by Lee Child
They were all three looking at me, so I shrugged and gave them a story about checking a Pentagon budget and seeing eight-thousand-dollar charges for maintenance tools called RTAFAs. I told them I was bored enough to be curious and had made a couple of calls and been told the acronym stood for rotational torque-adjustable fastener applicators. I told them I had tracked one down and found a three-dollar screwdriver. That had led to three-thousand-dollar hammers, thousand-dollar toilet seats, the whole nine yards. It’s a good story. It’s the sort of thing that suits any audience. Most people respond to the audacity and anti-government types get to seethe. But it isn’t true. It happened, I guess, but not to me. It was a different department entirely.
“Have you killed people?” Richard asked.
Four in the last three days, I thought.
“Don’t ask questions like that,” Elizabeth said.
“The soup is good,” Beck said. “Maybe not enough cheese.”
“Dad,” Richard said.
“What?”
“You need to think about your arteries. They’re going to get all clogged up.”
“They’re my arteries.”
“And you’re my dad.”
They glanced at each other. They both smiled shy smiles. Father and son, best buddies. Ambivalence. It was all set to be a long meal. Elizabeth changed the subject away from cholesterol. She started talking about the Portland Museum of Art instead. She said it had an I. M. Pei building and a collection of American and Impressionist masters. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to educate me or to tempt Richard to get out of the house and do something. I tuned her out. I wanted to get to the Saab. But I couldn’t, right then. So I tried to predict exactly what I would find there. Like a game. I heard Leon Garber in my head: Think about everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve heard. Work the clues. I hadn’t heard much. But I had seen a lot of things. I guessed they were all clues, of a sort. The dining table, for instance. The whole house, and everything in it. The cars. The Saab was a piece of junk. The Cadillac and the Lincolns were nice automobiles, but they weren’t Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The furniture was all old and dull and solid. Not cheap, but then, it didn’t represent current expenditure anyway. It was all paid for long ago. What had Eliot said in Boston? About the LA gangbanger? His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. Beck was supposed to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. But Beck didn’t live like an emperor. Why not? Because he was a cautious Yankee, unimpressed by consumer baubles?
“Look,” he said.
I surfaced and saw him holding his cell phone out to me. I took it from him and looked at the screen. The signal strength was back up to four bars.
“Microwaves,” I said. “Maybe they ramp up slowly.”
Then I looked again. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. No voice-mail messages. But it was a tiny phone and I have big thumbs and I accidentally touched the up-down arrow key underneath the screen. The display instantly changed to a list of names. His virtual phone book, I guessed. The screen was so small it could show only three contacts at a time. At the top was house. Then came gate. Third on the list was Xavier. I stared at it so hard the room went silent around me and blood roared in my ears.
“The soup was very good,” Richard said.
I handed the phone back to Beck. The cook reached across in front of me and took my bowl away.
The first time I ever heard the name Xavier was the sixth time I ever saw Dominique Kohl. It was seventeen days after we danced in the Baltimore bar. The weather had broken. The temperature had plummeted and the skies were gray and miserable. She was in full dress uniform. For a moment I thought I must have scheduled a performance review and forgotten all about it. But then, I had a company clerk to remind me about stuff like that, and he hadn’t mentioned anything.
“You’re going to hate this,” Kohl said.
“Why? You got promoted and you’re shipping out?”
She smiled at that. I realized it had come out as more of a personal compliment than I should have risked.
“I found the bad guy,” she said.
“How?”
“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said.
I looked at her. “Did we schedule a performance review?”
“No, but I think we should.”
“Why?”
“Because I found the bad guy. And I think performance reviews always go better just after a big break in a case.”
“You’re still working with Frasconi, right?”
“We’re partners,” she said, which wasn’t strictly an answer to the question.
“Is he helping?”
She made a face. “Permission to speak freely?”
I nodded.
“He’s a waste of good food,” she said.
I nodded again. That was my impression, too. Lieutenant Anthony Frasconi was solid, but he wasn’t the crispest shirt in the closet.
