any witnesses yet?'

'No.'

'Did they find Brubaker's car?'

'No.'

'It's got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and
arrived at midnight or one o'clock. In a distinctive car. Aren't
they looking for it?'

'There's something they're not sharing. I can feel it.'
'Did Willard get there yet?'
'I expect him any minute.'

'Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,' I said. 'And tell him
you heard the other thing wasn't a training accident after all.
That should make his day.'

Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer
had stepped inside and she was shoulder-to-shoulder with the

222

armoury clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing

through his log book together.

'Look at this,' she said.

She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries.
Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimetre
pistol at seven thirty in the evening of January 4th. He had
signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the
fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I
guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was

new to writing with Roman letters.

'Why did he take it?'I said.

'We don't ask for a reason,' the clerk said. 'We just do the
paperwork.'

We came out of the hangar and walked towards the accommodation
block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There
were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers' rides. Not many
imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but
mostly there were pick-up trucks and big Detroit coupds, some
of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with
hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tyres.
There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on

the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.

We detoured to take a look at it.

It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean,
inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly,
within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The
tyres were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the
hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in
through the windows. The interior looked like it had been
soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a
two-place car, but there was a parcel shelf behind the seats. It
was a small space. Small, but probably big enough for a crowbar
hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her
fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.

'No grit from the track,' she said. 'No blood on the seats.'
'No yogurt pot on the floor,' I said.
'He cleaned up after himself.'

We walked away. We went out through their main gate and

223

locked Trifonov's gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we
turned around and headed back inside.

I didn't want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get
Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down.
So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found
a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out
through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we
stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out
alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn't anywhere in
the mess.

So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of
the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past
Carbone's empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov
bunked three doors further down. We got there. His door was
standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on
the narrow cot, reading a book.

I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had
no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside
the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne
brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions.
The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart
from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game,
in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the
fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of

them as expendable. And they did.

So who was this guy?

NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance
in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles
carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them
awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time.
Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys,
built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He
was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six,
maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square
face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and
reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point
the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn't doing him
any favours. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and

224

close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older
than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands.
He was wearing brand new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.

'On your feet, soldier,' I said.

He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, face
down and open, like he was saving his place.

We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without
any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned
to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of time
before all the various log books in his life betrayed him.

We drove him back and got him to my office without incident.
We sat him down and unlocked the handcuffs and redid them
so that his right wrist was cuffed to the chair leg. Then we
took a second pair of cuffs and did the same thing with his
left. He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men's
ankles.

Summer stood next to the map, staring at the push pins,
like she was leading his gaze towards them and saying: We
know.

I sat at my desk.

'What's your name?' I said. 'For the record?'

'Trifonov,' he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his
throat.

'First name?'

'Slavi.'

'Slavi Trifonov,' I said. 'Rank?'

'I was a colonel at home. Now I'm a sergeant.'

%Vhere's home?'

'Sofia,' he said. 'In Bulgaria.'

'You're very young to have been a colonel.'
'I was very good at what I did.'
'And what did you do?'
He didn't answer.
'You have a nice car,' I said.

'Thank you,' he said. 'A car like that was always a dream to

me.'
¢¢here did you take it on the night of the fourth?'

225

He didn't answer.

'There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria,' I said.
'No,' he said. 'There are not.'
'So what did you do there?'
'I was in the regular army.'
'Doing what?'

'Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian army, the Bulgar

ian secret police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki.' 'Qualifications?'

'I had five years' training with the GRU.'

'Which is what?'

He smiled. 'I think you know what it is.'

I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a
military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough,
and they were just as ready to turn their fury inwards as
outwards.

'Why are you here?' I asked.

'In America?' he said. 'I'm waiting.'

'For what?'

'For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It
will happen soon, I think. Then I'm going back. I'm proud of my
country. It's a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I'm a
nationalist.'

'What are you teaching Delta?'

'Things that are out of date now. How to fight against the
things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I
think. You won.'

'You need to tell us where you were on the night of the
fourth.'

He said nothing.

'Why did you defect?'

'Because I was a patriot,' he said.

'Recent conversion?'

'I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered.'
'How did you get out?'

'Through Turkey. I went to the American base there.'
'Tell me about the night of the fourth.'
He said nothing.

'We've got your gun,' I said. 'You signed it out. You left the

226

post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the
morning.'

He said nothing.

'You fired two rounds.'

He said nothing.

'Why did you wash your car?'

'Because it's a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A

car like that was a dream to me.'
'You ever been to Kansas?'
'No.'

'Well, that's where you're headed. You're not going home to

Sofia. You're going to Fort Leavenworth instead.'

'Why?'

'You know why,' I said.

Trifonov didn't move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched
way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near
his knees. I sat still, too. I wasn't sure what to do. Our own
Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that.
They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory
deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their
instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training
methods. So I couldn't even imagine what Trifonov had been
through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I
could do to him. I wasn't above smacking people around. But I
figured this guy wouldn't say a word even if I disassembled him
limb by limb.

So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and
bribery.

'Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment,' I said.
'You know, to the army. So we wouldn't necessarily want to
pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you
back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go
home and be a patriot.'

'It was you who killed Carbone,' he said. 'People are talking
about it.'

'People are wrong,' I said. 'I wasn't here. And I didn't kill

Brubaker. Because I wasn't there, either.'

'Neither was I,' he said. 'Either.'

He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes

227

started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at
Summer's map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at
me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward
accent.

'Wait,' he said.
'For what?'
'No,' he said.
'No what?'

'No, sir,' he said.

'Tell me, Trifonov,' I said.

'You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?'

'You think you didn't?'

He went quiet again. Looked down.
'Tell me, Trifonov,' I said.
He looked up.

'It wasn't me,' he said.

I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations
of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov
was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say it
wasn't me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys
had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe
Trifonov was, too. There was something about him. I was
starting to get a very bad feeling.

'You're going to have to prove it,' I said.

'I can't.'

'You're going to have to. Or they'll throw away the key. They
might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren't going to let
Brubaker slide.'

He said nothing.

'Start over,' I said. 'The night of January fourth, where were
you?'

He just shook his head.

'You were somewhere,' I said. 'That's for damn sure. Because
you weren't here. You logged in and out. You and your gun.'

He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and
didn't speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted
silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the

228

chair. Almost imperceptibly. Tiny violen! movements, from side
to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on
his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where
he had been, but like he knew he couldn't. He was jumping
around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and
a hard place.

'The night of January fourth,' I said. 'Did you commit a
crime?'

His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.

'OK,' I said. 'Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime

than shooting Brubaker in the head?'

He said nothing.

'Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president's

ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?'

'No,' he said.

'I'll give you a clue,' I said. "Where you're sitting, that would be

about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head.'
He said nothing.
'Tell me.'

'It was a private thing,' he said.

'What kind of a private thing?'

He didn't answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her
map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had
been, chances were it wasn't Columbia, South Carolina. She
looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His

handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.
'What's going to happen to me?' he asked.
'That depends on what you did,' I said.
'I got a letter,' he said.
'Getting mail isn't a crime.'
'From a friend of a friend.'
'Tell me about the letter.'
'There's a man in Sofia,' he said.

He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair
legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed
it, he made it sound like he thought there was something
uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn't, really. It was a
story that could have been told by any of us.

229

There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister
had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour
of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States.
She had gotten married to an American. She had become
a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote
about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters.
There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation.
The sister's life was hell. The communist censors had passed
the letters, because anything that made America look bad
was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town
who knew his way around the city's dissident network. The
friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North
Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident
network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged
up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who
bought machine parts in Austria. The machine parts guy
had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its
way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January 2nd, early in
the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.

He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what
was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships
compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it
was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The
woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov
thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had
gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out
where it was.

His next available free time was the evening of January 4th.
He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centred around
the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends
within driving distance.

'Still got the letter?' I asked.

He nodded. 'But you won't be able to read it, because it's
written in Bulgarian.'

'What were you wearing that night?'
'Plain clothes. I'm not stupid.'
'What kind of plain clothes?'

230

'Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. AJerican. They're all the
plain clothes I've got.'

'What did you do to the guy?'

He shook his head. Wouldn't answer.

'OK,' I said. 'Let's all go to Cape Fear.'

We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP
Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast,
south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in
a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although
I couldn't remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never
known anyone who owned one.

And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many
places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie,
though. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere
hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having
some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was
good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally
annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert
Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching
civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety
minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were
going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that
billed the town as an historic and picturesque old port city but
we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear
and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We
drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and
made another left towards a place called Southport.

'Cape Fear is off of Southport,' Summer said. 'It's an island in
the ocean. I think there's a bridge.'

But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn't even get to
Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a
trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of
reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the
swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the
size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by
drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles
and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle.

231

Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double
wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket
fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had
fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten

miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.

'Here,' Trifonov said. 'Make a right.'

There was a wide centre track with narrower tracks branching
left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and
we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen
better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar paper roof was
curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a
television behind its windows.

'Her name is Elena,' Trifonov said.

We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena's door.
The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the
encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She
had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw
and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that
suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken
ribs. She was wearing a thin house dress and men's shoes. But
she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly.
There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of
pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out
at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty
and suffering and foreign status.

'Yes?' she said. 'Can I help you?' Her accent was like

Trifonov's, but much higher pitched. It was quite appealing.
'We need to talk to you,' Summer said, gently.
'What about?'

'About what Slavi Trifonov did for you,' I said.
'He didn't do anything,' she said.
'But you know the name.'
She paused.

'Please come in,' she said.

I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside.
Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion.
But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing
out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody
else in it.

232

'Your husband not here?' I said.
She shook her head.
'Where is he?'
She didn't answer.

'My guess is he's in the hospital,' Summer said. 'Am I right?'
Elena just looked at her.

'Mr Trifonov helped you,' I said. 'Now you need to help
him.'

She said nothing.

'If he wasn't here doing something good, he was somewhere
else doing something bad. That's the situation. So I need to

know which it was.'

She said nothing.

'This is very, very important,' I said.

'What if both things were bad?' she asked.

'The two things don't compare,' I said. 'Believe me. Not even
close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?'

She didn't answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the
trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I
could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she
had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and
education on the tube.

'I don't know exactly what happened,' she said. 'Mr Trifonov

just came here and took my husband away.'

'When?'

'The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a
letter from my brother in Sofia.'

I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an
hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average
of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at

Summer. She nodded. Easy.

'How long was he here?'

'Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced

himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.'
'And that was it?'
She nodded.

'What was he wearing?'
'A leather jacket. Jeans.'
'What kind of car was he in?'

233

'I don't know what it's called. Red, and low. A sports car. It
made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.'

'OK,' I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved towards the
door.

'Will my husband come back?' Elena said.

I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty,
shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes,
and the five years with GRU.

'I seriously doubt it,' I said.

We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine.
I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire
cage.

'Where did you leave the guy?' I asked him.
'On the road to Wilmington,' he said.
'When?'

'Three o'clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and

called nine one one. I didn't give my name.'

'You spent three hours on him?'

He nodded, slowly. 'I wanted to be sure he understood the
message.'

Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned
west and then north towards Wilmington. We passed the tourist
sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We
found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It
was mostly two-storey and had an ambulance entrance with a
broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor
with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door
and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them
in my pocket.

'What was the guy's name?' I asked him.

'Pickles,' he said.

The three of us walked in together and I showed my special
unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is it
confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world,
but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is
what most civilians do when they see it.

'Early morning of January fifth,' I said. 'Sometime after three
o'clock, there was an admission here.'

234

The guy rifled through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a

stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.
'Male or female?' he said.
'Male.'

He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the
other all the way out.

'John Doe,' he said. 'Indigent male, no ID, no insurance,

claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.'
'That's our guy,' I said.

'Your guy?' he said, looking at my uniform.

'We might be able to take care of his bill,' I said.

He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards,
like he was thinking one down, two hundred to go.

'He's in post-op,' he said. He pointed towards the elevator.
'Second floor.'

He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us
together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A
nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my
badge.

'Pickles,' I said.

She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across
the hallway.

'Five minutes only,' she said. 'He's very sick.'

Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened
the private room's door. The light was dim. There was a guy in
the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big
or small. I couldn't see much of him. He was mostly covered in
plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW
bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long
lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray
exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a
date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were
films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The
human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it
seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had
put a big dent in the hospital's radiography budget all by
himself.

I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice.
The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the

235

look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov

was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.
'You two wait outside,' I said.

Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the
head of the bed.

'How are you, asshole?' I said.

The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating,
and trembling inside his casts.

'That was the man,' he said. 'Right there. He did this to me.'
'Did what to you?'

'He shot me in the legs.'

I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been knee

capped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.
'Front or side?' I said.
'Side,' he said.

'Front is worse,' I said. 'You were lucky. Not that you
deserved to be lucky.'

'I didn't do anything.'

'Didn't you? I just met your wife.'
'Foreign bitch.'
'Don't say that.'

'It's her own fault. She won't do what I tell her. A man needs

to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.'

'Shut up,' I said.

'Aren't you going to do something?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I am. Watch.'

I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets.
Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right
knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the
door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.

'He's very sick,' I said.

We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage
desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the
Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but

stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.

'I apologize,' I said.

'Am I in trouble?' he said.

'Not with me,' I said. 'You're my kind of guy. But you're very

236

lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have

killed him. Then it might have been different.'

He smiled, briefly. He was calm.

'I trained five years with GRU,' he said. 'I know how to kill
people. And I know how not to.'

237

SIXTEEN

E GAVE TRIFONOV HIS STEYR BACK AND LIVF HIM OUT AT THE
Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and
then legged it to his room and picked up his book.
Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We drove
on and parked the Humvee in the MP motor pool. Walked back
to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log.
It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.

'Vassell and Coomer,' she said. 'They were the only other
people who left the post that night.'

'They went north,' I said. 'If you want to say they threw the
briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north.
They didn't go south to Columbia.'

'OK,' she said. 'So the same guy didn't do Carbone and
Brubaker. There's no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.'

'Welcome to the real world,' I said.

The real world got a whole lot worse when my phone rang
twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the
baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort
Jackson. She put him through.

'Willard has been and gone,' he said. 'Unbelievable.'

238

'Told you so.'

'He pitched all kinds of hissy fits.'
'But you're fireproof.'
'Thank God.'

I paused. 'Did you tell him about my guy?'

He paused. 'You told me to. Shouldn't I have?'

'It was a dry hole. Looked good at first, but it wasn't in the
end.'

'Well, he's on his way up to see you about it. He left here two
hours ago. He's going to be very disappointed.'

'Terrific,' I said.

'What are you going to do?' Summer asked.
'What is Willard?' I said. 'Fundamentally?'
'A careerist,' she said.
'Correct,' I said.

Technically the army has a total of twenty-six separate ranks.
A grunt comes in as an E-1 private, and as long as he doesn't do
anything stupid he is automatically promoted to an E-2 private
after a year, and to an E-3 private first class after another
year, or even a little earlier if he's any good. Then the ladder
stretches all the way up to a five-star General of the Army,
although I wasn't aware of anyone except George Washington
and Dwight David Eisenhower who ever made it that far. If you
count the E-9 sergeant major grade as three separate steps to
acknowledge the Command Sergeant Majors and the Sergeant
Major of the Army, and if you count all four warrant officer
grades, then a major like me has seven steps above him and
eighteen steps below him. Which gives a major like me considerable
experience of insubordination, going both ways, up
and down, giving and taking. With a million people on twenty
six separate rungs on the ladder, insubordination was a true art
form. And the canvas was one-on-one privacy.

So I sent Summer away and waited for Willard on my own. She
arguedabout it. In the end I got her to agree that one of us
should stay under the radar. She went to get a late dinner. My
sergeant brought me a sandwich. Roast beef and Swiss cheese,
white bread, a little mayo, a little mustard. The beef was pink. It

239

was a good sandwich. Then she brought me coffee. I was
halfway through my second cup when Willard arrived.

He came straight in. He left the door open. I didn't get up.
Didn't salute. Didn't stop sipping my coffee. He tolerated it, like
I knew he would. He was being very tactical. As far as he knew I
had a suspect that could take Brubaker's case away from the
Columbia PD and break the link between an elite colonel and
drug dealers in a crack alley. So he was prepared to start out
warm and friendly. Or maybe he was looking for a bonding
experience with one of his staff. He sat down and started
plucking at his trouser legs. He put a man-to-man expression on
his face, like we had just been through some kind of a shared
experience together.

'Wonderful drive from Jackson,' he said. 'Great roads.'

I said nothing.

'Just bought a vintage Pontiac GTO,' he said. 'Fine car. I put
polished headers on it, big bore pipes. Goes like shit off a shiny
shovel.'

I said nothing.

'You like muscle cars?'

'No,' I said. 'I like to take the bus.'

'That's not much fun.'

'OK, let me put it another way. I'm happy with the size of my
penis. I don't need compensation.'

He went white. Then he went red. The same shade as
Trifonov's Corvette. He glared at me like he was a real tough
guy.

'Tell me about the progress on Brubaker,' he said.
'Brubaker's not my case.'

'Sanchez told me you found the guy.'
'False alarm,'! said.
'Are you sure?'
'Totally.'

'Who were you looking at?'
'Your ex-wife.'
'What?'

'Someone told me she slept with half the colonels in the
army. Always had, like a hobby. So I figured that might include
Brubaker. I mean, it was a fifty-fifty chance.'

24O

tie stared at me.

'Only kidding,' I said. 'It was nobody. Just a dry hole.'

He looked away, furious. I got up and closed my office door.

Stepped back to my desk. Sat down again. Faced him.

'Your insolence is incredible,' he said.

'So make a complaint, Willard. Go up the chain of command
and tell someone I hurt your feelings. See if anyone believes
you. Or see if anyone believes you can't fix a thing like that all
by yourself. Watch that note go in your file. See what kind of an
impression it makes at your one-star promotion board.'

He squirmed in his chair. Hitched his body from side to side

and stared around the room. Fixed his gaze on Summer's map.
'What's that?' he said.
'It's a map,' I said.
'Of what?'

'Of the eastern United States.'

'What are the pins for?'

I didn't answer. He got up and stepped over to the wall.
Touched the pins with his fingertips, one at a time. DoC.,
Sper .ryville, and Green Valley. Then Raleigh, Fort Bird, Cape
Fear, and Columbia.

'What is all this?' he said.

'They're just pins,' I said.

He pulled the pin out of Green Valley, Virginia.

'Mrs Kramer,' he said. 'I told you to leave that alone.'

He pulled all the other pins out. Threw them down on the
floor. Then he saw the gate log. Scanned down it and stopped
when he got to Vassell and Coomer.

'I told you to leave them alone as well,' he said.

He tore the list off the wall. The tape took scabs of paint with
it. Then he tore the map down. More paint came with it. The
pins had left tiny holes in the sheet rock. They looked like a
map all by themselves. Or a constellation.

'You made holes in the wall,' he said. 'I won't have army
property abused in this way. It's unprofessional. What would
visitors to this room think?'

'They'd have thought there was a map on the wall,' I said. 'It
was you that pulled it down and made the mess.'

He dropped the crumpled paper on the floor.

241

'You want me to walk over to the Delta station?' he said.
'Want me to break your back?'
He went very quiet.

'You should think about your next promotion board,' he said.
'You think you're going to make lieutenant colonel while I'm
still here?'

'No,' I said. 'I really don't. But then, I don't expect you'll be
here very long.'

'Think again. This is a nice niche. The army will always need
cops.

'But it won't always need clueless assholes like you.'
'You're speaking to a senior officer.'

I looked around the room. 'But what am I saying? I don't see
any witnesses.'

He said nothing.

'You've got an authority problem,' I said. 'It's going to be fun
watching you try to solve it. Maybe we could solve it man to
man, in the gym. You want to try that?'

'Have you got a secure fax machine?' he said.

'Obviously,' I said. 'It's in the outer office. You passed it on
your way in. What are you? Blind as well as stupid?'

'Be standing next to it at exactly nine hundred hours
tomorrow. I'll be sending you a set of written orders.'

He glared at me one last time. Then he stepped outside and
slammed the door so hard that the whole wall shook and the air
current lifted the map and the gate log an inch off the floor.

I stayed at my desk. Dialled my brother in Washington, but he
didn't answer. I thought about calling my mother. But then I
figured there was nothing to say. Whatever I talked about she
would know I had called to ask: Are you still alive? She would
know that was what was on my mind.

So I got out of my chair and picked up the map and smoothed
it out. Taped it back on the wall. I picked up all seven pins and
put them back in place. Taped the gate log alongside the map.
Then I pulled it down again. It was useless. I balled it up and
threw it in the trash. Left the map there all on its own. My
sergeant came in with more coffee. I wondered briefly about
her baby's father. Where was he? Had he been an abusive

242

husband? If so, he was probably buried in a swamp somewhere.
Or several swamps, in several pieces. My phone rang and she
answered it for me. Passed me the receiver.

'Detective Clark,' she said. 'Up in Virginia.'

I trailed the phone cord around the desk and sat down again.
'We're making progress now,' he said. 'The Sperryville crowbar
is our weapon, for sure. We got an identical sample from

the hardware store and our medical examiner matched it up.'
'Good work,' I said.

'So I'm calling to tell you I can't keep on looking. We found
ours, so we can't be looking for yours any more. I can't justify
the overtime budget.'

'Sure,' I said. 'We anticipated that.'

'So you're on your own with it now, bud. And I'm real sorry
about that.'

I said nothing.

'Anything at your end? You got a name for me yet?'

I smiled. You can forget about a name, I thought. Bud. No quo, no quid. Not that there ever was a name in the first place.

'I'll let you know,' I said.

Summer came back after thirty more minutes and I told her to
take the rest of the night off. Told her to meet me for breakfast
in the O Club. At nine o'clock exactly, when Willard's orders
were due. I figured we could have a long leisurely meal, plenty
of eggs, plenty of coffee, and we could stroll back over about
ten fifteen.

'You moved the map,' she said.
'Willard tore it down. I put it back up.'
'He's dangerous.'

'Maybe,' I said. 'Maybe not. Time will tell.'

She went back to her quarters and I went back to mine. I was
in a room in the Bachelor Officers' row. It was pretty much like
a motel. There was a street named after some long-dead Medal
of Honor winner and a path branching off from the sidewalk
that led to my door. There were posts every twenty yards with
street lights on them. The one nearest nay door was out. It was
out because it had been busted with a stone. I could see glass
on the path. And three guys in the shadows. I walked past the

243

first one. He was the Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan.
He tapped the face of his watch with his forefinger. The second
guy did the same thing. The third guy just smiled. I got inside
and closed my door. Didn't hear them walk away. I didn't sleep
well.

They were gone by morning. I made it to the O Club OK. At
nine o'clock the dining room was pretty much empty, which
was an advantage. The disadvantage was that whatever food
remained had been stewing on the buffet for a while. But on
balance I thought it was a good situation. I was more of a loner
than a gourmet. Summer and I sat across from each other at a
small table in the centre of the room. Between us we ate almost
everything that was left. Summer consumed about a pound of
grits and two pounds of biscuits. She was small, but she could
eat. That was for damn sure. We took our time with our coffee
and walked over to my office at ten twenty. There was mayhem
inside. Every phone was ringing. The Louisiana corporal looked
harassed.

'Don't answer your phone,' he said. 'It's Colonel Willard. He
wanted immediate confirmation that you'd gotten your orders.
He's mad as hell.'

'What are the orders?'

He ducked back to his desk and offered me a sheet of
fax paper. The phones kept on ringing. I didn't take the sheet
of paper. I just stood there and read it over my corporal's
shoulder. There were two closely spaced paragraphs. Willard
was ordering me to examine the quartermaster's inward
delivery note file and his outward distribution log. I was to use
them to work out on paper exactly what ought to be there in the
on-post warehouse. Then I was to verify my conclusion by
means of a practical search. Then I was to compile a list of all
missing items and propose a course of action in writing to track
down their current whereabouts. I was to execute the order in a
prompt and timely fashion. I was to call him to confirm receipt
of the order immediately it was in my hand.

It was a classic make-work punishment. In the bad old days
they ordered you to paint coal white or fill sandbags with
teaspoons or scrub floors with toothbrushes. This was the

244

modern-day MP equivalent. It was a mindless task that would

take two weeks to complete. I smiled.

The phones were still ringing.

'The order was never in my hand,' I said. 'I'm not here.'
'Where are you?'

'Tell him someone dropped a gum wrapper in the flower bed
outside the post commander's office. Tell him I won't have army
real estate abused in that way. Tell him I've been on the trail
since well before dawn.'

I led Summer back out onto the sidewalk, away from the
ringing phones.

'Asshole,' I said.

'You should lie low,' she said. 'He'll be calling all over.'

I stood still. Looked around. Cold weather. Grey buildings,
grey sky.

'Let's take the day off,' I said. 'Let's go somewhere.'

'We've got things to do.'

I nodded. Carbone. Krarner. Brubaker.

'Can't stay here,' I said. 'So we can't do much about Carbone.'
'Want to go down to Columbia?'

'Not our case,' I said. 'Nothing we can do that Sanchez isn't
doing.'

'Too cold for the beach,' Summer said.

I nodded again. Suddenly wished it wasn't too cold for the
beach. I would have liked to see Summer on the beach. In a

bikini. A very small one, for preference.

'We have to work,' she said.

I looked south and west, beyond the post buildings. I could
see the trees, cold and dead against the horizon. I could see a
tall pine, dull and dormant, a little nearer. I figured it was close

to where we had found Carbone.

Carbone.

'Let's go to Green Valley,' I said. 'Let's visit with Detective
Clark. We could ask him for his crowbar notes. He made a start
for us. So maybe we could finish up. A four-hour drive might be

a good investment at this point.'

'And four hours back.'

e could have lunch. Maybe dinner. We could go AWOL.'
'They'd find us.'

245

I shook my head.

'Nobody would find me,' I said. 'Not ever.'

I stayed there on the sidewalk and Summer went away and
came back five minutes later in the green Chevy we had used
before. She pulled in tight to the kerb and buzzed her window

down before I could move.
'Is this smart?' she said.
'It's all we've got,' I said.

'No, I mean you're going to be on the gate log. Time out, ten

thirty. Willard could check it.'

I said nothing. She smiled.

'You could hide in the trunk,' she said. 'You could get out
again when we're through the gate.'

I shook my head. 'I'm not going to hide. Not because of an
asshole like Willard. If he checks the log I'll tell him the hunt
for the gum-wrapper guy suddenly went interstate. Or global,
even. We could go to Tahiti.'

I got in beside her and racked the seat all the way back and
started thinking about bikinis again. She took her foot off the
brake and accelerated down the main drag. Slowed and stopped
at the gate. An MP private came out with a clipboard. He noted
our plate number and we showed him ID. He wrote our names
down. Glanced into the car, checked the empty rear seat. Then
he nodded to his partner in the guard shack and the barrier
went up in front of us, very slowly. It was a thick pole with a
counterweight, red and white stripes. Summer waited until it
was exactly vertical and then she dropped the hammer and we
took off in a cloud of blue government-funded smoke from the
Chevy's rear tyres.

The weather got better as we drove north. We slid out from
under a shelf of low grey cloud into bright winter sunshine. It
was an army car so there was no radio in it. Just a blank panel
where the civilian model would have had AM and FM and a
cassette slot. So we talked from time to time and whiled the rest
away riding in aimless silence. It was a curious feeling, to be
free. I had spent just about my whole life being where the
military told me to be, every minute of every day. Now I felt like

246

a truant. There was a world out there. It was going about its
business, chaotic and untidy and undisciplined, and I was a part
of it, just briefly. I lay back in the seat and watched it spool
by, bright and stroboscopic, random images flashing past like
sunlight on a running river.

'Do you wear a bikini or a one-piece?' I asked.

v'hy?'

'Just checking,' I said. 'I was thinking about the beach.'
'Too cold.'

'Won't be in August.'

'Think you'll be here in August?'

'No,' I said.

'Pity,' she said. 'You'll never know what I wear.'
'You could mail me a picture.' Where to?'

'Fort Leavenworth, probably,' I said. 'The maximum security
wing.'

'No, where will you be? Seriously?'

'I have no idea,' I said. 'August is eight months away.'
%Vhere's the best place you ever served?'

I smiled. Gave her the same answer I give anyone who asks
that question.

'Right here,' I said. 'Right now.'

'Even with Willard on your back?'

'Willard's nothing. He'll be gone before I am.'

'Why is he here at all?'

I moved in my seat. 'My brother figures they're copying what
corporations do. Know-nothings aren't invested in the status

qtlO.'

'So a guy trained to write fuel consumption algorithms winds
up with two dead soldiers in his first week. And he doesn't want
to investigate either one of them.'

'Because that would be old-fashioned thinking. We have to
move on. We have to see the big picture.'

She smiled and drove on. Took the Green Valley ramp, going
way too fast.

The Green Valley Police Department had a building north of
town. It was a bigger place than I had expected, because Green

247

Valley itself was bigger than I had expected. It encompassed
the pretty centre we had already seen, but then it bulged north
through some country that was mostly strip malls and light
industrial units, almost all the way up to Sperryville. The police
station looked big enough for twenty or thirty cops. It was built
the way most places are where land is cheap. It was long
and low and sprawling, with a one-storey centre core and two
wings. The wings were built at right-angles, so the place was
U-shaped. The facades were concrete, moulded to look like
stone. There was a brown lawn in front and parking lots at both
sides. There was a flagpole dead centre on the lawn. Old Glory
was up there, weather-beaten and limp in the windless air. The
whole place looked a little grand, and a little bleached in the
pale sunlight.

We parked in the right-hand lot in an empty slot between two
white police cruisers. We got out into the brightness. Walked
over to the front doors and went in and asked the desk guy for
Detective Clark. The desk guy made an internal call and then
pointed us towards the left-hand wing. We walked through an
untidy corridor and ended up in a room the size of a basketball
court. Pretty much the whole thing was a detectives' bullpen.
There was a wooden fence that enclosed a line of four visitor
chairs and then there was a gate with a receptionist's desk next
to it. Beyond the gate was a lieutenant's office way off in one
corner and then nothing else except three pairs of back-to-back
desks covered with phones and paper. There were file cabinets
against the walls. The windows were grimy and most of them
had skewed and broken blinds.

There was no receptionist at the desk. There were two
detectives in the room, both of them wearing tweed sport coats,
both of them sitting with their backs to us. Clark was one of
them. He was talking on the phone. I rattled the gate latch.
Both guys turned around. Clark paused for a second, surprised,
and then he waved us in. We pulled chairs around and sat at the
ends of his desk, one on each side. He kept on talking into
the phone. We waited. I spent the time looking around the
room. The lieutenant's office had glass walls from waist-height
upward. There was a big desk in there. Nobody behind it. But
on it I could see two plaster casts, just like the ones our own

248

pathologist had made. I didn't get up and go look at them.
Didn't seem polite.

Clark finished his call. Hung up the phone and made a note
on a yellow pad. Then he breathed out and pushed his chair
way back so he could see both of us at the same time. He didn't
say anything. He knew we weren't making a social call. But
equally he didn't want to come right out and ask if we had a
name for him. Because he didn't want to look foolish if we
didn't.

'Just passing through,' I said.

'OK,' he said.

'Looking for a little help,' I said.

'What kind of help?'

'Thought you might give us your crowbar notes. Now that

you don't need them any more. Now that you've found yours.'
'Notes?'

'You listed all kinds of hardware stores. I figured it could save
us some time if we picked up where you left off.'

'I could have faxed them,' he said.

'There's probably a lot of them. We didn't want to cause you
the trouble.'

'I might not have been here.'

'We were passing by anyway.'

'OK,' he said again. 'Crowbar notes.' He swivelled his chair
and got up out of it and walked over to a file cabinet. Came back
with a green folder about a half-inch thick. He dropped it on his

desk. It made a decent thump.

'Good luck,' he said.

He sat down again and I nodded to Summer and she picked up
the folder. Opened it. It was full of paper. She leafed through.
Made a face. Passed it across to me. It was a long, long list of
places that stretched from New Jersey to North Carolina. There
were names and addresses and phone numbers. The first ninety
or so had check marks against them. Then there were about four
hundred that didn't.

'You have to be careful,' Clark said. 'Some places call them
crowbars and some call them wrecking bars. You have to be
sure they know what you're talking about.'

'Do they have different sizes?'

249

'Lots of different sizes. Ours is pretty big.'

'Can I see it? Or is it in your evidence room?'

'It's not evidence,' Clark said. 'It's not the actual weapon. It's
just an identical sample on loan from the Sperryville store. We
can't take it to court.'

'But it fits your plaster casts.'

'Like a glove,' he said. He got up again and walked into his
lieutenant's office and took the casts off the desk. Carried them
back one in each hand and put them down on his own desk.
They were very similar to ours. There was a positive and
a negative, just like we had. Mrs Kramer's head had been a
lot smaller than Carbone's, in terms of diameter. Therefore
the crowbar had caught less of its circumference. Therefore the
impression of the fatal wound was a little shorter in length than
ours. But it was just as deep and ugly. Clark picked it up and
ran his fingertip through the trench.

"Very violent blow,' he said. 'We're looking for a tall guy,

strong, right-handed. You seen anyone like that?'

'Every time I look in the mirror,' I said.

The cast of the weapon itself was a little shorter than ours,
too. But other than that, it looked very much the same. Same
chalky section, pitted here and there with microscopic imperfections
in the plaster, but basically straight and smooth and
brutal.

'Can I see the actual crowbar?' I said.

'Sure,' Clark said. He leaned down and opened a drawer in his
desk. Left it open like a display and moved his chair to get out
of my way. I leaned forward and looked down and saw the same
curved black thing I had seen the previous morning. Same
shape, same contours, same colour, same size, same claws,
same octagonal section. Same gloss, same precision. It was
exactly identical in every way to the one we had left behind in
Fort Bird's mortuary office.

We drove ten miles to Sperryville. I looked through Clark's list
to find the hardware store's address. It was right there on the
fifth line, because it was close to Green Valley. But there was no
check mark against its phone number. There was a pencilled
note instead: No answer. I guessed the owner had been busy

250

with a glazier and an insurance company. I guessed Clark's
guys would have gotten around to making a second call
eventually, but they had been overtaken by the NCIC search.

