Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Take your coat off,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I want the clerk to see your medal ribbons,” he said. “Military action going on overseas, we might get an upgrade.”

  “It’s Air France,” I said. “France isn’t even a military member of NATO.”

  “The check-in clerk will be American,” Joe said. “Try it.”

  I shrugged out of my coat. Folded it over my arm and walked sideways so the left of my chest stuck out forward.

  “OK now?” I said.

  “Perfect,” he said, and smiled.

  I smiled back. Left-to-right on the top row I wear the Silver Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit. Second row has the Soldier’s Medal, the Bronze Star, and my Purple Heart. The bottom two rows are the junk awards. I won all of the good stuff purely by accident and none of it means very much to me. Using it to get an upgrade out of an airline clerk is about what it’s good for. But Joe liked the top two rows. He served five years in Military Intelligence and didn’t get past the junk.

  We made it to the head of the line and he put his passport and ticket on the counter along with a Treasury Department ID. Then he stepped behind my shoulder. I put my own passport and ticket down. He nudged me in the back. I turned a little sideways and looked at the clerk.

  “Can you find us something with legroom?” I asked him.

  He was a small man, middle-aged, tired. He looked up at us. Together we measured almost thirteen feet tall and weighed about four hundred fifty pounds. He studied the Treasury ID and looked at my uniform and pattered on his keyboard and came up with a forced smile.

  “We’ll seat you gentlemen up front,” he said.

  Joe nudged me in the back again and I knew he was smiling.

  We were in the last row of the first-class cabin. We were talking, but we were avoiding the obvious subject. We talked about music, and then politics. We had another breakfast. We drank coffee. Air France makes pretty good coffee in first class.

  “Who was the general?” Joe asked.

  “Guy called Kramer,” I said. “An Armored commander in Europe.”

  “Armored? So why was he at Bird?”

  “He wasn’t on the post. He was at a motel thirty miles away. Rendezvous with a woman. We think she ran away with his briefcase.”

  “Civilian?”

  I shook my head. “We think she was an officer from Bird. He was supposed to be overnighting in D.C. on his way to California for a conference.”

  “That’s a three-hundred-mile detour.”

  “Two hundred and ninety-eight.”

  “But you don’t know who she is.”

  “She’s fairly senior. She drove her own Humvee out to the motel.”

  “She has to be fairly senior. Kramer’s known her for a good spell, to make it worth driving a five-hundred-ninety-six-mile round-trip detour.”

  I smiled. Anyone else would have said a six-hundred-mile detour. But not my brother. Like me he has no middle name. But it should be Pedantic. Joe Pedantic Reacher.

  “Bird is still all infantry, right?” he said. “Some Rangers, some Delta, but mostly grunts, as I recall. So have you got many senior women?”

  “There’s a Psy-Ops school now,” I said. “Half the instructors are women.”

  “Rank?”

  “Some captains, some majors, a couple of light colonels.”

  “What was in the briefcase?”

  “The agenda for the California conference,” I said. “Kramer’s staffers are pretending there isn’t one.”

  “There’s always an agenda,” Joe said.

  “I know.”

  “Check the majors and the light colonels,” he said. “That would be my advice.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And find out who wanted you at Bird,” he said. “And why. This Kramer thing wasn’t the reason. We know that for sure. Kramer was alive and well when your orders were cut.”

  We read day-old copies of Le Matin and Le Monde. About halfway through the flight we started talking in French. We were pretty rusty, but we got by. Once learned, never forgotten. He asked me about girlfriends. I guess he figured it was an appropriate subject for discussion in the French language. I told him I had been seeing a girl in Korea but since then I had been moved to the Philippines and then Panama and now to North Carolina so I didn’t expect to see her again. I told him about Lieutenant Summer. He seemed interested in her. He told me he wasn’t seeing anyone.

  Then he switched back to English and asked when I had last been in Germany.

  “Six months ago,” I said.

  “It’s the end of an era,” he said. “Germany will reunify. France will renew its nuclear testing because a reunified Germany will bring back bad memories. Then it will propose a common currency for the EC as a way of keeping the new Germany inside the tent. Ten years from now Poland will be in NATO and the USSR won’t exist anymore. There’ll be some rump nation. Maybe it will be in NATO too.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will be different in the future.”

  “Probably.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “When?”

  He turned in his seat and looked at me. “There’s going to be force reduction, Jack. You should face it. They’re not going to keep a million-man army going, not when the other guy has fallen apart.”

  “He hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

  “But he will. It’ll be over within a year. Gorbachev won’t last. There’ll be a coup. The old communists will make one last play, but it won’t stick. Then the reformers will be back forever. Yeltsin, probably. He’s OK. So in D.C. the temptation to save money will be irresistible. It’ll be like a hundred Christmases coming all at once. Never forget your Commander-in-Chief is primarily a politician.”

