64
Reacher said, “Walk to town with me. To the motel.”
Vaughan said, “I don’t know if I want to be seen with you. Especially at the motel. People are talking.”
“But not in a bad way.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Whatever, I’ll be gone tomorrow. So let them talk for one more day.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Maybe earlier. I might need to stick around to make a phone call. Apart from that, I’m done here.”
“Who do you need to call?”
“Just a number. I don’t think anyone will answer.”
“What about all this other stuff going on?”
“So far all we’ve got is the Pentagon washing its dirty linen in private. That’s not a crime.”
“What’s at the motel?”
“I’m guessing we’ll find room four is empty.”
They walked together through the damp late-morning air, two blocks north from Fifth Street to Third, and then three blocks west to the motel. They bypassed the office and headed on down the row. Room four’s door was standing open. There was a maid’s cart parked outside. The bed was stripped and the bathroom towels were dumped in a pile on the floor. The closets were empty. The maid had a vacuum cleaner going.
Vaughan said, “Mrs. Rogers is gone.”
Reacher nodded. “Now let’s find out when and how.”
They backtracked to the office. The clerk was on her stool behind the counter. Room four’s key was back on its hook. Now only two keys were missing. Reacher’s own, for room twelve, and Maria’s, for room eight.
The clerk slid off her stool and stood with her hands spread on the counter. Attentive, and helpful. Reacher glanced at the phone beside her and asked, “Did Mrs. Rogers get a call?”
The clerk nodded. “Six o’clock last night.”
“Good news?”
“She seemed very happy.”
“What then?”
“She checked out.”
“And went where?”
“She called a cab to take her to Burlington.”
“What’s in Burlington?”
“Mostly the airport bus to Denver.”
Reacher nodded. “Thanks for your help.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“That depends on your point of view.”
Reacher was hungry and he needed more coffee, so he led Vaughan another block north and another block west to the diner. The place was practically empty. Too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. Reacher stood for a second and then slid into the booth that Lucy Anderson had used the night he had met her. Vaughan sat across from him, where Lucy had sat. The waitress delivered ice water and silverware. They ordered coffee, and then Vaughan asked, “What exactly is going on?”
“All those young guys,” Reacher said. “What did they have in common?”
“I don’t know.”
“They were young, and they were guys.”
“And?”
“They were from California.”
“So?”
“And the only white one we saw had a hell of a tan.”
“So?”
Reacher said, “I sat right here with Lucy Anderson. She was cautious and a little wary, but basically we were getting along. She asked to see my wallet, to check I wasn’t an investigator. Then later I said I had been a cop, and she panicked. I put two and two together and figured her husband was a fugitive. The more she thought about it, the more worried she got. She was very hostile the next day.”
“Figures.”
“Then I caught a glimpse of her husband in Despair and went back to check the rooming house where he was staying. It was empty, but it was very clean.”
“Is that important?”
“Crucial,” Reacher said. “Then I saw Lucy again, after her husband had moved on. She said they have lawyers. She talked about people in her position. She sounded like she was part of something organized. I said I could follow her to her husband and she said it wouldn’t do me any good.”
The waitress came over with the coffee. Two mugs, two spoons, a Bunn flask full of a brand-new brew. She poured and walked away and Reacher sniffed the steam and took a sip.
“But I was misremembering all along,” he said. “I didn’t tell Lucy Anderson that I had been a cop. I told her I had been amilitary cop. That’s why she panicked. And that’s why the rooming house was so clean. It was like a barracks ready for inspection. Old habits die hard. The people passing through it were all soldiers. Lucy thought I was tracking them.”
Vaughan said, “Deserters.”
Reacher nodded. “That’s why the Anderson guy had such a great tan. He had been in Iraq. But he didn’t want to go back.”
“Where is he now?”
“Canada,” Reacher said. “That’s why Lucy wasn’t worried about me following her. It wouldn’t do me any good. No jurisdiction. It’s a sovereign nation, and they’re offering asylum up there.”
“The truck,” Vaughan said. “It was from Ontario.”
Reacher nodded. “Like a taxi service. The glow on the camera wasn’t stolen uranium. It was Mrs. Rogers’s husband in a hidden compartment. Body heat, like the driver. The shade of green was the same.”
65
Vaughan sat still and quiet for a long time. The waitress came back and refilled Reacher’s mug twice. Vaughan didn’t touch hers.
She asked, “What was the California connection?”
Reacher said, “Some kind of an anti-war activist group out there must be running an escape line. Maybe local service families are involved. They figured out a system. They sent guys up here with legitimate metal deliveries, and then their Canadian friends took them north over the border. There was a couple at the Despair hotel seven months ago, from California. A buck gets ten they were the organizers, recruiting sympathizers. And the sympathizers policed the whole thing. They busted your truck’s windows. They thought I was getting too nosy, and they were trying to move me on.”