Sperryville wasn't a big place, so we just cruised around
looking for the address. We found a bunch of stores on a short
strip and after driving it three times we found the right street
name on a green sign. It pointed us down what was basically a
narrow dead-end alley. We passed between the sides of two
clapboard structures and then the alley widened into a small
yard and we saw the hardware store facing us at the far end. It
was like a small one-storey barn, painted up to look more urban
than rural. It was a real morn-and-pop place. It had a family
name painted on an old sign. No indication that it was part of a
franchise. It was just an American small business, standing
alone, weathering the booms and busts from one generation to
the next.

But it was an excellent place for a dead-of-night burglary.
Quiet, isolated, invisible to passers-by on the main street, no
living accommodation on the second floor. In the front wall it
had a display window on the left set next to an entrance door on
the right, separated only by the width of the door frame. There
was a moon-shaped hole in the window glass, temporarily
backed by a sheet of unfinished plywood. The plywood had
been neatly trimmed to the right size. I figured the hole
had been punched through by the sole of a shoe. It was close to
the door. I figured a tall guy could put his left arm through the
hole up to the shoulder and get his hand around to the door
latch easily enough. But he would have had to reach all the way
in first and then bend his elbow slowly and deliberately, to
avoid snagging his clothes. I pictured him with his left cheek
against the cold glass, in the dark, breathing hard, groping
blindly.

We parked right in front of the store. Got out and spent a
minute looking in the window. It was full of items on display.
But whoever had put them there wasn't about to move on to
Saks Fifth Avenue anytime soon. Not for their famous holiday
windows. Because there was no art involved. No design. No
temptation. Everything was just lined up neatly on hand-built
shelves. Everything had a price tag. The window was saying:

251

This is what we've got. If you want it, come in and get it. But it all
looked like quality stuff. There were some strange items. I had
no idea what some of them were for. I didn't know much about
tools. I had never really used any, except knives. But it was
clear to me that this store chose what it carried pretty carefully.

We went in. There was a mechanical bell on the door that
rang as we entered. The plain neatness and organization we had
seen in the window was maintained inside. There were tidy
racks and shelves and bins. A wide-plank wooden floor. There
was a faint smell of machine oil. The place was quiet. No
customers. There was a guy behind the counter, maybe sixty
years old, maybe seventy. He was looking at us, alerted by the
bell. He was medium height and slender and a little stooped. He
wore round eyeglasses and a grey cardigan sweater. They made
him look intelligent, but they also made him look like he wasn't
accustomed to handling anything bigger than a small screwdriver.
They made him look like selling tools was a definite
second best to being at a university, teaching a course about

their design and their history and their development.

'May I help you?' he asked.

'We're here about the stolen wrecking bar,' I said. 'Or the

stolen crowbar, if that's what you prefer to call it.'

He nodded.

'Crowbar,' he said. 'Wrecking bar is a little uncouth, in my
opinion.'

'OK, we're here about the stolen crowbar,' I said.

He smiled, briefly. 'You're the army. Has martial law been
declared?'

'We have a parallel inquiry,' Summer said.

'Are you military police?'

'Yes,' Summer said. She told him our names and ranks. He
reciprocated with his own name, which matched the sign above
his door.

'We need some background,' I said. 'About the crowbar
market.'

He made a face like he was interested, but not very excited.
It was like asking a forensics guy about fingerprinting instead
of DNA. I got the impression that crowbar development had
slowed to a halt a long time ago.

252

'Where can I start?' he said.

'How many different sorts are there?'

'Dozens,' he said. 'There are at least six manufacturers that
I would consider dealing with myself. And plenty of others I
wouldn't.'

I looked around the store. 'Because you only carry quality
stuff.'

'Exactly,' he said. 'I can't compete with the big chains on price

alone. So I have to offer absolutely top quality and service.'
'Niche marketing,'! said.
He nodded again.

'Low-end crowbars would come from China,' he said. 'Mass
produced, cast iron, wrought iron, low-grade forged steel. I
wouldn't be interested.'

'So what do you carry?'

'I import a few titanium crowbars from Europe,' he said. 'Very
expensive, but very strong. More importantly, very light. They
were designed for police and firefighters. Or for underwater
work, where corrosion would otherwise be an issue. Or for
anyone else that needs something small and durable and easily
portable.'

'But it wasn't one of those that was stolen.'

The old guy shook his head. 'No, the titanium bars are
specialist items. The others I offer are slightly more mainstream.'

'And what are those?'

'This is a small store,' he said. 'I have to choose what I carry
very carefully. Which in some ways is a burden, but which
is also a delight, because choice is very liberating. These
decisions are mine, and mine alone. So obviously, for a crowbar,
I would choose high carbon chromium steel. Then the
question is, should it be single-tempered or double-tempered?
My honest preference would always be double-tempered, for
strength. And I would want the claws to be very slim, for utility,
and therefore case-hardened, for safety. That could be a lifesaver,
in some situations. Imagine a man on a high roof beam,
whose claw shattered. He'd fall off.'

'I guess he would,' I said. 'So, the right steel, double-tempered,
with the hard claws. What did you pick?'

253

'Well, actually I compromised with one of the items I carry.
My preferred manufacturer won't make anything shorter than

eighteen inches. But I needed a twelve-inch, obviously.'

I must have looked blank.

'For studs and joists,' the old guy said. 'If you're working
inside sixteen-inch centres, you can't use an eighteen-inch bar,
can you?'

'I guess not,' I said.

'So I take a twelve-inch with a half-inch section from one
source, even though it's only single-tempered. I think it's
satisfactory., though. In terms of strength. With only twelve
inches of leverage, the force a person generates isn't going to

overwhelm it.'

'OK,' I said.

'Apart from that particular item and the titanium specialties, I
order exclusively from a very old Pittsburgh company called
Fortis. They make two models for me. An eighteen-inch, and a
three-footer. Both of them are three-quarter-inch section. High
carbon double-tempered chromium steel, case-hardened claws,
very fine quality paint.'

'And it was the three-footer that was stolen,' I said.

He looked at me like I was clairvoyant.

'Detective Clark showed us the sample you lent him,' I said.
'I see,' he said.

'So, is the thirty-six-inch three-quarter-section Fortis a rare
item?'

He made a face, like he was a little disappointed.

'I sell one a year,' he said. 'Two, if I'm very lucky. They're
expensive. And appreciation for quality is declining shamefully.
Pearls before swine, I say.'

'Is that the same everywhere?'

'Eve .rywhere?' he repeated.

'In other stores. Regionally. With the Fortis crowbars.'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Perhaps I didn't make myself quite clear.
They're made for me. To my own design. To my own exact
specification. They're custom items.'

I stared at him. 'They're exclusive to this store?'
He nodded. 'The privilege of independence.'
'Literally exclusive?'

254

He nodded again. 'Unique in all the world.'
'When did you last sell one?'
'About nine months ago.'
'Does the paint wear off?'

'I know what you're asking,' he said. 'And the answer is yes,
of course. If you find one that looks new, it's the one that was
stolen on New Year's Eve.'

We borrowed an identical sample from him for comparative
purposes, the same way Detective Clark had. It was dewed
with machine oil and had tissue paper wrapped around the
centre shaft. We laid it like a trophy across the Chevy's back
seat. Then we ate in the car. Burgers, from a drive-through a

hundred yards north of the tool store.

'Tell me three new facts,' I said.

'One, Mrs Kramer and Carbone were killed by the same
individual weapon. Two, we're going to drive ourselves nuts

trying to find a connection between them.'
'And three?'
'I don't know.'

'Three, the bad guy knew Sperryville pretty well. Could you
have found that store in the dark, in a hurry, unless you knew
the town?'

We looked ahead through the windshield. The mouth of the
alley was just about visible. But then, we knew it was there. And
it was full daylight.

Summer closed her eyes.

'Focus on the weapon,' she said. 'Forget everything else.
Visualize it. The custom crowbar. Unique in all the world. It was
carried out of that alley, right there. Then it was in Green Valley
at two a.m. on January first. And then it was inside Fort Bird at
nine p.m. on the fourth. It went on a journey. We know where it
started, and we know where it finished. We don't know for sure
where it went in between, but we do know for certain it passed
one particular point along the way. It passed Fort Bird's main

gate. We don't know when, but we know for sure that it did.' She opened her eyes.

'We have to get back there,' she said. 'We have to look at the
logs again. The earliest it could have passed the gate is six a.m.

255

on January first, because Bird is four hours from Green Valley. The latest it could have passed the gate is, say, eight p.m. on
January fourth. That's an eighW-six-hour window. We need to
check the gate logs for everybody who entered during that
time. Because we know for sure that the crowbar came in, and

we know for sure that it didn't walk in by itself.'

I said nothing.

Tm sorry,' she said. 'There'll be a lot of names.'

The truant feeling was completely gone. We got back on the
road and headed east, looking for 1-95. We found it and we
turned south, towards Bird. Towards Willard on the phone.
Towards the angry Delta station. We slid back under the shelf
of grey cloud just before the North Carolina state line. The sky
went dark. Summer put the headlights on. We passed the State
Police building on the opposite shoulder. Passed the spot where
Kramer's briefcase had been found. Passed the rest area a
mile later. We merged with the east-west highway spur and
came off at the cloverleaf next to Kramer's motel. We left it
behind us and drove the thirty miles down to Fort Bird's gate.
The guard shack MPs signed us in at 1930 hours exactly. I told
them to copy their logs starting at 0600 hours January 1st and
ending at 2000 hours January 4th. I told them to have a Xerox
record of that eighty-six-hour slice of life delivered to my office
immediately.

My office was very quiet. The morning mayhem was long gone.
The sergeant with the baby son was back on duty. She looked
tired. I realized she didn't sleep much. She worked all night and
probably played with her kid all day. Tough life. She had coffee
going. I figured she was just as interested in it as I was. Maybe
more.

'Delta guys are restless,' she said. 'They know you arrested
the Bulgarian guy.'

'I didn't arrest him. I just asked him some questions.'

'That's a distinction they don't seem willing to make. People

have been in and out of here looking for you.'

vVere they armed?'

'They don't need to be armed. Not those guys. You should

256

have them confined to quarters. You could do that. You're
acting MP CO here.'

I shook my head. 'Anything else?'

'You need to call Colonel Willard before midnight, or he's
going to write you up as AWOL. He said that's a promise.'

I nodded. It was Willard's obvious next move. An AWOL
charge wouldn't reflect badly on a CO. Wouldn't make him look
like he had lost his grip. An AWOL charge was always on the
man who ran, fair and square.

'Anything else?' I said again.

'Sanchez wants a ten-sixteen,' she said. 'Down at Fort

Jackson. And your brother called again.'
'Any message?' I said.
'No message.'
'OK,' I said.

I went inside to my desk. Picked up my phone. Summer
stepped over to the map. Traced her fingers across the pins,
D.C. to Sperryville, Sperryville to Green Valley, Green Valley to

Fort Bird. I dialled Joe's number. He answered, second ring.
'I called Morn,' he said. 'She's still hanging in there.'

'She said soon, Joe. Doesn't mean we have to mount a daily
vigil.'

'Bound to be sooner than we think. And than we want.'
'How was she?'

'She sounded shaky.'

'You OK?'

'Not bad,' he said. 'You?'

'Not a great year so far.'

'You should call her next,' he said.
'I will,' I said. 'In a few days.'
'Do it tomorrow,' he said.

He hung up and I sat for a minute. Then I dabbed the cradle
to clear the line and asked my sergeant to get Sanchez for me.
Down at Jackson. I held the phone by my ear and waited.

Summer was looking right at me.

'A daily vigil?' she said.

'She's waiting for the plaster to come off,' I said: 'She doesn't
like it.'

Summer looked at me a little more and then turned back to

257

the map. I put the phone on speaker and laid the handset down
on the desk. There was a click on the line and we heard
Sanchez's voice.

'I've been hassling the Columbia PD about Brubaker's car,'
he said.

'Didn't they find it yet?' I said.

'No,' he said. 'And they weren't putting any effort into finding

it. Which was inconceivable to me. So I kept on hassling them.'
'And?'

'They dropped the other shoe.'

'Which is?'

'Brubaker wasn't killed in Columbia,' he said. 'He was dumped
there, is all.'

258

SEVENTEEN

ANCHEZ TOLD US THE COLUMBIA MEDICAL EXAMINERS HAD FOUND confused lividity patterns on Brubaker's body that in
their opinion meant he had been dead about three hours
before being tossed in the alley. Lividity is what happens to a
person's blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure
collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the
lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity.
It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin
liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later
the colour fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and
a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on
his front. But Brubaker's lividity was all over the place. The
Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then
kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley
on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of
the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point
where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs
of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his
front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of
his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.

259

'He was in the trunk of a car,' I said.

'Right over the muffler,' Sanchez said. 'Three-hour journey,
plenty of temperature.'

'This changes a lot of things.'

'It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia.'
'Or any witnesses,' I said. 'Or the shell cases or the bullets.'
'So what are we looking at?'

'Three hours in a car?' I said. 'At night, with empty roads?

Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius.'

'That's a pretty big circle,' Sanchez said.

'A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles,' I
said. 'Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What's the
Columbia PD doing about it?'

'Dropping it like a hot potato. It's an FBI case now.'

'What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?'

'They're a little sceptical. They figure heroin isn't our
bag. They figure we're more into marijuana and amphetamines.'

'I wish,' I said. 'I could use a little of both right now.'

'On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over.
Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from.
So they'll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don't get
anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to.'

'They're wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker
would die first.'

'They're thinking, maybe he did.'

His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the
handset back.

'It happened to the north, probably,' Summer said. 'Brubaker
started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere
up there.'

'Not our case,' I said.

'OK, the FBI should be looking.'

'I'm sure they already are.'

There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP
corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted
smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of
paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted
again.

26O

'Copies of the gate log, sir,' he said. 'First through fourth of
this month, times as requested.'

He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed
the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven
sheets in it. Not too bad.

'Let's go to work,' I said.

Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon
level meant a lot of leave had been cancelled. No real reason,
because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that
was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels
if they couldn't be raised up and dropped down, no point
in moving them at all if there weren't any associated consequences.
No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the
whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.

No point in cancelling leave without giving people something
to fill their time, either. So there were extra training sessions
and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and
started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost
everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year's Eve was
back on post and in the rack relatively early. They must have
straggled back around three or four or five in the morning,
because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.

Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were
looking at on New Year's Day totalled nineteen. Summer and I
were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D.C. after
the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves
off the list.

Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January 2nd
totalled sixteen. Twelve, on January 3rd. Seventeen, before 2000
hours on January 4th. Sixty-two names in total, during the
eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery
drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats.
They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters.
My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off,
because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted
the second and any subsequent entries in each case.

We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank
and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were

261

women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong
and right-handed.

'I'll work on the genders,' Summer said. 'I've still got the
basic strength lists. They have full names on them.'

I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the
pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right
away.

I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn't
want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked
outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up
inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club.
I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main
course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the
crowbar out of the back seat. He glanced at it. Led me inside.
He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his
office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and
lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his
desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue
paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly
identical.

'Are there wide variations?' the pathologist asked. 'With crow

bars?'

'More than you would think,' I said. 'I just had a big crowbar

lesson.'

'These two look the same.'

'They are the same. They're peas in a pod. Count on it.

They're custom made. They're unique in all the world.'
'Did you ever meet Carbone?' 5fery briefly,' I said.

'What was his posture like?'
'In what way?'
'Did he stoop?'

I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the

hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.

'He wasn't tall enough to stoop,' I said. 'He was a wiry guy,

solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet.

He looked athletic.'

'OK.'

262

'Why?'

'It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a
horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below
horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was
sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn't stooping.

But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.'
'You told us that already,' I said.

'No, I mean tall,' he said. 'I've been working on it. Mapping it

out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.'

'Like me,' I said.

'And as heavy as you, too. Not easy to break a skull as badly
as that.'

I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with
small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick
branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than
the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when
there really wasn't one.

'Six-four or six-five,' I said. 'Are you prepared to go to bat on
that?'

'In court?'

'It was a training accident,' I said. 'We're not going to court.
This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking

at people less than six feet four inches tall?'

The doctor breathed in, breathed out.

'Six-three,' he said. 'To be on the safe side. To allow a margin

for experimental error. I'd go to bat on six-three. Count on it.'
'OK,' I said.

He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up
again.

Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing
nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn't
taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and
accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.

'Thirty-three men,' she said. 'Twenty-three enlisted, ten
officers.'

'Who are they?'

'A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was

263

completely cancelled, but they had evening passes. Carbone

himself was in and out on the first, obviously.'

'We can cross him off.'

'OK, thirty-two men,' she said. 'The pathologist is one of
them.'

'We can take him out, too.'

'Thirty-one, then,' she said. 'And Vassell and Coomer are still
in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at
seven o'clock.'

'Take them out,' I said. 'They were eating dinner. Fish, and
steak.'

'Twenty-nine,' she said. 'Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.'

'OK,' I said. 'Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical
records.'

'Why?'

'To find out how tall they are.'

'Can't do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New
Year's Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won't
be here.'

'He wasn't here the night Carbone died,' I said. 'So you can
take him out too.'

'Twenty-eight,' she said.

'So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,' I said.

She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one

I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.

'We're making progress,' she said.

I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I
took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her
body. I savoured the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked
up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster
on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she
had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined
his dinner, too, as well as the pathologist's. But then, I hadn't
eaten anything yet myself.

'Yes, sir?' the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.

'I've got a question, chief,' I said. 'Something only you will
know.'

'Like what?'

'Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.'

264

The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The
Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and
twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows
the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest
half-ounce. It can't afford not to, literally. And it loves to show
off its specialized knowledge.

'No problem,' the guy said. 'Male adult population aged
twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half,
and one-seventy-eight. We're over-represented with Hispanics
by comparison with the nation as a whole which brings our
median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We
train pretty hard which brings our median weight up three
pounds to one-eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than
fat.'

'Those are this year's figures?'

'Last year's,' he said. 'This year is only a few days old.'
'What's the spread in height?'
'What are you looking for?'

'How many guys have we got six-three or better?'

'One in ten,' he said. 'In the army as a whole, maybe ninety
thousand. Call it a Superbowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe

a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.'

'OK, chief,' I said. 'Thanks.'

I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back
with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were
going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of
twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need
looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from
nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the
clock. Eight thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.

Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard.
Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and
Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty
eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a
marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty
pounds, and he was a padre.

Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post

265

bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called
people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There
was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big
steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook.
The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them
together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable
design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and
worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust
bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in
my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was
shaped on the corners. We couldn't put it together. Joe came in,
and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the
kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table
together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling
with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked
good at first, and then everything stalled and died.

'The crowbar didn't walk in by itself,' Summer said. 'One of
those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can't have

gotten here any other way.'

I said nothing.

'Want dinner?' she said.

'I think better when I'm hungry,' I said.

'We've run out of things to think about.'

I nodded. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together
and piled them neatly. Put Summer's original list of thirty-three
names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn't
bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus
the pathologist, because he wasn't a convincing suspect, and
because he was short, and because his practice swings with the
crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their
driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and
Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn't even
come at all.

'Why wasn't Marshall here?' I said.

Summer nodded. 'That's always bothered me. It's like Vassell

and Coomer had something to hide from him.'

'All they did was eat dinner.'

'But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer's funeral

266

with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive
them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay
home.'

I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans
at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky.
Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from
the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded
men with their chins ducked into their collars against
the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the
Mercury's rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He
must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then
gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver's seat.

'We should talk to him,' I said. 'Find out exactly what they
told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been
a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must
have felt a little excluded.'

I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her
to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII
Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get
back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the
map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of
Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn't been killed
there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east,
or west.

'Are you going to call Willard?' Summer asked me.
'Probably,' I said. 'Tomorrow, maybe.'
'Not before midnight?'

'I don't want to give him the satisfaction.'

'That's a risk.'

'I'm protected,' I said.

'Might not last for ever.'

'Doesn't matter. I'll have Delta Force coming after me soon.
That'll make everything else seem kind of academic.'

'Call Willard tonight,' she said. 'That would be my advice.'

I looked at her.

'As a friend,' she said. 'AWOL is a big deal. No point making

things worse.'

'OK,' I said.

'Do it now,' she said. 'Why not?'

267

'OK,' I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I
could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door.
She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United
States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely
terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been
flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the
fifth of January.

'Whose orders?' I asked her.
'General Vassell's,' she said.
'OK,' I said.

She closed the door.

'The fifth of January,' Summer said.

'The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,' I said.
'He knows something.'
'He wasn't even here.'

'Why else would they hide him away afterwards?'

'It's a coincidence.'

'You don't like coincidences.'

I nodded.

'OK,' I said. 'Let's go to Germany.'

268

EIGHTEEN

O WAY WAS WILLARD ABOUT TO AUTHORIZE ANY FOREIGN expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal's
office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the
company clerk's desk. I carried them back to my own office and
signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable
forgeries of Leon Garber's signature on the authorized by lines.

'We're breaking the law,' Summer said.

'This is the Battle of Kursk,' I said. 'We can't stop now.'

She hesitated.

'Your choice,' I said. 'In or out, no pressure from me.'

She said nothing.

'These vouchers won't come back for a month or two,' I said.
'By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We've got
nothing to lose.'

'OK,' she said.

'Go pack,' I said. i'hree days.'

She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next
in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the 0 Club dining room. The
one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would

269

be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I

picked up the phone and called Joe.

'I'm going to Germany,' I said.

'OK,' he said. 'Enjoy. Have a safe trip.'

'I can't go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way

back. You know, in the circumstances.'

He paused.

'No,' he said. 'I guess you can't.'

'Wouldn't be right not to,' I said. 'But she shouldn't think I
care more than you do. That wouldn't be right either. So you

should come over too.'

'When?'

'Take the overnight flight two days fl-om now. I'll meet you at
Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Then we'll go see her together.'

Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we
carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because
we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews
Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we
didn't want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in
the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of
course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth
rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other
cars heading our way.

I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and
the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles
and passed by Kramer's motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged
east to 1-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the
spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed
my eyes.

I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight.
We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel
vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that
was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited
in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches
and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The
military is always on the move. There are always people going
somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked.

270

Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and
uncomfortable.

The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff.
We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the
belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in
the centre bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs
to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps
doesn't have stewardesses and it doesn't brew in-flight coffee.

We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we
turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the
movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above
the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.

The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned
forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I
stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred
and I fell back to sleep. It wasn't comfortable, but one thing you
learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe
ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended
animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream
helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about
sixty per cent as good as being in bed.

We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our
initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message
from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward
lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All
around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer
had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a
cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get
messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like
she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned
to not knowing which.

We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for
the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust
howled, and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked
forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we
taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim
dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o'clock in the

271

afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the east coast, one
hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing
since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I
stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down
the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather
was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.

We were way out in the restricted military corner of
the Frankfurt airport. We took a personnel bus to the public
terminal. After that we were on our own. Some of the other guys
had transport waiting, but we didn't. We joined a bunch of
civilians in the taxi line. Shuffled up, one by one. When our turn
came we gave the driver a travel voucher and told him to drive
us east to XII Corps. He was happy enough to comply. He could
swap the voucher for hard currency at any U.S. post and I was
certain he would pick up a couple of XII Corps guys going out
into Frankfurt for a night on the town. No deadheading. No
empty running. He was making a living off of the U.S. Army,
just like plenty of Germans had for four and a half decades. He
was driving a Mercedes-Benz.

The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs.
They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast
tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new
neighbourhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes,
following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever
lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone I had seen the
pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been
smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence
would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And
under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a
trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and tea cups
and shells and rusted-out panzerfausts. Every time ground was
broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before
the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin,
surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles
of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.

The suburban streets were neat and clean. There were
discreet stores with apartments above them. The store windows
were full of shiny items. Street signs were black-on-white,

272

written in an archaic script that made them hard to read. There
were small U.S. Army road signs here and there, too. You
couldn't go very far without seeing one. We followed the XII
Corps arrows, getting closer all the time. We left the built-up
area and drove through a couple of kilometres of farmland. It
felt like a moat. Like insulation. The eastern sky ahead of us
was dark.

XII Corps was based in a typical glory-days installation. Some
Nazi industrialist had built a thousand-acre factory site out in
the fields, back in the 1930s. It had featured an impressive
home office building and ranks of low metal sheds stretching
hundreds of metres behind it. The sheds had been bombed to
twisted shards, over and over again. The home office building
had been only partially damaged. Some weary U.S. Army
armoured division had set up camp in it in 1945. Thin Frankfurt
women in headscarves and faded print dresses had been
brought in to pile the rubble, in exchange for food. They
worked with wheelbarrows and shovels. Then the Army Corps
of Engineers had fixed up the office building and bulldozed
the piles of rubble away. Successive huge waves of Pentagon
spending had rolled in. By 1953 the place was a flagship
installation. There was cleaned brick and shining white paint
and a strong perimeter fence. There were flagpoles and sentry
boxes and guard shacks. There were mess halls and a medical
clinic and a PX. There were barracks and workshops and warehouses.
Above all there was a thousand acres of flat land and by
1953 it was covered with American tanks. They were all lined
up, facing east, ready to roll out and fight for the Fulda Gap.

When we got there thirty-seven years later it was too dark to
see much. But I knew that nothing fundamental would have
changed. The tanks would be different, but that would be all.
The M4 Shermans that had won World War 2 were long gone,
except for two fine examples standing preserved outside the
main gate, one on each side, like symbols. They were placed
halfway up landscaped concrete ramps, noses high, tails low,
like they were still in motion, breasting a rise. They were lit up
theatrically. They were beautifully painted, glossy green, with
bright white stars on their sides. They looked much better than
they had originally. Behind them was a long driveway with

273

white-painted kerbs and the floodlit front of the office building,
which was now the post headquarters. Behind that would be the
tank lagers, with MIA1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up
shoulder-to-shoulder, hundreds of them, at nearly four million
bucks a piece.

We got out of the taxi and crossed the sidewalk and headed
for the main gate guard shack. My special unit badge got us
past it. It would get us past any U.S. Army checkpoint anywhere
except the inner ring of the Pentagon. We carried our bags
down the driveway.

'Been here before?' Summer asked me.

I shook my head as I walked.

'I've been in Heidelberg with the infantry,' I said. 'Many
times.'

'Is that near?'

'Not far,' I said.

There were broad stone steps leading up to the doors. The
whole place looked like a capitol building in some small state
back home. It was immaculately maintained. We went up the
steps and inside. There was a soldier at a desk just behind the
doors. Not an MP. Just a XII Corps office grunt. We showed
him our IDs.

'Your VOQ got space for us?' I asked.

'Sir, no problem,' he said.

'Two rooms,' I said. 'One night.'

'I'll call ahead,' he said. 'Just follow the signs.'

He pointed to the back of the hallway. There were more
doors there that would lead out into the complex. I checked my
watch. It said noon exactly. It was still set to East Coast time.
Six in the evening, in West Germany. Already dark.

'I need to see your MP XO,' I said. 'Is he still in his office?'

The guy used his phone and got an answer. Pointed us up a

broad staircase to the second floor.

'On your right,' he said.

We went up the stairs and turned right. There was a long
corridor with offices on both sides. They had hardwood doors
with reeded glass windows. We found the one we wanted and
went in. It was an outer chamber with a sergeant in it. It was
pretty much identical to the one back at Bird. Same paint, same

274

floor, same furniture, same temperature, same smell. Same
coffee, in the same standard-issue machine. The sergeant was
like plenty I had seen before, too. Calm, efficient, stoic, ready to
believe he ran the place all by himself, which he probably did.
He was behind his desk and he looked up at us as we came in.

Spent half a second deciding who we were and what we wanted.
'I guess you need the major,' he said.

I nodded. He picked up his phone and buzzed through to the
inner office.

'Go straight through,' he said.

We went in through the inner door and I saw a desk with a
guy called Swan behind it. I knew Swan pretty well. Last time I
had seen him was in the Philippines, three months earlier,
when he was starting a tour of duty that was scheduled to last a
year.

'Don't tell me,' I said. 'You got here December twenty-ninth.'

'Froze my ass off,' he said. 'All I had was Pacific gear. Took
X!I Corps three days to find me a winter uniform.'

I wasn't surprised. Swan was short, and wide. Almost cubic.
He probably owned a percentile all his own, on the quartermasters'
charts.

'Your Provost Marshal here?'! said.

He shook his head. 'Temporarily reassigned.'
'Garber signed your orders?'
'Allegedly.'
'Figured it out yet?'
'Not even close.' The either,' I said.

He shrugged, like he was saying, hey, the army, what can you
do?

'This is Lieutenant Summer,' I said.
'Special unit?' Swan said.
Summer shook her head.
'But she's cool,' I said.

Swan stretched a short arm over his desk and they shook
hands.

'I need to see a guy called Marshall,' I said. 'A major. Some
kind of a XII Corps staffer.'

'Is he in trouble?'

275

'Someone is. I'm hoping Marshall will help me figure out
who. You know him?'

'Never heard of him,' Swan said. 'I only just got here.'

'I know,' I said. 'December twenty-ninth.'

He smiled and gave me the what can you do shrug again and
picked up his phone. I heard him ask his sergeant to find
Marshall and tell him I wanted to see him at his convenience.
I looked around while we waited for the response. Swan's office
looked borrowed and temporary, just like mine did back in
North Carolina. It had the same kind of clock on the wall.

Electric, no second hand. No tick. It said ten minutes past six.
'Anything happening here?' I said.

'Not much,' Swan said. 'Some helicopter guy went shopping
in Heidelberg and got run over. And Kramer died, of course.

That's shaken things up some.'
'Who's next in line?'
'Vassell, I guess.'

'I met him,' I said. 'Wasn't impressed.'

'It's a poisoned chalice. Things are changing. You should
hear these guys talk. They're real gloomy.'

'The status quo is not an option,' I said. 'That's what I'm
hearing.'

His phone rang. He listened for a minute and put it down.

'Marshall's not on post,' he said. 'He's out on a night exercise

in the countryside. Back in the morning.'

Summer glanced at me. I shrugged.

'Have dinner with me,' Swan said. 'I'm lonely here with all
these cavalry types. The O Club in an hour?'

We carried our bags over to the Visiting Officers' Quarters and
found our rooms. Mine looked pretty much the same as the one
Kramer had died in, except it was cleaner. It was a standard
American motel layout. Presumably some hotel chain had bid
for the government contract, way back when. Then they had
air-freighted all the fixtures and fittings, right down to the sinks
and the towel rails and the toilet bowls.

I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs.
Knocked on Summer's door fifty-five minutes into Swan's hour.
She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the

276

room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a
woman's. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.

We found the O Club without any trouble. It occupied half of
one of the ground-floor wings of the main building. It was a
grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster mouldings.
There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found
Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was
wearing Class As with a combat infantryman's badge on the
coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His name
plate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling
he was going to join us for dinner. He told us he was a liaison
officer, working on behalf of the infantry. He told us there was
an Armored guy down in Heidelberg, doing the same job in
reverse.

'Been here long?' I asked him.

'Two years,' he said, which I was glad about. I needed some
background, and Swan didn't have it any more than I knew
anything about Fort Bird. Then I realized it was no accident
that Simon was joining the party. Swan must have figured out
what I wanted and set about providing it without being asked.
Swan was that kind of a guy.

'Pleased to meet you, colonel,' I said, and then I nodded to
Swan, like I was saying thanks. We drank cold American beers
from tall frosted glasses and then we went through to the
dining room. Swan had made a reservation. The steward put us
at a table in the corner. I sat where I could watch the whole
room at once. I didn't see anyone I knew. Vassell wasn't around.
Nor was Coomer.

The menu was absolutely standard. We could have been in
any O Club in the world. O Clubs aren't there to introduce you
to local cuisine. They're there to make you feel at home, somewhere
deep inside the army's own interpretation of America.
There was a choice of fish or steak. The fish was probably
European, but the steak would have been flown in across the
Atlantic. Some politician in one of the ranch states would have
leveraged a sweet deal with the Pentagon.

We small-talked for a spell. We bitched about pay and
benefits. Talked about people we knew. We mentioned Just
Cause in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Simon told us he had

277

been to Berlin two days previously and had gotten himself a
chip of concrete from the Wall. Told us he planned to have it
encased in a plastic cube. Planned to hand it on down the
generations, like an heirloom.

'Do you know Major Marshall?' I asked him.

'Fairly well,' he said.

'Who is he exactly?' I asked.
'Is this official?'
'Not really,' I said.

'He's a planner. A strategist, basically. Long-term kind of guy.
General Kramer seemed to like him. Always kept him close by,
made him his intelligence officer.'

'Does he have an intelligence background?'

'Not formally. But he'll have done rotations, I'm sure.'

'So is he a part of the inner team? I heard Kramer and Vassell
and Coomer mentioned all in the same breath, but not
Marshall.'

'He's on the team,' Simon said. 'That's for sure. But you know
what flag officers are like. They need a guy, but they aren't
about to admit it. So they abuse him a little. He fetches and
carries and drives them around, but when push comes to shove
they ask his opinion.'

'Is he going to move up now Kramer's gone? Maybe into
Coomer's slot?'

Simon made a face. 'He should. He's an Armor fanatic to the
core, like the rest of them. But nobody really knows what
the hell is going to happen. Kramer dying couldn't have come at
a worse time for them.'

'The world is changing,' I said.

'And what a world it was,' Simon said. 'Kramer's world,
basically, beginning to end. He graduated the Point in 'fifty-two,
and places like this one were all buttoned up by 'fifty-three, and
they've been the centre of the universe for almost forty years.
These places are so dug in, you wouldn't believe it. You know

who has done the most in this country?'

'Who?'