“He’s a nice man,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong.”
“But you’re doing all the work,” I said.
She nodded. She was holding the original file, the one that I had given her just after I found out she wasn’t a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. It was bulging with her notes.
“You helped, though,” she said. “You were right. The document in question is in the newspaper. Gorowski dumps the whole newspaper in a trash can at the parking lot exit. Same can, two Sundays in a row.”
“And?”
“And two Sundays in a row the same guy fishes it out again.”
I paused. It was a smart plan, except that the idea of fishing around in a garbage can gave it a certain vulnerability. A certain lack of plausibility. The garbage can thing is hard to do, unless you’re willing to go the whole way and dress up like a homeless person. And that’s hard to do in itself, if you want to be really convincing. Homeless people walk miles, spend all day, check every can along their route. To imitate their behavior plausibly takes infinite time and care.
“What kind of a guy?” I said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Who roots around in trash cans except street people, right?”
“So who does?”
“Imagine a typical Sunday,” she said. “A lazy day, you’re strolling, maybe the person you’re meeting is a little late, maybe the impulse to go out for a walk has turned out to be a little boring. But the sun is shining, and there’s a bench to sit on, and you know the Sunday papers are always fat and interesting. But you don’t happen to have one with you.”
“OK,” I said. “I’m imagining.”
“Have you noticed how a used newspaper kind of becomes community property? Seen what they do on a train, for instance? Or a subway? A guy reads his paper, leaves it on the seat when he gets out, another guy picks it up right away? He’d rather die than pick up half a candy bar, but he’ll pick up a used newspaper with no problem at all?”
“OK,” I said.
“Our guy is about forty,” she said. “Tall, maybe six-one, trim, maybe one-ninety, short black hair going gray, fairly upmarket. He wears good clothes, chinos, golf shirts, and he kind of saunters through the lot to the can.”
“Saunters?”
“It’s a word,” she said. “Like he’s strolling, lost in thought, not a care in the world. Like maybe he’s coming back from Sunday brunch. Then he notices the newspaper sitting in the top of the can, and he picks it up and checks the headlines for a moment, and he kind of tilts his head a little and he puts the paper under his arm like he’ll read some more of it later and he strolls on.”
“Saunters on,” I said.
“It’s incredibly natural,” she said. “I was right there watching it happen and I almost discounted it. It’s almost subliminal.”
I thought about it. She was right. She was a good student of human behavior. Which made her a good cop. If I ever did actually get around to a performance review, she was going to score off the charts.
“Something else you speculated about,” she said. “He saunters on out to the marina and gets on a boat.”
“He lives on it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, it’s got bunks and all, but I think it’s a hobby boat.”
“How do you know it’s got bunks?”
“I’ve been aboard,” she said.
“When?”
“The second Sunday,” she said. “Don’t forget, all I’d seen up to that point was the business with the newspaper. I still hadn’t positively identified the document. But he went out on another boat with some other guys, so I checked it out.”
“How?”
“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said. “I wore a bikini.”
“Wearing a bikini is a skill?” I said. Then I looked away. In her case, it would be more like world-class performance art.
“It was still hot then,” she said. “I blended in with the other yacht bunnies. I strolled out, walked up his little gangplank. Nobody noticed. I picked the lock on the hatch and searched for an hour.”
I had to ask.
“How did you conceal lock picks in a bikini?” I said.
“I was wearing shoes,” she said.
“Did you find the blueprint?”
“I found all of them.”
“Did the boat have a name?”
She nodded. “I traced it. There’s a yacht registry for all that stuff.”
“So who’s the guy?”
“This is the part you’re going to hate,” she said. “He’s a senior Military Intelligence officer. A lieutenant colonel, a Middle East specialist. They just gave him a medal for something he did in the Gulf.”
“Shit,” I said. “But there might be an innocent explanation.”
“There might,” she said. “But I doubt it. I just met with Gorowski an hour ago.”
