by Lee Child
The first sheet was an analysis of the problems that Armored was facing. The integrated units, the loss of prestige. The possibility of ceding command to others. It was gloomy, but it was conventional. And it was accurate, according to the Chief of Staff.
The second page and the third page contained more or less what I had predicted to Summer. Proposed attempts to smear key opponents, with maximum use of dirty laundry. Some of the margin notes hinted at some of the dirt, and a lot of it sounded pretty interesting. I wondered how they had gathered information like that. And I wondered if anyone in JAG Corps would follow up on it. Someone probably would. Investigations were like that. They led off in all kinds of random directions.
There were ideas for public relations campaigns. Most of them were pretty limp. These guys hadn’t mixed with the public since they took the bus up the Hudson to start their plebe year at the Point. Then there were references to the big defense contractors. There were ideas for political initiatives inside the Department of the Army and in Congress. Some of the political ideas looped right back and tied in with the defense contractor references. There were hints of some pretty sophisticated relationships there. Clearly money flowed one way and favors flowed the other way. The Secretary of Defense was mentioned by name. His help was taken pretty much for granted. On one line his name was actually underlined and a note in the margin read: bought and paid for. Altogether the first three pages were full of the kind of stuff you would expect from arrogant professionals heavily invested in the status quo. It was murky and sordid and desperate, for sure. But it wasn’t anything that would send you to jail.
That stuff came on the fourth page.
The fourth page had a curious heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile. Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art of War by Sun-tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish. Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell.
“Who’s Wavell?” Summer said.
“An old British field marshal,” I said. “World War Two. Then he was viceroy of India. He was blind in one eye from World War One.”
Underneath the Wavell quote was another penciled note, in a different hand. Coomer’s, probably. It said: Volunteers? Me? Marshall? Those three words were ringed and connected with a long looping pencil line back to the heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile.
“What’s that about?” Summer said.
“Read on,” I said.
Below the Sun-tzu quote was a typed list of eighteen names. I knew most of them. There were key battalion commanders from prestige infantry divisions like the 82nd and the 101st, and significant staffers from the Pentagon, and some other people. There was an interesting mix of ages and ranks. There were no really junior officers, but the list wasn’t confined to senior people. Not by any means. There were some rising stars in there. Some obvious choices, some offbeat mavericks. A few of the names meant nothing to me. They belonged to people I had never heard of. There was a guy listed called Abelson, for instance. I didn’t know who Abelson was. He had a penciled check mark against his name. Nobody else did.
“What’s the check mark for?” Summer said.
I dialed my sergeant outside at her desk.
“Ever heard of a guy called Abelson?” I asked her.
“No,” she said.
“Find out about him,” I said. “He’s probably a light colonel or better.”
I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure. But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow too. Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution. And from what I knew about the people whose names I recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically, those light units that looked ahead toward the twenty-first century rather than those that looked backward at the nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen people whose presence or absence would make a difference to the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.
My phone rang. I hit Speaker and we heard my sergeant’s voice.
“Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,” she said. “You know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating that particular drum?”
“Was?” I said.
“He died the day before New Year’s Eve. Car versus pedestrian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit-and-run.”
I clicked the phone off.
“Swan mentioned that,” I said. “In passing. Now that I think about it.”
“The check mark,” Summer said.
I nodded. “One down, seventeen to go.”
“What does T.E.P. mean?”
“It’s old CIA jargon,” I said. “It means terminate with extreme prejudice.”
She said nothing.
“In other words, assassinate,” I said.
We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The supreme proof of a commander’s courage. The surest test of his strength of will. I tried to imagine what kind of crazy isolated ego-driven fever could drive people to add grandiose quotations like those to a list of men they wanted to murder so they could keep their jobs and their prestige. I couldn’t even begin to figure it out. So I just gave it up and butted the four typewritten sheets back together and threaded the staple back through the original holes. I took an envelope from my drawer and slipped them inside it.
“It’s been out in the world since the first of the year,” I said. “And they knew it was gone for good on the fourth. It wasn’t in the briefcase, and it wasn’t on Brubaker’s body. That’s why they were resigned. They gave up on it a week ago. They killed three people looking for it, but they never found it. So they were just sitting there, knowing for sure sooner or later it was going to come back and bite them in the ass.”
I slid the envelope across the desk.
“Use it,” I told Summer. “Use it in D.C. Use it to nail their damn hides to the wall.”
By then it was already four o’clock in the morning and Summer left for the Pentagon immediately. I went to bed and got four hours’ sleep. Woke myself up at eight. I had one thing left to do, and I knew for sure there was one thing left to be done to me.
twenty-five
I got to my office at nine o’clock in the morning. The woman with the baby son was gone by then. The Louisiana corporal had taken her place.
