by Lee Child
THE PHONE CALL to the Fort Armstrong duty officer revealed nothing at all on the surface, but the guy’s evasions were voiced in such a way that a thirteen-year Army cop like Reacher took them to be confirmation as good as he’d get if they were written in an affidavit sworn before a notary public.
“He’s there,” he said.
Harper had been eavesdropping, and she didn’t look convinced.
“They tell you that for sure?” she asked.
“More or less,” he said.
“So is it worth going?”
He nodded. “He’s there, I guarantee it.”
The Nissan had no maps in it, and Harper had no idea of where she was. Reacher had only anecdotal knowledge of New Jersey geography. He knew how to get from A to B, and then from B to C, and then from C to D, but whether that was the most efficient direct route all the way from A to D, he had no idea. So he came out of the lot and headed for the turnpike on-ramp. He figured driving south for an hour would be a good start. He realized within a minute he was using the same road Lamarr had driven him on, just a few days before. It was raining lightly and the Nissan rode harder and lower than her big Buick. It was right down there in the tunnel of spray. The windshield was filmed with city grease and the wipers were blurring the view out with every alternate stroke. Smear, clear, smear, clear. The needle on the gas gauge was heading below a quarter.
“We should stop,” Harper said. “Get gas, clean the window.”
“And buy a map,” Reacher said.
He pulled off into the next service area. It was pretty much identical to the place Lamarr had used for lunch. Same layout, same buildings. He rolled through the rain to the gas pumps and left the car at the full-service island. The tank was full and the guy was cleaning the windshield when he got back, wet, carrying a colored map which unfolded awkwardly into a yard-square sheet.
“We’re on the wrong road,” he said. “Route 1 would be better.”
“OK, next exit,” Harper said, craning over. “Use 95 to jump across.”
She used her finger to trace south down Route 1. Found Fort Armstrong on the edge of the yellow shape that represented Trenton.
“Close to Fort Dix,” she said. “Where we were before. ”
Reacher said nothing. The guy finished with the windshield and Harper paid him through her window. Reacher wiped rain off his face with his sleeve and started the motor. Threaded his way back to the highway and watched for the turn onto 95.
I-95 was a mess, with heavy traffic. Route 1 was better. It curved through Highland Park and then ran dead straight for nearly twenty miles, all the way into Trenton. Reacher remembered Fort Armstrong as a left-hand turn coming north out of Trenton, so coming south it was a right-hand turn, onto another dead straight approach road, which took them all the way to a vehicle barrier outside a two-story brick guardhouse. Beyond the guardhouse were more roads and buildings. The roads were flat with whitewashed curbs and the buildings were all brick with radiused corners and external stairways made of welded tubular steel painted green. Window frames were metal. Classic Army architecture of the fifties, built with unlimited budgets and unlimited scope. Unlimited optimism.
"The U.S. military,” Reacher said. "We were kings of the world, back then.”
There was dimmed light in the guardhouse window next to the vehicle barrier. A sentry was visible, silhouetted against the light, bulky in a rain cape and helmet. He peered through the window and stepped to the door. Opened it up and came out to the car. Reacher buzzed his window down.
“You the guy who called the captain?” the sentry asked.
He was a heavy black guy. Low voice, slow accent from the Deep South. Far from home on a rainy night. Reacher nodded. The sentry grinned.
“He figured you might show up in person,” he said. “Go ahead in.”
He stepped back into the guardhouse and the barrier came up. Reacher drove carefully over the tire spikes and turned left.
“That was easy,” Harper said.
“You ever met a retired FBI agent?” Reacher asked.
“Sure, once or twice. Couple of the old guys.”
“How did you treat them?”
She nodded. “Like that guy treated you, I guess.”
“All organizations are the same,” he said. “Military police more so than the others, maybe. The rest of the Army hates you, so you stick together more.”
He turned right, then right again, then left.
“You been here before?” Harper asked.
“These places are all the same,” he said. “Look for the biggest flower bed, that’s where the general office is.”
She pointed. “That looks promising.”
He nodded. “You got the idea.”
The headlight beams played over a rose bed the size of an Olympic pool. The roses were just dormant stalks, sticking up out of a surface lumpy with horse manure and shredded bark. Behind them was a low symmetrical building with whitewashed steps leading up to double doors in the center. A light burned in a window in the middle of the left-hand wing.
“Duty office,” Reacher said. “The sentry called the captain soon as we were through the gate, so right now he’s walking down the corridor to the doors. Watch for the light.”
The fanlights above the doors lit up with a yellow glow.
“Now the outside lights,” Reacher said.
Two carriage lamps mounted on the door pillars lit up. Reacher stopped the car at the bottom of the steps.
“Now the doors open,” he said.
The doors opened inward and a man in uniform stepped through the gap.
“That was me, about a million years ago,” Reacher said.
