by Lee Child
“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. David did 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’re nothing. 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’s their 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 who don’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 d
ent 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.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think he agreed to the deal but couldn’t carry it through. He couldn’t betray guys just like him. I think he rode up to Despair but didn’t call in to the Marines. I think he hung around on the edge of town and stayed out of sight, because he was conflicted. He didn’t want to know who was involved, because he was afraid he might have to give them away later. He hung out for days, agonizing. He got thirsty and hungry. He started hallucinating and decided to walk over to Hope, and find you, and get out some other way.”
“So where is he?”
“He didn’t make it, Maria. He collapsed halfway. He died.”
“But where is his body?”
“The people in Despair took care of it.”
“I see.”
Then for the second time in an hour Reacher watched a woman cry. Vaughan held her and Reacher said, “He was a good man, Maria. He was just a kid who couldn’t take any more. And in the end he didn’t betray what he believed in.” He said those things over and over again, in different orders, and with different emphases, but they didn’t help.
Maria was all cried out after twenty minutes and Vaughan led her back inside. Then she joined Reacher again and they walked away together. She asked, “How did you know?”
Reacher said, “No other rational explanation.”
“Did he really do what you said? Agonized and then sacrificed himself?”
“Marines are good at self-sacrifice. On the other hand maybe he double-crossed the Corps from the get-go. Maybe he planned all along to head straight to Hope and grab Maria and disappear.”
“It doesn’t take four days to walk from Despair to Hope.”
“No,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t.”
“So he probably did the right thing.”
“I hope that was Maria’s impression.”
“Do you think he told them about the people in California?”
“I don’t know.”
“This will carry on if he didn’t.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It could get out of hand.”
“You could make a couple of calls. They’re in the hotel register in Despair, name and address. You could check and see who they are, and whether they’re still around, or whether they’ve disappeared into federal custody.”
“I’m sorry about what I said before.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
They walked on, and then Reacher said, “And you weren’t wrong, when you did what you did the night before last. Otherwise whoever killed David killed you too. You want to give them that? Because I don’t. I want you to have a life.”
“That sounds like the beginnings of a farewell speech.”
“Does it?”
“Why stay? The Pentagon is washing its dirty linen in private, which isn’t a crime. And we seem to have decided this other thing isn’t a crime either.”
“There’s one more thing on my mind,” Reacher said.
67
Reacher and Vaughan walked back to the diner, where Reacher ate for the first time since the burger he had scored in the Fort Shaw mess the night before. He topped up his caffeine level with four mugs of coffee and when he had finished he said, “We need to go see those MPs. Now you’ve established contact we might get away with a face-to-face meeting.”
Vaughan said, “We’re going to drive through Despair again?”
Reacher shook his head. “Let’s take your truck and go cross-country.”
They peeled the paper barcodes off the new glass and Vaughan fetched paper towels and Windex from her kitchen and they wiped the wax and the handprints off the screen. Then they set off, early in the afternoon. Vaughan took the wheel. They drove five miles west on Hope’s road and risked another nine on Despair’s. The air was clear and the mountains were visible ahead, first invitingly close and then impossibly distant. Three miles before Despair’s first vacant lot they slowed and bumped down off the road, onto the scrub, and started a long loop to the north. They kept the town on their left, on a three-mile radius. It was just a blur in the distance. Not possible to tell if it was guarded by mobs or sentries, or abandoned altogether.
It was slow going across the open land. Undergrowth scraped along the underside and low bushes slapped at their flanks. The ladder and the wrecking bar in the load bed bounced and rattled. The flashlight rolled from side to side. Occasionally they found dry washes and followed them through looping meanders at a higher speed. Then it was back to
picking their way around table rocks bigger than the Chevy itself and keeping the sun centered on the top rail of the windshield. Four times they drove into natural corrals and had to back up and start over. After an hour the town fell away behind them and the plant showed up ahead on the left. The wall glowed white in the sun. The parking lot looked empty. No cars. There was no smoke rising from the plant. No sparks, no noise. No activity at all.
Reacher said, “What day is it?”
Vaughan said, “It’s a regular workday.”
“Not a holiday?”
“No.”
“So where is everybody?”
They steered left and narrowed the gap between themselves and the plant. The Chevy was raising a healthy dust plume in the air behind it. It would be visible to a casual observer. But there were no casual observers. They slowed and stopped two miles out and waited. Five minutes. Ten. Then fifteen. No circulating Tahoes came around.
Vaughan asked, “What exactly is on your mind?”
“I like to be able to explain things to myself,” Reacher said.
“What can’t you explain?”
“The way they were so desperate to keep people out. The way they shut down the secret compound for the day just because I was barging around within half a mile of it. The way they found Ramirez’s body and dealt with it so fast and efficiently. It was no surprise to them. It’s like they set themselves up to be constantly vigilant for intruders. To expect them, even. And they worked out procedures in advance for dealing with them. And everyone in town is involved. The first day I showed up, even the waitress in the restaurant knew exactly what to do. Why would they go to those lengths?”
“They’re playing ball with the Pentagon. Keeping private things private.”
“Maybe. But I’m not sure. Certainly the Pentagon wouldn’t ask for that. Despair is already in the middle of nowhere and the plant is three miles out of town and the bad stuff happens in a walled-off compound inside it. That’s good enough for the Pentagon. They wouldn’t ask local people to go to bat for them. Because they trust walls and distance and geography, not people.”