by Lee Child
The bookstore had tables at the front of the ground floor. They were piled high with new titles. I found the non-fiction releases and came up empty. History, biography, economics, but no politics. I moved on and found what I wanted on the back side of the second table. Commentary and opinion from the left and the right, plus ghosted candidate autobiographies with shiny jackets and glossy airbrushed photographs. John Sansom’s book was about a half-inch thick and was called Always on a Mission. I took it with me and rode up on the escalator to the third floor, where the store directory told me the magazines were. I picked out all the news weeklies and carried them with the book to the military history shelves. I spent a moment there with some non-fiction publications and confirmed what I had suspected, which was that the army’s Human Resources Command didn’t do anything that the Personnel Command hadn’t done before it.
It was a change of name only. A rebranding. No new functions. Paperwork and records, like always.
Then I sat on a window sill and settled in to read the stuff I had picked up. My back was hot from the sun coming in through the glass, and my front was cold from an air conditioning vent directly above me. I used to feel bad about reading stuff in stores, with no intention to buy. But the stores themselves seem happy enough about it. They even encourage it. Some of them provide armchairs for the purpose. A new business model, apparently. And everyone does it. The store was only just open, but already the whole place looked like a refugee centre. There were people everywhere, sitting or sprawled on the floor, surrounded by piles of merchandise much bigger than mine.
The news weeklies all had campaign reports, squeezed in between advertisements and stories about medical breakthroughs and technology updates. Most of the coverage was top-ticket stuff, but the House and Senate contests got a few lines each. We were four months ahead of the first primaries and fourteen months ahead of the elections themselves, and some candidates were already lame ducks, but Sansom was still solidly in his race. He was polling well throughout his state, he was raising lots of money, his blunt manner was seen as refreshing, and his military background was held to qualify him for just about everything. Although in my opinion that’s like saying a sanitation worker could be mayor. Maybe so, maybe not. There’s no logic in the assumption. But clearly most journalists liked the guy. And clearly they had him earmarked for bigger things. He was seen as a potential presidential candidate either four or eight years down the line. One writer even hinted he could be airlifted out of his Senate race to become his party’s vice-presidential nominee this time around. He was already some kind of a celebrity.
His book cover was stylish. It was made up of his name and the title and two photographs. The larger was a blurred and grainy action picture blown up big enough to form a background to the whole thing. It showed a young man in worn and unbuttoned battledress and full camouflage face paint under a beanie hat. Laid over it was a newer studio portrait of the same guy, many years farther down the road, in a business suit. Sansom, obviously, then and now. His whole pitch, in a single visual.
The recent picture was well lit and perfectly focused and artfully posed and showed him to be a small lean guy, maybe five-nine and a hundred and fifty pounds. A whippet or a terrier rather than a pit bull, full of endurance and wiry stamina, like the best Special Forces soldiers always are. Although the older picture was probably from an earlier time in a regular unit. The Rangers, maybe. In my experience Delta guys of his vintage favoured beards and sunglasses and kaffiyeh scarves pulled down to their throats. Partly because of where they were likely to serve, and partly because they liked to appear disguised and anonymous, which in itself was part necessity and part dramatic fantasy. But probably his campaign manager had selected the photograph himself, accepting the junior unit in exchange for a picture that was recognizable, and recognizably American. Maybe people who looked like weird Palestinian hippies wouldn’t go down well in North Carolina.
The stuff inside the cover flap featured his full name and military rank, written out with a degree of formality: Major John I Sansom, U.S. Army, Retired. Then it said he was the winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and two Silver Stars. Then it said he had been a successful CEO, of something called Sansom Consulting. Again, his whole pitch, right there. I wondered what the rest of the book was for.
I skimmed it and found it fell into five main sections: his early life, his time in the service, his subsequent marriage and family, his time in business, and his political vision for the future. The early stuff was conventional for the genre. Hardscrabble local youth, no money, no frills, his mom a pillar of strength, his dad working two jobs to make ends meet. Almost certainly exaggerated. If you take political candidates as a population sample, then the United States is a Third World country. Everyone grows up poor, drinking water is a luxury, shoes are rare, a square meal is cause for jubilant celebration.
I skipped ahead to where he met his wife and found more of the same platitudes. She was wonderful, their kids were great. End of story. I didn’t understand much of the business part. Sansom Consulting had been a bunch of consultants, which made sense, but I couldn’t work out exactly what they had done. They had made suggestions, basically, and then bought into the corporations they were advising, and then sold their stakes and gotten rich. Sansom himself had made what he described as a fortune. I wasn’t sure how much he meant. I feel pretty good with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I suspected Sansom came out with more than that, but he didn’t specify how much more. Another four zeros? Five? Six?
I looked at the part about his political vision for the future and didn’t find much I hadn’t already gleaned from the news magazines. It boiled down to giving the voters everything they wanted. Low taxes, you got it. Public services, have at it. It made no sense to me. But all in all Sansom came across as a decent guy. I felt he would try to do the right thing, as much as any of them can. I felt he was in it for all the right reasons.
