Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

Home > Other > Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] > Page 308
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 308

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)


  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 backward 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 meters from here,” she said. “On the Avenue Bosquet. I could see Les Invalides and the École Militaire from my window. I was ten when the Germans came to Paris. I thought that was the end of the world. I was fifteen 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 traveled 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 percent, twenty percent, 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, anyway. It was a discussion that should have happened twelve months 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 big shot, placed his palms flat on the table and looked into his mother’s eyes.

  “Won’t you miss us, Mom?” 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 anymore? 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 forever. 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 anymore,” she told us. “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 Odéon. 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 St.- Germain and the Boulevard St.-Michel, in the Sixième. It may be the most Parisian street in the whole of the city. Narrow, diverse, slightly seedy, flanked by tall plaster facades, 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. Chèvre 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 no
dded. “Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying good-bye. 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 again in the Rue St.-Dominique 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. She stood there and we went down in the tiny elevator and set out on the long walk back to the Opéra 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

  Going west the time changes lengthened 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 good-bye 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 office. 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. Afterward, 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 color 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 toward 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.

  One Hundred and Tenth 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 gray 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 tape said: Willard, U.S. Army. He had iron-gray hair parted in a schoolboy style. It needed a trim. He had steel-rimmed eyeglasses and the kind of gray 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 hemorrhoids. 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 be
en the standard army etiquette. But I was damned if I was going to 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.

  “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.

 

‹ Prev