'Not Armored. Not the infantry. This theatre is all about the
Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman tanks way back weighed
thirty-eight tons and were nine feet wide. Now we're all the way

278

up to the M1A1 Abrams, which weighs seventy tons and is
eleven feet wide. Every step of the way for forty years the Corps
of Engineers has had work to do. They've widened roads,
hundreds of miles of them, all over West Germany. They've
strengthened bridges. Hell, they've built roads and bridges.
Dozens of them. You want a stream of seventy-ton tanks rolling
east to battle, you better make damn sure the roads and bridges
can take it.'

'OK,' I said.

'Billions of dollars,' Simon said. 'And of course, they knew
which roads and bridges to look at. They knew where we were
starting, and they knew where we were going. They talked
to the war garners, they looked at the maps, and they got
busy with the concrete and the rebar. Then they built way
stations everywhere we needed them. Permanent hardened fuel
stores, ammunition dumps, repair shops, hundreds of them, all
along strictly predetermined routes. So we're embedded here,
literally. We're dug in, literally. The Cold War battlefields are
literally set in stone, Reacher.'

'People are going to say we invested and we won.'

Simon nodded. 'And they'd be correct. But what comes next?'
'More investment,' I said.

'Exactly,' he said. 'Like in the navy, when the big battleships
were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the
beginning of the next. The Abrams tanks are like battleships.
They're magnificent, but they're out of date. About the only way
we can use them is down custom-built roads in directions we've
already planned to go.'

'They're mobile,' Summer said. 'Like any tank.'

'Not very mobile,' Simon said. 'Where is the next fight going
to be?'

I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the
geopolitical stuff.

'The Middle East?' I said. 'Iran or Iraq, maybe. They've both
gotten their breath back, they'll be looking for the next thing to
do.'

'Or the Balkans,' Swan said. 'When the Soviets finally
collapse, there's a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for
the lid to come off.'

279

'OK,' Simon said. 'Look at the Balkans, for instance.
Yugoslavia, maybe. That'll be the first place anything happens,
for sure. Right now they're just waiting for the starting gun.
What do we do?'

'Send in the airborne,' Swan said.

'OK,' Simon said again. 'We send in the 82nd and the 101st.
Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a
week. But what do we do after we get there? We're speed
bumps, that's all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy
units. And that's the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs
seventy tons. Can't airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put
it on a ship. And that's the good news. Because you don't
just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four
tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half
mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition,
huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like
moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to
make a worthwhile difference, you're looking at a six-month
build-up, minimum, and that's working right around the clock.'

'During which time the airborne troops are deep in the shit,' I
said.

'Tell me about it,' Simon said. 'And those are my boys, and I
worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of
foreign armour, we'd get slaughtered. It would be a very, very
anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens
when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is
they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks
later. Roads aren't wide enough, bridges aren't strong enough,
they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in
the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the
distance.'

Nobody spoke.

'Or take the Middle East,' Simon said. 'We all know Iraq
wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it's an
easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the
same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it's a little
hotter and dustier. The war plans we've got will work out just
fine. But do we even get that far? We've got the infantry sitting
there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who

280

says the Iraqis won't roll right over them in the first two
weeks?'

'Air power,' Summer said. 'Attack helicopters.'

'I wish,' Simon said. 'Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell,
but they don't win anything on their own. Never have, never
will. Boots on the ground is what wins things.'

I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman's standard

issue pride. But part of it was true, too.

'So what's going to happen?' I asked.

'Same thing as happened with the navy in 1941,' Simon
said. 'Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the
new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to
understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy
units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split.
We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armoured
vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in
the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight
smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds
of dinosaurs.'

Then he smiled.

'Basically we'll have to put the infantry in charge,' he said.

'You ever talk to people like Marshall about this kind of
stuff?'

'Their planners? No way.'

'What do they think about the future?'

'I have no idea. And I don't care. The future belongs to the
infantry.'

Dessert was apple pie, and then we had coffee. It was the usual
excellent brew. We slid back from the future into present-day
small talk. The stewards moved around, silently. Just another
evening, in an Officers' Club four thousand miles from the last
one.

'Marshall will be back at dawn,' Swan told me. 'Look for a
scout car at the rear of the first incoming column.'

I nodded. Figured dawn in January in Frankfurt would be
about 0700 hours. I set my mental alarm for six. Lieutenant
Colonel Simon said goodnight and wandered off. Summer
pushed her chair back and sprawled in it, as much as a tiny

281

person can sprawl. Swan sat forward with his elbows on the
table.

'You think they get much dope on this post?' I asked him.
'You want some?' he said.

'Brown heroin,' I said. 'Not for my personal use.'

Swan nodded. 'Guys here say there are Turkish guest
workers in Germany who could get you some. One of the speed
dealers could supply it, I'm sure.'

'You ever met a guy called Willard?' I asked him.

'The new boss?' he said. 'I got the memo. Never met him. But
some of the guys here know him. He was an intelligence wonk,
something to do with Armor.'

'He wrote algorithms,' I said.

'For what?'

'Soviet T-80 fuel consumption, I think. Told us what kind of
training they were doing.'

'And now he's running the 110th?'

I nodded.

'I know,' I said. 'Bizarre.'
'How did he do that?'
'Obviously someone liked him.'

'We should find out who. Start sending hate mail.'

I nodded again. Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds
of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?

'I'm going to bed,' I said.

My VOQ room was so generic I lost track of where I was within
a minute of closing my door. I hung my uniform in the closet
and washed up and crawled between the sheets. They smelled
of the same detergent the army uses everywhere. I thought of
my mother in Paris and Joe in D.C. My mother was already in
bed, probably. Joe would still be working, at whatever it was he
did. I said six a. rn. to myself and closed my eyes.

Dawn broke at 0650 by which time I was standing next to
Summer at XII Corps' east road gate. We had mugs of coffee in
our hands. The ground was frozen and there was mist in the air.
The sky was grey and the landscape was a shade of pastel

282

green. It was low and undulating and unexciting, like a lot of
Europe. There were stands of small neat trees here and there.
Dormant winter earth, giving off cold organic smells. It was
very quiet.

The road ran through the gate and then turned and headed
east and a little north, into the fog, towards Russia. It was wide
and straight, made from reinforced concrete. The kerb stones
were nicked here and there by tank tracks. Big wedge-shaped
chunks had been knocked out of them. A tank is a difficult
thing to steer.

We waited. Still quiet.

Then we heard them.

What is the twentieth century's signature sound? You could
have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an
aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across
an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low
overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a
helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of
bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They're
all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard
before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might
lobby for a Beatles' song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading
under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for
that choice. But a song and screaming could never qualify.
Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time.
They weren't invented after 1900.

No, the twentieth century's signature sound is the squeal and
clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in
Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was
heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It's
a brutal sound. It's the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive
overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote,
impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the
very noise they make tells you they can't be stopped. It tells you
you're weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track
stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around
and lurches straight towards you, roaring and squealing. That's
the real twentieth-century sound.

We heard the XII Corps Abrams column a long time before

283

we saw it. The noise came at us through the fog. We heard the
tracks, and the whine of the turbines. We heard the grind of
the drive gear and felt fast pattering bass shudders through the
soles of our feet as each new tread plate came off the cogs and
thumped down into position. We heard grit and stone crushed
under their weight.

Then we saw them. The lead tank loomed at us through
the mist. It was moving fast, pitching a little, staying flat, its
engine roaring. Behind it was another, and another. They
were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a
magnificent sight. The MIA1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to
a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the
jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it. It
is wrapped in armour made out of a depleted uranium core
sandwiched between rolled steel plate. The armour is dense and
impregnable. Battlefield shells and rockets and kinetic devices
bounce right off it. But its main trick is to stand off so far that
no battlefield shell or rocket or kinetic device can even reach it.
It sits there and watches enemy rounds fall short in the dirt.
Then it traverses its mighty gun and fires and a second later
and a mile and a half in the distance its assailant blows up and
burns. It is the ultimate unfair advantage.

The lead tank rolled past us. Eleven feet wide, twenty-six
feet long, nine and a half feet tall. Seventy tons. Its engine
bellowed and its weight shook the ground. Its tracks squealed
and clattered and slid on the concrete. Then the second tank
rolled by. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The noise
was deafening. The huge bulk of exotic metal buffeted the air.
The gun barrels dipped and swayed and bounced. Exhaust
fumes swirled all around.

There were altogether twenty tanks in the formation. They
drove in through the gate and their noise and vibration faded
behind us and then there was a short gap and a scout car came
out of the mist straight towards us. It was a shoot-and-scoot
Humvee armed with a TOW-2 anti-tank missile launcher. Two
guys in it. I stepped into its path and raised my hand. Paused. I
didn't know Marshall and I had only ever seen him once, in the
dark interior of the Grand Marquis outside Fort Bird's post
headquarters. But even so I was pretty sure that neither of the

284

guys in the Humvee was him. I remembered Marshall as large
and dark and these guys were small, which is much more usual
for Armored people. One thing there isn't a lot of inside an
Abrams is room.

The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked
around to the driver's window. Summer took up station on the
passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down.
Stared out at me.

'I'm looking for Major Marshall,' I said.

The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain,
too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with
balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The
passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards
strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes.
Some kind of score sheets.

'Marshall's not here,' the driver said.
'So where is he?'
'Who's asking?'

'You can read,' I said. I was wearing last night's BDUs. They

had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.
'Unit?' the guy said.

'You don't want to know.'

'Marshall went to California,' he said. 'Emergency deploy

ment to Fort Irwin.'

'When?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Try to be.'

'Last night sometime.'
'That's not very specific.'
'I'm honestly not sure.'

'What kind of an emergency have they got at Irwin?'
'I'm not sure about that, either.'
I nodded. Stepped back.
'Drive on,'I said.

Their Humvee moved out from the space between us and
Summer joined me in the middle of the road. The air smelled of
diesel and gas turbine exhaust and the concrete was scored
fresh white by the passage of the tank tracks.

'Wasted trip,' Summer said.

285

'Maybe not,' I said. 'Depends exactly when Marshall left. If it
was after Swan's phone call, that tells us something.'

We were shunted between three different offices, trying to find
out exactly what time Marshall left XI! Corps. We ended up in a
second-storey suite that housed General Vassell's operation.
Vassell himself wasn't there. We spoke to yet another captain.
He seemed to be in charge of an administrative company.

'Major Marshall took a civilian flight at 2300,' he said.
'Frankfurt to Dulles. Seven-hour layover and on to LAX from

National. I issued the vouchers myself.'

'When?'

'As he was leaving.'

'Which was when?'

'He left here three hours before his flight.'

'Eight o'clock?'

The captain nodded. 'On the dot.'

'I was told he was scheduled for night manoeuvres.'
'He was. That plan changed.'
"Why?'

'I'm not sure.'

I'm not sure seemed to be XII Corps' standard-issue answer
for everything.

'What's the panic at Irwin?' I said.

'I'm not sure.'

I smiled, briefly. 'When were Marshall's orders issued?'
'At seven o'clock.'
'Written?'
'Verbal.'
'By?'

'General Vassell.'

'Did Vassell countersign the travel vouchers himself?'
The captain nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'He did.'

'I need to speak to him,' I said.
'He went to London.'
'London?' I said.

'For a short-notice meeting with the British Ministry of
Defence.'

286

'When did he leave?'

'He travelled to the airport with Major Marshall.'

'Where's Colonel Coomer?'

'Berlin,' the guy said. 'Souvenir hunting.'

'Don't tell me,' I said. 'He went to the airport with Vassell and
Marshall.'

'No,' the captain said. 'He took the train.'

'Terrific,' I said.

Summer and I went to the O Club for breakfast. We got the
same corner table we had used the night before. We sat side by
side, backs to the wall, watching the room.

'OK,' I said. 'Swan's office called for Marshall's whereabouts
at 1810 and fifty minutes later he had orders for Irwin. An hour
after that he was off the post.'

'And Vassell lit out for London,' Summer said. 'And Coomer
jumped on a train for Berlin.'

'A night train,' I said. 'Who goes on a night train just for the
fun of it?'

'Everybody's got something to hide,' she said.
'Except me and my monkey.'
'What?'

'The Beatles,' I said. 'One of the sounds of the century.'
She just looked at me.

'What are they hiding?' she said.

'You tell me.'

She put her hands on the table, palms down. Took a breath.
'I can see part of it,' she said. The too.'

'The agenda,' she said. 'It was the other side of the coin from
what Colonel Simon was talking about last night. Simon was
salivating about the infantry taking Armored down a peg or two.
Kramer must have seen all of that coming. Two-star generals
aren't stupid. So the Irwin conference on New Year's Day was
about fighting the opposite corner. It was about resistance, I

guess. They don't want to give up what they've got.'

'Hell of a thing to give up,' I said.

'Believe it,' she said. 'Like battleship captains, way back.'
'So what was in the agenda?'

287

'Part defence, part offence,' she said. 'That's the obvious way
to do it. Arguments against integrated units, ridicule of lightweight
armoured vehicles, advocacy for their own specialized
expertise.'

'I agree,' I said. 'But it's not enough. The Pentagon is going to
be neck-deep in position papers full of shit like that, starting any
day now. For, against, if, but and however, we're going to be
bored to death with it. But there was something else in that
agenda that made them totally desperate to get Kramer's copy

back. What was it?'
'I don't know.' The either,' I said.

'And why did they run last night?' Summer said. 'By now they
must have destroyed Kramer's copy and every other copy. So
they could have lied through their teeth about what was in it, to
put your mind at rest. They could even have given you a phony
document. They could have said, here you go, this was it, check
it out.'

'They ran because of Mrs Kramer,' I said.

She nodded. 'I still think Vassell and Coomer killed her.
Kramer croaks, the ball is in their court, in the circumstances
they know it's their responsibility to go out and round up all the
loose paperwork. Mrs Kramer goes down as collateral damage.'

'That would make perfect sense,' I said. 'Except that neither
one of them looked particularly tall and strong to me.'

'They're both a lot taller and stronger than Mrs Kramer was.
Plus, you know, heat of the moment, pumped up with panic, we
could be seeing ambiguous forensic results. And we don't know
how good the Green Valley people are anyway. Could be some
family doctor doing a two-year term as coroner, and what the
hell would he know?'

'Maybe,' I said. 'But I still don't see how it can have
happened. Take out the drive time from D.C., take out ten
minutes to find that store and steal the crowbar, they had
ten minutes to react. And they didn't have a car, and they didn't
call for one.'

'They could have taken a taxi. Or a town car. Direct from the
hotel lobby. And we'd never trace it. New Year's Eve, it was
the busiest night of the year.'

288

'It would have been a long ride,' I said. 'Big fare. It might
stand out in some driver's memory.'

'New Year's Eve,' she said again. 'D.C. taxis and town cars
are all over three states. All kinds of weird destinations. It's a
possibility.'

'I don't think so,' I said. 'You don't take a taxi on a trip where
you break into a hardware store and a house.'

'No reason for the driver to have seen anything. Vassell or
Coomer or both could have walked into that alley in Sperryville
on foot. Come back five minutes later with the crowbar under
their coat. Same thing with Mrs Kramer's house. The cab could
have stopped on the driveway. All the action was around the
back.'

'Too big of a risk. A D.C. cab driver reads the papers same as
anyone else. Maybe more than anyone else, with all that traffic.
He sees the story from Green Valley, he remembers his two passengers.'

'They didn't see it as a risk. They weren't anticipating a story.
Because they thought Mrs Kramer wasn't going to be home.
They thought she would be at the hospital. And they figured no
way would a couple of trivial burglaries in Sperryville and
Green Valley make it into the D.C. papers.'

I nodded. Thought back to something Detective Clark had
said, days ago. I had people up and down the street, canvassing.
There were some cars around.

'Maybe,' I said. 'Maybe we should check taxis.'

Vorst night of the year,' Summer said. 'Like for alibis.'

'It would be a hell of a thing,' I said. 'Wouldn't it? Taking a

cab to do a thing like that?'

'Nerves of steel.'

'If they've got nerves of steel, why did they run away last
night?'

She was quiet for a moment.

'That really doesn't make any sense,' she said. 'Because they
can't run for ever. They must know that. They must know that
sooner or later they're going to have to turn around and bite
back.'

'I agree. And they should have done it right here. Right now.
This is their turf. I don't understand why they didn't.'

289

'It will be a hell of a bite. Their whole professional lives are on

the line. You should be very careful.'
'You too,' I said. 'Not just me.'
'Offence is the best defence.'
'Agreed,' I said.

'So are we going after them?'
'You bet your ass.'
'Which one first?'

'Marshall,' I said. 'He's the one I want.'

'Why?'

'Rule of thumb,' I said. 'Chase the one they sent furthest

away, because they see him as the weakest link.'
'Now?' she said.
I shook my head.

'We're going to Paris next,' I said. 'I have to see my morn.'

290

NINETEEN

E REPACKED OUR BAGS AND MOVED OUT OF OUR VOQ rooms and paid a final courtesy visit to Swan in his
office. He had some news for us.
'I'm supposed to arrest you both,' he said.
'Why?' I said.

'You're AWOL. Willard put a hit out on you.'

'What, worldwide?'

Swan shook his head. q'his post only. They found your car at
Andrews and Willard talked to Transportation Corps. So he
knew you were headed here.'

'When did you get the telex?'

'An hour ago.'

'When did we leave here?'
'An hour before that.'
'Where did we go?'

'No idea. You didn't say. I assumed you were returning to
base.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'Better not tell me where you're really going.'
'Paris,' I said. 'Personal time.'
'What's going on?'

291

'I wish I knew.'

'You want me to call you a cab?'

'That would be great.'

Ten minutes later we were in another Mercedes-Benz, heading
back the way we had come.

We had a choice of Lufthansa or Air France from Frankfurt
am-Main to Paris. I chose Air France. I figured their coffee
would be better, and I figured if Willard got around to checking
civilian carriers he would hit on Lufthansa first. I figured he was
that kind of a simpleton.

We swapped two more of the forged travel vouchers for two
seats in coach on the ten o'clock flight. Waited in the gate
lounge. We were in BDUs, but we didn't really stand out. There
were American military uniforms all over the airport. I saw
some XII Corps MPs, prowling in pairs. But I wasn't worried. I
figured they were on routine co-operation with the civilian
cops. They weren't looking for us. I had the feeling that
Willard's telex was going to stay on Swan's desk for an hour or twO.

We boarded on time and stuffed our bags in the overhead.
Buckled up and settled in. There were a dozen military on the
plane with us. Paris always was a popular R&R destination for
people stationed in Germany. The weather was still misty. But it
wasn't bad enough to delay us any. We took off on time and
climbed over the grey city and struck out south and west across
pastel fields and huge tracts of forest. Then we climbed through
the cloud into the sun and we couldn't see the ground any
more.

It was a short flight. We started our descent during my second
cup of coffee. Summer was drinking juice. She looked nervous.
Part excited, and part worried. I figured she had never been to
Paris before. And I figured she had never been AWOL before,
either. I could see it was weighing on her. Truth is it was
weighing on me a little, too. It was a complicating factor. I could
have done without it. But I wasn't surprised to be hit with it. It
had always been the obvious next step for Willard to take. Now I figured we were going to be chased around the world by

292

BOLO messages. Be on the lookout for. Or else we were going
to have a generalized all-points bulletin dumped on us.

We landed at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and were off the plane
and in the jetway by eleven thirty in the morning. The airport
was crowded. The taxi line was a zoo, just like it had been when
Joe and I arrived the last time. So we gave up on it and walked
to the navette station. Waited in line and climbed into the little
bus. It was packed and uncomfortable. But Paris was warmer
than Frankfurt had been. There was a watery sun out and I

knew the city was going to look spectacular.
'Been here before?' I said.
'Never,' Summer said.

'Don't look at the first twenty klicks,' I said. 'Wait until we're

inside the Pariphrique.'

'What's that?'

'Like a ring road. Like the Beltway. That's where the good
part starts.'

'Your morn live inside it?'

I nodded. 'On one of the nicest avenues in town. Where all

the embassies are. Near the Eiffel Tower.'

'Are we going straight there?'

'Tomorrow,' I said. 'We're going to be tourists first.'

'Why?'

'I have to wait until my brother gets in. I can't go on my own.
We have to go together.'

She said nothing to that. Just glanced at me. The bus started
up and pulled away from the kerb. She watched out the window
the whole way. I could see by the reflection of her face in the
glass that she agreed with me. Inside the Priph(}rique was
better.

We got out at the Place de l'Opra and stood on the sidewalk
and let the rest of the passengers swarm ahead of us. I figured
we should choose a hotel and dump our bags before we did
anything else.

We walked south on the Rue de la Paix, through the Place
Vend6me, down to the Tuileries. Then we turned right and walked straight up the Champs Elysees. There might have been
better places to walk with a pretty woman on a lazy day under a

293

watery winter sun, but right then I couldn't readily recall any.
We made a left onto the Rue Marbeuf and came out on the

Avenue George V just about opposite the George V hotel.

'OK for you?' I said.

'Will they let us in?' Summer asked.

'Only one way to find out.'

We crossed the street and a guy in a top hat opened the door
for us. The girl at the desk had a bunch of little flags on her
lapel, one for each language she spoke. I used French, which
pleased her. I gave her two vouchers and asked for two rooms.
She didn't hesitate. She went right ahead and gave us keys just
like I had paid with gold bullion, or a credit card. The George V
was one of those places. There was nothing they hadn't seen
before. Or if there was, they weren't about to admit it to anyone.

The rooms the multilingual girl gave us both faced south and
both had a partial view of the Eiffel Tower. One was decorated
in shades of pale blue and had a sitting area and a bathroom the
size of a tennis court. The other was three doors down the hall.
It was done in parchment yellow and it had an iron Juliet
balcony.

'Your choice,' I said.

'I'll take the one with the balcony,' she said.

We dumped our bags and washed up and met in the lobby
fifteen minutes later. I was ready for lunch, but Summer had
other ideas.

'I want to buy clothes,' she said. 'Tourists don't wear BDUs.'
'This one does,' I said.

'So break out,' she said. 'Live a little. Where should we go?'

I shrugged. You couldn't walk twenty yards in Paris without
falling over at least three clothes stores. But most of them

wanted a month's pay for a single garment.
'We could try Bon March6,' I said.
'What's that?'

'Department store,' I said. 'It means cheap, literally.'
'A department store called Cheap?'
'My kind of place,' I said.
'Anywhere else?'

'Samaritaine,' I said. 'On the river, at the Pont Neuf. There's a
terrace at the top with a view.'

294

'Let's go there.'

It was a long walk along the river, all the way to the tip of the

The de la Cit. It took us an hour, because we kept stopping to
look at things. We passed the Louvre. We browsed the little
green stalls set up on the river wall.

'What does Pont Neuf mean?' Summer asked me.

'New Bridge,' I said.

She looked ahead at the ancient stone structure.
'It's the oldest bridge in Paris,' I said.
'So why do they call it new?'
'Because it was new once.'

We stepped into the warmth of the store. Like all such places
the cosmetics came first and filled the air with scent. Summer
led me up one floor to the women's clothes. I sat in a comfortable
chair and let her look around. She was gone for a good half
hour. She came back wearing a complete new outfit. Black
shoes, a black pencil skirt, a grey-and-white Breton sweater,
a grey wool jacket. And a beret. She looked like a million
dollars. Her BDUs and her boots were in a Samaritaine bag in
her hand.

'You next,' she said. She took me up to the men's department.
The only pants they had with 95-centimetre inseams were
Algerian knock-offs of American blue jeans, so that set the tone.
I bought a light blue sweatshirt and a black cotton bomber
jacket. I kept my army boots on. They looked OK with the jeans
and they matched the jacket.

'Buy a beret,' Summer said, so I bought a beret. It was black
with a leather binding. I paid for the whole lot with American
dollars at a pretty good rate of exchange. I dressed in the
changing cubicle. Put my camouflage gear in the carrier bag.
Checked the mirror and adjusted the beret to a rakish angle
and stepped out.

Summer said nothing.

'Lunch now,' I said.

We went up to the ninth-floor caf. It was too cold to sit out
on the terrace, but we sat at a window and got pretty much the
same view. We could see the Notre-Dame cathedral to the east
and the Montparnasse tower all the way to the south. The sun
was still out. It was a great city.

295

'How did Willard find our car?' Summer said. 'How would he
even know where to look? The United States is a big country.'

'He didn't find it,' I said. 'Not until someone told him where it

was. '

'Who?'

'Vassell,' I said. 'Or Coomer. Swan's sergeant used my name
on the phone, back at XII Corps. So at the same time as they
were getting Marshall off the post they were calling Willard
back in Rock Creek, telling him I was over there in Germany
and hassling them again. They were asking him why the hell he
had let me travel. And they were telling him to recall me.'

'They can't dictate where a special unit investigator goes.'
'They can now, because of Willard. They're old buddies. I just
figured it out. Swan as good as told us, but it didn't click right
away. Willard has ties to Armored from his time in Intelligence.
Who did he talk to all those years? About that Soviet fuel
crap? Armored, that's who. There's a relationship there. That's
why he was so hot about Kramer. He wasn't worried about
embarrassment for the army in general. He was worried

about embarrassment for Armored Branch in particular.'
'Because they're his people.'

'Correct. And that's why Vassell and Coomer ran last night.
They didn't run, as such. They're just giving Willard time and
space to deal with us.'

'Willard knows he didn't sign our travel vouchers.'

I nodded. 'That's for sure.'

'So we're in serious trouble now. We're AWOL and we're

travelling on stolen vouchers.'
'We'll be OK.'
'How exactly?'

'When we get a result.'
'Are we going to?'
I didn't answer.

After lunch we crossed the river and walked a long roundabout
route back to the hotel. We looked just like tourists, in our
casual clothes, carrying our Samaritaine bags. All we needed
was a camera. We window shopped in the Boulevard Saint
Germain and looked at the Luxembourg gardens. We saw

296

Les Invalides and the Ecole Militaire. Then we walked up the
Avenue Bosquet, which took me within fifty yards of the back
of my mother's apartment house. I didn't tell Summer that.
She would have made me go in and see her. We crossed the
Seine again at the Pont de l'Alma and got coffee in a bistro
on the Avenue New-York. Then we strolled up the hill to the
hotel.

'Siesta time,' Summer said. 'Then dinner.'

I was happy enough to go for a nap. I was pretty tired. I lay
down on the bed in the pale blue room and fell asleep within
minutes.

Summer woke me up two hours later by calling me on the
phone from her room. She wanted to know if I knew any
restaurants. Paris is full of restaurants, but I was dressed like
an idiot and I had less than thirty bucks in my pocket. So I
picked a place I knew on the Rue Vernet. I figured I could go
there in jeans and a sweatshirt without getting stared at and
without paying a fortune. And it was close enough to walk. No
cab fare.

We met in the lobby. Summer still looked great. Her skirt
and jacket looked as good for the evening as they had for the
afternoon. She had abandoned her beret. I had kept mine on.
We walked up the hill toward the Champs Elysees. Halfway
there, Summer did a strange thing. She took my hand in hers. It
was going dark and we were surrounded by strolling couples
and I guessed it felt natural to her. It felt natural to me, too. It
took me a minute to realize she had done it. Or, it took me a
minute to realize there was anything wrong with it. It took her
the same minute. At the end of it she got flustered and looked

up at me and let go again.

'Sorry,' she said.

'Don't be,' I said. 'It felt good.'

'It just happened,' she said.

We walked on and turned into the Rue Vernet. Found the
restaurant. It was early in the evening in January and the owner
found us a table right away. It was in a corner. There were
flowers and a lit candle on it. We ordered water and a pichet of
red wine to drink while we thought about the food.

297

'You're at home here,' Summer said to me.
'Not really,' I said. 'I'm not at home anywhere.'
'You speak pretty good French.'

'I speak pretty good English too. Doesn't mean I feel at home
in North Carolina, for instance.'

'But you like some places better than others.'
I nodded. 'This one is OK.'
'Done any long-term thinking?'

'You sound like my brother. He wants me to make a plan.'
'Everything is going to change.'
'They'll always need cops,' I said.
'Cops who go AWOL?'

'All we need is a result,' I said. 'Mrs Kramer, or Carbone. Or
Brubaker, maybe. We've got three bites of the cherry. Three
chances.'

She said nothing.

'Relax,' I said. 'We're out of the world for forty-eight hours.
Let's enjoy ourselves. Worrying isn't going to get us anywhere.
We're in Paris.'

She nodded. I watched her face. Watched her try to get past
it. Her eyes were expressive in the candlelight. It was like she
had troubles in front of her, maybe piled high into stacks, like
cartons. I saw her shoulder her way around them, to the quiet
place in the back of the closet.

'Drink your wine,' I said. 'Have tim.'

My hand was resting on the table. She reached out and
squeezed it and picked up her glass.

"We'll always have North Carolina,' she said.

We ordered three courses each off the fixed-price page of
the menu. Then we took three hours to eat them. We kept the
conversation away from work. We talked about personal things
instead. She asked me about my family. I told her a little about
Joe, and not much about my mother. She told me about her
folks, and her brothers and sisters, and enough cousins that I
lost track about who was who. Mostly I watched her face in the
candlelight. Her skin had a copper tone mixed behind pure
ebony black. Her eyes were like coal. Her jaw was delicate,
like fine china. She looked impossibly small and gentle, for a

298

soldier. But then I remembered her sharpshooter badges. More
than I had.

'Am I going to meet your morn?' she said.
'If you want to,' I said. 'But she's very sick.'
'Not just a broken leg?'
I shook my head.

'She has cancer,' I said.

'Is it bad?'

'As bad as it gets.'

Summer nodded. 'I figured it had to be something like that.

You've been upset ever since you came over here the first time.'
'Have I?'

'It's bound to bother you.'

I nodded in turn. 'More than I thought it would.'

'Don't you like her?'

'I like her fine. But, you know, nobody lives for ever. Conceptually
these things don't come as a surprise.'

'I should probably stay away. It wouldn't be appropriate if I

came. You should go with Joe. Just the two of you.'
'She likes meeting new people.'
'She might not be feeling good.'

'We should wait and see. Maybe she'll want to go out for
lunch.'

'How does she look?'

'Terrible,' I said.

'Then she won't want to meet new people.'

We sat in silence for a spell. Our waiter brought the check. We counted our cash and paid half each and left a decent
tip. We held hands all the way back to the hotel. It felt like
the obvious thing to do. We were alone together in a sea of
troubles, some of them shared, some of them private. The guy
with the top hat opened the door for us and wished us bonne
nuit. Good night. We rode up in the elevator, side by side, not
touching. When we got out on our floor Summer had to go left
and I had to go right. It was an awkward moment. We didn't
speak..I could see she wanted to come with me and I sure as
hell wanted to go with her. I could see her room in my mind.
The yellow walls, the smell of perfume. The bed. I imagined
lifting her new sweater over her head. Unzipping her new skirt

299

and hearing it fall to the floor. I figured it would have a silk
lining. I figured it would make a rustling sound.

I knew it wouldn't be right. But we were already AWOL. We
were already in all kinds of deep shit. It would be comfort and

consolation, apart from whatever else it would be.

'What time in the morning?' she said.

'Early for me,' I said. 'I have to be at the airport at six.'
'I'll come with you. Keep you company.'
'Thanks.'

'My pleasure,' she said.

We stood there.

'We'll have to get up about four,' she said.
'I guess,' I said. 'About four.'
We stood there.

'Good night then, I guess,' she said.

'Sleep well,' I said.

I turned right. Didn't look back. I heard her door open and
close a second after mine.

It was eleven o'clock. I went to bed but I didn't sleep. I just
lay there and stared at the ceiling for an hour. There was city
light coming in the window. It was cold and yellow and hazy. I
could see the pulses from the Eiffel Tower's party lights. They
flashed gold, on and off, somewhere between fast and slow and
relentless. They changed the pattern on the plaster above my
head, once a second. I heard the sound of brakes on a distant
street, and the yap of a small dog, and lonely footsteps far below
my window, and the beep of a faraway horn. Then the city went
quiet and silence crowded in on me. It howled all around me,
like a siren. I raised my wrist. Checked my watch. It was
midnight. I dropped my wrist back down on the bed and was hit
by a wave of loneliness so bad it left me breathless.

I put the light on and rolled over to the phone. There were
instructions printed on a little plate below the dial buttons. To
call another guest's room, press three and enter the room number. I pressed three and entered the room number. She answered,
first ring.

'You awake?' I said.

'Yes,' she said.

3OO

'Want company?'

'Yes,' she said.

I pulled my jeans and sweatshirt on and walked barefoot
down the corridor. Knocked at her door. She opened it and
reached out her hand and pulled me inside. She was still fully
dressed. Still in her skirt and sweater. She kissed me hard at
the door and I kissed her back, harder. The door swung shut
behind us. I heard the hiss of its closer and the click of its latch.
We headed for the bed.

She wore dark red underwear. It was made of silk, or satin. I
could smell her perfume everywhere. It was in the room and on
her body. She was tiny and delicate and quick and strong. The
same city light was coming in the window. Now it bathed me in
warmth. Gave me energy. I could see the Eiffel Tower's lights
on her ceiling. We matched our rhythm to their rhythm, slow,
fast, relentless. Afterwards we turned away from them and lay
like spoons, burned out and breathing hard, close but not
speaking, like we weren't sure exactly what we had done.

I slept an hour and woke up in the same position. I had a
strong sensation of something lost and something gained, but I
couldn't explain either feeling. Summer stayed asleep. She was
nestled solidly into the curve of my body. She smelled good.
She felt warm. She felt lithe and strong and peaceful. She was
breathing slow. My left arm was under her shoulders and my
right arm was draped across her waist. Her hand was cupped in
mine, half open, half curled.

I turned my head and watched the play of light on the ceiling. I heard the faint noise of a motorbike maybe a mile away, on
the other side of the Arc de Triomphe. I heard a dog bark in
the distance. Other than that the city was silent. Two million
people were asleep. Joe was in the air, somewhere on the Great
Circle route, maybe closing in on Iceland. I couldn't picture my
mother. I closed my eyes. Tried to sleep again.

The alarm clock in my head went off at four. Summer was still
asleep. I eased my arm out from under her and worked some
kind of circulation back into my shoulder and slid out of bed
and padded across the carpet to the bathroom. Then I put my

301

pants on and shrugged into my sweatshirt and woke Summer
with a kiss.

'Rise and shine, lieutenant,' I said.