The captain waited at the top of the steps, far enough out to be in the light from the carriage lamps, far enough in to be sheltered from the drizzle. He was a head shorter than Reacher had ever been, but he was broad and he looked fit. Dark hair neatly combed, plain steel eyeglasses. His uniform jacket was buttoned, but his face looked open enough. Reacher slid out of the Nissan and walked around the hood. Harper joined him at the foot of the whitewashed steps.
“Come in out of the rain,” the captain called.
His accent was East Coast urban. Bright and alert. He had an amiable smile. Looked like a decent guy. Reacher went up the steps first. Harper saw his shoes leaving wet stains on the whitewash. Glanced down and saw her own were doing the same thing.
“Sorry,” she said.
The captain smiled again.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The prisoners paint them every morning.”
“This is Lisa Harper,” Reacher said. “She’s with the FBI.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the captain said. “I’m John Leighton.”
The three of them shook hands all around at the doors and Leighton led them inside. He turned off the carriage lamps with a switch inside the doors and then killed the hallway light.
“Budgets,” he said. “Can’t waste money.”
Light from his office was spilling out into the corridor, and he led them toward it. Stood at his door and ushered them inside. The office was original fifties, updated only where strictly necessary. Old desk, new computer, old file cabinet, new phone. There were crammed bookcases and every surface was overloaded with paper.
“They’re keeping you busy,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Tell me about it.”
“So we’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
“Don’t worry. I called around, after you called me, naturally. Friend of a friend said I should push the boat out. Word is you were a solid guy, for a major.”
Reacher smiled, briefly.
“Well, I always tried to be,” he said. “For a major. Who was the friend of the friend?”
“Some guy worked for you when you worked for old Leon Garber. He said you were a stand-up guy and old Garber always swore by you, which makes you pretty much OK as long as this generation is still in harness.”
“Pe
ople still remember Garber?”
"Do Yankees fans still remember Joe DiMaggio?”
“I’m seeing Garber’s daughter,” Reacher said.
“I know,” Leighton said. “Word gets around. You’re a lucky guy. Jodie Garber’s a nice lady, from what I recall.”
“You know her?”
Leighton nodded. "I met her on the bases, when I was coming up.”
“I’ll remember you to her.”
Then he lapsed into silence, thinking about Jodie, and Leon. He was going to sell the house Leon had left him, and Jodie was worrying about it.
“Sit down,” Leighton said. “Please.”
There were two upright chairs in front of the desk, tubular metal and canvas, like the things storefront churches threw away a generation ago.
“So how can I help you?” Leighton said, aiming the question at Reacher, looking at Harper.
“She’ll explain,” Reacher said.
She ran through it all from the beginning, summarizing. It took seven or eight minutes. Leighton listened attentively, interrupting her here and there.
“I know about the women,” he said. “We heard.”
She finished with Reacher’s smoke screen theory, the possible Army thefts, and the trail which led from Petrosian’s boys in New York to Bob in New Jersey.
“His name is Bob McGuire,” Leighton said. “Quartermaster sergeant. But he’s not your guy. We’ve had him two months, and he’s too dumb, anyway.”
“We figured that,” Harper said. “Feeling was he could name names, maybe lead us to somebody more likely.”
“A bigger fish?”
Harper nodded. “Somebody doing enough business to make it worth killing witnesses.”
Leighton nodded back.
“Theoretically, there might be such a person,” he said, cautiously.
“You got a name?”
Leighton looked at her and shook his head. Leaned back in his chair and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Suddenly looked very tired.
“Problem?” Reacher asked.
“How long have you been out?” Leighton asked back, eyes closed.
“About three years, I guess,” Reacher said.
Leighton yawned and stretched and returned to an upright position.
“Things have changed,” he said. “Time marches on, right?”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything,” Leighton said. “Well, this, mainly.” He leaned over and tapped his computer monitor with his nail. It made a glassy ringing thunk, like a bottle. “Smaller Army, easier to organize, more time on our hands. So they computerized us, completely. Makes communication a whole lot easier. Makes it so we all know each other’s business. Makes inventories easier to manage. You want to know how many Willys Jeep tires we got in store, even though we don’t use Willys Jeeps anymore? Give me ten minutes, I can tell you.”
“So?”
“So we keep track of everything, much better than we used to. For instance, we know how many M9 Berettas have ever been delivered, we know how many have ever been legitimately issued, and we know how many we got in store. And if those numbers didn’t add up, we’d be worrying about it, believe me.”
“So do the numbers add up?”
Leighton grinned, briefly. “They do now. That’s for damn sure. Nobody’s stolen an M9 Beretta from the U.S. Army in the last year and a half.”
“So what was Bob McGuire doing two months ago?” Reacher asked.