  I thought back to the sergeant with the baby son.

  “It’ll happen slowly,” I said.

  Joe shook his head. “It’ll happen faster than you think.”

  “We’ll always have enemies,” I said.

  “No question,” he said. “But they’ll be different kinds of enemies. They won’t have ten thousand tanks lined up across the plains of Germany.”

  I said nothing.

  “You should find out why you’re at Bird,” Joe said. “Either nothing much is happening there, and therefore you’re on the way down, or something is happening there, and they want you around to deal with it, in which case you’re on the way up.”

  I said nothing.

  “You need to know either way,” he said. “Force reduction is coming, and you need to know if you’re up or down right now.”

  “They’ll always need cops,” I said. “They bring it down to a two-man army, one of them better be an MP.”

  “You should make a plan,” he said.

  “I never make plans.”

  “You need to.”

  I traced my fingertips across the ribbons on my chest.

  “They got me a seat in the front of the plane,” I said. “Maybe they’ll keep me in a job.”

  “Maybe they will,” Joe said. “But even if they do, will it be a job you want? Everything’s going to get horribly second-rate.”

  I noticed his shirt cuffs. They were clean and crisp and secured by discreet cuff links made from silver and black onyx. His tie was a plain somber item made from silk. He had shaved carefully. The bottom of his sideburn was cut exactly square. My brother was a man horrified by anything less than the best.

  “A job’s a job,” I said. “I’m not choosy.”

  We slept the rest of the way. We were woken by the pilot on the PA telling us we were about to start our descent into Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. Local time was eight o’clock in the evening. Nearly the whole of the second day of the new decade had disappeared like a mirage as we slid through one Atlantic time zone after another.

  We changed some money and hiked over to the taxi line.
It was a mile long, full of people and luggage. It was hardly moving. So we found a navette instead, which is what the French call an airport shuttle bus. We had to stand all the way through the dreary northern suburbs and into the center of Paris. We got out at the Place de l’Opéra at nine in the evening. Paris was dark and damp and cold and quiet. Cafés and restaurants had warm lights burning behind closed doors and fogged windows. The streets were wet and lined with small parked cars. The cars were all misted over with nighttime dew. We walked together south and west and crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde. Turned west again along the Quai d’Orsay. The river was dark and sluggish. Nothing was moving on it. The streets were empty. Nobody was out and about.

  “Should we get flowers?” I asked.

  “Too late,” Joe said. “Everything’s closed.”

  We turned left at the Place de la Résistance and walked into the Avenue Rapp, side by side. We saw the Eiffel Tower on our right as we passed the mouth of the Rue de l’Université. It was lit up in gold. Our heels sounded like rifle shots on the silent sidewalk. We arrived at my mother’s building. It was a modest six-story stone apartment house trapped between two gaudier Belle Époque facades. Joe took his hand out of his pocket and unlocked the street door.

  “You have a key?” I said.

  He nodded. “I’ve always had a key.”

  Inside the street door was a cobbled alley that led through to the center courtyard. The concierge’s room was on the left. Beyond it was a small alcove with a small, slow elevator. We rode it up to the fifth floor. Stepped out into a high, wide hallway. It was dimly lit. It had dark decorative tiles on the floor. The right-hand apartment had tall oak double doors with a discreet brass plaque engraved: M. & Mme. Girard. The left-hand doors were painted off-white and labeled: Mme. Reacher.

  We knocked and waited.

  six

  We heard slow shuffling steps inside the apartment and a long moment later my mother opened the door.

  “Bonsoir, Maman,” Joe said.

  I just stared at her.

  She was very thin and very gray and very stooped and she looked about a hundred years older than the last time I had seen her. She had a long heavy plaster cast on her left leg and she was leaning on an aluminum walker. Her hands were gripping it hard and I could see bones and veins and tendons standing out. She was trembling. Her skin looked translucent. Only her eyes were the same as I remembered them. They were blue and merry and filled with amusement.

  “Joe,” she said. “And Reacher.”

  She always called me by my last name. Nobody remembered why. Maybe I had started it, as a kid. Maybe she had continued it, the way families do.

  “My boys,” she said. “Just look at the two of you.”

  She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Come inside,” she said. “Make yourselves at home.”

  She turned the walker around with short clumsy movements and shuffled back through the hallway. She was panting and wheezing. I stepped in after her. Joe closed the door and followed me. The hallway was narrow and tall and was followed by a living room with wood floors and white sofas and white walls and framed mirrors. My mother made her way to a sofa and backed up to it slowly and dropped herself into it. She seemed to disappear in its depth.

  “What happened?” I asked again.

  She wouldn’t answer. She just waved the inquiry away with an impatient movement of her hand. Joe and I sat down, side by side.

  “You’re going to have to tell us,” I said.