She stretched her arms up high and arched her back. The
sheet fell away to her waist.

'Good morning,' she said.

I kissed her again.

'I like Paris,' she said. 'I had fun here.' The too.'
'Lots of fun.'

'Lobby in half an hour,' I said.

I went back to my own room and called room service for
coffee. I was through shaving and showering before it arrived. I
took the tray at the door wearing just a towel. Then I dressed in
flesh BDUs and poured my first cup and checked my watch.
It was four twenty in the morning in Paris, which made it
ten twenty in the evening on the east coast, which made it well
after the end of bankers' hours. And which made it seven
twenty in the evening on the west coast, which was early
enough that a hard-working guy might still be at his desk. I
checked the plate on the phone again and hit nine for a line.
Dialled the only number I had ever permanently memorized,
which was the Rock Creek switchboard back in Virginia. An
operator answered on the first ring.

'This is Reacher,' I said. 'I need a number for Fort Irwin's MP
XO.'

'Sir, there's a standing order from Colonel Willard that you
should return to base immediately.'

'I'll be right there, soon as I can. But I need that number first.'
'Sir, where are you now?'

'In a whorehouse in Sydney, Australia,' I said. 'Give me that
Irwin number.'

He gave me the number. I repeated it to myself and hit nine
again and dialled it. Calvin Franz's sergeant answered, second
ring.

'I need Franz,' I said.

There was a click and then silence and I was settling in for a
long wait when Franz came through.

'I need you to do something for me,' I said.

302

'Like what?'

'You've got a XII Corps guy called Marshall there. You know
him?'

'No.'

'I need him to stay there until I can get there myself. It's very
important.'

'I can't stop people leaving the post unless I arrest them.'

'Just tell him I called from Berlin. That should do it. As long

as he thinks I'm in Germany, he'll stay in California.'

'Why?'

'Because that's what he's been told to do.'
'Does he know you?'
'Not personally.'

'Then that's an awkward conversation for me to have. Like, I
can't just walk up to a guy I never met and say, hey, hot news,
another guy you never met called Reacher wants you to know
he's stuck in Berlin.'

'So be subtle,' I said. 'Tell him I asked you to ask him a

question for me, because there's no way I can get there myself.'
'What question?'

'Ask him about the day of Kramer's funeral. Was he at
Arlington? What did he do the rest of the day? Why didn't he
drive his guys to North Carolina? What reason did they give

him for wanting to drive themselves?'

'That's four questions.'

'Whatever, just make it sound like you're asking on my behalf

because California isn't in my travel plans.'

"Where can I get back to you?'

I looked down at the phone and read out the George V's
number.

'That's France,' he said. 'Not Germany.'

'Marshall doesn't need to know that,' I said. 'I'll be back here
later.'

5Vhen are you coming to California?'
"Within forty-eight hours, I hope.'
'OK," he said. 'Anything else?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Call Fort Bird for me and ask my sergeant to get
histories on General Vassell and Colonel Coomer. Specifically I
want to know if either one of them has a connection with a town

303

called Sperryville in Virginia. Born there, grew up there, family
there, any kind of connection that would indicate they might
know what kind of retail outlet was where. Tell her to sit on the
answers until I get in touch.'

'OK,' he said again. 'Is that it?'

'No,' I said. 'Also tell her to call Detective Clark in Green
Valley and have him fax his street canvasses relating to the

night of New Year's Eve. She'll know what I'm talking about.'
'I'm glad someone will,' Franz said.
He paused. He was writing stuff down.
'So is that it?' he said.
'For now,' I said.

I hung up and made it down to the lobby about five minutes
after Summer. She was waiting there. She had been much faster
than me. But then, she didn't have to shave and I don't think
she had made any calls or taken time for coffee. Like me, she
was back in BDUs. Somehow she had cleaned her boots, or had
gotten them cleaned. They were gleaming.

We didn't have money for a cab to the airport. So we walked
back through the pre-dawn darkness to the Place de l'Op6ra
and caught the bus. It was less crowded than the last time but
just as uncomfortable. We got brief glimpses of the sleeping
city and then we crossed the P6riph6rique and ground slowly
through the dismal outer suburbs.

We got to Roissy-Charles de Gaulle just before six. It was busy
there. I guessed airports worked on floating time zones all their
own. It was busier at six in the morning than it would be in the
middle of the afternoon. There were crowds of people everywhere.
Cars and buses were loading and unloading, red-eyed
travellers were coming out and going in and struggling with
bags. It looked like the whole world was on the move.

The arrivals screen showed that Joe's flight was already on
the ground. We hiked around to the customs area's exit doors.
Took our places among a big crowd of meeters and greeters. I
figured Joe would be one of the first passengers through. He
would have walked fast from the plane and he wouldn't have
checked any luggage. No delays.

We saw a few stragglers coming out from the previous flight.

304

They were mostly families slowed by young children or
individuals who had waited for odd-sized luggage. People in the
crowd turned towards them expectantly and then turned away
again when they realized they weren't who they were looking
for. I watched them do it for a spell. It was an interesting
physical dynamic. Just subtle adjustments of posture were
enough to display interest, and then lack of interest. Welcome,
and then dismissal. A half-turn inward, and then a half-turn
away. Sometimes it was nothing more than a transfer of body
weight from one foot to the other.

The last stragglers were mixed in with the first people off of
Joe's flight. There were businessmen moving fast, humping
briefcases and suit carriers. There were young women in
high heels and dark glasses, expensively dressed. Models?
Actresses? Call girls? There were government people, French
and American. I could pick them out by the way they looked.
Smart and serious, plenty of eyeglasses, but their shoes and
suits and coats weren't the best quality. Low-level diplomats,
probably. The flight was from D.C., after all.

Joe came out about twelfth in line. He was in the same
overcoat I had seen before, but a different suit and a different
tie. He looked good. He was walking fast and carrying a black
leather overnight bag. He was a head taller than anyone else.

He came out of the door and stopped dead and scanned around.
'He looks just like you,' Summer said.
'But I'm a nicer person,' I said.
He saw me right away, because I was also a head taller than
anyone else. I pointed to a spot outside of the main traffic
stream. He shuffled through the crowd and made his way
towards it. We looped around and joined him there.

'Lieutenant Summer,' he said. 'I'm very pleased to meet you.'
I hadn't seen him look at the tapes on her jacket, where it
said Summer, U.S. Army. Or at the lieutenant's bars on her
collar. He must have remembered her name and her rank from

when we had talked before.
'You OK?'I asked him.
'I'm tired,' he said.
'Want breakfast?'
'Let's get it in town.'

305

The taxi line was a mile long and moving slow. We ignored it.
Headed straight for the navette again. We missed one and were
first in line for the next. It came inside ten minutes. Joe spent
the waiting time asking Summer about her visit to Paris. She
gave him chapter and verse, but not about the events after
midnight. I stood on the kerb with my back to the roadway,
watching the eastern sky above the terminal roof. Dawn was
breaking fast. It was going to be another sunny day. It was the
tenth of January, and the weather was the best I had seen in
the new decade so far.

We got in the bus and sat in three seats together that faced
sideways opposite the luggage rack. Summer sat in the middle
seat. Joe sat forward of her and I sat to the rear. They were
small, uncomfortable seats. Hard plastic. No leg room. Joe's
knees were up around his ears and his head was swaying from
side to side with the motion. He looked pale. I guessed putting
him on a bus was not much of a welcome, after an overnight
flight across the Atlantic. I felt a little bad about it. But then, I
was the same size. I had the same accommodation problem.
And I hadn't gotten a whole lot of sleep either. And I was broke.
And I guessed being on the move was better for him than
standing in the taxi line for an hour.

He brightened up some after we crossed the Priphrique
and entered Haussmann's urban splendour. The sun was well
up by then and the city was bathed in gold and honey. The cafes
were already busy and the sidewalks were already crowded
with people moving at a measured pace and carrying baguettes
and newspapers. Legislation limited Parisians to a 35-hour work
week, and they spent a lot of the remaining 133 taking great
pleasure in not doing very much of anything. It was relaxing
just to watch them.

We got out at the familiar spot in the Place de l'Opra.
Walked south the same way we had walked the week before,
crossing the river at the Pont de la Concorde, turning west on
the Quai d'Orsay, turning south into the Avenue Rapp. We got
as far as the Rue de l'Universit where the Eiffel Tower was
visible, and then Summer stopped.

'I'll go look at the tower,' she said. 'You guys go on ahead and
see your morn.'

306

Joe looked at me. Does she know? I nodded. She knows.

'Thanks, lieutenant,' he said. 'We'll go see how she is. If she's

up for it, maybe you could join us at lunch.'
'Call me at the hotel,' she said.
'You know where it is?' I said.

She turned and pointed north along the avenue. 'Across
the bridge right there and up the hill, on the left side. Straight
line.'

I smiled. She had a decent sense of geography. Joe looked a
little puzzled. He had seen the direction she had pointed, and

he knew what was up there.
'The George V?' he said.
'Why not?' I said.

'Is that on the army's dime?'
'More or less,' I said.
'Outstanding.'

Summer stretched up tall and kissed me on the cheek and
shook Joe's hand. We stayed there with the weak sun on our
shoulders and watched her walk away towards the base of the
tower. There was already a thin stream of tourists heading
the same way. We could see-the souvenir sellers unpacking. We
stood and watched them in the distance. Watched Summer get
smaller and smaller as she got further away.

'She's very nice,' Joe said. 'Where did you find her?'

'She was at Fort Bird.'

'You figured out what's going on there yet?'

'I'm a little closer.'

'I would hope you are. You've been there nearly two weeks.'

'Remember that guy I asked you about? Willard? He would
have spent time with Armored, right?'

Joe nodded. 'I'm sure he reported to them direct. Fed his

stuff straight into their intelligence operation.'

'Do you remember any names?'

'In Armored Branch? Not really. I never paid much attention
to Willard. His thing wasn't very mainstream. It was a side
issue.'

'Ever heard of a guy called Marshall?'

'Don't remember him,' Joe said.

I said nothing. Joe turned and looked south down the avenue.

3O7

Wrapped his coat tighter around him and turned his face up to
the sun.

'Let's go,' he said.

'When did you call her last?'

'The day before yesterday. It was your turn next.'

We moved off and walked down the avenue, side by side,
matching our pace to the leisurely stroll of the people around

US.

'Want breakfast first?' I said. 'We don't want to wake her.'
'The nurse will let us in.'

We passed the post office. There was a car abandoned halfway
up on the sidewalk. It had been in some kind of an
accident. It had a smashed fender and a flat tyre. We stepped
out into the street to pass it by. Saw a large black vehicle

double-parked on the road forty yards ahead.

We stared at it.

'Un corbillard,' Joe said.

A hearse.

We stared at it. Tried to figure which building it was waiting
at. Tried to gauge the distance. The head-on perspective made
it difficult. I glanced upward at the roof lines. First came a
limestone Belle Epoque facade, seven storeys high. Then a drop
to my mother's plainer six-storey building. I traced my gaze
vertically all the way down the frontage. To the street. To the

hearse. It was parked right in front of my mother's door.

We ran.

There was a man in a black silk hat standing on the sidewalk.
The street door to my mother's building was open. We glanced
at the man in the hat and went in through the door to the
courtyard. The concierge was standing in her doorway. She had
a handkerchief in her hand and tears in her eyes. She paid us no attention. We headed for the elevator. Rode up to five. The
elevator was agonizingly slow.

The door to the apartment was standing open. I could see
men in black coats inside. Three of them. We went in. The men
in the coats stood back. They said nothing. The girl with the
luminous eyes came out of the kitchen. She looked pale. She
stopped when she saw us. Then she turned and walked slowly
across the room to meet us.

308

'What?' Joe said.
She didn't answer.
'When?' I said.

'Last night,' she said. 'It was very peaceful.'

The men in the coats realized who we must be and shuffled
out into the hallway. They were very quiet. They made no noise
at all. Joe took an unsteady step and sat down on the sofa. I

stayed where I was. I stood still in the middle of the floor.
'When?' I said again.

'At midnight,' the girl said. 'In her sleep.'

I closed my eyes. Opened them again a minute later. The girl

was still there. Her eyes were on mine.
'Were you with her?' I said.
She nodded.

'All the time,' she said.
'Was there a doctor here?'
'She sent him away.'
'What happened?'

'She said she felt well. She went to bed at eleven. She slept an
hour, and then she just stopped breathing.'

I looked up at the ceiling. 'Was she in pain?'

'Not at the end.'

'But she said she felt well.'

'Her time had come. I've seen it before.' I looked at her, and then I looked away.
'Would you like to see her?' the girl said.

'Joe?' I said. He shook his head. Stayed on the sofa. I stepped
towards the bedroom. There was a mahogany coffin set up on
velvet-padded trestles next to the bed. It was lined with white
silk and it was empty. My mother's body was still in the bed.
The sheets were made up around her. Her head was resting
gently on the pillow and her arms were crossed over her chest
outside the covers. Her eyes were closed. She was barely
recognizable.

Summer had asked me." Does it upset you to see dead people?
No, I .had said.

Why not? she had asked me.

I don't know, I had said.

I had never seen my father's body. I was away somewhere

309

when he died. It had been a heart thing. Some VA hospital had
done its best, but it was hopeless from the start. I had flown in

on the morning of the funeral and had left again the same night. Funeral, I thought. Joe will handle it.

I stayed by my mother's bed for five long minutes, eyes open,
eyes dry. Then I turned around and stepped back into the living
room. It was crowded again. The croque-morts were back. The
pallbearers. And there was an old man on the sofa, next to Joe.
He was sitting stiffly. There were two walking sticks propped
next to him. He had thin grey hair and a heavy dark suit with
a tiny ribbon in the buttonhole. Red, white and blue, maybe a
Croix de Guerre ribbon, or the Mdaille de la Rsistance. He
had a small cardboard box balanced on his bony knees. It was
tied with a piece of faded red string.

'This is Monsieur Lamonnier,' Joe said. 'Family friend.'

The old guy grabbed his sticks and started to struggle up to
shake my hand but I waved him back down and stepped over
close. He was maybe seventy-five or eighty. He was lean and
dried-out and relatively tall for a Frenchman.

'You're the one she called Reacher,' he said.

I nodded.

'That's me,' I said. 'I don't remember you.'

"We never met. But I knew your mother a long time.'
'Thanks for stopping by.'
'You too,' he said. Touch, I thought.
'What's in the box?' I said.

'Things she refused to keep here,' the old guy said. 'But
things I felt should be found here, at a time like this, by her

sons.'

He handed me the box, like it was a sacred burden. I took it
and put it under my arm. It felt about halfway between light and
heavy. I guessed there was a book in there. Maybe an old
leather-bound diary. Some other stuff, too.

'Joe,' I said. 'Let's go get breakfast.'

We walked fast and aimlessly. We turned into the Rue Saint
Dominique and passed by two caf6s at the top of the Rue de

310

l'Exposition without stopping. We crossed the Avenue Bosquet
against the light and then we made an arbitrary left into the Rue
Jean Nicot. Joe stopped at a tabac and bought cigarettes. I
would have smiled if I had been able to. The street was named
after the guy who discovered nicotine.

We lit up together on the sidewalk and then ducked into the
first cafe we saw. We were all done walking. We were ready for
the talking.

'You shouldn't have waited for me,' Joe said. 'You could have
seen her one last time.'
'I felt it happen,' I said. 'Midnight last night, something hit

me.'

'You could have been with her.'

'Too late now.'

'It would have been OK with me.'
'It wouldn't have been OK with her.'
¢Ve should have stayed a week ago.'

'She didn't want us to stay, Joe. That wasn't in her plan. She
was an individual, entitled to her privacy. She was a mother, but
that wasn't all she was.'

He went quiet. The waiter brought us coffee and a small straw basket full of croissants. He seemed to sense the mood.

He put them down gently and backed away.

'Will you see to the funeral?' I said.

He nodded. 'I'll make it four days from now. Can you stay?'
'No,' I said. 'But I'll get back.'

'OK,' he said. 'I'll stay a week or so. I guess I'll need to find
her will. We'll probably have to sell her place. Unless you want
it?'

I shook my head. 'I don't want it. You?'

'I don't see how I could use it.'

'It wouldn't have been right for me to go on my own,' I said.
Joe said nothing.

'We saw her last week,' I said. 'We were all together. It was a
good time.'

'You .think?'

"We had fun. That's the way she wanted it. That's why she
made the effort. That's why she asked to go to Polidor. It wasn't
like she ate anything.'

311

He just shrugged. We drank our coffee in silence. I tried a
croissant. It was OK, but I had no appetite. I put it back in the
basket.

'Life,' Joe said. 'What a completely weird thing it is. A person
lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of
things, feels all kinds of things, and then it's over. Like it never
happened at all.'

'We'll always remember her.'

'No, we'll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to
share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about.
Therefore the rest already doesn't exist. As of now.'

We smoked another cigarette each and sat quiet. Then we
walked back, slowly, side by side, a little burned out, at some
kind of peace.

The coffin was in the corbillard when we got back to her
building. They must have stood it upright in the elevator. The
concierge was out on the sidewalk, standing next to the old man
with the medal ribbon. He was leaning on his walking sticks.
The nurse was there too, standing on her own. The pallbearers
had their hands clasped in front of them. They were looking
down at the ground.

'They're taking her to the dpdt mortuaire,' the nurse said. The funeral parlour. 'OK,' Joe said.

I didn't stay. I said goodbye to the nurse and the concierge
and shook hands with the old guy. Then I nodded to Joe and set
off walking up the avenue. I didn't look back. I crossed the
Seine at the Pont de l'Alma and walked up the Avenue George V
to the hotel. I went up in the elevator and back to my room. I
still had the old guy's box under my arm. I dropped it on the
bed and stood still, completely unsure about what to do next.

I was still standing there twenty minutes later when the phone
rang. It was Calvin Franz, calling from Fort Irwin in California.
He had to say his name twice. The first time, I couldn't recall
who he was.

'I spoke to Marshall,' he said.

'Who?'

312

'Your XII Corps guy.'
I said nothing.
'You O K?'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'm fine. You spoke to Marshall.'

'He went to Kramer's funeral. He drove Vassell and Coomer there and back. Then he claims he didn't drive them the rest of
the day because he had important Pentagon meetings all afternoon.'

'But?'

'I didn't believe him. He's a gofer. If Vassell and Coomer had
wanted him to drive, he'd have been driving, meetings or no

meetings.'

'And?'

'And knowing what kind of a hard time you would give me if I

didn't check, I checked.'

'And?'

'Those meetings must have been with himself in the toilet

stall, because nobody else saw him around.'

'So what was he doing instead?'

'No idea. But he was doing something, that's for sure. The
way he answered me was just way too smooth. I mean, this
all was six days ago. Who the hell remembers what meetings

they had six days ago? But this guy claims to.'
'You tell him I was in Germany?'
'He seemed to know already.'
'You tell him I was staying there?'

'He seemed to take it for granted you weren't heading for
California anytime soon.'

'These guys are old buddies with Willard,' I said. 'He's
promised them he'll keep me away from them. He's running the
110th like it's Armored's private army.'

'I checked those histories myself, by the way. For Vassell and
Coomer, because you got me curious. There's nothing there to
suggest either one of them ever heard of any place called

Sperryville, Virginia.'

'Are you sure?'

'Completely. Vassell is from Mississippi and Coomer is from
Illinois. Neither of them has ever lived or served anywhere near Sperryville.'

313

I was quiet for a second.

'Are they married?' I said.

'Married?' Franz said. 'Yes, there were wives and kids in

there. But they were local girls. No in-laws in Sperryville.'
'OK,' I said.

'So what are you going to do?'

'I'm coming to California.'

I put the phone down and walked along the corridor to
Summer's door. I knocked and waited. She opened up. She was
back from sightseeing.

'She died last night,' I said.

'I know,' Summer said. four brother just called me from the

apartment. He wanted me to make sure you were OK.'
'I'm OK,'I said.
'I'm very sorry.'

I shrugged. 'Conceptually these things don't come as a
surprise.'

%Vhen was it?'

'Midnight. She just gave up.'

'I feel bad. You should have gone to see her yesterday. You
shouldn't have spent the day with me. We shouldn't have done
all that ridiculous shopping.'

'I saw her last week. We had fun. Better that last week was
the last time.'

'I would have wanted whatever extra time I could have
gotten.'

'It was always going to be an arbitrary date,' I said. 'I could
have gone yesterday, in the afternoon, maybe. Now I'd be
wishing I had stayed for the evening. If I had stayed for the
evening, I'd be wishing I had stayed until midnight.'

'You were in here with me at midnight. I feel bad about that,

tOO.'

'Don't,' I said. 'I don't feel bad about it. My mother wouldn't,
either. She was French, after all. If she'd known those were my

options, she'd have insisted.'

'You're just saying that.'

Nell, I guess she wasn't very broadminded. But she always
wanted whatever made us happy.'

314

'Did she give up because she was left alone?'

I shook my head. 'She wanted to be left alone so she could
give up.'

Summer said nothing.

'We're leaving,' I said. 'We'll get a night flight back.'
'California?'

'East coast first,' I said. 'There are things I need to check.'
'What things?' she said.

I didn't tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I
couldn't have handled laughter.

Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with
me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur
Lamonnier's box.

%Vhat's that?' she said.

'Something some old guy brought around. He said it's some

thing that should be found with my mother's stuff.'
'What's in it?'
'I don't know.'
'So open it.'

I shoved it across the counterpane. 'You open it.'

I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot.
Her clear nail varnish flashed in the light. She got the string off
and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of
thick sturdy cardboard you don't see much any more. Inside
were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It
was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked
paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was
a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles
were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing
in any picerie in France. Except this one had been restrung.
The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It
was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long
time.

'What is it?' Summer said.

'Looks like a garrotte,' I said.

'The book is in French,' she said. 'I can't read it:'

She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper
dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a non-fiction memoir.

315

The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The
whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with
railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was
a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening
chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north
squeezed down through Paris and then fanned out again to
points south. You couldn't travel anywhere without transiting
the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small
country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same
way. The capital city was always the centre of the spiderweb.

I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of
the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph
was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamonnier. I recognized
him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he
had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff
way he had sat on my mother's sofa. And his walking sticks.
He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I
had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated
mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le
Chemin de Fer Hurnain. The Human Railroad. He had been
awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle,
and the George Cross by the British, and the Distinguished

Service Medal by the Americans.

'What is it?' Summer said.

'Seems like I just met an old Resistance hero,' I said.
'What's it got to do with your morn?'

'Maybe she and this Lamonnier guy were sweethearts way
back.'

'And he wants to tell you and Joe about it? About what a great
guy he was? At a time like this? That's a little self-centred, isn't it?'

I read on a little more. Like most French books it used a
weird construction called the past historic tense, which was
reserved for written stuff only. It made it hard for a non-native
to read. And the first part of the story was not very gripping. It
made the point very laboriously that trains incoming from the
north disgorged their passengers at the Gare du Nord terminal,
and if those passengers wanted to carry on south they had to
cross Paris on foot or by car or subway or taxi to another

316

terminal like the Gare d'Austerlitz or the Gare de Lyon before
joining a southbound train.

'It's about something called the human railroad,' I said.
'Except there aren't many humans in it so far.'

I passed the book to Summer and she flipped through it
again.

'It's signed,' she said.

She showed me the first blank page. There was an old faded
inscription on it. Blue ink, neat penmanship. Someone had

written: ,3, Bdatrice de Pierre. To Beatrice from Pierre.

'Was your mother called Beatrice?' Summer asked.

'No,' I said. 'Her name was Josephine. Josephine Moutier,
and then Josephine Reacher.'

She passed the book back to me.

'I think I've heard of the human railroad,' she said. 'It was a
World War Two thing. It was about rescuing bomber crews that
were shot down over Belgium and Holland. Local Resistance
cells scooped them up and passed them along a chain all the
way down to the Spanish border. Then they could get back
home and get back in action. It was important because trained
crews were valuable. Plus it saved people from years in a POW
camp.'

'That would explain Lamonnier's medals,' I said. 'One from
each Allied government.'

I put the book down on the bed and thought about packing. I
figured I would throw the Samaritaine jeans and sweatshirt and
jacket away. I didn't need them. Didn't want them. Then I
looked at the book again and saw that some of the pages had
different edges from some of the others. I picked it up and
opened it and found some half-tone photographs. Most of them
were posed studio portraits, reproduced head-and-shoulders six
to a page. The others were clandestine action shots. They
showed Allied airmen hiding in cellars lit by candles placed on
barrels, and small groups of furtive men dressed in borrowed
peasant clothing on country tracks, and Pyrenean guides amid
snowy mountainous terrain. One of the action shots showed
two men with a young girl between them. The girl was not
much more than a child. She was holding both men's hands,
smiling gaily, leading them down a street in a city. Paris, almost

317

certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Batrice de
service ? ses travaux. Beatrice on duty, doing her work. Beatrice
looked to be about thirteen years old.

I was pretty sure Beatrice was my mother.

I flipped back to the pages of studio portraits and found her.
It was some kind of a school photograph. She looked to be
about sixteen in it. The caption was Batrice en 1947. Beatrice
in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced
together Lamonnier's narrative thesis. There were two
main tactical problems with the human railroad. Finding the
downed airmen was not one of them. They fell out of the sky,
literally, all over the Low Countries, dozens of them every
moonless night. If the Resistance got to them first, they stood a
chance. If the Wehrmacht got to them first, they didn't. It was
a matter of pure luck. If they got lucky and the Resistance got
to them ahead of the Germans, they would be hidden out,
their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible
disguises, forged papers would be issued, rail tickets would be
bought, and a courier would escort them on a train to Paris, and

they would be on their way home.

Maybe.

The first tactical problem was the possibility of a spot check
on the train itself, sometime during the initial journey. These
were blond corn-fed farm boys from America, or red-headed
British boys from Scotland, or anything else that didn't look
dark and pinched and wartime French. They stood out. They
didn't speak the language. Lots of subterfuges were developed.
They would pretend to be asleep, or sick, or mute, or deaf. The
couriers would do all the talking.

The second tactical problem was transiting Paris itself. Paris
was crawling with Germans. There were random check points
everywhere. Clumsy lost foreigners stuck out like sore thumbs.
Private cars had disappeared completely. Taxis were hard to
find. There was no gasoline. Men walking in the company of
other men became targets. So women were used as couriers.
And then one of the dodges Lamonnier dreamed up was to use
a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and
lead them through the streets to the Gare de Lyon. She would
laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older

318

brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and
disarming. She got people through check points like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.

Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Batrice.
Lamonnier's was Pierre.

I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it
up. Inside was a medal. It was La Mdaille de la Rsistance. The
Resistance Medal. It had a fancy red white and blue ribbon and
the medal itself was gold. I turned it over. On the back it was

neatly engraved: Josephine Moutier. My mother.

'She never told you?' Summer said.

I shook my head. 'Not a word. Not one, ever.'

Then I looked back in the box. What the hell was the garrotte
about?

'Call Joe,' I said. 'Tell him we're coming over. Tell him to get
Lamonnier back there.'

We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was
already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe
and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been,
because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave
him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at
Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph.
Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures.
Looked at me.

'She ever mention any of this to you?' he said.
'Never. You?"
'Never,' he said.

I looked at Lamonnier. 'What was the garrotte for?'
Lamonnier said nothing.
'Tell us,' I said.

'She was found out,' he said. 'By a boy at her school. A boy of
her own age. An unpleasant boy, the son of collaborators. He

teased and tormented her about what he was going to do.'
'What did he do?'

'At first, nothing. That was extremely unsettling for your
mother. Then he demanded certain indignities as the price of
his continued silence. Naturally, your mother refused. He told
her he would inform on her. So she pretended to relent. She

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arranged to meet him under the Pont des Invalides, late one
night. She had to slip out of her house. But first she took her
mother's cheese cutter from the kitchen. She replaced the wire
with a string from her father's piano. It was the G below middle
C, I think. It was still missing, years later. She met the boy and
she strangled him.'

'She what?' Joe said.

'She strangled him.'

'She was thirteen years old.'

Lamonnier nodded. 'At that age the physical differences

between girls and boys are not a significant handicap.'
'She was thirteen years old and she killed a guy?' 'They were desperate times.'
'What exactly happened?' I said.

'She used the garrotte. As she had planned. It's not a difficult
instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she
needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a
weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone

and she was safe. The human railroad was safe.'

Joe stared at him. 'You let her do that?'

Lamonnier shrugged. An expressive, Gallic shrug, just like
my mother's.

'I didn't know about it,' he said. 'She didn't tell me until
afterwards. I suppose at first my instinct would have been to
forbid it. But I couldn't have taken care of it myself. I had no
legs. I couldn't have climbed down under the bridge and I
wouldn't have been steady enough for fighting. I had a man
loosely employed as an assassin, but he was busy elsewhere. In
Belgium, I think. I couldn't have afforded the risk of waiting for
him to get back. So on balance I think I would have told her to
go ahead. They were desperate times, and we were doing vital
work.'

'Did this really happen?' Joe said.

'I know it did,' Lamonnier said. 'Fish ate through the boy's
belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance down

stream. We passed a nervous week. But nothing came of it.'
'How long did she work for you?' I asked.

'All through 1943,' he said. 'She was extremely good. But her
face became well known. At first her face was her guardian. It

32O

was so young and so innocent. How could anyone suspect a face
like that? Then it became a liability. She became familiar to les
boches. And how many brothers and cousins and uncles could

one girl have? So I had to stand her down.'

'Did you recruit her?'

'She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help.'
'How many people did she save?'

'Eighty men,' Lamonnier said. 'She was my best Paris courier.
She was a phenomenon. The consequences of discovery didn't
bear thinking about. She lived with the worst kind of fear in her

gut for a whole year, but never once did she let me down.'

We all sat quiet.

'How did you start?' I asked.

'I was a war cripple,' he said. 'One of many. We were
too medically burdensome for them to want us as hostage
prisoners. We were useless as forced labourers. So they left us
in Paris. But I wanted to do something. I wasn't physically
capable of fighting. But I could organize. Those are not physical
skills. I knew that trained bomber crews were worth their
weight in gold. So I decided to get them home.'

'Why would my mother go her whole life without mentioning
this stuff?'

Lamonnier shrugged again. Weary, unsure, still mystified all
those years later.

'Many reasons, I think,' he said. 'France was a conflicted
country in 1945. Many had resisted, many had collaborated,
many had done neither. Most preferred a clean slate. And she
was ashamed of killing the boy, I think. It weighed on her
conscience. I told her it hadn't been a choice. It wasn't a
voluntary action. I told her it had been the right thing to do. But
she preferred to forget the whole thing. I had to beg her to
accept her medal.'

Joe and I and Summer said nothing. We all sat quiet.

'I wanted her sons to know,' Lamonnier said.

Summer and I walked back to the hotel. We didn't talk. I felt
like a guy who suddenly finds out he was adopted. You're not
the man I thought you were. All my life I had assumed I was
what I was because of my father, the career Marine. Now I felt

321

different genes stirring. My father hadn't killed the enemy at
the age of thirteen. But my mother had. She had lived through
desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was
necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I
would have thought possible. At that moment I knew I would
miss her for ever. I felt empty. I had lost something I never
knew I had.

We carried our bags down to the lobby and checked out at the
desk. We gave back our keys and the multilingual girl prepared
a long and detailed account. I had to countersign it. I knew
I was in trouble as soon as I saw it. It was outrageously
expensive. I had figured the army might overlook the forged
vouchers in exchange for a result. But now I wasn't so sure. I
figured the George V tariff might change their view. It was like
adding insult to injury. We had been there one night, but we
were being charged for two because we were late checking out.
My room service coffee cost as much as a meal in a bistro. My
phone call to Rock Creek cost as much as a three-course lunch
at the best restaurant in town. My phone call to Franz in
California cost as much as a five-course dinner. Summer's call
to Joe less than a mile away in my mother's apartment asking
him to get hold of Lamonnier was billed at less than two
minutes and cost as much as the room service coffee. And we
had been charged fees for taking incoming calls. One was from
Franz to me and the other was from Joe to Summer, when
he asked her to check I was OK. That little piece of sibling
consideration was going to cost the government five bucks.
Altogether it was the worst hotel bill I had ever seen.

The multilingual girl printed two copies. I signed one for her
and she folded the other into an embossed George V envelope
and gave it to me. For my records, she said. For my court
martial, I thought. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. Took it
out again about six hours later, when I finally realized who had
done what, and to who, and why, and how.

322

TWENTY

E MADE THE FAMILIAR TREK TO THE PLACE DE L'OPIRA AND caught the airport bus. It was my sixth time on that
bus in about a week. The sixth time was no more
comfortable than the previous five. It was the discomfort that
started me thinking.

We got out at international departures and found the Air
France ticket desk. Swapped two vouchers for two seats to
Dulles on the eleven o'clock red-eye. That gave us a long
wait. We humped our bags across the concourse and started
out in a bar. Summer wasn't conversational. I guess she
couldn't think of anything to say. But the truth was I was doing
OK at that point. Life was unfolding the same way it always had
for everyone. Sooner or later you ended up an orphan. There
was no escaping it. It had happened that way for a thousand
generations. No point in getting all upset about it.

We drank bottles of beer and looked for somewhere to eat. I
had missed breakfast and lunch and I guessed Summer hadn't
eaten either. We walked past all the little tax-exempt boutiques
and found a place that was made up to look like a sidewalk
bistro. We pooled our few remaining dollars and checked the
menu and worked out that we could afford one course each,

323

plus juice for her and coffee for me, and a tip for the waiter. We
ordered steak frites, which turned out to be a decent slab of
meat with shoestring fries and mayonnaise. You could get good
food anywhere in France. Even an airport.

After an hour we moved down to the gate. We were still early
and it was almost deserted. Just a few transit passengers, all
shopped out, or broke like us. We sat far away from them and
stared into space.

'Feels bad, going back,' Summer said. 'You can forget how

much trouble you're in when you're away.'

'All we need is a result,' I said.

'We're not going to get one. It's been ten days and we're
nowhere.'

I nodded. Ten days since Mrs Kramer died, six days since
Carbone died. Five days since Delta had given me a week to
clear my name.