“JAG Corps is here for you,” he said. He jerked his thumb at my inner door. “I let them go straight in.”
I nodded. Looked around for coffee. There wasn’t any. Bad start. I opened my door and stepped inside. Found two guys in there. One of them was in a visitor’s chair. One of them was at my desk. Both of them were in Class As. Both had JAG Corps badges on their lapels. A small gold wreath, crossed with a saber and an arrow. The guy in the visitor’s chair was a captain. The guy at my desk was a lieutenant colonel.
“Where do I sit?” I said.
“Anywhere you like,” the colonel said.
I said nothing.
“I saw the telexes from Irwin,” he said. “You have my sincere congratulations, Major. You did an outstanding job.”
I said nothing.
“And I heard about Kramer’s agenda,” he said. “I just got a call from the Chief of Staff’s office. That’s an even better result. It justifies Operation Argon all by itself.”
“You’re not here to discuss
the case,” I said.
“No,” he said. “We’re not. That discussion is happening at the Pentagon, with your lieutenant.”
I took a spare visitor’s chair and put it against the wall, under the map. I sat down on it. Leaned back. Put my hand up over my head and played with the pushpins. The colonel leaned forward and looked at me. He waited, like he wanted me to speak first.
“You planning on enjoying this?” I asked him.
“It’s my job,” he said.
“You like your job?”
“Not all the time,” he said.
I said nothing.
“This case was like a wave on the beach,” he said. “Like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind.”
I said nothing.
“Except it did leave something behind,” he said. “It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we have to address it.”
He waited for me to speak. I thought about clamming up. Thought about making him do all the work himself. But in the end I just shrugged and gave it up.
“The brutality complaint,” I said.
He nodded. “Colonel Willard brought it to our attention. And it’s awkward. Whereas the unauthorized use of the travel warrants can be dismissed as germane to the investigation, the brutality complaint can’t. Because apparently the two civilians were completely unrelated to the business at hand.”
“I was misinformed,” I said.
“That doesn’t alter the fact, I’m afraid.”
“Your witness is dead.”
“He left a signed affidavit. That stands forever. That’s the same as if he were right there in the courtroom, testifying.”
I said nothing.
“It comes down to a simple question of fact,” the colonel said. “A simple yes or no answer, really. Did you do what Carbone alleged?”
I said nothing.
The colonel stood up. “You can talk it over with your counsel.”
I glanced at the captain. Apparently he was my lawyer. The colonel shuffled out and closed the door on us. The captain leaned forward from his chair and shook my hand and told me his name.
“You should cut the colonel some slack,” he said. “He’s giving you a loophole a mile wide. This whole thing is a charade.”
“I rocked the boat,” I said. “The army is getting its licks in.”
“You’re wrong, Reacher. Nobody wants to screw you over this. Willard forced the issue, is all. So we have to go through the motions.”
“Which are?”
“All you’ve got to do is deny it. That throws Carbone’s evidence into dispute, and since he’s not around to be cross-examined, your Sixth Amendment right to be confronted by the witness against you kicks in and it guarantees you an automatic dismissal.”
I sat still.
“How would it be done?” I said.
“You sign an affidavit just like Carbone did. His says black, yours says white, the problem goes away.”
“Official paper?”
“It’ll take five minutes. We can do it right here. Your corporal can type it and witness it. Dead easy.”
I nodded.
“What’s the alternative?” I said.
“You’d be nuts to even think about an alternative.”
“What would happen?”
“It would be like pleading guilty.”
“What would happen?” I said again.
“With an effective guilty plea? Loss of rank, loss of pay, backdated to the incident. Civilian Affairs wouldn’t let us get away with anything less.”
I said nothing.
“You’d be busted back to captain. In the regular MPs, because the 110th wouldn’t want you anymore. That’s the short answer. But you’d be nuts to even think about it. All you have to do is deny it.”
I sat there and thought about Carbone. Thirty-five years old, sixteen of them in the service. Infantry, Airborne, the Rangers, Delta. Sixteen years of hard time. He had done nothing except try to keep a secret he should never have had to keep. And try to alert his unit to a threat. Nothing much wrong with either of those things. But he was dead. Dead in the woods, dead on a slab. Then I thought about the fat guy at the strip club. I didn’t really care about the farmer. A busted nose was no big deal. But the fat guy was messed up bad. On the other hand, he wasn’t one of North Carolina’s finest citizens. I doubted if the governor was lining him up for a civic award.
I thought about both of those guys for a long time. Carbone, and the fat man in the parking lot. Then I thought about myself. A major, a star, a hotshot special unit investigator, a go-to guy headed for the top.