Vaughan pushed her mug out of the way and moved the salt and the pepper and the sugar in front of her. She put them in a neat line. She straightened her index finger and jabbed at the pepper shaker. Moved it out of place. Jabbed at it again, and knocked it over.
“A small subgroup,” she said. “The few left-hand people, working behind Thurman’s back. Helping deserters.”
Reacher said nothing.
Vaughan asked, “Do you know who they are?”
“No idea.”
“I want to find out.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to have them arrested. I want to call the FBI with a list of names.”
“OK.”
“Well, don’t you want to?”
Reacher said, “No, I don’t.”
Vaughan was too civilized and too small town to have the fight in the diner. She just threw money on the table and stalked out. Reacher followed her, like he knew he was supposed to. She headed toward the quieter area on the edge of town, or toward the motel again, or toward the police station. Reacher wasn’t sure which. Either she wanted solitude, or to demand phone records from the motel clerk, or to be in front of her computer. She was walking fast, in a fury, but Reacher caught her easily. He fell in beside her and matched her pace for pace and waited for her to speak.
She said, “You knew about this yesterday.”
He said, “Since the day before.”
“How?”
“The same way I figured the patients in David’s hospital were military. They were all young men.”
“You waited until that truck was over the border before you told me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want you to have it stopped.”
“Why not?”
“I wanted Rogers to get away.”
Vaughan stopped walking. “For God’s sake, you were a military cop.”
Reacher nodded. “Thirteen years.”
�
��You hunted guys like Rogers.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And now you’ve gone over to the dark side?”
Reacher said nothing.
Vaughan said, “Did you know Rogers?”
“Never heard of him. But I knew ten thousand just like him.”
Vaughan started walking again. Reacher kept pace. She stopped fifty yards short of the motel. Outside the police station. The brick façade looked cold in the gray light. The neat aluminum letters looked colder.
“They had a duty,” Vaughan said. “You had a duty. Daviddid his duty. They should do theirs, and you should do yours.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Soldiers should go where they’re told,” she said. “They should follow orders. They don’t get to choose. And you swore an oath. You should obey it. They’re traitors to their country. They’re cowards. And you are, too. I can’t believe I slept with you. You’renothing. You’re disgusting. You make my skin crawl.”
Reacher said, “Duty is a house of cards.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I went where they told me. I followed orders. I did everything they asked, and I watched ten thousand guys do the same. And we were happy to, deep down. I mean, we bitched and pissed and moaned, like soldiers always do. But we bought the deal. Because duty is a transaction, Vaughan. It’s a two-way street. We owe them, they owe us. And what they owe us is a solemn promise to risk our lives and limbs if and only if there’s a damn good reason. Most of the time they’re wrong anyway, but we like to feel some kind of good faith somewhere. At least a little bit. And that’s all gone now. Now it’s all about political vanity and electioneering. That’s all. And guys know that. You can try, but you can’t bullshit a soldier.They blew it, not us. They pulled out the big card at the bottom of the house and the whole thing fell down. And guys like Anderson and Rogers are over there watching their friends getting killed and maimed and they’re thinking, Why? Why should we do this shit?”
“And you think going AWOL is the answer?”
“I think the answer is for civilians to get off their fat asses and vote the bums out. They should exercise control. That’stheir duty. That’s the next-biggest card at the bottom of the house. But that’s gone, too. So don’t talk to me about AWOL. Why should the grunts on the ground be the only ones whodon’t go AWOL? What kind of a two-way street is that?”
“You served thirteen years and you support deserters?”
“I understand their decision. Precisely because I served those thirteen years. I had the good times. I wish they could have had them, too. I loved the army. And I hate what happened to it. I feel the same as I would if I had a sister and she married a creep. Should she keep her marriage vows? To a point, sure, but no further.”
“If you were in now, would you have deserted?”
Reacher shook his head. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough.”
“It takes courage?”
“For most guys, more than you would think.”
“People don’t want to hear that their loved ones died for no good reason.”
“I know. But that doesn’t change the truth.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t,” Reacher said. “You hate the politicians, and the commanders, and the voters, and the Pentagon.” Then he said, “And you hate that David didn’t go AWOL after his first tour.”
Vaughan turned and faced the street. Held still. Closed her eyes. She stood like that for a long time, pale, a small tremble in her lower lip. Then she spoke. Just a whisper. She said, “I asked him to. I begged him. I said we could start again anywhere he wanted, anywhere in the world. I said we could change our names, anything. But he wouldn’t agree. Stupid, stupid man.”
Then she cried, right there on the street, outside her place of work. Her knees buckled and she staggered a step and Reacher caught her and held her tight. Her tears soaked his shirt. Her body trembled. She wrapped her arms around him. She crushed her face into his chest. She wailed and cried for her shattered life, her broken dreams, the telephone call two years before, the chaplain’s visit to her door, the X-rays, the filthy hospitals, the unstoppable hiss of the respirator.