'We've got nothing,' Summer said. 'Not even the easy stuff.
We didn't even find the woman from Kramer's motel. That
shouldn't have been difficult.'

I nodded again. She was right. That shouldn't have been
difficult.

The gate filled with travellers and we boarded forty minutes
before take-off. Summer and I had seats behind an old couple in
an exit row. I wished we could change places with them. I
would have been glad of the extra room. We took off on time
and I spent the first hour getting more and more cramped and
uncomfortable. The stewardess served a meal that I couldn't
have eaten even if I had wanted to, because I didn't have

enough room to move my elbows and operate the silverware.
One thought led to another.

I thought about Joe flying in the night before. He would have
flown coach. That was clear. A civil servant on a personal trip
doesn't fly any other way. He would have been cramped and
uncomfortable all night long, a little more than me because he
was an inch taller. So I felt bad all over again about putting him
in the bus to town. I recalled the hard plastic seats and his
cramped position and the way his head was jerked around by
the motion. I should have sprung for a cab from the city and

324

kept it waiting at the kerb. I should have found a way to scare
up some cash.

One thought led to another.

I pictured Kramer and Vassell and Coomer flying in from
Frankfurt on New Year's Eve. American Airlines. A Boeing jet.
No more spacious than any other jet. An early start from XII
Corps. A long flight to Dulles. I pictured them walking down

the jetway, stiff, airless, dehydrated, uncomfortable.

One thought led to another.

I pulled the George V bill out of my pocket. Opened the
envelope. Read it through. Read it through again. Examined
every line and every item.

The hotel bill, the airplane, the bus to town.
The bus to town, the airplane, the hotel bill.
I closed my eyes.

I thought about things that Sanchez and the Delta adjutant
and Detective Clark and Andrea Norton and Summer herself
had said to me. I thought about the crowd of meeters and
greeters we had seen in the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle arrivals
hall. I thought about Sperryville, Virginia. I thought about Mrs
Kramer's house in Green Valley.

In the end dominoes fell all over the place and landed in ways
that made nobody look very good. Least of all me, because I
had made many mistakes, including one big one that I knew for
sure was going to come right back and bite me in the ass.

I kept myself so busy pondering my prior mistakes that I let my
preoccupation lead me into making another one. I spent all
my time thinking about the past and no time at all thinking
about the future. About countermeasures. About what would
be waiting for us at Dulles. We touched down at two in the
morning and came out through the customs hall and landed
straight in a trap set by Willard.

Standing in the same place they had stood six days earlier
were the same three warrant officers from the Provost Marshal
General's office. Two W3s and a W4. I saw them. They saw us. I
spent a second wondering how the hell Willard had done it. Did
he have guys standing by at every airport in the country all day
and all night? Did he have a Europe-wide trace out on our travel

325

vouchers? Could he do that himself? Or was the FBI involved?
The Department of the Army? The State Department? Interpol?
NATO? I had no idea. I made an absurd mental note that one
day I should try to find out.

Then I spent another second deciding what to do about the
situation.

Delay was not an option. Not now. Not in Willard's hands. I
needed freedom of movement and freedom of action for twenty
four or forty-eight more hours. Then I would go see Willard. I
would go see him happily. Because at that point I would be
ready to slap him around and arrest him.

The W4 walked up to us with his W3s at his back.

'I have orders to place you both in handcuffs,' he said.
'Ignore your orders,' I said.
'I can't,' he said.
'Try.'

'I can't,' he said again.

I nodded.

'OK, we'll trade,' I said. 'You try it with the handcuffs, I'll
break your arms. You walk us to the car, we'll go quietly.'

He thought about it. He was armed. So were his guys. We
weren't. But nobody wants to shoot people in the middle of an
airport. Not unarmed people from your own unit. That would
lead to a bad conscience. And paperwork. And he didn't want a
fistfight. Not three against two. I was too big and Summer was

too small to make it fair.
'Deal?' he said.
'Deal,' I lied.
'So let's go.'

Last time he had walked ahead of me and his hot-dog W3s
had stayed on my shoulders. I sincerely hoped he would repeat
that pattern. I guessed the W3s figured themselves for real
bad-ass sons of bitches and I guessed they were close to being
correct, but it was the W4 I was most worried about. He looked
like the genuine article. But he didn't have eyes in the back of
his head. So I hoped he would walk in front.

He did. Summer and I stayed side by side with our bags in
our hands and the W3s formed up wide and behind us in an
arrowhead pattern. The W4 led the way. We went out through

326

the doors into the cold. Turned towards the restricted lane
where they had parked last time. It was past two in the morning
and the airport approach roads were completely deserted.
There were lonely pools of yellow light from fixtures up on
posts. It had been raining. The ground was wet.

We crossed the public pick-up lane and crossed the median
where the bus shelters were. We headed onward into the dark. I could see the bulk of a parking garage half-left and the green
Chevy Caprice far away to the right. We turned towards it.
Walked in the roadway. Most other times of the day we would
have been mown down by traffic. But right then the whole place
was still and silent. Past two o'clock in the morning.

I dropped my bag and used both hands and shoved Summer
out of the way. Stopped dead and jerked my right elbow backward
and smashed the right-hand W3 hard in the face. Kept my
feet planted and twisted the other way like a violent calisthenic
exercise and smacked the left-hand W3 with my left elbow.
Then I stepped forward and met the W4 as he spun towards the
noise and came in for me. I hit him with a straight left to the
chest. His weight was moving and my weight was moving and
the blow messed him up pretty good. I followed it with a right
hook to his chin and put him on the ground. Turned back to the
W3s to check how they were doing. They were both down on
their backs. There was some blood on their faces. Broken
noses, loosened teeth. A lot of shock and surprise. An excellent
stun factor. I was pleased. They were good, and I was better. I
checked the W4. He wasn't doing much. I squatted down next
to the W3s and took their Berettas out of their holsters. Then I
twisted away and took the W4's out of his. Threaded all three
guns on my forefinger. Then I used my other hand to find the
car keys. The right-hand W3 had them in his pocket. I took
them out and tossed them to Summer. She was back on her
feet. She was looking a little dismayed.

I gave her the three Berettas and I dragged the W4 by his
collar to the nearest bus shelter. Then I went back for the W3s
and dragged them over one in each hand. I got them all lined
up face down on the floor. They were conscious, but they were
groggy. Heavy blows to the head are a lot more consequential
in real life than they are in the movies. And I was breathing

327

hard myself. Almost panting. The adrenalin was kicking in.
Some kind of a delayed reaction. Fighting has an effect on both
parties to the deal.

I crouched down next to the W4.

'I apologize, chief,' I said. 'But you got in the way.'

He said nothing. Just stared up at me. Anger, shock,
wounded pride, confusion.

'Now listen,' I said. 'Listen carefully. You never saw us. We
weren't here. We never came. You waited for hours, but we
didn't show. You came back out and some thief had boosted
your car in the night. That's what happened, OK?'

He tried to say something, but the words wouldn't come out
right.

'Yes, I know,' I said. 'It's pretty weak and it makes you look
real stupid. But how good does it make you look that you let us

escape? That you didn't handcuff us like you were ordered to?'
He said nothing.

'That's your story,' I said. "We didn't show, and your car was
stolen. Stick to it or I'll put it about that it was the lieutenant
who took you down. A ninety-pound girl. One against three.
People will love that. They'll go nuts for it. And you know how

rumours can follow you around for ever.'
He said nothing.
'Your choice,' I said.

He shrugged. Said nothing.

'I apologize,' I said. 'Sincerely.'

We left them there and grabbed our bags and ran to their car.
Summer unlocked it and we slid in and she fired it up. Put it in

gear and moved away from the kerb.

'Go slow,' I said.

I waited until we were alongside the bus shelter and then
wound the window down and tossed the Berettas out on the
sidewalk. Their cover story wouldn't hold up if they lost their
weapons as well as their car. The three guns landed near the
three guys and they all got up on their hands and knees and

started to crawl towards them.

'Now go,'I said.

Summer hit the gas hard and the tyres lit up and about a
second later we were well outside handgun range. She kept her

328

foot down and we left the airport doing about ninety miles an
hour.

'You OK?' I said.

'So far,' she said.

'I'm sorry I had to shove you.'

'We should have just run,' she said. 'We could have lost them
in the terminal.'

'We needed a car,' I said. 'I'm sick of taking the bus.'
'But now we're way out of line.'
'That's for sure,' I said.

I checked my watch. It was close to three in the morning. We
were heading south from Dulles. Going nowhere, fast. In the
dark. We needed a destination.

'You know my phone number at Bird?' I said.

'Sure,' Summer said.

'OK, pull over at the next place with a phone.'

She spotted an all-night gas station about five miles later. It
was all lit up on the horizon. We pulled in and checked it out.
There was a miniature grocery store behind the pumps but it
was closed. At night you had to pay for your gas through a
bulletproof window. There was a pay phone outside next to the
air hose. It was in an aluminum box mounted on the wall. The
box had phone shapes drilled into the sides. Summer dialled
my Fort Bird office number and handed me the receiver. I
heard one cycle of ring tone and then my sergeant answered.

The night-duty woman. The one with the baby son.
'This is Reacher,' I said.
'You're in deep shit,' she said.
'And that's the good news,' I said.
'What's the bad news?'

'You're going to join me right there in it. What kind of
babysitting arrangements have you got?'

'My neighbour's girl stays. From the trailer next door.'
'Can she stay an hour longer?'
'Why?'

'I want you to meet me. I want you to bring me some stuff.'
'It'll cost you.'
'How much?'
329

'Two dollars an hour. For the babysitter.'

'I haven't got two dollars. That's something I want you to
bring. Money.'

'You want me to give you money?'
'A loan,' I said. 'Couple of days.'
'How much?' Whatever you've got.'
"When and where?'

'When you get off. At six. At the diner near the strip club.'
"What do you need me to bring?'

'Phone records,' I said. 'All calls made out of Fort Bird
starting from midnight on New Year's Eve until maybe the third
of January. And an army phone book. I need to speak to
Sanchez and Franz and all kinds of other people. And I need
Major Marshall's personal file. The XII Corps guy. I need you to

get a copy faxed in from somewhere.'

'Anything else?'

'I want to know where Vassell and Coomer parked their car
when they came down for dinner on the fourth. I want you to
see if anyone noticed.'

'OK,' she said. 'Is that it?'

'No,' I said. 'I want to know where Major Marshall was on the
second and the third. Scare up some travel clerk somewhere
and see if any vouchers were issued. And I want a phone
number for the Jefferson Hotel in D.C.'

'That's an awful lot to do in three hours.'

'That's why I'm asking you instead of the day guy. You're
better than he is.'

'Stick it,' she said. 'Flattery doesn't work on me.'

'Hope springs eternal,' I said.

We got back into the car and got back on the road. Headed east
for 1-95. I told Summer to go slow. If she didn't, then the way
she was likely to drive on empty roads at night would get us to
the diner well before my sergeant, and I didn't want that
to happen. My sergeant would get there around six thirty. I
wanted to get there after her, maybe six forty. I wanted to check
she hadn't done her duty and dropped a dime on me and set up
an ambush. It was unlikely, but not impossible. I wanted to be

330

able to drive by and check. I didn't want to be already in a booth
drinking coffee when Willard showed up.

'Why do you want all that stuff?' Summer asked.
'I know what happened to Mrs Kramer,' I said.
'How?'

'I figured it out,' I said. 'Like I should have at the beginning.

But I didn't think. I didn't have enough imagination.'

'It's not enough to imagine things.'

'It is,' I said. 'Sometimes that's what it's all about. Sometimes
that's all an investigator has got. You have to imagine what
people must have done. The way they must have thought and

acted. You have to think yourself into being them.'

'Being who?'

'Vassell and Coomer,' I said. 'We know who they are. We
know what they're like. Therefore we can predict what they
did.'

'What did they do?'

'They got an early start and flew all day from Frankfurt. On
New Year's Eve. They wore Class As, trying to get an upgrade.
Maybe they succeeded, with American Airlines out of Germany.
Maybe they didn't. Either way, they couldn't have counted on it.

They must have been prepared to spend eight hours in coach.'
'So?'

'Would guys like Vassell and Coomer be happy to wait in the
Dulles taxi line? Or take a shuttle bus to the city? All cramped
and uncomfortable?'

'No,' Summer said. 'They wouldn't do either thing.'

'Exactly,' I said. 'They wouldn't do either thing. They're way
too important for that. They wouldn't dream of it. Not in a
million years. Guys like that, they need to be met by a car and
a driver.'

'Who?'

'Marshall,' I said. 'That's who. He's their blue-eyed gofer. He
was already over here, at their service. He must have picked
them up at the airport. Maybe Kramer, too. Did Kramer take
the Hertz bus to the rental lot? I don't think so. I think Marshall
drove him there. Then he drove Vassell and Coomer to the
Jefferson Hotel.'

'And?'

331

'And he stayed there with them, Summer. I think he had a
room booked. Maybe they wanted him on the spot to drive
them to National the next morning. He was going with them,
after all. He was going to Irwin too. Or maybe they just wanted
to talk to him, urgently. Just the three of them, Vassell,
Coomer, and Marshall. Maybe it was easier to talk without
Kramer there. And Marshall had a lot of stuff to talk about.
They started his temporary detached duty in November. You
told me that yourself. November was when the Wall started
coming down. November was when the danger signals started
coming in. So they sent him over here in November to get his
ear close to the ground in the Pentagon. That's my guess. But
whatever, Marshall stayed the night with Vassell and Coomer at

the Jefferson Hotel. I'm sure of it.'

'OK, so?'

'Marshall was at the hotel, and his car was in valet parking.
And you know what? I checked our bill from Paris. They
charged an arm and a leg for everything. Especially the phone
calls. But not all the phone calls. The room-to-room calls
we made didn't show up at all. You called me at six, about
dinner. Then I called you at midnight, because I was lonely.
Those calls didn't show up anywhere on the bill. Hit three for
another room, and it's free. Dial nine for a line, and it triggers
the computer. There were no calls on Vassell and Coomer's bill
and therefore we thought they had made no calls. But they had made calls. It's obvious. They made internal calls. Room to
room. Vassell took the message from XII Corps in Germany,
and then he called Coomer's room to discuss what the hell to do
about the situation. And then one or other of them picked
up the phone and called Marshall's room. They called their
blue-eyed gofer and told him to run downstairs and jump in his
car.'

'Marshall did it?'

I nodded. 'They sent him out into the night to clean up their
mess.'

'Can we prove it?'

'We can make a start,' I said. 'I'll bet you three things.
First, we'll call the Jefferson Hotel and we'll find a booking in
Marshall's name for New Year's Eve. Second, Marshall's file

332

will tell us he once lived in Sperryville, Virginia. And third, his

file will tell us he's tall and heavy and right-handed.'

She went quiet. Her eyelids started moving.

'Is it enough?' she said. 'Is Mrs Kramer enough of a result to
get us off the hook?'

'There's more to come,' I said.

It was like being in a parallel universe, watching Summer
driving slow. We drifted down the highway with the world
going half-speed outside our windows. The big Chevy engine
was loafing along a little above idle. The tyres were quiet. We
passed all our familiar landmarks. The state police facility, the
spot where Kramer's briefcase had been found, the rest area,
the spur to the small highway. We crawled off at the cloverleaf
and I scanned the gas station and the greasy spoon and the
lounge parking and the motel. The whole place was full of
yellow light and fog and black shadow but I could see well
enough. There was no sign of a set-up. Summer turned into the
lot and drove a long slow circuit. There were three eighteen
wheelers parked like beached whales and a couple of old
sedans that were probably abandoned. They had the look. They
had dull paint and soft tyres and they were low on their springs.
There was an old Ford pick-up truck with a baby seat strapped
to the bench. I guessed that was my sergeant's. There was
nothing else. Six forty in the morning, and the world was dark
and still and quiet.

We put the car out of sight behind the lounge bar and walked
across the lot to the diner. Its windows were misted by the
cooking steam. There was hot white light inside. It looked like a Hopper painting. My sergeant was alone at a booth in back. We
walked in and sat down beside her. She hauled a grocery bag

up off the floor. It was full of stuff.

'First things first,' she said.

She put her hand in the bag and came out with a bullet. She stood it upright on the table in front of me. It was a
standard nine-millimetre Parabellum. Standard NATO load.
Full metal jacket. For a sidearm or a sub-machine gun. The
shiny brass casing had something scratched on it. I picked
it up. Looked at it. There was a word engraved there. It was

333

rough and uneven. It had been done fast and by hand. It said: Reacher.

'A bullet with my name on it,' I said.

'From Delta,' my sergeant said. 'Hand delivered, yesterday.'
'Who by?'

'The young one with the beard.'

'Charming,' I said. 'Remind me to kick his ass.'
'Don't joke about it. They're awful stirred up.'
'They're looking at the wrong guy.'
'Can you prove that?'

I paused. Knowing and proving were two different things. I
dropped the bullet into my pocket and put my hands on the
table.

'Maybe I can,' I said.

'You know who killed Carbone too?' Summer said.

'One thing at a time,' I said.

'Here's your money,' my sergeant said. 'It's all I could get.'

She went into her bag again and put forty-seven dollars on the
table.

'Thanks,' I said. 'Call it I owe you fifty. Three bucks interest.'
'Fifty-two,' she said. 'Don't forget the babysitter.'
'What else have you got?'

She came out with a concertina of printer paper. It was the
kind with faint blue rulings and holes in the sides. There were
lines and lines of numbers on it.

'The phone records,' she said.

Then she gave me a sheet of army memo paper with a 202
number on it.

'The Jefferson Hotel,' she said.

Then she gave me a roll of curled fax paper.

'Major Marshall's personal file,' she said.

She followed that with an army phone book. It was thick and
green and had numbers in it for all our posts and installations
worldwide. Then she gave me more curled fax paper. It was
Detective Clark's street canvass results, from New Year's Eve,
up in Green Valley.

'Franz in California told me you wanted it,' she said.

'Great,' I said. 'Thanks. Thanks for everything.'

She nodded. 'You better believe I'm better than the day guy.

334

And someone better be prepared to say so when they start with
the force reduction.'

'I'll tell them,' I said.

'Don't,' she said. 'Won't help a bit, coming from you. You'll
either be dead or in prison.'

'You brought all this stuff,' I said. 'You haven't given up on
me yet.'

She said nothing.

Where did Vassell and Coomer park their car?' I asked.

'On the fourth?' she said. 'Nobody knows for sure. The first
night patrol saw a staff car backed in all by itself at the far end
of the lot. But you can't take that to the bank. He didn't get a
plate number, so it's not a positive ID. And the second night
patrol can't remember it at all. Therefore it's one guy's report
against another.'

'What exactly did the first guy see?'

'He called it a staff car.'

'Was it a black Grand Marquis?'

'It was a black something,' she said. 'But all staff cars are

black or green. Nothing unique about a black car.'

'But it was out of the way.'

She nodded. 'On its own, far end of the lot. But the second
guy can't confirm it.'

'Where was Maior Marshall on the second and the third?'

'That was easier,' she said. 'Two travel warrants. To Frank

furt on the second, back here on the third.'

'An overnight in Germany?'

She nodded again. 'There and back.'

We sat quiet. The counterman came over with a pad and a
pencil. I looked at the menu and the forty-seven dollars on the
table and ordered less than two bucks' worth of coffee and eggs.
Summer took the hint and ordered juice and biscuits. That was

about as cheap as we could get, consistent with staying vertical.
'Am I done here?' my sergeant asked.
I nodded. 'Thanks. I mean it.'
Summer slid out to let her get up.
'Kiss your baby for me,' I said.

My sergeant just stood there, all bone and sinew. Hard as
woodpecker lips. Staring straight at me.

335

'My morn just died,' I said. 'One day your son will remember
mornings like these.'

She nodded once and walked to the door. A minute later we
saw her in her pick-up truck, a small figure all alone at the
wheel. She drove off into the dawn mist. A rope of exhaust
followed behind her and then drifted away.

I shuffled all the paper into a logical pile and started with
Marshall's personal file. The quality of the fax transmission
wasn't great, but it was legible. There was the usual mass of
information. On the first page I found out that Marshall had
been born in September of 1958. Therefore he was thirty-one
years old. He had no wife and no children. No ex-wives, either.
He was wedded to the military, I guessed. He was listed at
six-four and two hundred twenty pounds. The army needed
to know that to keep their quartermaster percentiles up to
speed. He was listed as right-handed. The army needed to
know that because bolt-action sniper rifles are made for right
handers. Left-handed soldiers don't usually get assigned as

snipers. Pigeon-holing starts on day one, in the military.

I turned the page.

Marshall had been born in Sperryville, Virginia, and had gone
all the way through kindergarten and grade school and high
school there.

I smiled. Summer looked at me, questions in her eyes. I
separated the pages and slid them across to her and stretched
over and used my finger to point out the relevant lines. Then
I slid her the memo paper with the Jefferson Hotel number on it.

'Go find a phone,' I said.

She found one just inside the door, on the wall, near the
register. I saw her put two quarters in, and dial, and talk, and
wait. I saw her give her name and rank and unit. I saw her
listen. I saw her talk some more. I saw her wait some more. And
listen some more. She put more quarters in. It was a long call. I
guessed she was getting transferred all over the place. Then
I saw her say thank you. I saw her hang up. I saw her come
back to me, looking grim and satisfied.

'He had a room,' she said. 'In fact he made the booking

336

himself, the day before. Three rooms, for him, and Vassell, and

Coomer. And there was a valet parking charge.'

'Did you speak to the valet station?'

She nodded. 'It was a black Mercury. In just after lunch, out
again at twenty to one in the morning, back in again at twenty
past three in the morning, out again finally after breakfast on
New Year's Day.'

I riffed through the pile of paper and found the fax from
Detective Clark in Green Valley. The results of his house-to
house canvass. There was a fair amount of vehicle activity
listed. It had been New Year's Eve and lots of people were
heading to and from parties. There had been what someone
thought was a taxi on Mrs Kramer's road, just before two
o'clock in the morning.

'A staff car could be mistaken for a taxi,' I said. 'You know, a
plain black sedan, clean condition but a little tired, a lot of miles

on it, the same shape as a Crown Victoria.'
'Plausible,' Summer said.
'Likely,' I said.

We paid the check and left a dollar tip and counted what was
left of my sergeant's loan. Decided we were going to have to
keep on eating cheap, because we were going to need gas

money. And phone money. And some other expenses.

'Where to now?' Summer asked me.

'Across the street,' I said. 'To the motel. We're going to hole
up all day. A little more work, and then we sleep.'

We left the Chevy hidden behind the lounge bar and crossed
the street on foot. Woke the skinny guy in the motel office and
asked him for a room.

'One room?' he said.

I nodded. Summer didn't object. She knew we couldn't afford
two rooms. And we weren't new to sharing. Paris had worked
out OK for us, as far as night-time arrangements were concerned.

'Fifteen bucks,' the skinny guy said.

I gave him the money and he smiled and gave me the key to
the room Kramer had died in. I figured it was an attempt at
humour. I didn't say anything. I didn't mind. I figured a room a

337

guy had died in was better than the rooms that rented by the
hour.

We walked together down the row and unlocked the door
and stepped inside. The room was still dank and brown and
miserable. The corpse had been hauled away, but other than

that it was exactly the same as when I had first seen it.
'It ain't the George V,' Summer said.
'That's for damn sure,' I said.

We put our bags on the floor and I put my sergeant's paperwork
on the bed. The counterpane felt slightly damp. I fiddled
with the heater under the window until I got some warmth out
of it.

'What next?' Summer asked.

'The phone records,' I said. 'I'm looking for a call to a nine
one nine area code.'

'That'll be a local call. Fort Bird is nine one nine too.'
'Great,' I said. 'There'll be a million local calls.'

I spread the print-out on the bed and started looking. There
weren't a million local calls. But there were certainly hundreds.
I started at midnight on New Year's Eve and worked forward
from there. I ignored the numbers that had been called more
than once from more than one phone. I figured those would
be cab companies or clubs or bars. I ignored the numbers that
had the same exchange code as Fort Bird. Those would be
off-post housing, mainly. Soldiers on duty would have been
calling them in the hour after midnight, wishing their spouses
and children a happy new year. I concentrated on numbers that
stood out. Numbers in other North Carolina cities. In particular
I was looking for a number in another city that had been called
once only maybe thirty or forty minutes after midnight. That
was my target. I went through the print-out, patiently, line by
line, page by page, looking for it. I was in no hurry. I had all
day.

I found it after the third concertina fold. It was listed at twelve
thirty-two. Thirty-two minutes after 1989 became 1990. That
was right about when I would have expected it. It was a call
that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. That was about right too, in
terms of duration. It was a solid prospect. I scanned ahead.
Checked the next twenty or thirty minutes. There was nothing

338

else there that looked half as good. I went back and put my
finger under the number I liked. It was my best bet. Or my only
hope.

'Got a pen?' I said.

Summer gave me one from her pocket.

'Got quarters?' I said.

She showed me fifty cents. I wrote the best-bet number on
the army memo paper right underneath the D.C. number for
the Jefferson Hotel. Passed it to her.

'Call it,' I said. 'Find out who answers. You'll have to go back
across the street to the diner. The motel phone is busted.'

She was gone about eight minutes. I spent the time cleaning
my teeth. I had a theory: if you can't get time to sleep, a shower
is a good substitute. If you can't get time to shower, cleaning
your teeth is the next best thing.

I left my toothbrush in a glass in the bathroom and Summer
came through the door. She brought cold and misty air in with
her.

'It was a golf resort outside of Raleigh,' she said.

'Good enough for me,' I said.

'Brubaker,' she said. 'That's where Brubaker was. On vacation.'

'Probably dancing,' I said. 'Don't you think? At half past
midnight on New Year's Eve? The desk clerk probably had to
drag him out of the ballroom to the phone. That's why the call

lasted a quarter of an hour. Most of it was waiting time.'

'Who called him?'

There were codes on the print-out indicating the location of
the originating phone. They meant nothing to me. They were
just numbers and letters. But my sergeant had supplied a key
for me. On the sheet after the last concertina fold was a list of
the codes and the locations they stood for. She had been right.
She was better than the day guy. But then, she was an E-5
sergeant and he was an E-4 corporal, and sergeants made the
U.S. Army worth serving in.

I checked the code against the key.

'Someone on a pay phone in the Delta barracks;' I said.

'So a Delta guy called his CO,' Summer said. 'How does that
help us?'

339

'The timing is suggestive,' I said. 'Must have been an urgent
matter, right?'

'Who was it?'

'One step at a time,' I said.
'Don't shut me out.'
'I'm not.'

'You are. You're walling up.'

I said nothing.

'Your morn died, and you're hurting, and you're closing in on
yourself. But you shouldn't. You can't do this alone, Reacher.

You can't live your whole life alone.'

I shook my head.

'It's not that,' I said. 'It's that I'm only guessing here. I'm
holding my breath all the time. One long shot after another.
And I don't want to fall flat on my face. Not right in front of you.

You wouldn't respect me any more.'

She said nothing.

'I know,' I said. 'You already don't respect me because you saw me naked.'

She paused. Then she smiled.

'But you need to get used to that,' I said. 'Because it's going
to happen again. Right now, in fact. We're taking the rest of the
day off.'

The bed was awful. The mattress dipped in the middle and the
sheets were damp. Maybe worse than damp. A place like that, if
the room hadn't been rented since Kramer died, I was pretty
sure the bed wouldn't have been changed, either. Kramer had
never actually gotten into it, but he had died right on top of it.
He had probably leaked all kinds of bodily fluids. Summer
didn't seem to mind. But she hadn't seen him there, all grey and
white and inert.

But then I figured, what do you want for fifteen bucks? And Summer took my mind off the sheets. She distracted me big
time. We were plenty tired, but not too tired. We did well,
second time around. The second time is often the best. That's
been my experience. You're looking forward to it, and you're
not bored with it yet.

Afterwards, we slept like babies. The heater finally put some

34O

temperature into the room. The sheets warmed up. The traffic
sounds on the highway were soothing. Like white noise. We
were safe. Nobody would think of looking for us there. Kramer
had chosen well. It was a hideaway. We rolled down into the
mattress dip together and held each other tight. I ended up
thinking it was the best bed I had ever been in.

We woke up much later, very hungry. It was after six o'clock in
the evening. Already dark outside the window. The January
days were spooling by one after the other, and we weren't
paying much attention to them. We showered and dressed and
headed across the street to eat. I took the army phone directory
with me.

We went for the most calories for the fewest dollars but still
ended up blowing more than eight bucks between us. I got my
own back with the coffee. The diner had a bottomless cup
policy and I exploited it ruthlessly. Then I camped out near the
register and used the phone on the wall. Checked the number

in the army book and called Sanchez down at Jackson.

'I hear you're in the shit,' he said.

'Temporarily,' I said. 'You heard anything more about
Brubaker?'

'Like what?'

'Like, did they find his car yet?'

'Yes, they did. And it was a long way from Columbia.'

'Let me guess,' I said. 'Somewhere more than an hour due
north of Fort Bird, and maybe east and a little south of Raleigh.

How about Smithfield, North Carolina?'

'How the hell did you know that?'

'Just a feeling,' I said. 'Had to be close to where 1-95 meets
U.S.70. Right on a main drag. Do they think that's where he was
killed?'

'No question about it. Killed right there in his car. Someone
shot him from the back seat. The windshield was blown out in
front of the driver's position and what was left of the glass was
all covered in blood and brains. And there were spatters on the
steering wheel that hadn't been smudged. Therefore nobody
drove the car after he died. Therefore that's where he was
killed. Right there in his car. Smithfield, North Carolina.'

341

'Did they find shell cases?'

'No shell cases. No significant trace evidence either, apart

from the kind of normal shit they would expect to find.'

'Have they got a narrative theory?'

'It was an industrial unit parking lot. Big place, like a local
landmark, with a big lot, busy in the daytime but deserted at
night. They think it was a two-car rendezvous. Brubaker gets
there first, the second car pulls up alongside, at least two guys
get out of it, they get into Brubaker's car, one in the front and
one in the back, they sit a spell, maybe they talk a little, then
the guy in the back pulls a gun and shoots. Which by the way is
how they figure Brubaker's watch got busted. They figure he
had his left wrist up on the top of the wheel, the way guys do
when they're sitting in their cars. But whatever, he goes down
and they drag him out and they put him in the trunk of the
other car and they drive him down to Columbia and they leave
him there.'

'With dope and money in his pocket.'

'They don't know where that came from yet.'

'Why didn't the bad guys move his car?' I said. 'Seems kind of
dumb to take the body to South Carolina and leave the car
where it was.'

'Nobody knows why. Maybe because it's conspicuous to drive
a car full of blood with a blown windshield. Or maybe because
bad guys are dumb sometimes.'

'You got notes about what Mrs Brubaker said about the
phone calls he took?'

'After dinner on the fourth?'

'No, earlier,' I said. 'On New Year's Eve. About half an hour
after they all held hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne".'

'Maybe. I took some pretty good notes. I could go look.'

'Be quick,' I said. 'I'm on a pay phone here.'

I heard the receiver go down on his desk. Heard faint
scratchy movement far away in his office. I waited. Put another
pair of quarters in the slot. We were already down two bucks on
toll calls. Plus twelve for eating and fifteen for the room. We had
eighteen dollars left. Out of which I knew for sure I was going
to be spending another ten, hopefully pretty soon. I began to
wish the army didn't buy Caprices with big V-8s in them. A little

342

four-cylinder thing like Kramer had rented would have gotten
us further, on eight bucks' worth of gas.

I heard Sanchez pick up the phone again.

'OK, New Year's Eve,' he said. 'She told me he was dragged
out of a dinner dance around twelve thirty in the morning. She

told me she was a little bit aggrieved about it.'

'Did he tell her anything about the call?'

'No. But she said he danced better after it. Like he was
all fired up. Like he was on the trail of something. He was all
excited.'

'She could tell that from the way he danced?'

'They were married a long time, Reacher. You get to know a
person.'

'OK,' I said. 'Thanks, Sanchez. I got to go.'
'Be careful.'
'Always am.'

I hung up and walked back to our table.

Where now?' Summer said.

'Now we're going to go see girls take their clothes off,' I said.

It was a short walk across the lot from the greasy spoon to
the lounge bar. There were a few cars around, but not many.
It was still early. It would be another couple of hours before
the crowds really built up. The locals were still home, eating
dinner, watching the sports news. Guys from Fort Bird were
finishing chow time in the mess, showering, getting changed,
hooking up in twos and threes, finding car keys, picking out
designated drivers. But I still kept my eye out. I didn't want to
bump into a crowd of Delta people. Not outside in the dark.
Time was too precious to waste.

We pulled the door and stepped inside. There was a new face
behind the register. Maybe a friend or a relative of the fat guy. I
didn't know him. He didn't know me. And we were in BDUs. No
unit designations. No indication that we were MPs. So the new
face was happy enough to see us. He figured us for a nice little
upward tick in his first-hour cash flow. We walked right past
him.

The place was less than one-tenth full. It felt very different
that way. It felt cold and vast and empty. Like some kind of a

343

factory. Without a press of bodies the music was louder and
tinnier than ever. There were whole expanses of vacant floor.
Whole acres. Hundreds of unoccupied chairs. There was only
one girl performing. She was on the main stage. She was bathed
in warm red light, but she looked cold and listless. I saw
Summer watching her. Saw her shudder. I had said: So what are
you going to do? Go work up at the strip club with Sin? Face to

face, it wasn't a very appealing option.

'Why are we here?' she asked.

'For the key to everything,' I said. 'My biggest mistake.'
'Which was?'
'Watch,' I said.

I walked around to the dressing-room door. Knocked twice. A
girl I didn't know opened up. She kept the door close to her

body and stuck her head around. Maybe she was naked.
'I need to see Sin,' I said.
'She's not here.'

'She is,' I said. 'She's got Christmas to pay for.'

'She's busy.'

'Ten dollars,' I said. 'Ten dollars to talk. No touching.'

The girl disappeared and the door swung shut behind her. I
stood out of the way, so the first person Sin would see would be
Summer. We waited. And waited. Then the door opened up
again and Sin stepped out. She was in a tight sheath dress. It
was pink. It sparkled. She was tall on clear plastic heels. I
stepped behind her. Got between her and the dressing-room
door. She turned and saw me. Trapped.