“OK,” I said. “Bring the colonel back in.”
The captain got up out of his chair and opened the door. Held it for the colonel. Closed it behind him. Sat down again next to me. The colonel shuffled past us and sat down at the desk.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s wrap this thing up. The complaint is baseless, yes?”
I looked at him. Said nothing.
“Well?”
You’re going to do the right thing.
“The complaint is true,” I said.
He stared at me.
“The complaint is accurate,” I said. “In every detail. It went down exactly like Carbone described.”
“Christ,” the colonel said.
“Are you crazy?” the captain said.
“Probably,” I said. “But Carbone wasn’t a liar. That shouldn’t be the last thing that goes in his record. He deserves better than that. He was in sixteen years.”
The room went quiet. We all just sat there. They were looking at a lot of paperwork. I was looking at being an MP captain again. No more special unit. But it wasn’t a big surprise. I had seen it coming. I had seen it coming ever since I closed my eyes on the plane and the dominoes started falling, end over end, one after the other.
“One request,” I said. “I want a two-day suspension included. Starting now.”
“Why?”
“I have to go to a funeral. I don’t want to beg my CO for leave.”
The colonel looked away.
“Granted,” he said.
I went back to my quarters and packed my duffel with everything I owned. I cashed a check at the commissary and left fifty-two dollars in an envelope for my sergeant. I mailed fifty back to Franz. I collected the crowbar that Marshall had used from the pathologist and I put it with the one we had on loan from the store. Then I went to the MP motor pool and looked for a vehicle to borrow. I was surprised to see Kramer’s rental still parked there.
“Nobody told us what to do with it,” the clerk said.
“Why not?”
“Sir, you tell me. It was your case.”
I wanted something inconspicuous, and the little red Ford stood out among all the olive drab and black. But then I realized the situation would be reversed out in the world. Out there, the little red Ford wouldn’t attract a second glance.
“I’ll take it back now,” I said. “I’m headed to Dulles anyway.”
There was no paperwork, because it wasn’t an army vehicle.
I left Fort Bird at twenty past ten in the morning and drove north toward Green Valley. I went much slower than before, because the Ford was a slow car and I was a slow driver, at least compared to Summer. I didn’t stop for lunch. I just kept on going. I arrived at the police station at a quarter past three in the afternoon. I found Detective Clark at his desk in the bullpen. I told him his case was closed. Told him Summer would give him the details. I collected the crowbar he had on loan and drove the ten miles to Sperryville. I squeezed through the narrow alley and parked outside the hardware store. The window had been fixed. The square of plywood was gone. I looped all three crowbars over my forearm and went inside and returned them to the old guy behind the counter. Then I got back in the car and followed the only road out of town, all the way to Washington D.C.
I
took a short counterclockwise loop on the Beltway and went looking for the worst part of town I could find. There was plenty of choice. I picked a four-block square that was mostly crumbling warehouses with narrow alleys between. I found what I wanted in the third alley I checked. I saw an emaciated whore come out a brick doorway. I went in past her and found a guy in a hat. He had what I wanted. It took a minute to get some mutual trust going. But eventually cash money settled our differences, like it always does everywhere. I bought a little reefer, a little speed, and two dime rocks of crack cocaine. I could see the guy in the hat wasn’t impressed by the quantities. I could see he wrote me off as an amateur.
Then I drove to Rock Creek, Virginia. I got there just before five o’clock. Parked three hundred yards from 110th Special Unit headquarters, up on a rise, where I could look down over the fence into the parking lot. I picked out Willard’s car with no trouble at all. He had told me all about it. A classic Pontiac GTO. It was right there, near the rear exit. I slumped way down in my seat and kept my eyes wide-open and watched.
He came out at five-fifteen. Bankers’ hours. He fired up the Pontiac and backed it away from the building. I had my window cracked open for air and even from three hundred yards I could hear the rumble of the pipes. They made a pretty good V-8 sound. I figured it was a sound Summer would have enjoyed. I made a mental note that if I ever won the lottery I should buy her a GTO of her own.
I fired up the Ford. Willard came out of the lot and turned toward me. I hunkered down and let him go past. Then I waited one thousand, two thousand and U-turned and followed after him. He was an easy tail. With the window down I could have done it by sound alone. He drove fairly slow, big and obvious up ahead, near the crown of the road. I stayed well back and let the drive-time traffic fill his mirrors. He headed east toward the D.C. suburbs. I figured he would have a rental in Arlington or Maclean from his Pentagon days. I hoped it wasn’t an apartment. But I figured it would more likely be a house. With a garage, for the muscle car. Which was good, because a house was easier.