  “We came all this way,” Joe said.

  “I thought you were just visiting,” she said.

  “No you didn’t,” I said.

  She stared at a spot on the wall.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “Well, it was just bad timing.”

  “In what way?”

  “I got unlucky,” she said.

  “How?”

  “I was hit by a car,” she said. “It broke my leg.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Two weeks ago,” she said. “Right outside my door, here on the Avenue. It was raining, I had an umbrella, it was shading my eyes, I stepped out, and the driver saw me and braked, but the pavé was wet and the car slid right into me, very slowly, like slow motion, but I was transfixed and I couldn’t move. I felt it hit my knee, very gently, like a kiss, but it snapped a bone. It hurt like hell.”

  I saw in my mind the guy in the parking lot outside the nude bar near Bird, writhing around in an oily puddle.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Joe asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “But it’ll mend, right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s trivial.”

  Joe just looked at me.

  “What else?” I said.

  She kept on looking at the wall. Did the dismissive thing with her hand again.

  “What else?” Joe asked.

  She looked at me, and then she looked at him.

  “They gave me an X ray,” she said. “I’m an old woman, according to them. According to them, old women who break bones are at risk from pneumonia. Because we’re laid up and immobile and our lungs can fill and get infected.”

  “And?”

  She said nothing.

  “Have you got pneumonia?” I said.

  “No.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They found out. With the X ray.”

  “Found what out?”

  “That I have cancer.”

  Nobody spoke for a long time.

  “But you already knew,” I said.

  She smiled at me, like she always did.

  “Yes, darling,” she said. “I already knew.”

  “For how long?”

  “For a year,” she said.

  Nobody spoke.

  “What sort of cancer?” Joe said.

  “Every sort there is, now.”

  “Is it treatable?”

  She shook her head.

  “Was it treatable?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”

  “What were the symptoms?”

  “I had stomachaches. I had no appetite.”

  “Then it spread?”

  “Now I hurt all over. It’s in my bones. And this stupid leg doesn’t help.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate.

  “What was to tell?” she said.

  “Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”

  She didn’t answer for a time.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Of what?” Joe said. “Life?”

  She smiled. “No, Joe, I mean I’m tired. It’s late and I need to go to bed, is what I mean. We’ll talk some more tomorrow. I promise. Don’t let’s have a lot of fuss now.”

  We let her go to bed. We had to. We had no choice. She was the most stubborn woman imaginable. We found stuff to eat in her kitchen. She had laid in provisions for us. That was clear. Her refrigerator was stocked with the kinds of things that wouldn’t interest a woman with no appetite. We ate pâté and cheese and made coffee and sat at her table to drink it. The Avenue Rapp was still and silent and deserted, five floors below her window.

  “What do you think?” Joe asked me.

  “I think she’s dying,” I said. “That’s why we came, after all.”

  “Can we make her get treatment?”

  “It’s too late. It would be a waste of time. And we can’t make her do anything. When could anyone make her do what she didn’t want to?”

  “Why doesn’t she want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He just looked at me.

  “She’s a fatalist,” I said.

>   “She’s only sixty years old.”

  I nodded. She had been thirty when I was born, and forty-eight when I stopped living wherever we called home. I hadn’t noticed her age at all. At forty-eight she had looked younger than I did when I was twenty-eight. I had last seen her a year and a half ago. I had stopped by Paris for two days, en route from Germany to the Middle East. She had been fine. She had looked great. She was about two years into widowhood then, and like with a lot of people the two-year threshold had been like turning a corner. She had looked like a person with a lot of life left.

  “Why didn’t she tell us?” Joe said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wish she had.”

  “Shit happens,” I said.

  Joe just nodded.

  She had made up her guest room with clean fresh sheets and towels and she had put flowers in bone china vases on the nightstands. It was a small fragrant room full of two twin beds. I pictured her struggling around with her walker, fighting with duvets, folding corners, smoothing things out.

  Joe and I didn’t talk. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up in the bathroom. Set the clock in my head for seven the next morning and got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling for an hour. Then I went to sleep.

  I woke at exactly seven. Joe was already up. Maybe he hadn’t slept at all. Maybe he was accustomed to a more regular lifestyle than I was. Maybe the jet lag bothered him more. I showered and took fatigue pants and a T-shirt from my duffel and put them on. Found Joe in the kitchen. He had coffee going.

  “Mom’s still asleep,” he said. “Medication, probably.”

  “I’ll go get breakfast,” I said.

  I put my coat on and walked a block to a pâtisserie I knew on the Rue St.-Dominique. I bought croissants and pain au chocolat and carried the waxed bag home. My mother was still in her room when I got back.

  “She’s committing suicide,” Joe said. “We can’t let her.”

  I said nothing.

  “What?” he said. “If she picked up a gun and held it to her head, wouldn’t you stop her?”