'Couple of questions,' I said. 'That's all.'

She looked better than the last time I had seen her. The
bruises on her face were ten days old and were more or less
healed up. Her make-up was maybe a little thicker than before.
But that was the only sign of her troubles. Her eyes looked
vacant. I guessed she had just shot up. Right between her toes.

Whatever gets you through the night. 'Ten dollars,' she said.
'Let's sit,'! said.
We found a table far from a speaker. It was relatively quiet
there. I took a ten-spot out of my pocket and held it out. Didn't
let go of it.

344

'You remember me?'I said.

She nodded.

'Remember that night?' I said.

She nodded again.

'OK, here's the thing. Who hit you?'

'That soldier,' she said. 'The one you were talking to just
before.'

345

TWENTY-ONE

KEPT TIGHT HOLD OF THE TEN-DOLLAR BILL AND TOOK HER THROUGH
it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee
she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She
had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But
none of them knew anything. None of them had any information
at all, either first-hand or second-hand. There were no rumours
going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in
the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard
nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room.
There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else
was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she
should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt
sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had
actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it
and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped
into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description
of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to
remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It
makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us
Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put
emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before.

346

Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he
had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had
been stunned by the blows. She hadn't seen them coming. She
sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them
against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And
looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting
hit.

'Tell me again,' I said. 'It was the soldier, not the owner.'
She looked at me like I was crazy.

'The owner never hits us,' she said. 'We're his meal ticket.'

I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet
table.

'What does it mean?' Summer said.
'Everything,' I said.
'How did you know?'

I shrugged. We were back in Kramer's motel room, folding
stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last
time.

'I saw it wrong,' I said. 'I guess I started to realize in Paris.
When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They
were watching people coming out and they were kind of half
prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them,
depending. That's how it was in the bar that night. I walked in,
I'm a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for
a split second. But they didn't know me and they didn't like
what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very
subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn't
shut me out. He turned towards me. I thought it was just
random, but it wasn't. I thought I was selecting him, but he was
selecting me just as much.'

'It had to be random. He didn't know you.'

'He didn't know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw
them. He had been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he
was looking at.'

'So why turn towards you?'

'It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning
away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.'

347

'Why?'

'Because he wanted to know why I was there.'

'Did you tell him?'

I nodded. 'Looking back, yes I did. Not in detail. I just wanted
him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was
nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the
street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart
guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of

me.'

'Why would he care?'

'Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in
order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries
dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart.
Delta doesn't hire dumb guys, that's for sure. He went in and
smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything.
And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it.
He didn't even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me
up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he
wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we
fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He
saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he
put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got
both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I
would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary
procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met
him before.'

%Vhy did he want you dead-ended? What was his motive?'
'He didn't want me to find out who took the briefcase.'
'Why not?'

I sat down on the bed.

'Why did we never find the woman Kramer met in here?'

'I don't know.'

'Because there never was a woman,' I said. 'Kramer met
Carbone in here.'

She just stared at me.

'Kramer was gay too,' I said. 'He and Carbone were getting it

on.'

348

'Carbone took the briefcase,' I said. 'Right out of this room.
Because he had to keep the relationship secret. Just like we
thought about the phantom woman, maybe he was worried
there was something personal to him in it. Or maybe Kramer
had been bragging about the Irwin conference. Talking about
how Armored was going to fight its corner. So maybe Carbone
was curious. Or even concerned. He'd been an infantryman for
sixteen years. And the type of guy who gets into Delta, he's got
a lot of unit loyalty. Maybe more loyalty to his unit than to his
lover.'

'I don't believe it,' Summer said.

'You should,' I said. 'It all fits. Andrea Norton more or less
told us. I think she knew about Kramer. Either consciously
or subconsciously, I'm not sure which. We accused her, and
she wasn't annoyed, remember? She was amused instead. Or
bewildered, maybe. She was a sexual psychologist, she'd met
the guy, maybe she'd picked up a vibe, professionally. Or the
absence of a vibe, personally. So in our minds we had her
in bed with Kramer, and she just couldn't make it compute.
So she didn't get mad. It just didn't connect. And we know
Kramer's marriage was a sham. No kids. He hadn't lived at
home for five years. Detective Clark in Green Valley wondered
why he wasn't divorced. He once asked me, divorce isn't a
dealbreaker for a general, is it? I said no, it isn't. But being gay
is. That's for damn sure. Being gay is a big-time dealbreaker
for a general. That's why he kept the marriage going. It was
cover, for the army. Just like the girlfriend photo in Carbone's
wallet.'

'We have no proof.'

'But we can get close. Carbone had a condom in his wallet, as
well as the girlfriend photo. A buck gets ten it's from the same
pack as the one Walter Reed took off Kramer's body. And
another buck gets ten we can comb old assignment orders and
find out where and when they met. Some joint exercise somewhere,
like we thought all along. Plus Carbone was a vehicle
guy for Delta. Their adjutant told me that. He had access to
their whole stable of Humvees, any old time he wanted it. So
another buck gets ten we'll find he was out in one, alone, on
New Year's Eve.'

349

vVas he killed for the briefcase? In the end? Like Mrs Kramer?'

I shook my head. 'Neither one of them was killed simply for
the briefcase.'

She just looked at me.

'Later,' I said. 'One step at a time.'

'But he had the briefcase. You said so. He ran off with it.'

I nodded. 'And he searched it as soon as he got back to Bird.
He found the agenda. He read it. And something in it made him
call his CO immediately.'

'He called Brubaker? How could he do that? He couldn't say,
hey, I was just sleeping with a general and guess what I found?'

'He could have said he found it somewhere else. On the
sidewalk, maybe. But actually I'm wondering if Brubaker knew
about Carbone and Kramer all along. It's possible. Delta is a
family and Brubaker was a very hands-on type of CO. It's
possible he knew. And maybe he exploited the situation. For
intelligence purposes. These guys are incredibly competitive.
And Sanchez told me Brubaker never missed any angle or any
advantage or any wrinkle. So maybe the price of Brubaker's
tolerance was that Carbone had to pass stuff on, from the pillow
talk.'

'That's awful.'

I nodded. 'Like being a whore. I told you there would be no

winners here. Everyone's going to come out looking bad.'
'Except us. If we get the results.'
'You're going to be OK. I'm not.'
'Why?'

'Wait and see,' I said.

We carried our bags to the Chevy, which was still hidden
behind the lounge bar. We put them in the trunk. The lot was
fuller than it had been before. The night was heating up. I
checked my watch. Almost eight o'clock on the east coast,
almost five on the west coast. I stood still, trying to decide. If we

pause for breath even for a second, we'll be overrun again.

'I need to make two more calls,' I said.

I took the army phone book with me and we walked back to
the greasy spoon. I checked every pocket for loose change and
came up with a small pile. Summer contributed a quarter and a

35O

nickel. The counterman changed the pennies for silver. I fed
the phone and dialled Franz at Fort Irwin. Five o'clock in the
afternoon, it was the middle of his work day.

'Am I going to get past your main gate?' I asked him.

'Why wouldn't you?'

'Willard's chasing me. He's liable to warn anyplace he thinks
I'm going.'

'I haven't heard from him yet.'

'Maybe you could switch your telex off for a day or two.'
'What's your ETA?'
'Tomorrow sometime.'

'Your buddies are already here. They just got in.'

'I haven't got any buddies.'

'Vassell and Coomer. They're fresh in from Europe.'
'Why?'
'Exercises.'

'Is Marshall still there?'

'Sure. He drove out to LAX to pick them up. They all came
back together. Like one big happy family.'

'I need you to do two things for me,' I said.

'Two more things, you mean.'

'I need a ride from LAX myself. Tomorrow, first morning

arrival from D.C. I need you to send someone.'

'And?'

'And I need you to get someone to locate the staff car Vassell
and Coomer used back here. It's a black Mercury Grand
Marquis. Marshall signed it out on New Year's Eve. By now it's
either back in the Pentagon garage or parked at Andrews. I
need someone to find it and to do a full court press on it,
forensically. And fast.'

'What would they be looking for?'
'Anything at all.'
'OK,' Franz said.

'I'll see you tomorrow,' I said.

I hung up and turned the pages in the army directory all the
way from F for Fort Irwin to P for Pentagon. Slid my finger
down the sub-section to C for Chief of Staff's Office. I left it
there, briefly.

'Vassell and Coomer are at Irwin,' I said.

351

'Why?' Summer said.

'Hiding out,' I said. 'They think we're still in Europe. They
know Willard is watching the airports. They're sitting ducks.'

'Do we want them?' Summer said. 'They didn't know about
Mrs Kramer. That was clear. They were shocked when you told
them, that night in your office. So I guess they authorized the
burglary, but not the collateral damage.'

I nodded. She was right. They had been surprised, that
night in my office. Coomer had gone pale and asked: Was it a
burglary? It was a question that came straight from a guilty
conscience. That meant Marshall hadn't told them at that point.
He had kept the really bad news to himself. He had come back
to the D.C. hotel at twenty past three in the morning, and he
had told them the briefcase hadn't been there, but he hadn't
told them what else had gone down. Vassell and Coomer must
have been piecing it together on the fly, that night in my office,
in the dark and after the event. It must have been an interesting
ride home. Harsh words must have been exchanged.

'It's down to Marshall alone,' Summer said. 'He panicked, is
all.'

'Technically it was a conspiracy,' I said. 'Legally they all share
the blame.'

'Hard to prosecute.'

'That's JAG Corps' problem.'

'It's a weak case. Hard to prove.'

'They did other stuff,' I said. 'Believe me, Mrs Kramer getting
hit on the head is the least of their worries.'

I fed the phone again and dialled the Chief of Staff's office,
deep inside the Pentagon. A woman's voice answered. It was a
perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant,
nearly accentless. I guessed she was a senior administrator,
working late. I guessed she was about fifty, blonde going grey,
powder on her face.

'Write this down,' I said to her. 'I am a military police major
called Reacher. I was recently transferred out of Panama and
into Fort Bird, North Carolina. I will be standing at the E-ring
check point inside your building at midnight tonight. It is
entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets me there.'

I paused.

352

'Is that it?' the woman said.

'Yes,' I said, and hung up. I scooped fifteen remaining cents
back into my pocket. Closed the phone book and wedged it
under my arm.

'Let's go,' I said. We drove through the gas station and
topped off the tank with eight bucks' worth of gas. Then we
headed north.

'It's entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you
there?' Summer said. 'What the hell is that about?'

We were on 1-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two
and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and
the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The
whole world was back at work.

'There's something heavy-duty going on,' I said. 'Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less
than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it's heavy-duty,
with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could
have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on
the same day?'

'You're a major,' she said. 'So are Franz and Sanchez and all
the others. Any colonel could have moved you.'

'But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were
taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most
Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.'

'OK then, any brigadier general could have done it.'
'With forged signatures on the orders?'
'Anyone can forge a signature.'

'And hope to get away with it afterwards? No, this whole
thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with

impunity. Someone untouchable.'

'The Chief of Staff?'

I shook my head. 'No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right
now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry.
And we can assume he's a reasonably smart guy. They don't put
dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin
Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized
that pretty soon everything else would be coming down, too.
The whole established order.'

353

'And?'

'And he started to worry about some kind of a move by
Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys
have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted
trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in
the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think
he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger
coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don't want
integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things
the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about
starting something dramatic. Something bad. That's why they
were so worried about the agenda getting out.'

'But change happens. Ultimately it can't be resisted.'
'Nobody ever accepts that fact,' I said. 'Nobody ever has, and
nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee
you'll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away
somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and
that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of new-fangled junk.
There'll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises,
putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that

their way is the only way.'

Summer said nothing.

I smiled. 'Go back in our records and you'll probably find

Kramer's granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.'
'What exactly were they planning?'

I shrugged. 'We didn't see the agenda. But we can make some
pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously.
Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with
defence industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say
that lightweight armoured vehicles can't be made safe, that
would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell
people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in
tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to
scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet
big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions
of dollars.'

'That's just standard-issue bitching.'

'So maybe there's more. We don't know yet. Kramer's heart
attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.'

354

'You think they'll start it up again?'

'Wouldn't you? If you had everything to lose?'

She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned
slightly and looked at me. Her eyelids were moving.

'So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?' she said. 'If
you're right, then it's the Vice-Chief who's on your side. He
brought you here. He's the one who's been protecting you.'

'Game of chess,' I said. 'Tug of war. Good guy, bad guy. The
good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away.
Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy
outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks
the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we
know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is

Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.'
'The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?'
I nodded.

'So why demand to see him?'

'Because we're in the army, Summer,' I said. 'We're supposed
to confront our enemies, not our friends.'

We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my
strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and
bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man's
equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff's face was a whole other
ballgame. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above
it. There had been three of them during my years of service and
I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as
far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an
Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who
moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart.
Something made them different from the rest of us.

But they started out the same. I could have been one of them,
theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But
for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined
engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get
sent on somewhere else afterwards. Somewhere better. You
had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or
Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere
overseas like Oxford or Cambridge in England. You had to get

355

a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a Master's or a Ph.D. in
economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a
White House Fellow. That's where my career path diverged.
Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw
a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books.
Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeon-holing
starts on day one, in the military. So they went their way and
I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I
went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to
my turf, they'd be crawling on their bellies. How I was going

to do on their turf remained to be seen.
'I'm going in by myself,' I said.
'You are not,' Summer said.

'I am,' I said. 'You can call it what you like. Advice from a
friend, or a direct order from a superior officer. But you're
staying in the car. That's for sure. I'll handcuff you to the

steering wheel if I have to.'

'We're in this together.'

'But we're allowed to be intelligent. This isn't like going to
see Andrea Norton. This is as risky as it gets. No reason for
both of us to go down in flames.'

'Would you stay in the car? If you were me?'

'I'd hide underneath it,'! said.

She said nothing. Just drove, as fast as ever. We hit the
Beltway. Started the long clockwise quarter-circle up towards
Arlington.

Pentagon security was a little tighter than usual. Maybe
someone was worried about Noriega's leftover forces staging a
two-thousand-mile northward penetration. But we got into the
parking lot with no trouble at all. It was almost deserted.
Summer drove a long slow circuit and came to rest near the
main entrance. She killed the motor and jammed the parking
brake on. She did it a little harder than she really needed to. I
guessed she was making a point. I checked my watch. It was
five minutes before midnight.

'Are we going to argue?' I said.

She shrugged.

'Good luck,' she said. 'And give him hell.'

356

I slid out into the cold. Closed the door behind me and stood
still for a second. The bulk of the building loomed up over me
in the dark. People said it was the world's largest office complex
and right then I believed them. I started walking. There
was a long ramp up to the doors. Then there was a guarded
lobby the size of a basketball court. My special unit badge got
me through that. Then I headed for the heart of the complex.
There were five concentric pentagon-shaped corridors, called
rings. Each one of them was protected by a separate check
point. My badge was good enough to get me through B, C, and
D. Nothing on earth was going to get me into the E-ring. I
stopped outside the final check point and nodded to the guard.
He nodded back. He was used to people waiting there.

I leaned against the wall. It was smooth-painted concrete and
it felt cold and slick. The building was silent. I could hear
nothing except water in pipes and the faint rush of forced-air
heating and the guard's steady breathing. The floors were
shined linoleum tile and they reflected the ceiling fluorescents
in a long double image that ran away to a distant vanishing
point.

I waited. I could see a clock in the guard's booth. It rolled
past midnight. Past five after midnight. Then ten after. I waited.
I started to figure my challenge had been ignored. These
guys were political. Maybe they played a smarter game than I
could conceive. Maybe they had more gloss and sophistication
and patience. Maybe I was more than a little bit out of my
league.

Or maybe the woman with the voice had thrown my message

in the trash.

I waited.

Then at fifteen minutes past midnight I heard faraway heels
echoing on the linoleum. Dress shoes, a staccato little rhythm
that was part urgent and part relaxed. Like a man who was busy
but not panicked. I couldn't see him. The sound of his heels on
the floor was billowing out at me around an angled corner. It
ran ahead of him down the deserted corridor like an early
warning signal.

I listened to the sound and watched the spot where it told me
he would appear, which was right where the fluorescent tubes

357

on the ceiling met their reflections in the floor. The sound kept
on coming. Then a man stepped around the corner and walked
through the flare of light. He kept on walking straight towards
me, the rhythm of his heels unbroken, not slowing, not speeding
up, still busy, not panicked. He came closer. He was the
Chief of Staff of the Army. He was in formal evening mess
dress. He was wearing a short blue jacket nipped in at the waist.
Blue pants with two gold stripes. A bow tie. Gold studs and
cufflinks. Elaborate knots and swirls of gold braid all over his
sleeves and his shoulders. He was covered with gold insignia
and badges and sashes and miniature versions of his medals.
He had a full head of grey hair. He was about five-nine and
one-eighty. Exactly average size for the modern army.

He got within ten feet of me and I snapped to attention and
saluted. It was a pure reflex action. Like a Catholic meeting the
Pope. He didn't salute back. He just looked at me. Maybe there
was a protocol that forbade saluting while wearing the evening
mess uniform. Or while bareheaded in the Pentagon. Or maybe
he was just rude.

He put his hand out to shake.

'Very sorry I'm late,' he said. 'Good of you to wait. I was at the

White House. For a state dinner with some foreign friends.'

I shook his hand.

'Let's go to my office,' he said.

He led me past the E-ring guard and we turned left into the
corridor and walked a little way. Then we stepped into a suite
and I met the woman with the voice. She looked more or less
like I had predicted. But she sounded even better in person

than she had on the phone.

'Coffee, major?' she said.

She had a fresh pot brewed. I guessed she had clicked the
switch at about eleven fifty-three, so it had finished perking
at midnight exactly. I guessed the Chief of Staff's suite was
that sort of place. She gave me a saucer and a cup made of
transparent bone china. I was afraid of crushing it like an
eggshell. She was wearing civilian clothes. A dark suit so severe
it was more formal than a uniform.

'This way,' the Chief of Staff said.

He led me into his office. My cup rattled on its saucer. His

358

office was surprisingly plain. It had the same painted concrete
walls as the rest of the building. The same type of steel desk I
had seen in the Fort Bird pathologist's office.

'Take a seat,' he said. 'If you don't mind, we'll make this
quick. It's late.'

I said nothing. He watched me.

'I got your message,' he said. 'Received and understood.'

I said nothing. He tried an ice-breaker.

'Noriega's top guys are still out there,' he said. 'Why do you
suppose that is?'

'Thirty thousand square miles,' I said. 'A lot of space for
people to hide in.'

'Will we get them all?'

'No question,' I said. 'Someone will sell them out.'
'You're a cynic.'
'A realist,' I said.

'What have you got to tell me, major?'

I sipped my coffee. The lights were low. I was suddenly aware
that I was deep inside one of the world's most secure buildings,
late at night, face to face with the nation's most powerful
soldier. And I was about to make a serious accusation. And only
one other person knew I was there, and maybe she was already
in a cell somewhere.

'I was in Panama two weeks ago,' I said. 'Then I was transferred
out.'

'Why do you think that was?'

I took a breath. 'I think the Vice-Chief wanted particular
individuals on the ground in particular locations because he

was worried about trouble.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'An internal coup by your old buddies in Armored Branch.'
He paused for a long moment.

'Would that have been a realistic worry?' he asked.

I nodded. 'There was a conference at Irwin scheduled for
New Year's Day. I believe the agenda was certainly con

troversial, probably illegal, maybe treasonous.'

The Chief of Staff said nothing.

'But it misfired,' I said. 'Because General Kramer died. But
there were potential problems from the fallout. So you personally

359

intervened by moving Colonel Garber out of the 110th and

replacing him with an incompetent.'

'Why would I do that?'

'So that nature would take its course and the investigation

would misfire too.'

He sat still for another long moment. Then he smiled.

'Good analysis,' he said. 'The collapse of Soviet communism

was bound to lead to stresses inside the U.S. military. Those
stresses were bound to manifest themselves with all kinds
of internal plotting and planning. The internal plotting and
planning was bound to be anticipated and steps were bound to
be taken to nip potential trouble in the bud. And as you say,
there were bound to be tensions at the very top that led to

moves and countermoves.'

I said nothing.

'Like a game of chess,' he said. 'The Vice-Chief moves, and I
countermove. An inevitable conclusion, I suppose, because you
were looking for a pair of senior individuals in which one
outranks the other.'

I looked straight at him.

'Am I wrong?' I said.

'Only in two particulars,' he said. 'Obviously you're right in

that there are huge changes coming. CIA was a little slow to
spot Ivan's imminent demise, so we've had less than a year
to think things through. But believe me, we've thought them
through. We're in a unique situation now. We're like a heavyweight
boxer who's trained for years for a shot at the world
title, and then we wake up one morning and find our intended
opponent has dropped dead. It's a very bewildering sensation.
But we've done our homework.'

He leaned down and opened a drawer and struggled out with

an enormous loose-leaf file. It was at least three inches thick. It
thumped down on his desktop. It had a green jacket with a long
word stencilled on it in black. He reversed it so I could read it.
It said: Transformation.

'Your first mistake is that your focus was too close,' he said.

'You need to stand back and look at it from our perspective.
From above. It's not just Armored Branch that is going to
change. Everyone is going to change. Obviously we're going

360

to move towards highly mobile integrated units. But it's a
bad mistake to see them as infantry units with a few bells
and whistles tacked on. They're going to be a completely
new concept. They'll be something that has never existed
before. Maybe we'll integrate attack helicopters too, and give
the command to the guys in the sky. Maybe we'll move into
electronic warfare and give the command to the guys with the
computers.'

I said nothing.

He laid his hand on the file, palm down. 'My point is that
nobody is going to come out of this unscathed. Yes, Armored is
going to be professionally devastated. No question about that.
But so is the infantry and so is the artillery, and so is transport,
and so is logistics support, and so is everyone else, equally, just
as much. Maybe more, for some people. Including the military
police, probably. Everything is going to change, major. There

will be no stone unturned.'

I said nothing.

'This is not about Armored versus the infantry,' he said. 'You
need to understand that. That's a vast oversimplification. It's
actually about everyone versus everyone else. There will be
no winners, I'm afraid. But equally therefore, there will be no
losers. You could choose to think about it that way. Everyone is
in the same boat.'

He took his hand off the file.

'What's my second mistake?' I said.

'I moved you out of Panama,' he said. 'Not the Vice-Chief.
He knew nothing about it. I selected twenty men personally
and put them where I thought I needed them. I spread them
around, because in my judgement it was fifty-fifty as to who
was going to blink first. The light units, or the heavy units?
It was impossible to predict. Once their commanders started
thinking, they would all realize they have everything to lose. I
sent you to Fort Bird, for instance, because I was a little worried

about David Brubaker. He was a very proactive type.'
'But it was Armored who blinked first,' I said.
He nodded.

'Apparently,' he said. 'If you say so. It was always going to be
a fifty-fifty chance. And I guess I'm a little disappointed. Those

361

were my boys. But I'm not defensive about them. I moved
onward and upward. I left them behind. I'm perfectly happy to

let the chips fall where they may.'
'So why did you move Garber?'
'I didn't.'

'So who did?'

vVho outranks me?'
'Nobody,' I said.
'I wish,' he said. I said nothing.

"What does an M-16 rifle cost?' he said.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Not a lot, I guess.'

"We get them for about four hundred dollars,' he said. 'What

does an Abrams MIA1 main battle tank cost?'

'About four million.'

'So think about the big defence contractors,' he said. 'Whose
side are they on? The light units, or the heavy units?'

I didn't answer. I figured the question was rhetorical.
'Who outranks me?' he asked again.
'The Secretary of Defence,' I said.

He nodded. 'A nasty little man. A politician. Political parties
take campaign contributions. And defence contractors can see

the future the same as anyone else.'

I said nothing.

'A lot for you to think about,' the Chief of Staff said. He
hefted the big Transformation file back into his drawer.
Replaced it on his desktop with a slimmer jacket. It was
marked: Argon.

'You know what argon is?' he asked.

'It's an inert gas,' I said. 'They use it in fire extinguishers. It
spreads a layer low down over a fire and prevents it from taking
hold.'

'That's why I chose the name. Operation Argon was the plan

that moved you people at the end of December.'

'Why did you use Garber's signature?'
'Like you suggested in another context, I wanted to let nature
take its course. MP orders signed by the Chief of Staff would
have raised a lot of eyebrows. Everyone would have switched to
best behaviour. Or smelled a rat and gone deeper underground.

362

It would have made your job harder. It would have defeated my
purpose.

'Your purpose?'

'I wanted prevention, of course. That was the main priority.
But I was also curious, major. I wanted to see who would blink
first.'

He handed me the file.

'You're a special unit investigator,' he said. 'By statute the
l l0th has extraordinary powers. You are authorized to arrest
any soldier anywhere, including me, here in my office, if you so
choose. So read the Argon file. I think you'll find it clears me. If
you agree, go about your business elsewhere.'

He got up from behind his desk. We shook hands again.
Then he walked out of the room. Left me all alone in his office,
in the heart of the Pentagon, in the middle of the night.

Thirty minutes later I got back in the car with Summer. She had

kept the motor off to save gas and it was cold inside.

'Well?' she said.

'One crucial error,' I said. 'The tug of war wasn't the Vice
Chief and the Chief. It was the Chief himself and the Secretary
of Defence.'

'Are you sure?'

I nodded. 'I saw the file. There were memos and orders
going back nine months. Different papers, different typewriters,
different pens, no way to fake all that in four hours. It was the

Chief of Staff's initiative all along, and he was always kosher.'
'So how did he take it?'

'Pretty well,' I said. 'Considering. But I don't think he'll feel

like helping me.'
'With what?'

'With the trouble I'm in.'
'Which is?'
'Wait and see.'

She just looked at me.
'Where now?' she said.
'California,' I said.

363

TWENTY-TWO

HE CHEVY WAS RUNNING ON FUMES BY THE TIME WE GOT TO THE National airport. We put it in the long term lot and hiked
back to the terminal. It was about a mile. There were no
shuttle buses running. It was the middle of the night and the
place was practically deserted. Inside the terminal we had to
roust a clerk out of a back office. I gave him the last of our
stolen vouchers and he booked us on the first morning flight to
I-AX. We were looking at a long wait.

'What's the mission?' Summer said.

'Three arrests,'! said. Tassell, Coomer, and Marshall.'
'Charge?'

'Serial homicide,' I said. 'Mrs Kramer, Carbone, and
Brubaker.'

She stared at me. 'Can you prove it?'

I shook my head. 'I know exactly what happened. I know
when, and how, and where, and why. But I can't prove a damn

thing. We're going to have to rely on confessions.'

'We won't get them.'

'I've gotten them before,' I said. "There are ways.'

She flinched.

'This is the army, Summer,' I said. 'It ain't a quilting bee.'

364

'Tell me about Carbone and Brubaker.'

'I need to eat,' I said. 'I'm hungry.'

'We don't have any money,' Summer said.

Most places had metal grilles down over their doors anyway.
Maybe they would feed us on the plane. We carried our bags
over to a seating area next to a twenty-foot window that had
nothing but black night outside. The seats were long vinyl
benches with fixed armrests every two feet to stop people fom

lying down and sleeping.

'Tell me,' she said.

'It's still a series of crazy long shots, one after the other.'
'Try me.'

'OK, start over with Mrs Kramer. Why did Marshall go to
Green Valley?'

'Because it was the obvious first place to try.'

'But it wasn't. It was almost the obvious last place to try.
Kramer had hardly been there in five years. His staff must have
known that. They'd travelled with him many times before. Yet
they made a fast decision and Marshall went straight there.
Why?'

'Because Kramer had told them that's where he was going?'
'Correct,' I said. 'He told them he was with his wife to conceal
the fact he was actually with Carbone. But then, why would he

have to tell them anything?'

'I don't know.'

'Because there's a category of person you have to tell something.'

'Who?'

'Suppose you're a rich guy travelling with your mistress. You
spend one night apart, you have to tell her something. And if
you tell her you're dropping in on your wife purely to keep up
appearances, she has to buy it. Maybe she doesn't like it, but
she has to buy it. Because it's expected, occasionally. It's all
part of the deal.'

'Kramer didn't have a mistress. He was gay.'
'He had Marshall.'
'No,' she said. 'No way.'

I nodded. 'Kramer was two-timing Marshall. Marshall was his
main squeeze. They were in a relationship. Marshall wasn't an

365

intelligence officer but Kramer appointed him one anyway
to keep him close. They were an item. But Kramer had a
wandering eye. He met Carbone somewhere and started seeing
him on the side. So on New Year's Eve Kramer told Marshall
he was going to see his wife and Marshall believed him. Like
the rich guy's mistress would. That's why Marshall went to
Green Valley. In his heart he knew for sure Kramer had gone
there. He was the one person in the world who felt he would know for sure. It was him who told Vassell and Coomer where
Kramer was. But Kramer was lying to him. Like people do, in
relationships.'

Summer was quiet for a long moment. She just stared out at

the night.

'Does this affect what happened there?' she said.

'I think it does, slightly,' I said. 'I think Mrs Kramer talked to

Marshall. She must have recognized him from her time on post
in Germany. She probably knew all about him and her husband. Generals' wives are usually pretty smart. Maybe she even knew
there was a second guy in the picture. Maybe she was pissed
off and taunted Marshall about it. Like, you can't keep your
man either, right? Maybe Marshall got mad and lashed out.
Maybe that's why he didn't tell Vassell and Coomer right away.
Because the collateral damage wasn't just about the burglary
itself. It was also about an argument. That's why I said Mrs
Kramer wasn't killed just for the briefcase. I think partly she
was killed because she taunted a jealous guy who lost his
temper.'

'This is all just guesswork.'

'Mrs Kramer is dead. That isn't a guess.'

'The rest of it is.'

'Marshall is thirty-one, never been married.'

'That doesn't prove a thing.'

'I know,' I said. 'I know. There's no proof anywhere. Proof is a

scarce commodity right now.'

Summer was quiet for a beat. 'Then what happened?'

'Then Vassell and Coomer and Marshall started the hunt

for the briefcase in earnest. They had an advantage over us
because they knew they were looking for a man, not a woman.
Marshall flew back to Germany on the second and searched

366

Kramer's office and his quarters. He found something that led
to Carbone. Maybe a diary, or a letter, or a photograph. Or a
name or a number in an address book. Whatever. He flew back
on the third and they made a plan and they called Carbone.
They blackmailed him. They set up a swap for the next night.
The briefcase for the letter or the photograph or whatever it
was. Carbone accepted the deal. He was happy to because
he didn't want exposure and anyway he had already called
Brubaker with the details of the agenda. He had nothing to lose
and everything to gain. Maybe he'd been through the process
before. Maybe more than once. Poor guy had been gay in the
army for sixteen years. But this time it didn't work out for him.

Because Marshall killed him during the exchange.'

'Marshall? Marshall wasn't even there.'

'He was,' I said. 'You figured it out yourself. You told me
about it when we were leaving the post to go see Detective
Clark about the crowbar. Remember? When Willard was

chasing me on the phone? You made a suggestion.'

'What suggestion?'

'Marshall was in the trunk of the car, Summer. Coomer was
driving, Vassell was in the passenger seat, and Marshall was in
the trunk. That's how they got past the gate. Then they backed
in at the far end of the O Club lot. Backed in, because Coomer
popped the trunk before he got out. Marshall held the lid
down low, but they still needed concealment. Then Vassell and
Coomer went inside and started to build their cast-iron alibis.
Meanwhile Marshall waits almost two hours in the trunk,
holding the lid, until it's all quiet. Then he climbs out and he
drives off. That's why the first night patrol remembers the car
and the second patrol doesn't. The car was there, and then it
wasn't. So Marshall picks Carbone up at some prearranged spot
and they drive out to the woods together. Carbone is holding
the briefcase. Marshall opens the trunk and gives Carbone an
envelope or something. Carbone turns away into the moonlight
to check it's what he's been promised. Even a guy as cautious
as a Delta soldier would do that. His whole career is on the line.
Behind him Marshall comes out with the crowbar and hits
him. Not just because of the briefcase. He's going to get the
briefcase anyway. The exchange is working. And Carbone can't

367

afford to talk afterwards. Marshall hits him partly because he's
mad at him. He's jealous of his time with Kramer. That's part of
why he kills him. Then he retrieves the envelope and grabs the
briefcase. Throws them both in the trunk. We know the rest.
He's known all along what he was going to do and he's come
equipped for the misdirection. Then he drives back to the post
buildings and ditches the crowbar on the way. He parks the car
in the original slot and gets back in the trunk. Vassell and

Coomer come out of the 0 Club and they drive away.'

'And then what?'

'They drive, and they drive. They're excited and uptight. But
they know by then what their blue-eyed boy did to Mrs Kramer.
So they're also nervous and worried. They can't find anyplace
they can stop where they can let a man who may or may not be
bloodstained out of the trunk. First really safe place they find is
the rest area an hour north. They park far away from other cars
again and let Marshall out. Marshall hands over the briefcase.
They resume their journey. They spend sixty seconds searching
the briefcase and then they sling it out the window a mile
further on.'

Summer sat quiet. She was thinking. Her lower lids were

jacking upward a fraction at a time.

'It's just a theory,' she said.

'Can you explain what we know any other way?'
She thought about it. Then she shook her head.
'What about Brubaker?' she said.

A voice came out of speakers in the ceiling and told us our
flight was ready to board. We picked up our bags and shuffled
into line. It was still full dark outside. I counted the other
passengers. Hoped there would be some spare seats, so there
would be some spare breakfasts. I was very hungry. But it didn't
look good. It was going to be a pretty full flight. I guessed LA's
pull was pretty strong, in January, when you lived in D.C. I
guessed people didn't need much of an excuse to schedule
meetings out there.

'What about Brubaker?' Summer said again.

We shuffled down the aisle and found our seats. We had a
window and a middle. The aisle was already occupied by a nun.
She was old. I hoped her hearing was shot. I didn't want her

368

eavesdropping. She moved and let us in. I made Summer sit
next to her. I sat by the window. Buckled my belt. Kept quiet
for a moment. Watched the airport scene outside. Busy guys
were doing things under floodlights. Then we pushed back
from the gate and started taxiing. There was no take-off queue.
We were in the air within two minutes.