There were photographs in the middle of the book. All except one were bland snapshots tracing Sansom’s life from the age of three months to the present day. They were the kind of things that I imagine most guys could dig out of a shoebox in the back of a closet. Parents, childhood, schooldays, his service years, his bride-to-be, their kids, business portraits. Normal stuff, probably interchangeable with the pictures in all the other candidate biographies.
But the photograph that was different was bizarre.
SEVENTEEN
The photograph that was different was a news picture I had seen before. It was of an American politician called Donald Rumsfeld, in Baghdad, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, back in 1983. Donald Rumsfeld had twice been Secretary of Defense, but at the time of the picture had been a special presidential envoy for Ronald Reagan. He had gone to Baghdad to kiss Saddam’s ass and pat him on the back and give him a pair of solid gold spurs as a gift and a symbol of America’s everlasting gratitude. Eight years later we had been kicking Saddam’s ass, not kissing it. Fifteen years after that, we killed him. Sansom had captioned the picture Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Political commentary; I supposed. Or a business homily, although I could find no mention of the actual episode in the text itself.
I turned back to his service career, and prepared to read about it carefully. That was my area of expertise, after all. Sansom joined the army in 1975 and left in 1992. A seventeen-year window. four years longer than mine, by virtue of starting nine years earlier and quitting five years earlier. A good era, basically, compared to most. The Vietnam paroxysm was over, and the new professional all-volunteer army was well established and still well funded. It looked like Sansom had enjoyed it. His narrative was coherent. He described basic training accurately; described Officer Candidate School well, was entertaining about his early infantry service. He was open about being ambitious. He picked up every qualification available to him and moved to the Rangers and then the nasc
ent Delta Force. As usual he dramatized Delta’s induction process, the hell weeks, the attrition, the endurance, the exhaustion. As usual he didn’t criticize its incompleteness. Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.
But overall I felt Sansom was pretty honest. Truth is, most Delta missions are aborted before they even start, and most that do start fail. Some guys never see action. Sansom didn’t dress it up. He was straightforward about the patchy excitement, and frank about the failures. Above all he didn’t mention goatherds, not even once. Most Special Forces after-action reports blame mission failures on itinerant goat tenders. Guys are infiltrated into what they claim are inhospitable and virtually uninhabited regions, and are immediately discovered by local peasants with large herds of goats. Statistically unlikely. Nutritionally unlikely, given the barren terrain. Goats have to eat something. Maybe it was true one time, but since then it has become a code. Much more palliative to say We were hunkered down and a goatherd stumbled over us than to say We screwed up. But Sansom never mentioned either the ruminant animals or their attendant agricultural personnel, which was a big point in his favour.
In fact, he didn’t mention much of anything. Certainly not a whole lot in the success column. There was what must have been fairly routine stuff in West Africa, plus Panama, plus some SCUD hunting in Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. Apart from that, nothing. Just a lot or training and standing by, which was always followed by standing down and then more training. His was maybe the first unexaggerated Special Forces memoir that I had ever seen. More than that, even. Not just unexaggerated. It was downplayed. Minimized, and de-emphasized. Dressed down, not up.
Which was interesting.
EIGHTEEN
I took a lot of care getting back to the coffee shop on Eighth. Our principal brought a whole crew. And by now they all knew roughly what I looked like. The Radio Shack guy had told me how pictures and video could be phoned through from one person to another. For my part I had no idea what the opposition looked like, but if their principal had been forced to hire guys in nice suits as local camouflage, then his own crew probably looked somewhat different themselves. Otherwise, no point. I saw lots of different-looking people. Maybe a couple hundred thousand. You always do, in New York City. But none of them showed any interest in me. None of them stayed with me. Not that I made it easy. I took the 4 train to Grand Central, walked two circuits through the crowds, took the shuttle to Times Square, walked a long and illogical loop from there to Ninth Avenue, and came on the diner from the west, straight past the 14th Precinct.
Jacob Mark was already inside.
He was in a back booth, cleaned up, hair brushed, wearing dark pants and a white shirt and a navy windbreaker. He could have had off duty cop tattooed across his forehead. He looked unhappy but not frightened. I slid in opposite him and sat sideways, so I could watch the street through the windows.
‘Did you talk to Peter?’ I asked him. He shook his head.
‘But?’
‘I think he’s OK.’
‘You think or you know?’
He didn’t answer, because the waitress came by. The same woman from the morning. I was too hungry to be sensitive about whether or not Jake was going to eat. I ordered a big platter, tuna salad with eggs and a bunch of other stuff. Plus coffee to drink. Jake followed my lead and got a grilled cheese sandwich and water.
I said, ‘Tell me what happened.’
He said, ‘The campus cops helped me out. They were happy to. Peter’s a football star. He wasn’t home. So they rousted his buddies and got the story. Turns out Peter is away somewhere with a woman.’
‘Where?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘What woman?’
‘A girl from a bar. Peter and the guys were out four nights ago. The girl was in the place. Peter left with her.’
I said nothing.
Jake said, ‘What?’
