by Lee Child
I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”
“Why would he care?”
“Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart. Delta doesn’t hire dumb guys, that’s for sure. He went in and smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything. And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it. He didn’t even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met him before.”
“Why did he want you dead-ended? What was his motive?”
“He didn’t want me to find out who took the briefcase.”
“Why not?”
I sat down on the bed.
“Why did we never find the woman Kramer met in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because there never was a woman,” I said. “Kramer met Carbone in here.”
She just stared at me.
“Kramer was gay too,” I said. “He and Carbone were getting it on.”
“Carbone took the briefcase,” I said. “Right out of this room. Because he had to keep the relationship secret. Just like we thought about the phantom woman, maybe he was worried there was something personal to him in it. Or maybe Kramer had been bragging about the Irwin conference. Talking about how Armored was going to fight its corner. So maybe Carbone was curious. Or even concerned. He’d been an infantryman for sixteen years. And the type of guy who gets into Delta, he’s got a lot of unit loyalty. Maybe more loyalty to his unit than to his lover.”
“I don’t believe it,” Summer said.
“You should,” I said. “It all fits. Andrea Norton more or less told us. I think she knew about Kramer. Either consciously or subconsciously, I’m not sure which. We accused her, and she wasn’t annoyed, remember? She was amused instead. Or bewildered, maybe. She was a sexual psychologist, she’d met the guy, maybe she’d picked up a vibe, professionally. Or the absence of a vibe, personally. So in our minds we had her in bed with Kramer, and she just couldn’t make it compute. So she didn’t get mad. It just didn’t connect. And we know Kramer’s marriage was a sham. No kids. He hadn’t lived at home for five years. Detective Clark wondered why he wasn’t divorced. He once asked me, Divorce isn’t a deal-breaker for a general, is it? I said, No, it isn’t. But being gay is. That’s for damn sure. Being gay is a big-time deal-breaker for a general. That’s why he kept the marriage going. It was cover, for the army. Just like the girlfriend photo in Carbone’s wallet.”
“We have no proof.”
“But we can get close. Carbone had a condom in his wallet, as well as the girlfriend photo. A buck gets ten it’s from the same pack as the one Walter Reed took off Kramer’s body. And another buck gets ten we can comb old assignment orders and find out where and when they met. Some joint exercise somewhere, like we thought all along. Plus Carbone was a vehicle guy for Delta. Their adjutant told me that. He had access to their whole stable of Humvees, any old time he wanted it. So another buck gets ten we’ll find Carbone was out in one, alone, on New Year’s Eve.”
“Was he killed for the briefcase? In the end? Like Mrs. Kramer?”
I shook my head. “Neither one of them was killed just for the briefcase.”
She just looked at me.
“Later,” I said. “One step at a time.”
“But Carbone had the briefcase. You said so. He ran off with it.”
I nodded. “And he searched it as soon as he got back to Bird. He found the agenda. He read it. And something in it made him call his CO immediately.”
“He called Brubaker? How could he do that? He couldn’t say, Hey, I was just sleeping with a general and guess what I found?”
“He could have said he found it somewhere else. On the sidewalk, maybe. But actually I’m wondering if Brubaker knew about Carbone and Kramer all along. It’s possible. Delta is a family and Brubaker was a very hands-on type of CO. It’s possible he knew. And maybe he exploited the situation. For intelligence purposes. These guys are incredibly competitive. And Sanchez told me Brubaker never missed any angle or any advantage or any wrinkle. So maybe the price of Brubaker’s tolerance was that Carbone had to pass stuff on, from the pillow talk.”
“That’s awful.”
I nodded. “Like being a whore. I told you there would be no winners here. Everyone’s going to come out looking bad.”
“Except us. If we get the results.”
“You’re going to be OK. I’m not.”
“Why?”
“Wait and see,” I said.