'I'm not sure about Brubaker,' I said. 'How did he get in the
picture? Did they call him or did he call them? He knew about
the agenda thirty minutes into New Year's Day. A proactive guy
like that, maybe he tried a little pressure of his own. Or maybe
Vassell and Coomer were just assuming a worst-case scenario.
They might have figured a senior NCO like Carbone would
have called his boss. So I'm not sure who called who first.
Maybe they all called each other at the same time. Maybe there
were mutual threats or maybe Vassell and Coomer suggested
they could all work together to find a way where everybody
benefits.'

'Would that be likely?'

'Who knows?' I said. 'These integrated units are going to be
weird. Brubaker was certainly going to be popular, because
he's already into weird warfare. So maybe Vassell and Coomer
conned him into thinking they were looking for a strategic
alliance. Whatever, they all set up a rendezvous for late on the
fourth. Brubaker must have specified the location. He must
have driven past that spot plenty of times, back and forth
from Bird to his golf place. And he must have been feeling
confident. He wouldn't have let Marshall sit behind him if he
was worried.'

'How do you know it was Marshall behind him?'

'Protocol,' I said. 'He's a colonel talking to a general and
another colonel. He'll have put Vassell in the front seat
and Coomer in the back seat on the passenger's side so he
could turn and see them both. Marshall could be out of sight

and out of mind. He was only a major. Who needs him?'

'Did they intend to kill him? Or did it just happen?'

'They intended to, for sure. They had a plan ready° A faraway
place to dump the body, heroin that Marshall picked up on his
overnight in Germany, a loaded gun. So we were right, after all,
but purely by accident. The same people that killed Carbone

369

drove straight out the main gate and killed Brubaker. Hardly
touched the brakes.'

'Double misdirection,' Summer said. 'The heroin thing, and
dumping him to the south, not the north.'

'Amateur hour,' I said. 'The Columbia medics must have
spotted the lividity thing and the muffler burns immediately.
Pure dumb luck for Vassell and Coomer that the medics didn't tell us immediately. Plus, they left Brubaker's car up north. That
was serious brain fade.'

'They must have been tired. Stress, tension, all that driving.
They came down from Arlington Cemetery, went back up
to Smithfield, came back down to Columbia, went back up to
Dulles. Maybe eighteen hours straight. No wonder they made
an occasional mistake. But they'd have gotten away with it if

you hadn't ignored Willard.'

I nodded. Said nothing.

'It's a very weak case,' Summer said. 'In fact it's incredibly

weak. It isn't even circumstantial. It's just pure speculation.'
'Tell me about it. That's why we need confessions.'

'You need to think very carefully before you confront anyone.
A case as weak as this, it could be you that goes to jail. For
harassment.'

I heard activity behind me and the stewardess came into view
with the breakfasts. She handed one to the nun, and one to
Summer, and one to me. It was a pitiful meal. There was cold
juice and a hot ham and cheese sandwich. That was all. Coffee
later, I assumed. I hoped. I finished everything in about thirty
seconds. Summer took about thirty-one. But the nun didn't
touch her tray. She just left it right there in front of her. I
nudged Summer in the ribs.

'Ask her if she's going to eat that,' I said.

'I can't,' she said.

'She's got a charitable obligation,' I said. 'It's what being a
nun is all about.'

'I can't,' she said again.

'You can.'

She sighed. 'OK, in a minute.'

But she blew it. She waited too long. The nun opened the foil
and started to eat the sandwich.

370

'Damn,' I said.

'Sorry,' Summer said.

I looked at her. 'What did you say?'

'I said I'm sorry.'

'No, before that. The last thing you said.'

'I said I can't just ask her.'

I shook my head. 'No, before the breakfasts came.'
'I said it's a very weak case.'
'Before that.'

I saw her rewind the tape in her head. 'I said Vassell and
Coomer would have gotten away with it if you hadn't ignored
Willard.'

I nodded. Thought about that fact for a minute. Then I closed
my eyes.

I opened them again in Los Angeles. The plane touched down
and the thump and screech of tyres on tarmac woke me up.
Then the reverse thrust screamed and the brakes jerked me
forward against my belt. It was first light outside. The dawn
looked brown, like it often did there. A voice on the PA told us
it was seven o'clock in the morning in California. We had been
heading west for two solid days and each twenty-four-hour
period was averaging more like twenty-eight. I had slept for a
while and I didn't feel tired. But I still felt hungry.

We shuffled off the plane and walked down to the baggage
claim. That was where drivers met people. I scanned around.
Saw that Calvin Franz hadn't sent anyone. He had come himself
instead. I was happy about that. He was a welcome sight. I felt

like we were going to be in good hands.

'I've got news for you,' he said.

I introduced him to Summer. He shook her hand and took
her bag and carried it. I guessed it was partly a courtly gesture
and partly his way of hustling us out to his Humvee a little bit
faster. It was parked there in the no-waiting zone. But the cops
were staying well away from it. Camouflaged black-and-green
Humvees tend to have that effect. We all piled in. I let Summer
ride in front. Partly a courtly gesture of my own, and partly
because I wanted to sprawl in the back. I was cramped from the
plane.

371

'They found the Grand Marquis,' Franz said.

He gunned the big turbo-diesel and moved off the kerb.
Irwin was just north of Barstow, which was about thirty miles
away across the breadth of the city. I figured it would take
him about an hour to get us there through the morning traffic. I
saw Summer watching how he drove. Professional appraisal in
her eyes. It would probably have taken her about thirty-five
minutes.

'It was at Andrews,' Franz said. 'Dumped there on the fifth.'
'When Marshall was recalled to Germany,' I said.

Franz nodded at the wheel. 'That's what their gate log says.
Parked by Marshall with a Transportation Corps reference on
the docket. Our guys trailered it to the FBI. Faster that way.
They had to call in a few favours. The Bureau worked on it all
night. Reluctantly at first, but then they got interested in a big

hurry. It seems to be tied in with a case they're working.'
'Brubaker,' I said.

He nodded again. 'The trunk mat had parts of Brubaker on it.
Blood and brain matter, to be specific. It had been scrubbed

with a paper towel, but not well enough.'

'Anything else?' I said.

'Lots of things. There was blood from a different source, just
trace evidence of a transfer smear, maybe from a jacket sleeve
or a knife blade.'

'Carbone's,' I said. 'From when Marshall was riding in the
trunk afterwards. Did they find a knife?'

'No,' Franz said. 'But Marshall's prints are all over the inside
of the trunk.'

'They would be,' I said. 'He spent several hours in there.'
'There was a single dog tag under the mat,' Franz said. 'Like
the chain had been broken and one of them had slipped off and
gotten away.'

'Carbone's?' I said.

'None other.'

'Amateur hour,' I said. 'Anything else?'

'Mostly normal stuff. It was an untidy car. Lots of hair and

fibre, fast-food wrappers, soda cans, stuff like that.'

'Any yogurt pots?'

'One,' Franz said. 'In the trunk.'

372

'Strawberry or raspberry?'

'Strawberry. Marshall's prints on the foil tab. Seems like he
had a snack.'

'He opened it,' I said. 'But he didn't eat it.'

'There was an empty envelope,' Franz said. 'Addressed to
Kramer at XII Corps in Germany. Airmail, postmarked a year
ago. No return address. Like a photo mailer, but it didn't have
anything in it.'

I said nothing. He was looking at me in the mirror.

'Is any of this good news?' he said.

I smiled. 'It just moved us up from speculative to circumstantial.'

'A giant leap for mankind,' he said.

Then I stopped smiling and looked away. I started thinking
about Carbone, and Brubaker, and Mrs Kramer. And Mrs
Reacher. All over the world people were dying, in the early part
of January 1990.

In the end it took us more than an hour to get to irwin. I
guessed it was true what people said about LA highways. The
post looked the same as it usually did. As busy as always. It
occupied a huge acreage of the Mojave desert. One or other of
the armoured cavalry regiments lived there on a rotating basis
and acted as the home team when other units came in to
exercise. There was a real spring training atmosphere. The
weather was always good, people always had fun in the sunshine
playing with the big expensive toys.

'You want to take care of business right away?' Franz asked.
'Are you keeping an eye on them?'
He nodded. 'Discreetly.'

'So let's have breakfast first.'

A U.S. Army O Club was the perfect destination for people
half-starved on airline food. The buffet was a mile long.
Same menu as in Germany, but the orange juice and the fruit
platters looked more authentic in California. I ate as much as an
average rifle company and Summer ate more. Franz had already
eaten. I fuelled up on as much coffee as I could take. Then I
pushed back from the table. Took a deep breath.

'OK,' I said. 'Let's go do it.'

373

We went back to Franz's office and he made a call to his guys.
They told him Marshall was already out on the range, but
Vassell and Coomer were sitting tight in a VOQ rec room. Franz
drove us there in his Humvee. We got out on the sidewalk. The
sun was bright. The air was warm and dusty. I could smell all
the prickly little desert plants that were growing as far as the
eye could see.

Irwin's VOQ looked like it had been built by the same motel
contractor that had gotten the XII Corps contract in Germany.
There were rows of identical rooms around a sandy courtyard.
On one side was a shared facility. TV rooms, table tennis,
lounges. Franz led us in through a door and stepped to one side
and we found Vassell and Coomer sitting knee-to-knee in a pair
of leather armchairs. I realized I had seen them only once
before, when they came to my office at Bird. That seemed
disproportionate, considering how much time I had spent thinking
about them.

They were both wearing crisp new BDUs in the revised
desert camouflage, the pattern people were calling chocolate
chip. They both looked just as fake as they had in their woodland
greens. They still looked like Rotary Club members.

Vassell was still bald and Coomer was still wearing eyeglasses.
They both looked up at me.
I took a breath.
Senior officers.
Harassment.

It could be you that goes to jail.

'General Vassell,' I said. 'And Colonel Coomer. You are under
arrest on a charge of violating the Uniform Code of Military
Justice in that you conspired together and with other persons to
commit homicide.'

I held my breath.

But neither one of them had a reaction. Neither one of them
spoke. They just gave it up. They just looked resigned. Like the
other shoe had finally dropped and the inevitable had finally
happened. Like they had been expecting this moment from the
start. Like they had known for sure it was coming all along. I
breathed out. There were supposed to be all kinds of stages in a
person's reaction to bad news. Grief, anger, denial. But these

374

guys were already through all of that. That was clear. They
were right there at the end of the process, butted hard up
against acceptance.

I cued Summer to complete the formalities. There were
all kinds of things from the Uniform Code that you had to
spell out. All kinds of advisements and warnings. Summer ran
through them better than I would have. Her voice was clear
and her manner was professional. Neither Vassell nor Coomer
responded at all. No bluster, no pleading, no angry protestations
of innocence. They just nodded obediently in all the right
places. Got up out of their chairs at the end without even being
told.

'Handcuffs?' Summer asked me.

I nodded.

'For sure,' I said. 'And walk them to the brig. All the way.
Don't put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They're a
disgrace.'

I got directions from a cavalry guy and took Franz's Humvee to
go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut
near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was
described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed
to be fairly beat up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape
and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established
tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I
ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the
tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of
the Interior.

I left the main post alone, at nine thirty in the morning
exactly. I didn't want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up
with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the
end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a
borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.

375

TWENTY-THREE

RWIN OWNED ENOUGH OF THE MOJAVE THAT IT COULD BE A plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or,
if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in
for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was
long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a
tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was
completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out
there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the
temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial
Humvee manual called 2-40 air conditioning, which meant
you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That
set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a
Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in
the vastness it felt like no speed at all.

A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn't
found the hut. The range went on forever. It was one of the
world's great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe
the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have
been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to
myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty
plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been

376

the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might
have been tanks on the move.

I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing
behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was
hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the
horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to
it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old
tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After
another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The
old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and
Marshall's own Humvee in the middle. It was parked to the
west of the building in the morning shade. It looked like the
same shoot-and-scoot adaptation I had seen at XII Corps in
Germany. The building was a simple raw cinder block square.
Big holes for windows. No glass. The tank was an old M551,
which was a lightweight armoured-aluminum piece that had
started its design life as a reconnaissance vehicle. It was about a
quarter of the weight of an Abrams and it was exactly the type
of thing that people like Lieutenarit Colonel Simon were betting
the future on. It had seen service with some of our airborne
divisions. It wasn't a bad machine. But this example looked
pretty much decomposed. It had old plywood skirts on it
designed to make it resemble some kind of previous-generation
Soviet armour. There had been no point in training our guys to
shoot at something our other guys were still using.

I stayed on the track and coasted to a stop about thirty yards
south of the hut. Opened the door and slid out into the heat.
I guessed it was less than seventy degrees but after North
Carolina and Frankfurt and Paris it felt like Saudi Arabia.

I saw Marshall watching me from a hole in the cinder block.
I had only seen him once and never face to face. He had been
in the Grand Marquis on New Year's Day, outside Bird's post
headquarters, in the dark, behind green-tinted glass. I had
pegged him then as a tall dark guy and his file had confirmed it.
He looked just the same now. Tall, heavy, olive skin. Thick
black hair cut short. He was in desert camouflage and he was
stooping a little to see out the cinder block hole.

I stood next to my Humvee. He watched me, silently.
'Marshall?' I called.

377

He didn't respond.
'You alone in there?'
No reply.

'Military police,' I called, louder. 'All personnel, exit that
structure immediately.'

Nobody responded. Nobody came out. I could still see
Marshall through the hole. He could still see me. I guessed he
was alone. If he had had a partner in there, the partner would

have come out. Nobody else had a reason to be afraid of me.
'Marshall?' I called again.

He ducked out of sight..lust melted backward into the
shadows inside. I took the borrowed gun out of my pocket. It
was a new-issue Beretta M9. I heard an old training mantra
in my head: Never trust a weapon that you haven't personally
test-red. I chambered a round. The sound was loud in the
desert stillness. I saw the dust cloud in the west. It was maybe a
little larger and a little closer than before. I clicked the Beretta's
safety to fire.

'Marshall?' I called.

He didn't reply. But I heard a low voice very faintly and then a
brief scratchy burst of radio static. There was no antenna on the
roof of the hut. He must have had a portable field radio in there
with him.

Nho are you going to call, Marshall?' I said to myself. 'The
cavalry?'

Then I thought: the cavalry. An armoured cavalry regiment. I turned and looked west at the dust cloud. Suddenly realized
how things stood. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with
a proven killer. He was in a hut, I was out in the open. My
partner was a ninety-pound woman about fifty miles away. His
buddies were riding around in seventy-ton tanks just below the
visible horizon.

I got off the track fast. Worked around to the east of the hut. I
saw Marshall again. He moved from one hole to another and
watched me. Just gazed out at me.

'Step out of the hut, major,' I called.

There was silence for a long moment. Then he called back to

'I'm not going to do that,' he said.

378

'Step out, major,' I called. 'You know why I'm here.'

He ducked back into the darkness.

'As of right now you're resisting arrest,' I called.

No reply. No sound at all. I moved on. Circled the hut.
Worked around to the north. There were no holes in the north
wall. Just an iron door. It was closed. I figured it wouldn't have a
lock. What was there to steal? I could walk right up to it and
pull it open. Was he armed? I guessed standard procedure
would make him unarmed. What kind of deadly enemy could a
gunnery observer expect to face? But I guessed a smart guy in
Marshall's situation would be taking all kinds of precautions.

There was beaten earth outside the iron door where people
had made informal tracks to places they had parked. What an
architect would call pathways of desire. None of them led north
towards me. They all led roughly west or east. Shade in the
morning, shade in the afternoon. So I stayed on open ground
and got within ten yards of the door. Then I stopped. A good
position, on the face of it. Maybe better than going all the way
in and risking a surprise. I could wait there all day. No problem.
It was January. The noon sun wasn't going to hurt me. I could
wait until Marshall gave up. Or starved to death. I had eaten
more recently than he had. That was for sure. And if he decided
to come out shooting, I could shoot him first. No problem with
that either.

The problem was with the holes in the cinder block. In the
other three walls. They had looked the size of regular windows.
Big enough for a man to climb through. Even a big man like
Marshall. He could climb through the west wall and get to
his Humvee. Or he could climb through the south wall and get
to mine. Military vehicles don't have ignition keys. They have
big red starter buttons precisely so that guys can throw themselves
inside in a panic and get themselves the hell out of
Dodge. And I couldn't watch the west wall and the south wall
simultaneously. Not from any kind of a position that offered
concealment.

Did i need concealment?

Was he armed?

I had an idea about how to find out.

Never trust a weapon that you haven't personally test-fired.

379

I aimed at the centre of the iron door and pulled the trigger.
The Beretta worked. It worked just fine. It flashed and boomed
and kicked and there was an enormous clang and the round left

a small bright pit in the metal ten yards away.

I let the echoes die.

'Marshall?' I called. 'You're resisting arrest. So I'm going to
come around and I'm going to start firing through the window
apertures. Either the rounds will kill you or the ricochets will
wound you. You want me to stop at any time, you just come on
out with your hands on your head.'

I heard a burst of radio static again. Inside the hut.

I moved to the west. Kept low and fast. If he was armed he
was going to shoot, but he was going to miss. Give me a choice
of who to get shot at by and I'll pick a pointy-headed strategic
planner any day of the week. On the other hand, he hadn't been
completely inept with Carbone or Brubaker. So I widened my
radius a little to give myself a chance of getting behind his
Humvee. Or behind the old Sheridan tank.

Halfway there I paused and fired. It was no kind of a good
system to make a promise and then not keep it. But I aimed
high on the inside face of the window reveal so that if the round
hit him it would have had to come off two walls and the ceiling
first. Most of the energy would be expended and it wouldn't
hurt him much. The nine-millimetre Parabellum was a decent
round, but it didn't have magical properties.

I got behind the hood of his Humvee. Rested my gun hand on
the warm metal. The camouflage paint was rough. It felt like it
had sand mixed in with it. I aimed up at the hut. I was down in a
slight dip now and it was above me. I fired again, high on the
other side of the window reveal.

'Marshall?' I called. 'You want suicide by cop, that's OK with

me.'

No reply. I was three rounds down. Twelve rounds to go. A
smart guy might just lie on the floor and let me blast away. All
my trajectories would be upward in relation to him because I
was down in a dip. And because of the window sills. I could try
banking rounds off the ceiling and the far wall but ricochets
didn't necessarily work like billiards. They weren't predictable
and they weren't reliable.

380

I saw movement at the window.

He was armed.

And not with a handgun, either. I saw a big wide shotgun
barrel come out at me. Black. It looked about the size of a
rainwater pipe. I figured it for an Ithaca Mag-10. A handsome
piece. If you wanted a shotgun, the Mag-10 was about as good
as it got. It was nicknamed The Roadblocker because it was
effective against soft-skinned vehicles. I ducked backward and
put the Humvee's engine block between myself and the hut.
Made myself as small as I could get.

Then I heard the radio again. Inside the hut. It was a very
short transmission and faint and full of static and I couldn't
make out any actual words but the rhythm and the inflection of
the burst came across like a three-syllable question. Maybe say
again? It was what you heard after you issued a confusing
order.

I heard a repeat transmission. Say again? Then I heard
Marshall's voice. Barely audible. Four syllables. Fluffy consonants
at the beginning. Affirmative, maybe.

Who was he talking to and what was he ordering?

'Give it up, Marshall,' I called. 'How much shit do you want to
be in?'

It was what a hostage negotiator would have called a pressure
question. It was supposed to have a negative psychological
effect. But it made no legal sense. If he shot me he would go to
Leavenworth for four hundred years. If he didn't, he would go
for three hundred years. No practical difference. A rational man
would ignore it.

He ignored it. He was plenty rational. He ignored it and he
fired the big Ithaca instead, which is exactly what I would have
done.

In theory it was the moment I was waiting for. Firing a long
gun that requires a physical input before it can be fired again
leaves the shooter vulnerable after pulling the trigger. I should
have come out from cover immediately and returned lethal
aimed fire. But the sheer stunning impact of the ten-gauge
cartridge slowed me down by half a second. I wasn't hit. The
spray pattern was low and tight and it caught the Humvee's
front wheel. I felt the tyre blow and the truck dropped its front

381

corner ten inches into the sand. There was smoke and dust
everywhere. When I looked half a second later the shotgun
barrel was gone. I fired up at the top of the window reveal. I
wanted a tight ricochet that came down vertically and drilled
through his head.

I didn't get one. He called out to me.

'I'm reloading,' he said.

I paused. He probably wasn't. A Mag-10 holds three rounds.
He had only fired one. He probably wanted me to come out of
cover and charge his position. Whereupon he would rear up and
smile and blow me away. I stayed where I was. I didn't have the
luxury of reloading. I was four down, eleven to go.

I heard the radio again. Brief static, four syllables, a descending
scale. Acknowledged, out. Fast and casual, like a piano trill.

Marshall fired again. I saw the black barrel move in the
window and there was another loud explosion and the far back
corner of the Humvee dropped ten inches. Just dumped itself
straight down. I flattened in the dirt for a second and squinted
underneath. He was shooting the tyres out. A Humvee can run on flat tyres. That was part of the design demand. But it can't run
on no tyres. And a ten-gauge shotgun doesn't just flatten a tyre.
It removes a tyre. It tears the rubber right off the rim and leaves
little tiny shreds of it all over a twenty-foot radius.

He was disabling his own Humvee and he was going to make a
break for mine.

I got up on my knees again and crouched behind the hood.
Now I was actually safer than I had been before. The big vehicle
was canted right down on the passenger side so that there was
a solid angled wedge of metal between me and him all the way
to the desert floor. I pressed up against the front fender. Lined
myself up with the engine block. Put six hundred pounds of cast
iron between me and the gun. I could smell diesel. A fuel line
had been hit. It was leaking fast. No tyres, nothing in the tank. And no percentage in soaking my shirt with diesel and lighting
it and tossing it in the hut. I had no matches. And diesel
isn't flammable the way gasoline is. It's just a greasy liquid. It
needs to be vaporized and put under intense pressure before
it explodes. That was why the Humvee was designed with a
diesel engine. Safety.

382

'Now I'm reloading,' Marshall called.

I waited. Was he or wasn't he? He probably was. But I didn't
care. I wasn't going to rush him. I had a better idea. I crawled
along the Humvee's tilted flank and stopped at the rear bumper.
Looked past it and scoped out my view. To the south I could see
my own Humvee. To the north I could see almost all the way to
the hut. There was an open space twenty-five yards wide in
between. Like no-man's-land. Marshall would have to traverse
twenty-five continuous yards of open ground to get from the
hut to my Humvee. Right through my field of fire. He would
probably run backward, shooting as he went. But his weapon
packed only three rounds fully loaded. If he spaced them out,
he would be firing once every eight yards. If he loosed them all
off at the start full blast and unaimed, he would be naked all the
rest of the way to the truck. Either option, he was going down.
That was for damn sure. I had eleven Parabellums and an

accurate pistol and a steel bumper to rest my wrist on.
I smiled. I waited.

Then the Sheridan came apart behind me.

I heard a hum in the air like a shell the size of a Volkswagen
was incoming and I turned in time to see the old tank smashed
to pieces like it had been hit by a train. It jumped a whole foot
off the ground and the fake plywood skirts splintered and spun
away and the turret came off its ring and turned over slowly in
the air and thumped down in the sand ten feet from me.

There was no explosion. Just a huge bass metal-to-metal
thump. And then nothing but eerie silence.

I turned back. Watched the open ground. Marshall was still
in the hut. Then a shadow passed over my head and I saw a
shell in the air with that weird slow-motion optical illusion you
get with long-range artillery. It flew right over me in a perfect
arc and hit the desert floor fifty yards further on. It kicked up a

huge plume of dust and sand and buried itself deep.

No explosion.

They were firing practice rounds at me.

I heard the whine of turbines in the far distance. The faint
clatter of drive sprockets and idlers and track-return rollers.
The muffled roar of engines as tanks raced towards me. I heard

383

a faint boom as a big gun fired. Then nothing. Then a hum in the
air. Then more smashing and tearing of metal as the Sheridan
was hit again. No explosion. A practice round is the same as a
regular shell, the same size, the same weight, with a full load of
propellant, but no explosive in the nose cone. It's just a lump
of dumb metal. Like a handgun bullet, except it's five inches
wide and more than a foot long.

Marshall had switched their training target.

That was what all the radio chatter had been about. Marshall
had ordered them away from whatever they were doing five
miles to the west. He had ordered them to move in towards
him and put rounds down on his own position. They had
been incredulous. Say again? Say again? Marshall had replied: Affirmative.

He had switched their training target to cover his escape.
How many tanks were out there? How long did I have? If
'enty tank guns quartered the area they would hit a man-sized
target before very long. Within minutes. That was clear. The
law of averages absolutely guaranteed it. And to be hit by a
bullet five inches wide and more than a foot long would be no
fun at all. A near miss would be just as bad. A fifty-pound chunk
of metal hitting the Humvee I was hiding behind would shred it
to supersonic pieces as small and sharp as K-bar blades. Even
without an explosive charge the sheer kinetic energy alone
would make that happen. It would be like a grenade going off
right next to me.

I heard a ragged boom, boom north and west of me. Low, dull
sounds. Two guns firing in a tight sequence. Closer than they
had been before. The air hissed. One shell went long but the
other came in low on a flat trajectory and hit the Sheridan
square in the side. It went in and it came out, straight through
the aluminum hull like a .38 through a tin can. If Lieutenant
Colonel Simon had been there to see it he might have changed
his mind about the future.

More guns fired. One after the other. A ragged salvo. There
were no explosions. But the brutal calamitous physical noise
was maybe worse. It was some kind of primeval clamour. The
air hissed. There was deep brainless thudding as dead shells hit
the earth. There were shuddering bass peals of metal against

384

metal, like ancient giants clashing with swords. Huge chunks of
wreckage from the Sheridan cartwheeled away and clanged and
shivered and skidded on the sand. There was dust and dirt
everywhere in the air. I was choking on it. Marshall was still in
the hut. I stayed down in a low crouch and kept my Beretta
aimed at the open ground. Waited. Forced my hand to keep
still. Stared at the empty space. Just stared at it, desperately. I
didn't understand. Marshall had to know he couldn't wait much
longer. He had called down a hailstorm of metal. We were being
attacked by Abrams tanks. My Humvee was going to get hit any
second. His only avenue of escape was going to vanish right
before his eyes. It was going to flip up in the air and come down
on its roof. The law of averages guaranteed it. Or else the hut
would get hit and collapse all around him first. He would be
buried in the rubble. One thing or the other would happen. For
sure. It had to. So why the hell was he waiting?

Then I got up on my knees and stared at the hut.
Because I knew why. Suicide.

I had offered him suicide by cop but he had already chosen
suicide by tank. He had seen me coming and he had guessed
who I was. Like Vassell and Coomer he had been sitting numb
day after day just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And finally
there it was, at last, the other shoe, coming straight at him
through the desert dust in a Humvee. He had thought and he
had decided and he had gotten on the radio.

He was going down, and he was taking me with him.

I could hear the tanks pretty close now. Not more than eight
or nine hundred yards. I could hear the squeal and clatter of
their tracks. They were still moving fast. They would be fanning
out, like it said in the field manual. They would be pitching and
rolling. They would be kicking up rooster tails of dust. They
would be forming a loose mobile semicircle with their big guns
pointing inward like the spokes of a wheel.

I crawled back and looked at my Humvee. But if I went for it
Marshall would shoot me down from the safety of the hut. No
question about that. The twenty-five yards of open ground must
have looked as good to him as they looked to me.

I waited.

385

I heard the boom of a gun and the whump of a shell and I
stood up and ran the other way. I heard another boom and
another whump and the first shell slammed into the Sheridan
and bowled it all the way over and then the second hit
Marshall's Humvee and demolished it completely. I threw
myself behind the north corner of the hut and rolled tight
against the base of the wall and listened to shards of metal
rattling against the cinder blocks and the screeching as the old
Sheridan's armour finally came apart.

The tanks were very close now. I could hear their engine
notes rising and falling as they breasted rises and crashed
through dips. I could hear their tracks slapping against their
skirts. I could hear their hydraulics whining as they traversed
their guns.

I got to my feet. Stood up straight. Wiped dust out of my eyes.
Stepped over to the iron door. Saw the bright crater my gun had
made. I knew Marshall had to be either standing in the south
window looking for me running or standing in the west window
looking for me dead behind the wreckage. I knew he was tall
and I knew he was right-handed. I fixed an abstract target in my
mind. Moved my left hand and put it on the door knob. Waited.

The next shells were fired so close that I heard boom whump
boom whump with no pause in between. I pulled the door and
stepped inside. Marshall was right there in front of me. He
was facing away, looking south, framed by the brightness of
the window. I aimed at his right shoulder blade and pulled the
trigger and a shell took the roof off the hut. The room was
instantly full of dust and I was hit by falling beams and
corrugated sheets and stung by fragments of flying concrete. I
went down on my knees. Then I collapsed on my front. I was
pinned. I couldn't see Marshall. I heaved myself back up on my
knees and flailed my arms to fight off the debris. The dust was
sucking upward in a ragged spiral and I could see bright blue
sky above me. I could hear tank tracks all around me. Then I heard another boom whump and the front corner of the hut blew
away. It was there, and then it wasn't. It was solid, and then it
was a spray of grey dust coming towards me at the speed of
sound. A gale of dusty air whipped after it and knocked me off
my feet again.

386

I struggled back up and crawled forward. Just butted my way
through fallen beams and lumps of broken concrete. I threw
twisted sheets of roofing iron aside. I was like a plough. Like a
bulldozer, grinding forward, piling debris to the left and right of
me. There was too much dust to see anything except the
sunlight. It was right there in front of me. Brightness ahead,
darkness behind. I kept on going.

I found the Mag-10. Its barrel was crushed. I threw it aside
and ploughed on. Found Marshall on the floor. He wasn't
moving. I pulled stuff off him and grabbed his collar and hauled
him up into a sitting position. Dragged him forward until I came
to the front wall. I put my back against it and slid upright until I
felt the window aperture. I was choking and spitting dust. It was
in my eyes. I dragged him upward and hauled him over the
window sill and dumped him out. Then I fell out after him. Got
up on my hands and knees and grabbed his collar again and
dragged him away. Outside the hut the dust was clearing.
I could see tanks, maybe three hundred yards to the left
and right of us. Lots of tanks. Hot metal in the harsh sunlight.
They had outflanked us. They were holding in a perfect circle,
engines idling, guns flat, aiming over open sights. I heard boom
whump again and saw bright muzzle flash from one of them and
saw it pitch backward from the recoil. I saw its shell pass right
over us. I saw it in the air. Heard it break the sound barrier with
a crack like a neck snapping. Heard it smash into the remains
of the hut. Felt more dust and concrete shower down on my
back. I went down on my face and lay still, trapped in no man's
land.

Then another tank fired. I saw it jerk backward from the
recoil. Seventy tons, smashed back so hard its front end came
right up in the air. Its shell screamed overhead. I started
moving again. I dragged Marshall behind me and crawled
through the dirt like I was swimming. I had no idea what he
had said on the radio. No idea what his orders had been. He
had to have told them he was moving out. Maybe he had told
them to disregard the Humvees. Maybe that explained their say
again? Maybe he had told them the Humvees were fair game.
Maybe that was what they had found hard to believe.
But I knew they wouldn't stop firing now. Because they

387

couldn't see us. Dust was drifting like smoke and the view out
of a buttoned-up Abrams wasn't great to begin with. It was like
looking lengthwise through a grocery bag with a small square
hole cut out of the bottom. I paused and batted dust out of the
way and coughed and peered forward. We were close to my
Humvee.

It looked straight and level.
It looked intact.
So far.

I stood up and raced the last ten feet and hauled Marshall
around to the passenger side and opened the door and
crammed him into the front. Then I climbed right in over him
and dumped myself into the driver's seat. Hit that big red
button and fired it up. Shoved it into gear and stamped on the
gas so hard the acceleration slammed the door shut. Then I
turned the lights full on and put my foot to the floor and
charged. Summer would have been proud of me. I drove
straight for the line of tanks. Two hundred yards. One hundred
yards. I picked my spot and aimed carefully and burst through
the gap between two main battle tanks doing more than eighty
miles an hour.

I slowed down after a mile. After another mile, I stopped.
Marshall was alive. But he was unconscious and he was
bleeding all over the place. My aim had been good. His
shoulder had a big messy nine-millimetre broken-bone through
and-through gunshot wound in it and he had plenty of other
cuts from the hut's collapse. His blood was all mixed with
cement dust like a maroon paste. I got him arranged on the seat
and strapped him in tight with the harness. Then I broke out
the first aid kit and put pressure bandages on both sides of
his shoulder and jabbed him with morphine. I wrote M on his
forehead with a grease pencil like you were supposed to in the
field. That way the medics wouldn't overdose him when he got
to the hospital.

Then I walked around in the fresh air for a spell. Just walked
up and down the track, aimlessly. I coughed and spat and
dusted myself down as well as I could. I was bruised and sore
from being pelted with concrete fragments. Two miles behind

388

me I could still hear tanks firing. I guessed they were waiting
for a cease-fire order. I guessed they were likely to run out of
rounds before they got one.

I kept the 2-40 A/C going all the way back. Halfway there,
Marshall woke up. I saw his chin come up off his chest. Saw
him glance ahead, and then at me to his left. He was full of
morphine and his right arm was useless, but I was still cautious.
If he grabbed the wheel with his left he might force us off the
track. He might run us over some unexploded debris. Or a
tortoise. So I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse
punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid
smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anaesthetic. He
stayed out all the way back to the post.

I drove him straight to the base hospital. Called Franz from the
nurses' station and ordered up a guard squad. I waited for them
to arrive and promised rank and medals for anyone who helped
ensure Marshall saw the inside of a courtroom. I told them to
read him his rights as soon as he woke up. And I told them
to mount a suicide watch. Then I left them to it and drove
back to Franz's office. My BDUs were torn up and stiff with
dust and I guessed my face and hands and hair didn't look any
better because Franz laughed as soon as he saw me.