Afterward they walked up and down the block together, aimlessly, just to be moving. The sky was gray with low cloud and the air smelled like rain was on the way. Vaughan wiped her face on Reacher’s shirt tail and ran her fingers through her hair. She blinked her eyes clear and swallowed and took deep breaths. They ended up outside the police station again and Reacher saw her gaze trace the line of twenty aluminum letters fixed to the brick.Hope Police Department. She said, “Why didn’t Raphael Ramirez make it?”
Reacher said, “Because Ramirez was different.”
66
Reacher said, “One phone call from your desk will explain it. We might as well go ahead and make it. Since we’re right here anyway. Maria has waited long enough.”
Vaughan said, “One call to who?”
“The MPs west of Despair. You were briefed about them, they’ll have been briefed about you. Therefore they’ll cooperate.”
“What do I ask them?”
“Ask them to fax Ramirez’s summary file. They’ll say, Who? You’ll tell them, Bullshit, you know Maria was just there, so you know they know who he is. And tell them we know Maria was there for twenty-one hours, which is enough time for them to have gotten all the paperwork in the world.”
“What are we going to find?”
“My guess is Ramirez was in prison two weeks ago.”
The Hope Police Department’s fax machine was a boxy old product standing alone on a rolling cart. It had been square and graceless to start with, and now it was grubby and worn. But it worked. Eleven minutes after Vaughan finished her call it sparked up and started whirring and sucked a blank page out of the feeder tray and fed it back out with writing on it.
Not much writing. It was a bare-bones summary. Very little result for twenty-one hours of bureaucratic pestering. But that was explained by the fact that it had been the army doing the asking and the Marines doing the answering. Inter-service cooperation wasn’t usually very cooperative.
Raphael Ramirez had been a private in the Marine Corps. At the age of eighteen he had been deployed to Iraq. At the age of nineteen he had served a second deployment. At the age of twenty he had gone AWOL ahead of a third deployment. He had gone on the run but had been arrested five days later in Los Angeles and locked up awaiting court martial back at Pendleton.
Date of arrest, three weeks previously.
Reacher said, “Let’s go find Maria.”
They found her in her motel room. Her bed had a dent where she had been sitting, staying warm, saving energy, passing time, enduring. She answered the door tentatively, as if she was certain that all news would be bad. There was nothing in Reacher’s face to change her mind. He and Vaughan led her outside and sat her in the plastic lawn chair under her bathroom window. Reacher took room nine’s chair and Vaughan took room seven’s. They dragged them over and positioned them and made a tight little triangle on the concrete apron.
Reacher said, “Raphael was a Marine.”
Maria nodded. Said nothing.
Reacher said, “He had been to Iraq twice. He didn’t want to go back a third time. So nearly four weeks ago he went on the run. He headed up to LA. Maybe he had friends there. Did he call you?”
Maria said nothing.
Vaughan said, “You’re not in trouble, Maria. Nobody’s going to get you for anything.”
Maria said, “He called most days.”
Reacher asked, “How was he?”
“Scared. Scared to death. Scared of being AWOL, scared of going back.”
“What happened in Iraq?”
“To him? Not much, really. But he saw things. He said the people we were supposed to be helping were killing us, and we were killing the people we were supposed to be helping. Everybody was killing everybody else. In bad ways. It was driving
him crazy.”
“So he ran. And he called most days.”
Maria nodded.
Reacher said, “But then he didn’t call, for two or three days. Is that right?”
“He lost his cell phone. He was moving a lot. To stay safe. Then he got a new phone.”
“How did he sound on the new phone?”
“Still scared. Very worried. Even worse.”
“Then what?”
“He called to say he had found some people. Or some people had found him. They were going to get him to Canada. Through a place called Despair, in Colorado. He said I should come here, to Hope, and wait for his call. Then I should join him in Canada.”
“Did he call from Despair?”
“No.”
“Why did you go to the MPs?”
“To ask if they had found him and arrested him. I was worried. But they said they had never heard of him. They were army, he was Marine Corps.”
“And so you came back here to wait some more.”
Maria nodded.
Reacher said, “It wasn’t exactly like that. He was arrested in LA. The Marines caught up with him. He didn’t lose his phone. He was in jail for two or three days.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“He wasn’t allowed to.”
“Did he break out again?”
Reacher shook his head. “My guess is he made a deal. The Marine Corps offered him a choice. Five years in Leavenworth, or go undercover to bust the escape line that ran from California all the way to Canada. Names, addresses, descriptions, techniques, routes, all that kind of stuff. He agreed, and they drove him back to LA and turned him loose. That’s why the MPs didn’t respond. They found out what was going on and were told to stonewall you.”
“So where is Raphael now? Why doesn’t he call?”
Reacher said, “My father was a Marine. Marines have a code. Did Raphael tell you about it?”
Maria said, “Unit, corps, God, country.”
Reacher nodded. “It’s a list of their loyalties, in priority order. Raphael’s primary loyalty was to his unit. His company, in fact. Really just a handful of guys. Guys like him.”
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