We carried our bags to the Chevy, which was still hidden behind the lounge bar. We put them in the trunk. The lot was fuller than it had been before. The night was heating up. I checked my watch. Almost eight o’clock on the East Coast, almost five on the West Coast. I stood still, trying to decide. If we pause for breath even for a second, we’ll be overrun again.
“I need to make two more calls,” I said.
I took the army phone book with me and we walked back to the greasy spoon. I checked every pocket for loose change and came up with a small pile. Summer contributed a quarter and a nickel. The counterman changed the pennies for silver. I fed the phone and dialed Franz at Fort Irwin. Five o’clock in the afternoon, it was the middle of his workday.
“Am I going to get past your main gate?” I asked him.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Willard’s chasing me. He’s liable to warn any place he thinks I’m going.”
“I haven’t heard from him yet.”
“Maybe you could switch your telex off for a day or two.”
“What’s your ETA?”
“Tomorrow sometime.”
“Your buddies are already here. They just got in.”
“I haven’t got any buddies.”
“Vassell and Coomer. They’re fresh in from Europe.”
“Why?”
“Exercises.”
“Is Marshall still there?”
“Sure. He drove out to LAX to pick them up. They all came back together. One big happy family.”
“I need you to do two things for me,” I said.
“Two more things, you mean.”
“I need a ride from LAX myself. Tomorrow, first morning arrival from D.C. I need you to send someone.”
“And?”
“And I need you to get someone to locate the staff car Vassell and Coomer used back here. It’s a black Mercury Grand Marquis. Marshall signed it out on New Year’s Eve. By now it’s either back in the Pentagon garage or parked at Andrews. I need someone to find it and to do a full-court press on it, forensically. And fast.”
“What would they be looking for?”
“Anything at all.”
“OK,” Franz said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
I hung up and turned the pages in the army directory all the way from F for Fort Irwin to P for Pentagon. Slid my finger down the subsection to C for Chief of Staff’s Office. I left it there, briefly.
“Vassell and Coomer are at Irwin,” I said.
“Why?” Summer said.
“Hiding out,” I said. “They think we’re still in Europe. They know Willard is watching the airports. They’re sitting ducks.”
“Do we want them?” Summer said. “They didn’t know about
Mrs. Kramer. That was clear. They were shocked when you told them, that night in your office. So I guess they authorized the burglary, but not the collateral damage.”
I nodded. She was right. They had been surprised, that night in my office. Coomer had gone pale and asked: Was it a burglary? It was a question that came straight from a guilty conscience. That meant Marshall hadn’t told them yet. He had kept the really bad news to himself. He had come back to the D.C. hotel at twenty past three in the morning, and he had told them the briefcase hadn’t been there, but he hadn’t told them what else had gone down. Vassell and Coomer must have been piecing it together on the fly, that night in my office, in the dark and after the event. It must have been an interesting ride home. Harsh words must have been exchanged.
“It’s down to Marshall alone,” Summer said. “He panicked, is all.”
“Technically it was a conspiracy,” I said. “Legally they all share the blame.”
“Hard to prosecute.”
“That’s JAG Corps’ problem.”
“It’s a weak case. Hard to prove.”
“They did other stuff,” I said. “Believe me, Mrs. Kramer is the least of their worries.”
I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless. I guessed she was a senior administrator, working late. I guessed she was about fifty, blonde going gray, powder on her face.
“Write this down,” I said to her. “I am a military police major called Reacher. I was recently transferred out of Panama and into Fort Bird, North Carolina. I will be standing at the E-ring checkpoint inside your building at midnight tonight. It is entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets me there.”
I paused.
“Is that it?” the woman said.
“Yes,” I said, and hung up. I scooped fifteen remaining cents back into my pocket. Closed the phone book and wedged it under my arm.
“Let’s go,” I said. We drove through the gas station and topped off the tank with eight bucks’ worth of gas. Then we headed north.
“It’s entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you there?” Summer said. “What the hell is that about?”
We were on I-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The whole world was back at work.