'I guess it's tough taking desk jockeys down,' he said.
'Where's Summer?' I said.

'Telexing JAG Corps,' he said. 'Talking to people on the
phone.'

'I lost your Beretta,' I said.

'Where?'

'Somewhere it's going to take a bunch of archaeologists a
hundred years to find.'

'Is my Humvee OK?'

'Better than Marshall's,' I said.

I found my bag and an empty VOQ room and took a long hot
shower: Then I transferred all my pocket stuff to a new set of
BDUs and trashed the damaged ones. I figured any quartermaster
would agree they were deteriorated beyond reasonable
future use. I sat on the bed for a while. Just breathed in,

389

breathed out. Then I walked back to Franz's place. I found
Summer there. She was looking radiant. She was holding a new
file folder that already had a lot of pages in it.

'We're on track,' she said. 'JAG Corps says the arrests were
righteous.'

'Did you lay out the case?'

'They say they'll need confessions.'

I said nothing.

'We have to meet with the prosecutors tomorrow,' she said.
'In D.C.'

'You'll have to do it,' I said. 'I won't be around.'

"Why not?'

I didn't answer.

'You OK?'

'Are Vassell and Coomer talking?'

She shook her head. 'They haven't said a word. JAG Corps
is flying them to Washington tonight. They've been assigned
lawyers.'

'There's something wrong,' I said.

'What?'

'It's been way too easy.'

I thought for a moment.

'We need to get back to Bird,' I said. 'Right now.'

Franz lent me fifty bucks and gave me two blank travel
vouchers. I signed them and Leon Garber countersigned them
even though he was thousands of miles away in Korea. Then
Franz drove us back to LAX. He used a staff car because his
Humvee was full of Marshall's blood. Traffic was light and it
was a fast trip. We went in and I swapped the vouchers for seats
on the first flight to D.C. I checked my bag. I didn't want to
carry it this time. We took off at three o'clock in the afternoon.
We had been in California eight hours exactly.

390

TWENTY-FOUR

LYING EAST THE TIME ZONES STOLE BACK THE HOURS WE HAD gained going west. It was eleven o'clock at night at
Washington National when we landed. I reclaimed my
duffel from the carousel and we took the shuttle to the long
term lot. The Chevy was waiting there right where we left it. I
used some of Franz's fifty bucks and we filled the tank. Then
Summer drove us back to Bird. She went as fast as always
and took the same old route, down 1-95, past all our familiar
reference points. The State Police barracks, the place where the
briefcase was found, the rest area, the cloverleaf, the motel,
the lounge bar. We were timed in through Fort Bird's main gate
at three in the morning. The post was quiet. There was a night

mist clamped down all over it. Nothing was stirring.
'Where to?' Summer said.
'The Delta station,' I said.

She drove us around to the old prison gates and the sentry let
us in. We parked in their main lot. I could see Trifonov's red
Corvette in the darkness. It was all on its own, near the wall

with the water hose. It looked very clean.

'Why are we here?' Summer said.

'We had a very weak case,' I said. 'You made that point

391

yourself. And you were right. It was very weak. The forensics
with the staff car helped, but we never really got beyond
purely circumstantial stuff. We can't actually put Vassell and
Coomer and Marshall at any of the scenes. Not definitively.
We can't prove Marshall ever actually touched the crowbar. We
can't prove he didn't actually eat the yogurt for a snack. And we
certainly can't prove that Vassell and Coomer ever actually
ordered him to do anything. If push came to shove, they could

claim he was an out-of-control lone wolf.'

'So?'

'We walked in and confronted two senior officers who were
doubly insulated from a very weak and circumstantial case.
What should have happened?'

'They should have fought it.'

I nodded. 'They should have scoffed at it. They should have
laughed it off. They should have gotten offended. They should
have threatened and blustered. They should have thrown us
out. But they didn't do any of that. They just sat still for it.
And their silence kind of pled themselves guilty. That was my
impression. That's how I took it.'

The too,' Summer said. 'Certainly.'
'So why didn't they fight?'
She was quiet for a spell.
'Guilty consciences?' she said.
I shook my head. 'Spare me.'
She was quiet a moment longer.

'Shit,' she said. 'Maybe they're just waiting. Maybe they're
going to collapse the case in full view of everybody. In D.C.,
tomorrow, when they've got their lawyers there. To ruin
our careers. To put us in our place. Maybe it's a vindictive
thing.'

I shook my head again. 'What did I charge them with?'
'Conspiracy to commit homicide.'

I nodded. 'I think they misunderstood me.'

'It was plain English.'

'They understood the words. But not the context. I was
talking about one thing, and they thought I was talking about a
different thing. They thought I was talking about something
else entirely. They pled guilty to the wrong conspiracy,

392

Summer. They pled guilty to something they know can be

proved beyond a reasonable doubt.'

She said nothing.

'The agenda,' I said. 'It's still out there. They never got it
back. Carbone double-crossed them. They opened the briefcase
up there on 1-95, and the agenda wasn't in it. It was already
gone.'

'So where is it?'

'I'll show you where,' I said. 'That's why we came back. So
you can use it tomorrow. Up in D.C. Use it to leverage all the
other stuff. The things we're weak on.'

We slid out of the car into the cold. Walked across the lot to
the cell block door. Stepped inside. I could hear the sounds of
sleeping men. I could taste the sour dormitory air. We walked
through corridors and turned corners in the dark until we came
to Carbone's billet. It was empty and undisturbed. We stepped
in and I snapped the light on. Stepped over to the bed. Reached
up to the shelf. Ran my fingers along the spines of the books.
Pulled out the tall thin Rolling Stones souvenir. Held it. Shook
it.

A four-page conference agenda fell out on the bed.

We stared at it.

'Brubaker told him to hide it,' I said.

I picked it up and handed it to Summer. Turned the light
back off and stepped out into the corridor. Came face to face
with the young Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan. He
was in skivvies and a T-shirt. He was barefoot. He had been
drinking beer about four hours ago, according to the way he
smelled.

'Well, well,' he said. 'Look who we have here.'

I said nothing.

'You woke me up talking,' he said. 'And flashing lights on and
off.'

I said nothing.

He glanced into Carbone's cell. 'Revisiting the scene of the
crime?'.

'This isn't where he died.'

'You know what I mean.'

Then he smiled and I saw his hands bunch into fists. I

393

slammed him back against the wall with my left forearm. His
skull hit the concrete and his eyes glazed for a second. I kept
my arm hard and level across his chest. Got the point of my
elbow on his right bicep and spread my open fingers across his
left bicep. Pinned him to the wall. Leaned on him with all my
weight. Kept on leaning until he was having trouble breathing.

'Do me a favour,' I said. 'Read the newspaper every day this
week.'

Then I fumbled in my jacket pocket with my free hand and
found the bullet. The one he had delivered. The one with my
name on it. I held it with my finger and thumb right down at the

base. It shone gold in the faint night light.

'Watch this,' I said.

I showed him the bullet. Then I shoved it up his nose.

My sergeant was at her desk. The one with the baby son. She
had coffee going. I poured two mugs and carried them into my
office. Summer carried the agenda, like a trophy. She took the
staple out of the paper and laid the four sheets side by side on
my desk.

They were original typewritten pages. Not carbons, not
faxes, not photocopies. That was clear. There were handwritten
notes and pencilled amendments between the lines and in the
margins. There were three different scripts. Mostly Kramer's, I
guessed, but Vassell's and Coomer's as well, almost certainly. It
had been a round-robin first draft. That was clear, too. It had
been the subject of a lot of thought and scrutiny.

The first sheet was an analysis of the problems that Armored
was facing. The integrated units, the loss of prestige. The
possibility of ceding command to others. It was gloomy, but it
was conventional. And it was accurate, according to the Chief of
Staff.

The second page and the third page contained more or
less what I had predicted to Summer. Proposed attempts to
discredit key opponents, with maximum use of dirty laundry.
Some of the margin notes hinted at some of the dirt, and a lot
of it sounded pretty interesting. I wondered how they had
gathered information like that. And I wondered if anyone in
JAG Corps would follow up on it. Someone probably would.

394

Investigations were like that. They led off in all kinds of random
directions.

There were ideas for public relations campaigns. Most of
them were pretty limp. These guys hadn't mixed with the public
since they took the bus up the Hudson to start their plebe year
at the Point. Then there were references to the big defence
contractors. There were ideas for political initiatives inside the
Department of the Army and in Congress. Some of the political
ideas looped right back and tied in with the defence contractor
references. There were hints of some pretty sophisticated
relationships there. Clearly money flowed one way and favours
flowed the other way. The Secretary of Defence was mentioned
by name. His help was taken pretty much for granted. On one
line his name was actually underlined and a note in the margin
read: bought and paid for. Altogether the first three pages
were full of the kind of stuff you would expect from arrogant
professionals heavily invested in the status quo. It was murky
and sordid and desperate, for sure. But it wasn't anything that
would send you to jail.

That stuff came on the fourth page.

The fourth page had a curious heading: T.E.P., The Extra
Mile. Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art
of War by Sun Tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when
your back is to the wall is to perish. Alongside that in the margin
was a pencilled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell's
handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a
commander's courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his
strength of will. Wavell.

'Who's Wavell?' Summer said.

'An old British field marshal,' I said. 'World War Two. Then
he was viceroy of India. He was blind in one eye from World
War One.'

Underneath the Wavell quote was another pencilled note, in a
different hand. Coomer's, probably. It said: Volunteers? Me?
Marshall? Those three words were ringed and connected with a
long looping pencil line back to the heading: T.E.P., The Extra
Mile.

'What's that about?' Summer said.

'Read on,'I said.

395

Below the Sun Tzu quote was a typed list of eighteen names. 1
knew most of them. There were key battalion commanders
from prestige infantry divisions like the 82nd and the 101st, and
significant staffers from the Pentagon, and some other people.
There was an interesting mix of ages and ranks. There were no
really junior officers, but the list wasn't confined to senior
people. Not by any means. There were some rising stars in
there. Some obvious choices, some off-beat mavericks. A few of
the names meant nothing to me. They belonged to people I had
never heard of. There was a guy listed called Abelson, for
instance. I didn't know who Abelson was. He had a pencilled

check mark against his name. Nobody else did.
'What's the check mark for?' Summer said.
I dialled my sergeant outside at her desk.

'Ever heard of a guy called Abelson?' I asked her.

'No,' she said.

'Find out about him,' I said. 'He's probably a light colonel or
better.'

I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to
interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive
evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex
neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the
army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure.
But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow, too.
Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution.
And from what I knew about the people whose names I
recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was
exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically,
those light units that looked ahead towards the twenty-first
century rather than those that looked backward at the
nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a
million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There
had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision
targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the
planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen
people whose presence or absence would make a difference to
the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.

My phone rang. I hit speaker and we heard my sergeant's
voice.

396

'Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,' she said. 'You
know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating

that particular drum?'

'Was?' I said.

'He died the day before New Year's Eve. Car versus pedes

trian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit and run.'

I clicked the phone off.

'Swan mentioned that,' I said. 'In passing. Now that I think
about it.'

'The check mark,' Summer said.

I nodded. 'One down, seventeen to go.'

'What does T.E.P. mean?'

'It's old CIA jargon,' I said. 'It means terminate with extreme
prejudice.'

She said nothing.

'Assassinate, in other words,' I said.

We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous
quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The
supreme proof of a commander's courage. The surest test of his
strength of will. I tried to imagine what kind of crazy isolated
ego-driven fever could drive people to add grandiose quotations
like those to a list of men they wanted to kill so they could
keep their jobs and their prestige. I couldn't even begin to
figure it out. So I just gave it up and butted the four typewritten
sheets back together and threaded the staple back through the
original holes. I took an envelope from my drawer and slipped
them inside it.

'It's been out in the world since the first of the year,' I said.
'And they knew it was gone for good on the fourth. It wasn't in
the briefcase, and it wasn't on Brubaker's body. That's why they
were resigned. They gave up on it a week ago. They killed three
people looking for it, but they never found it. So they were just
sitting there, knowing for sure sooner or later it was going to
come back and bite them in the ass.'

I slid the envelope across the desk.

'Use it,' I said. 'Use it in D.C. Use it to nail their hides to the
damn wall.'

397

By then it was already four o'clock in the morning and Summer
left for the Pentagon immediately. I went to bed and got
four hours' sleep. Woke myself up at eight. I had one thing
left to do, and I knew for sure there was one thing left to be
done to me.

398

TWENTY-FIVE

GOT TO MY OFFICE AT NINE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. THE WOMAN with the baby son was gone by then. The Louisiana corporal
had taken her place.

'JAG Corps is here for you,' he said. He jerked his thumb at
my inner door. 'I let them go straight in.'

I nodded. Looked around for coffee. There wasn't any. Bad
start. I opened my door and stepped inside. Found two guys in
there. One of them was in a visitor chair. One of them was at
my desk. Both of them were in Class As. Both of them had JAG
Corps badges on their lapels. A small gold wreath, crossed with
a sabre and an arrow. The guy in the visitor chair was a captain.

The guy at my desk was a lieutenant colonel.

'Where do I sit?' I said.

'Anywhere you like,' the colonel said.

I said nothing.

'I saw the telexes from Irwin,' he said. 'You have my sincere

congratulations, major. You did an outstanding job.'

I said nothing.

'And I heard about Kramer's agenda,' he said. 'I just got a call
from the Chief of Staff's office. That's an even better result. It
justifies Operation Argon all by itself.'

399

'You're not here to discuss the case,' I said.

'No,' he said. 'We're not. That discussion is happening at the
Pentagon, with your lieutenant.'

I took a spare visitor chair and put it against the wall, under
the map. I sat down on it. Leaned back. Put my hand up over my
head and played with the push pins. The colonel leaned forward

and looked at me. He waited, like he wanted me to speak first.
'You planning on enjoying this?' I asked him.
'It's my job,' he said.
'You like your job?'

'Not all the time,' he said.

I said nothing.

'This case was like a wave on the beach,' he said. 'Like a big
old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and

then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind.'

I said nothing.

'Except it did leave something behind,' he said. 'It left a big
ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we
have to address it.'

He waited for me to speak. I thought about clamming up.
Thought about making him do all the work himself. But in the

end I just shrugged and gave it up.

'The brutality complaint,' I said.

He nodded. 'Colonel Willard brought it to our attention.
And it's awkward. Whereas the unauthorized use of the travel
warrants can be dismissed as germane to the investigation, the
brutality complaint can't. Because apparently the two civilians

were completely unrelated to the business at hand.'

'I was misinformed,' I said.

'That doesn't alter the fact, I'm afraid.'

'Your witness is dead.'

'He left a signed affidavit. That stands for ever. That's the

same as if he were right there in the courtroom, testifying.'

I said nothing.

'It comes down to a simple question of fact,' the colonel said.
'A simple yes or no answer, really. Did you do what Carbone
alleged?'

I said nothing.

The colonel stood up. 'You can talk it over with your counsel.'

400

I glanced at the captain. Apparently he was my lawyer. The
colonel shuffled out and closed the door on us. The captain
leaned forward from his chair and shook my hand and told me
his name.

'You should cut the colonel some slack,' he said. 'He's giving
you a loophole a mile wide. This whole thing is a charade.'

'I rocked the boat,' I said. 'The army is getting its licks in.'

'You're wrong. Nobody wants to screw you over this. Willard

forced the issue, is all. So we have to go through the motions.'
'Which are?'

'All you've got to do is deny it. That throws Carbone's
evidence into dispute, and since he's not around to be cross
examined, your Sixth Amendment right to be confronted by the
witness against you kicks in and it guarantees you an automatic
dismissal.'

i sat still.

'How would it be done?' I said.

'You sign an affidavit just like Carbone did. His says black,

yours says white, the problem goes away.'

'Official paper?'

'It'll take five minutes. We can do it right here. Your corporal

can type it and witness it. Dead easy.'

I nodded.

'What's the alternative?' I said.

'You'd be nuts to even think about an alternative.'

"What would happen?'

'It would be like pleading guilty.'

WVhat would happen?' I said again.

'With an effective guilty plea? Loss of rank, loss of pay,
backdated to the incident. Civilian Affairs wouldn't let us get

away with anything less.'

I said nothing.

You'd be busted back to captain. In the regular MPs, because
the 110th wouldn't want you any more. That's the short answer.
But you'd be nuts to even think about it. All you have to do is
deny it."

I sat there and thought about Carbone. Thirty-five years old,
sixteen of them in the service. Infantry, airborne, the Rangers,
Delta. Sixteen years of hard time. He had done nothing except

401

try to keep a secret he should never have had to keep. And try
to alert his unit to a threat. Nothing much wrong with either of
those things. But he was dead. Dead in the woods, dead on a
slab. Then I thought about the fat guy at the strip club. I didn't
really care about the farmer. A busted nose was no big deal. But
the fat guy was messed up bad. On the other hand, he wasn't
one of North Carolina's finest citizens. I doubted if the governor
was lining him up for a civic award.

I thought about both of those guys for a long time. Carbone,
and the fat man in the parking lot. Then I thought about myself.
A major, a star, a hotshot special unit investigator, a go-to guy
headed for the top.

'OK,' I said. 'Bring the colonel back in.'

The captain got up out of his chair and opened the door. Held
it for the colonel. Closed it behind him. Sat down again next to
me. The colonel shuffled past us and sat down at the desk.

'Right,' he said. 'Let's wrap this thing up. The complaint is
baseless, yes?'

I looked at him. Said nothing.

'Well?'

You're going to do the right thing. 'The complaint is true,' I said.
He stared at me.

'The complaint is accurate,' I said. 'In every detail. It went

down exactly like Carbone described.'

'Christ,' the colonel said.

'Are you crazy?' the captain said.

'Probably,' I said. 'But Carbone wasn't a liar. That shouldn't
be the last thing that goes in his record. He deserves better
than that. He was in sixteen years.'

The room went quiet. We all just sat there. They were looking
at a lot of paperwork. I was looking at being an MP captain
again. No more special unit. But it wasn't a big surprise. I had
seen it coming. I had seen it coming ever since I closed my eyes
on the plane and the dominoes started falling, end over end, one
after the other.

'One request,' I said. 'I want a two-day suspension included.
Starting now.'

'Why?'

402

'I have to go to a funeral. I don't want to beg my CO for leave.'
The colonel looked away.

'Granted,' he said.

I went back to my quarters and packed my duffel with everything
I owned. I cashed a check at the commissary and left
fifty-two dollars in an envelope for my sergeant. I mailed
fifty back to Franz. I collected the crowbar that Marshall had
used from the pathologist and I put it with the one we had on loan from the store. Then I went to the MP motor pool and
looked for a vehicle to borrow. I was surprised to see Kramer's
rental still parked there.

'Nobody told us what to do with it,' the clerk said.

'Why not?'

'Sir, you tell me. It was your case.'

I wanted something inconspicuous, and the little red Ford
stood out among all the olive drab and black. But then I realized
the situation would be reversed out in the world. Out there, the
little red Ford wouldn't attract a second glance.

'I'll take it back now,' I said. 'I'm headed to Dulles anyway.'
There was no paperwork, because it wasn't an army vehicle.

I left Fort Bird at twenty past ten in the morning and drove
north towards Green Valley. I went much slower than before,
because the Ford was a slow car and I was a slow driver, at least
compared to Summer. I didn't stop for lunch. I just kept on
going. I arrived at the police station at a quarter past three
in the afternoon. I found Detective Clark at his desk in the
bullpen. I told him his case was closed. Told him Summer
would give him the details. I collected the crowbar he had on
loan and drove the ten miles to Sperryville. I squeezed through
the narrow alley and parked outside the hardware store. The
window had been fixed. The square of plywood was gone. I
looped all three crowbars over my forearm and went inside and
returned them to the old guy behind the counter. Then I got
back in the car and followed the only road out of town, all the
way to Washington D.C.

403

I took a short counterclockwise loop on the Beltway and
went looking for the worst part of town I could find. There was
plenty of choice. I picked a four-block square that was mostly
crumbling warehouses with narrow alleys between. I found
what I wanted in the third alley I checked. I saw an emaciated
whore come out a brick doorway. I went in past her and found a
guy in a hat. He had what I wanted. It took a minute to get some
mutual trust going. But eventually cash money settled our
differences, like it always does everywhere. I bought a little
reefer, a little speed, and two dime rocks of crack cocaine. I
could see the guy in the hat wasn't impressed by the quantities. I could see he wrote me off as an amateur.

Then I drove to Rock Creek, Virginia. I got there just before
five o'clock. Parked three hundred yards from 110th Special
Unit headquarters, up on a rise, where I could look down
over the fence into the parking lot. I picked out Willard's
car with no trouble at all. He had told me all about it. A
classic Pontiac GTO. It was right there, near the rear exit. I
slumped way down in my seat and kept my eyes wide open and
watched.

He came out at five fifteen. Bankers' hours. He fired up the
Pontiac and backed it away from the building. I had my window
cracked open for air and even from three hundred yards I could
hear the rumble of the pipes. They made a pretty good V-8
sound. I figured it was a sound Summer would have enjoyed. I
made a mental note that if I ever won the lottery I should buy
her a GTO of her own.

I fired up the Ford. Willard came out of the lot and turned
towards me. I hunkered down and let him go past. Then I
waited one thousand, two thousand and U-turned and followed
after him. He was an easy tail. With the window down I could
have done it by sound alone. He drove fairly slow, big and
obvious up ahead, near the crown of the road. I stayed well back
and let the drive-time traffic fill his mirrors. He headed east
towards the D.C. suburbs. I figured he would have a rental in
Arlington or Maclean from his Pentagon days. I hoped it wasn't
an apartment. But I figured it would more likely be a house.

404

With a garage, for the muscle car. Which was good, because a
house was easier.

It was a house. It was on a rural street in the no-man's-land
north of Arlington. Plenty of trees, most of them bare, some of
them evergreen. The lots were irregular. The driveways were
long and curved. The plantings were messy. The street should
have had a sign: Divorced or single male middle-income government
workers only. It was that kind of a place. Not totally ideal,
but a lot better than a straight suburban tract with side-by-side
front yards full of frolicking kids and anxious mothers.

I drove on by and parked a mile away. Sat and waited for the
darkness.

I waited until seven o'clock and I walked. There was low cloud
and mist. No starlight. No moon. I was in woodland-pattern
BDUs. I was as invisible as the Pentagon could make me. I
figured at seven the place would still be mostly empty. I figured
a lot of middle-income government workers would have
ambitions to become high-income government workers, so they
would stay at their desks, trying to impress whoever needed
impressing. I used the street that ran parallel to the back of
Willard's street and found two messy yards next to each other.
Neither house was lit. I walked down the first driveway and
kept on going around the dark bulk of the house and straight
through the back yard. I stood still. No dogs barked. I turned
and tracked along the boundary fences until I was looking at
Willard's own back yard. It was full of dead hummocked grass.
There was a rusted-out barbecue grill abandoned in the middle
of the lawn. In army terms the place was not standing tall and
squared away. It was a mess.

I bent a fence post until I had room to slip past it. Walked
straight through Willard's yard and around his garage to his
front door. There was no porch light. The view from the street
was half-open, half-obscured. Not perfect. But not bad. I put my
elbow on the bell. Heard it sound inside. There was a short
pause and then I heard footsteps. I stood back. Willard opened
the door. No delay at all. Maybe he was expecting Chinese
food. Or a pizza.

4O5

I punched him in the chest to move him backward. Stepped in
after him and closed the door behind me with my foot. It was a
dismal house. The air was stale. Willard was clutching the stair
post, gasping for breath. I hit him in the face and knocked him
down. He came up on his hands and knees and I kicked
him hard in the ass and kept on kicking until he took the hint
and started crawling towards the kitchen as fast as he could. He
got himself in there and kind of rolled over and sat on the floor
with his back hard up against a cabinet. There was fear in his
face, for sure, but confusion, too. Like he couldn't believe I was
doing this. Like he was thinking: this is about a disciplinary

complaint? His bureaucratic calculus couldn't compute it.
'Did you hear about Vassell and Coomer?' I asked him.
He nodded, fast and scared.

'Remember Lieutenant Summer?' I asked him.

He nodded again.

'She pointed something out to me,' I said. 'Kind of obvious,
but she said they would have gotten away with it if I hadn't
ignored you.'

He just stared at me.

'It made me think,' I said. 'What exactly was I ignoring?'

He said nothing.

'I misjudged you,' I said. 'I apologize. Because I thought I was
ignoring a busybody careerist asshole. I thought I was ignoring
some kind of a prissy nervous idiot corporate manager who
thought he knew better. But I wasn't. I was ignoring something
else entirely.'

He stared up at me.

'You didn't feel embarrassed about Kramer,' I said. 'You
didn't feel sensitive about me harassing Vassell and Coomer.
You weren't speaking for the army when you wanted Carbone
written up as a training accident. You were doing the job
you were put there to do. Someone wanted three homicides
covered up, and you were put there to do it for them. You
were participating in a deliberate cover-up, Willard. That's what
you were doing. That's what I was ignoring. I mean, what the
hell else were you doing, ordering me not to investigate a
homicide? It was a cover-up, and it was planned, and it was
structured, and it was decided well in advance. It was decided

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on the second day of January, when Garber was moved out and
you were moved in. You were put in there so that what they
were planning to do on the fourth could be controlled. No other
reason.'

He said nothing.

'I thought they wanted an incompetent in there, so that
nature would take its course. But they went one better than

that. They put a friend in there.'

He said nothing.

'You should have refused,' I said. 'If you had refused, they
wouldn't have gone ahead with it and Carbone and Brubaker

would still be alive.'

He said nothing.

'You killed them, Willard. Just as much as they did.'

I crouched down next to him. He scrabbled on the floor and
pressed backward against the cupboard behind him. He had

defeat in his eyes. But he gave it one last shot.
'You can't prove anything,' he said.
Now I said nothing.

'Maybe it was just incompetence,' he said. 'You thought about

that? How are you going to prove the intention?'

I said nothing. His eyes went hard.

'You're not dealing with idiots,' he said. 'There's no proof
anywhere.'

I took Franz's Beretta out of my pocket. The one I had
brought out of the Mojave. I hadn't lost it. It had ridden all the
way with me from California. That was why I had checked my
luggage, just that one time. They won't let you carry guns
inside the cabin. Not without paperwork.

'This piece is listed as destroyed,' I said. 'It doesn't officially
exist any more.'

He stared at it.

'Don't be stupid,' he said. 'You can't prove anything.'

'You're not dealing with an idiot either,' I said.

'You don't understand,' he said. 'It was an order. From the
top. We!re in the army. We obey orders.'

I shook my head. 'That excuse never worked for any soldier
anywhere.'

'It was an order,' he said again.

407

'From who?'

He just closed his eyes and shook his head.

'Doesn't matter,' I said. 'I know exactly who it was. And I
know I can't get to him. Not where he is. But I can get to you.

You can be my messenger.'
He opened his eyes.
'You won't do it,' he said.
'Why didn't you refuse?'

'I couldn't refuse. It was time to choose up sides. Don't you

see? We're all going to have to do that.'

I nodded. 'I guess we are.'

'Be smart now,' he said. 'Please.'

'I thought you were one bad apple,' I said. 'But the whole

barrel is bad. The good apples are the rare ones.'

He stared at me.

'You ruined it for me,' I said. 'You and your damn friends.'
'Ruined what?'
'Everything.'

I stood up. Stepped back. Clicked the Beretta's safety to fire. He stared at me.

'Goodbye, Colonel Willard,' I said.

I put the gun to my temple. He stared at me.

'Just kidding,' I said.

Then I shot him through the centre of the forehead.

It was a typical nine-millimetre full metal jacket through-and
through. It put the back of his skull into the cupboard behind
him and left it there with a lot of smashed china. I stuffed the
reefer and the speed and the crack cocaine in his pockets, along
with a symbolic roll of dollar bills. Then I walked out the back
door and away through his yard. I slipped through the fence
and through the lot behind his and walked back to my car. I sat
in the driver's seat and opened my duffel and changed my
boots. Took off the pair that had been ruined in the Mojave and
put on a better pair. Then I drove west, toward Dulles. Into the
Hertz return bays. Car rental bosses aren't dumb. They know
people get cars messy. They know they accumulate all kinds of
crap inside. So they position big garbage cans near the return
bays in the hope that renters will do the decent thing and clear

408

some of the crap out themselves. That way they save on wages.
Cut out even a minute a car, and staff costs drop a lot over a
whole year. I put my old boots in one can, and the Beretta in
another. As many cars as Hertz rented at Dulles in a day, those
cans were headed for the crusher on a regular basis.

I walked all the way to the terminal. I didn't feel like taking
the bus. I showed my military ID and used my checkbook and
bought a one-way ticket to Paris, on the same Air France
red-eye Joe had taken back when the world was different.

I got to the Avenue Rapp at eight in the morning. Joe told me
the cars were coming at ten. So I shaved and showered in the
guest bathroom and found my mother's ironing board and
pressed my Class A uniform very carefully. I found polish in a
cupboard and shined my shoes. Then I dressed. I put my full
array of medals on, all four rows. I followed the Correct Order of
Wear regulations, and the Wear of Full Size Medals regulations.
Each one hung down neatly over the ribbon in the row below. I
used a cloth and cleaned them. I cleaned my other badges too,
including my major's oak leaves, one last time. Then I went into
the white-painted living room to wait.

Joe was in a black suit. I was no expert on clothing but I
figured it was new. It was some kind of a fine material. Silk,
maybe. Or cashmere. I didn't know. It was beautifully cut. He
had a white shirt and a black tie. Black shoes. He looked good.
I had never seen him look better. He was holding up. He was a
little strained around the eyes, maybe. We didn't talk. Just
waited.

At five to ten we went down to the street. The corbillard showed up right on time, from the dp6t mortuaire. Behind it
was a black Citroen limousine. We got in the limousine and
closed the doors and it moved off after the hearse, slow
and quiet.

'Just us?'I said.

'The others are meeting us there.'

'Who's coming?'

'Lamonnier,' he said. 'Some of her friends.'
'Where are we doing it?'
'Pre Lachaise,' he said.

409

I nodded. Pre Lachaise was a famous old cemetery. Some
kind of a special place. I figured maybe my mother's Resistance
history entitled her to be buried there. Maybe Lamonnier had
fixed it.

'There's an offer in on the apartment,' Joe said.

'How much?'

'In dollars your share would be about sixty thousand.'

'I don't want it,' I said. 'Give my share to Lamonnier. Tell him
to find whatever old guys are still alive and spread it around.

He'll know some organizations.'

'Old soldiers?'

'Old anybody. Whoever did the right thing at the right time.'
'You sure? You might need it.'
'I'd rather not have it.'
'OK,' he said. 'Your choice.'

I watched out the windows. It was a grey day. The honey
tones of Paris were beaten down by the weather. The river was
sluggish, like molten iron. We drove through the Place de la
Bastille. Pre Lachaise was up in the northeast. Not far, but not
so near you thought of it as close. We got out of the car near a
little booth that sold maps to the famous graves. All kinds of
people were buried at Pre Lachaise. Chopin, Molire, Edith
Piaf, Jim Morrison.

There were people waiting for us at the cemetery gate. There
was the concierge from my mother's building, and two other
women I didn't know. The croque-morts lifted the coffin up
on their shoulders. They held it steady for a second and then
set off at a slow march. Joe and I fell in behind, side by side.
The three women followed us. The air was cold. We walked
along gritty paths between strange European mausoleums and
headstones. Eventually we came to an open grave. Excavated
earth was piled neatly on one side of it and covered with a
green carpet that I guessed was supposed to look like grass.
Lamonnier was waiting there for us. I guessed he had gotten
there well ahead of time. He probably walked slower than a
funeral. Probably hadn't wanted to hold us up, or embarrass
himself.

The pallbearers set the coffin down on rope slings that were
already laid out in position. Then they picked it up again and

410

manoeuvred it over the hole and used the ropes to lower it
down gently. Into the hole. There was a man who read some
stuff from a book. I heard the words in French and their
English translations drifted through my mind. Dust to dust,
certain it is, vale of tears. I didn't really pay attention. I just
looked at the coffin, down in the hole.

The man finished speaking and one of the pallbearers pulled
back the green carpet and Joe scooped up a handful of dirt. He
weighed it in his palm and then threw it down on the coffin lid.
It thumped on the wood. The man with the book did the same
thing. Then the concierge. Then both of the other women.
Then Lamonnier. He lurched over on his awkward canes and
bent down and filled his hand with earth. Paused with his eyes
full of tears and just turned his wrist so that the dirt trailed out
of his fist like water.

I stepped up and put my hand to my heart and slipped my
Silver Star off its pin. Held it in my palm. The Silver Star is a
beautiful medal. It has a tiny silver star in the centre of a much
larger gold one. It has a bright silk ribbon in red white and
blue, all shot through with a watermark. Mine was engraved on
the back: J. Reacher. I thought: J for Josephine. I tossed it down
in the hole. It hit the coffin and bounced once and landed right
side up, a little gleam of light in the greyness.

I called long distance from the Avenue Rapp and got orders
back to Panama. Joe and I ate a late lunch together and
promised to stay in better touch. Then I headed back to the
airport and flew through London and Miami and picked up
a transport south. As a newly minted captain I was given a
company to command. We were tasked to maintain order in
Panama City during the Just Cause endgame. It was fun. I
had a decent bunch of guys. Being out in the field again was
refreshing. And the coffee was as good as ever. They ship it
wherever we go, in cans as big as oil drums.

I never went back to Fort Bird. Never saw that sergeant
again, the one with the baby son. I thought of her sometimes,
when force reduction began to bite. I never saw Summer again,
either. I heard she talked up Kramer's agenda so much that
JAG Corps wanted the death penalty for treason, and then she

411

finessed confessions out of Vassell and Coomer and Marshall
on all the other stuff in exchange for life in prison. I heard she
got promoted captain the day after they went to Leavenworth.
So she and I ended up on the same pay grade. We met in the
middle. But our paths never crossed again.

I never went back to Paris, either. I meant to. I thought I
might go climb down under the Pont des Invalides, late at night,
and just sniff the air. But it never happened. I was in the army,
and I was always where someone else told me to be.

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