“Selling out the last of his stockpile. He’d been thieving ten years, at least. A little computer analysis made it obvious. Him, and a couple dozen others in a couple dozen different locations. We put procedures in place to dry up the stealing and we rounded up all the bad guys selling whatever they still had left.”
“All of them?”
“Computer says so. We were leaking weapons like crazy, all kinds of descriptions, couple of dozen locations, so we arrest a couple dozen guys, and the leakage has stopped. McGuire was about the last, maybe second-to-last, I’m not sure.”
“No more weapons theft?”
“Yesterday’s news,” Leighton said. “You’re behind the times.”
There was silence.
“Good job,” Reacher said. “Congratulations.”
“Smaller Army,” Leighton said. “More time on our hands.”
“You got them all?” Harper asked.
Leighton just nodded. “All of them. Big push, worldwide. There weren’t that many. Computers did the trick.”
Silence in the office.
“Well, shit, there goes that theory,” she said.
She stared at the floor. Leighton shook his head, cautiously.
“Maybe not,” he said. “We’ve got a theory of our own.”
She looked up again. “The big fish?”
Leighton nodded. “Right.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s only theoretical, as of now.”
“Theoretical?”
“He’s not active,” Leighton said. “He’s not stealing anything. Like I told you, we identified all the leaks and we plugged them all. Couple dozen guys waiting for trial, all the leak locations accounted for. But the way we picked them up was we sent undercover guys in, to buy the stuff. Entrapment. Bob McGuire, for instance, he sold a couple of Berettas to a couple of lieutenants in a bar.”
"We were just there,” Harper said. "MacStiophan’s, near the New Jersey Turnpike.”
“Right,” Leighton said. “Our guys bought two M9s out of the trunk of his car, two hundred bucks apiece, which is about a third of what the Army pays for them, by the by. So then we haul McGuire in and we start ripping him apart. We know more or less exactly how many pieces he’s stolen over the years, because of the inventory analysis on the computer, and we figure an average price, and we start looking for where the money has gone. And we find about a half of it, either in bank accounts or in the form of stuff he’s bought.”
“So?” Reacher said.
“So nothing, not right then. But we’re pooling information and the story is pretty much the same everywhere. They’ve all got about a half of their money missing. More or less the exact same proportion everywhere. And these guys are not the smartest guys you’ve ever met, right? They couldn’t hide their money from us. And even if they could, why would they all hide exactly half of it? Why wouldn’t some of them hide all of it, or two thirds, or three quarters? You know, whatever, a different proportion in each case?”
“Enter the theoretical big fish,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Exactly. How else to explain it? It was like a puzzle with a missing piece. We started to figure some kind of a godfather figure, you know, some big guy in the shadows, maybe organizing everything, maybe offering protection in exchange for half the profit.”
“Or half the guns,” Reacher said.
“Right,” Leighton said.
“Somebody running a protection racket,” Harper said. “Like a scam inside a scam.”
“Right,” Leighton said again.
There was a long pause.
“Looks good from our point of view,” Harper said. “Guy like that, he’s smart and capable, and he has to run around taking care of problems in various random locations. Could explain why he’s interested in so many different women. Not because all the women knew him, but because maybe each one of them knew one of his clients.”
“Timing is good for you too,” Leighton said. “If our guy is your guy, he started planning two, three months ago, when he heard his clients were starting to go down.”
Harper sat forward. “What was the volume of business like two, three years ago?”
"Pretty heavy,” Leighton said. "You’re really asking how much these women could have seen, right?”
“Right.”
“They could have seen plenty,” Leighton said.
“So how good is your case?” she asked. “Against Bob McGuire, for instance?”
Leighton shrugged. “Not brilli
ant. We’ve got him for the two pieces he sold to our guys, of course, but that’s only two pieces. The rest of it is basically circumstantial, and the fact the money doesn’t tie up properly weakens the hell out of it.”
“So eliminating the witnesses before the trials makes sense.”
Leighton nodded. “Makes a hell of a lot of sense, I guess.”
“So who is this guy?”
Leighton rubbed his eyes again. “We have no idea. We don’t even know for sure there is a guy. He’s just a guess right now. Just our theory.”
“Nobody’s saying anything?”
“Not a damn word. We’ve been asking, two months solid. We’ve got two dozen guys, all of them with their mouths shut tight. We figure the big guy’s really put the frighteners on.”
“He’s scary, that’s for sure,” Harper said. “From what we know about him.”
There was silence in Leighton’s office. Just the brittle patter of rain on the windows.
“If he exists,” Leighton said.
“He exists,” Harper said.
Leighton nodded. “We think so too.”
“Well, we need his name, I guess,” Reacher said.
No reply.
“I should go talk to McGuire for you,” Reacher said.
Leighton smiled. “I figured you’d be saying that before long. I was all set to say no, it’s improper. But you know what? I just changed my mind. I just decided to say yes, go ahead. Be my guest.”