“OK,” I said. That explained the dress greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. “And?”
“And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two. The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won’t talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid’s absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn’t play ball. I don’t see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff.”
“No,” I said. “Nor do I. Who is the guy?”
“His name is Francis Xavier Quinn,” she said.
The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn’t really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new identity, ready made. An identity that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.
“Rare or well?” Beck asked me.
He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.
“Rare,” I said. “Thank you.”
He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife’s work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.
“Horseradish?” Elizabeth said.
I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn’t know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I’d heard, everything I’d seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper. Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.
“Have you read Pasternak?” Elizabeth asked me.
“What do you think of Edward Hopper?” Richard asked.
“You think the M16 should be replaced?” Beck said.
I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated. But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.
“I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies,” I said. “I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night.”
“Nighthawks,” Richard said.
I nodded. “I like the guy on the left, all alone.”
“Remember the name of the diner?”
“Phillies,” I said. “And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle.”
“Really?” Beck said.
“It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do,” I said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.”
“Hopper was a genius,” Richard said.
“Pasternak was a genius,” Elizabeth said. “Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn’t been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison.”
“I guess the M16 is an improved rifle,” Beck said.
“Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler,” Richard said. “He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett.”
“Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?” his mother said.
They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.
“He’s a real Pentagon insider,” she said to me, the seventh time we met. “Lives close by in Virginia. That’s why he keeps his boat up in Baltimore, I guess.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Forty,” she said.
“Have you seen his full record?”
She shook her head. “Most of it is classified.”
I nodded. Tried to put the chronology together. A forty-year-old would have been eligible for the last two years of the Vietnam draft, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. But a guy who wound up as an intel light colonel before the age of forty had almost certainly been a college graduate, maybe even a Ph.D., which would have gotten him a deferment. So he probably didn’t go to Indochina, which in the normal way of things would have slowed his promotion. No bloody wars, no dread diseases. But his promotion hadn’t been slow, because he was a light colonel before the age of forty.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kohl said. “How come he’s already two whole pay grades above you?”
“Actually I was thinking about you in a bikini.”
She shook her head. “No you weren’t.”
“He’s older than me.”
“He went up like a bottle rocket.”
“Maybe he’s smarter than me,” I said.
“Almost certainly,” she said. “But even so, he’s gone real far, real fast.”
I nodded.
“Great,” I said. “So now we’re messing with a big star from the intel community.”
“He’s got lots of contact with foreigners,�
� she said. “I’ve seen him with all kinds of people. Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians.”
“He’s supposed to,” I said. “He’s a Middle East specialist.”
“He comes from California,” she said. “His dad was a railroad worker. His mom stayed at home. They lived in a small house in the north of the state. He inherited it, and it’s his only asset. And we can assume he’s been on military pay since college.”
“OK,” I said.
“He’s a poor boy, Reacher,” she said. “So how come he rents a big house in MacLean, Virginia? How come he owns a yacht?”
“Is it a yacht?”
“It’s a big sailboat with bedrooms. That’s a yacht, right?”
“POV?”
“A brand-new Lexus.”
I said nothing.
“Why don’t his own people ask these kind of questions?” she said.
“They never do,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that? Something can be plain as day and it passes them by.”
“I really don’t understand how that happens,” she said.
I shrugged.
“They’re human,” I said. “We should cut them some slack. Preconceptions get in the way. They ask themselves how good he is, not how bad he is.”
She nodded. “Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper. Preconceptions.”
“But they should know better.”
“I guess.”
“Military Intelligence,” I said.
“The world’s biggest oxymoron,” she replied, in the familiar old ritual. “Like safe danger.”
“Like dry water,” I said.
“Did you enjoy it?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.
I didn’t answer. Preconceptions get in the way.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked again.
I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.
“Sorry?” I said. Everything I had heard.
“Dinner,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”
I looked down. My plate was completely empty.
“It was fabulous,” I said. Everything I had seen.
“Really?”
“No question,” I said. You haven’t found anything useful.
