“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.
“Brubaker doesn’t use the field manual,” he said.
“I want to see Carbone’s billet,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I need to sanitize it. If I’m going to sign off on a truck 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. 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 color photograph in a brass frame. The photograph was of an older woman who 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 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 license 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. 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 yourself 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.
“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.”
eleven
I 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 coffeepot 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 dialed 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 t
o the incinerator guy. One burn bag, full of paper shreds, maybe enough for about sixty sheets.”
“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. First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about it.”
“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 dialed 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 on Mrs. Kramer. 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.”
“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.”
“Neighbors 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 tire 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 fiber 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 deal-breaker even for a general, right?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “Not anymore.”
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.”
“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. “We 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 dishonorable 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.
“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 dishonorable 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 laying 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 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.”
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