I asked, ‘Who picked up who?’
He nodded. ‘This is what makes me feel OK. He did all the work. His buddies said it was a four-hour project. He had to put everything into it. Like a championship game, the guys said. So it wasn’t Mata Hari or anything.’
‘Description?’
‘A total babe. And these are jocks talking, so they mean it. A little older, but not much. Maybe twenty-five or six. You’re a college senior, that’s an irresistible challenge, right there.’
‘Name?’
Jake shook his head. ‘The others kept their distance. It’s an etiquette thing.’
‘Their regular place?’
‘On their circuit.’
‘Hooker? Decoy?’
‘No way. These guys get around. They ain’t dumb. They can tell. And Peter did all the work, anyway. Four hours, everything he had ever learned.’
‘It would have been over in four minutes if she had wanted it to be.’
Jake nodded again. ‘Believe me, I’ve been through it a hundred times. Any funny business, an hour would have been enough to make it look kosher. Two, tops. Nobody would stretch it to four. So it’s OK. More than OK, from Peter’s point of view. Four days with a total babe? What were you doing when you were twenty- two?’
‘I hear you,’ I said. When I was twenty-two I had the same kinds of priorities. Although a four-day relationship would have seemed long to me. Practically like engagement, or marriage.
Jake said, ‘But?’
‘Susan was delayed four hours on the Turnpike. I’m wondering what kind of a deadline could have passed, to make a mother feel like killing herself.’
‘Peter’s OK. Don’t worry about it. He’ll be home soon, weak at the knees but happy.’
I said nothing more. The waitress came by with the food. It looked pretty good, and there was a lot of it. Jake asked, ‘Did the private guys find you?’
I nodded and told him the story between forkfuls of tuna. He said, ‘They knew your name? That’s not good.’
‘Not ideal, no. And they knew I talked to Susan on the train.’
‘How?’
‘They’re ex-cops. They’ve still got friends on the job. No other explanation.’
‘Lee and Docherty?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe some day guy who came in and read the file.’
‘And they took your picture? That’s not good, either.’
‘Not ideal,’ I said again.
‘Any sign of this other crew they were talking about?’ he asked.
I checked the window and said, ‘So far, nothing.’
‘What else?’
‘John Sansom isn’t exaggerating about his career. He seems to have done nothing very special. And that kind of a claim isn’t really worth refuting.’
‘Dead end, then.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘He was a major. That’s one automatic promotion plus two on merit. He must have done something they liked. I was a major too. I know how it works.’
‘What did you do that they liked?’
‘Something they regretted later, probably.’
‘Length of service,’ Jake said. ‘You stick around, you get promoted.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s not how it works. Plus this guy won three of the top four medals available to him, one of them twice. So he must have done something special. Four somethings, in fact.’
‘Everybody gets medals.’
‘Not those medals. I got a Silver Star myself, which is pocket change to this guy, and I know for a fact they don’t fall out of the box with the breakfast cereal. And I got a Purple Heart, too, which Sansom apparently didn’t. He doesn’t mention one in his book. And no politician would forget about a wound in action. Not in a million years. But it’s relatively unusual to win a gallantry medal without a wound. Normally the two things go hand in hand.’
‘So maybe he’s bullshitting about the me
dals.’
I shook my head again. ‘Can’t be done. Maybe with a combat pip on a Vietnam ribbon, something like that, but these are heavy-duty awards. This guy’s got everything except the Medal of Honor.’
‘So?’
‘So I think he is bullshitting about his career, but in reverse. He’s leaving stuff out, not putting stuff in.’
‘Why would he?’
‘Because he was on at least four secret missions, and he still can’t talk about them. Which makes them very secret indeed, because the guy is in the middle of an election campaign, and the urge to talk must be huge.’
‘What kind of secret missions?’
‘Could be anything. Black ops, covert actions, against anybody.’
‘So maybe Susan was asked for details.’
‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Delta’s orders and operational logs and after-action reports aren’t anywhere near HRC. They’re either destroyed or locked up for sixty years at Fort Bragg. No disrespect, but your sister couldn’t have gotten within a million miles of them.’
‘So how does this help us?’
‘It eliminates Sansom’s combat career, that’s how. If Sansom is involved at all, it’s in some other capacity.’
‘Is he involved?’
‘Why else would his name have been mentioned?’
‘What capacity?’
I put my fork down and drained my cup and said, ‘I don’t want to stay in here. It’s ground zero for this other crew. It’s the first place they’ll check.’
I left a tip on the table and headed for the register. This time the waitress was pleased. We were in and out in record time.
* * *
Manhattan is both the best and the worst place in the world to be hunted. The best, because it is teeming with people, and every square yard of it has literally hundreds of witnesses all around. The worst, because it is teeming with people, and you have to check each and every one of them, just in case, which is tiring, and frustrating, and fatiguing, and eventually drives you crazy, or makes you lazy. So for the sake of convenience we went back to West 35th and walked the shady side of the street, up and down opposite the row of parked cop cars, which seemed like the safest stretch of sidewalk in the city.