“There’s something heavy-duty going on,” I said. “Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it’s heavy-duty, with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on the same day?”
“You’re a major,” she said. “So are Franz and Sanchez and all the others. Any colonel could have moved you.”
“But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.”
“OK then, any Brigadier General could have done it.”
“With forged signatures on the orders?”
“Anyone can forge a signature.”
“And hope to get away with it afterward? No, this whole thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with impunity. Someone untouchable.”
“The Chief of Staff?”
I shook my head. “No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry. And we can assume he’s a reasonably smart guy. They don’t put dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized that pretty soon everything else would be coming down too. The whole established order.”
“And?”
“And he started to worry about some kind of a move by Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don’t want integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about starting something dramatic. Something bad. That’s why they were so worried about the agenda getting out.”
“But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.”
“Nobody ever accepts that fact,” I said. “Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of newfangled junk. There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises, putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that their way is the only way.”
Summer said nothing.
I smiled. “Go back in our records and you’ll probably find Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.”
“What exactly were they planning?”
I shrugged. “We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously. Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with defense industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say that lightweight armored vehicles can’t be made safe, that would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“That’s just standard-issue bitching.”
“So maybe there’s more. We don’t know yet. Kramer’s heart attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.”
“You think they’ll start it up again?”
“Wouldn’t you? If you had everything to lose?”
She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned slightly and looked at me.
“So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?” she asked. “If you’re right, then it’s the Vice-Chief who’s on your side. He brought you here. He’s the one who’s been protecting you.”
“Game of chess,” I said. “Tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. The good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away. Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.”
“The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?”
I nodded.
“So why demand to see him?”
“Because we’re in the army, Summer,” I said. “We’re supposed to confront our enemies, not our friends.”
We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff’s face was a whole other ball game. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above it. There had been three of them during my years of service and I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart. Something made them different from the rest of us.
But they started out the same. I could have been one of them, theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get sent on somewhere else afterward. Somewhere better. You had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere overseas like Oxford
or Cambridge in England. You had to get a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a master’s or a Ph.D. in economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a White House Fellow. That’s where my career path diverged. Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books. Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military. So they went their way and I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to my turf, they’d be crawling on their bellies. How I was going to do on their turf remained to be seen.
“I’m going in by myself,” I said.
“You are not,” Summer said.
“I am,” I said. “You can call it what you like. Advice from a friend, or a direct order from a superior officer. But you’re staying in the car. That’s for sure. I’ll handcuff you to the steering wheel if I have to.”
“We’re in this together.”
“But we’re allowed to be intelligent. This isn’t like going to see Andrea Norton. This is as risky as it gets. No reason for both of us to go down in flames.”
“Would you stay in the car? If you were me?”
“I’d hide underneath it,” I said.
She said nothing. Just drove, as fast as ever. We hit the Beltway. Started the long clockwise quarter-circle up toward Arlington.
Pentagon security was a little tighter than usual. Maybe someone was worried about Noriega’s leftover forces staging a two-thousand-mile northward penetration. But we got into the parking lot with no trouble at all. It was almost deserted. Summer drove a long slow circuit and came to rest near the main entrance. She killed the motor and jammed the parking brake on. She did it a little harder than she really needed to. I guessed she was making a point. I checked my watch. It was five minutes before midnight.
“Are we going to argue?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Good luck,” she said. “And give him hell.”
I slid out into the cold. Closed the door behind me and stood still for a second. The bulk of the building loomed up over me in the dark. People said it was the world’s largest office complex and right then I believed them. I started walking. There was a long ramp up to the doors. Then there was a guarded lobby the size of a basketball court. My special unit badge got me through that. Then I headed for the heart of the complex. There were five concentric pentagon-shaped corridors, called rings. Each one of them was protected by a separate checkpoint. My badge was good enough to get me through B, C, and D. Nothing on earth was going to get me into the E-ring. I stopped outside the final checkpoint and nodded to the guard. He nodded back. He was used to people waiting there.
