Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “I’m clear,” she said. “Bring it on.”

  I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent progress, of a sort, in her life.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For being on my side.”

  “I’m not on your side,” she said. “You’re on mine.”

  My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal, calling from his desk outside my door.

  “North Carolina State Police on the line,” he said. “They want a duty officer. You want to take it?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I guess I better.”

  There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an I-95 patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S. Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase was currently being held, in case I was interested in having someone sent out to pick it up.

  twelve

  Summer drove. We took the Humvee I had left at the curb. We didn’t want to take time to sign out a sedan. It cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn’t one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tires were whining loud. It was four o’clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark.

  We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.

  We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors. Summer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built for function and floored with linoleum, which was shined every night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.

  There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He didn’t ask for ID or inquire why we were there. He didn’t speculate as to why General Kramer hadn’t shown up himself. He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store’s name printed across it in red.

  The briefcase itself matched Kramer’s suit carrier in every way. Same color, same design, same age, same level of wear and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport. There was a paper-clipped itinerary three sheets thick. There was a hardcover book.

  There was no conference agenda.

  I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter. Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

  “Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?” I asked.

  The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer, not me.

  “I put it in the bag myself,” he said. “I wanted to keep it clean. I wasn’t sure how soon someone would get here.”

  “Where exactly was it found?” I asked him.

  He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina’s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia. The guy’s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively.

  “Here,” he said. “Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now.”

  “Any way of knowing how long it had been there?”

  “Not really,” he said. “We’re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month.”

  “So how was it found?”

  “Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking from his car to the car he had stopped.”

  “When was this exactly?”

  “Today,” the guy said. “Start of the second watch. Not long after noon.”

  “It wasn’t there a month,” I said.

  “When did he lose it?”

  “New Year’s Eve,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “It was stolen from where he was staying.”

  “Where was he staying?”

  “A motel about thirty miles south of here.”

  “So the bad guys were coming back north.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light and stared at it from every angle.

  “January,” he said. “We’ve got a little night dew right now. And it’s cold enough that we’re worried about ice. So we’ve got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated. It’s got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas. But not very much. It hasn’t been out there since New Year’s Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say. One night, not more.”

  “Can you be certain?” Summer asked.

  He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.

  “Just a guess,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You’ll have to sign for it.”

  I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right breast pocket, but I figured he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had spent most of his time looking at Summer’s pockets. So I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and picked up the briefcase and turned away.

  “Funny sort of burglary,” the desk guy said. “There’s an Amex card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents.”

  I didn’t reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the Humvee.

  Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median. She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of thing a Humvee was good for.

  “Try this,” she said. “Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o’clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car window.”

  “They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird.”

  “So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there.”

  “They were all alibied.”

  “Only superficially. New Year’s Eve parties are
pretty chaotic.”

  I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.

  “Sixty miles,” I said. “The case was found sixty miles north of Bird. That’s an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that.”

  Summer said nothing.

  “And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty conspicuous.”

  “Maybe there really wasn’t an agenda.”

  “It would be the first time in military history.”

  “Then maybe it really wasn’t important.”

  “They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That might be the first time in military history too. That was an important conference, Summer, believe me.”

  She said nothing.

  “Do that U-turn thing again,” I said. “Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.”

  The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The buildings were shared by both sets of travelers. Therefore they had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting. People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing something farther on, even though that might have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms. Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.

  There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility’s main entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out.

  “Too public,” Summer said. “This is going nowhere.”

  I nodded again. “I’d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Mrs. Kramer.”

  “Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.”

  “That feels like we’re giving up.”

  We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off-roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left. There was a vague sunset in the West, to my right. The road looked damp. Summer didn’t seem very worried about the possibility of ice.

  I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched the dome light on and searched Kramer’s briefcase, thoroughly. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I wasn’t proved wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively. He hadn’t been anywhere else. He was a true specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world’s last great tank arena and its command structure.

  The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be. Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip. They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date.

  The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly. There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin’s Visiting Officers’ Quarters, which he had never reached.

  His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must have been a sophisticated guy, financially.

  There was a Virginia driver’s license. He had been using Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.

  There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything he needed and nothing he didn’t.

  The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust all those years ago.

  There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was the sort of guy who emptied his case and turned it upside down and shook it every time he packed for a trip. I put everything back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the floor by my feet.

  “Speak to the dining room guy,” I said. “When we get back. Find out who was at the table with Vassell and Coomer.”

  “OK,” Summer said. She drove on.

  We got back to Bird in time for dinner. We ate in the O Club bar with a bunch of fellow MPs. If Willard had spies among them, they would have seen nothing except a couple of tired people doing not very much of anything. But Summer slipped away between courses and came back with news in her eyes. I ate my dessert and drank my coffee slowly enough that nobody could think I had urgent business anywhere. Then I stood up and wandered out. Waited in the cold on the sidewalk. Summer came out five minutes later. I smiled. It felt like we were conducting a clandestine affair.

  “Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.”

  “The Psy-Ops person?”

  “The very same.”

  “She was at a party on New Year’s Eve?”

  Summer made a face. “You know what those parties are like. A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise, confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could have slipped away.”

  “Where was the bar?”

  “Thirty minutes from the motel.”

  “Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure.”

  “People say she was there. But she could have made it back by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five. She’d have been back with five minutes to spare. It could have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts over.”

  I said nothing.

  “She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her
phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a diary. She didn’t want the scandal. But once she was through with it, she didn’t need the rest of the stuff anymore. She’d have been happy to hand it back when asked.”

  “How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?”

  “Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.”

  “Not logical,” I said. “If people knew about Kramer and Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?”

  “OK, maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was something that people thought was over.”

  I nodded. “What can we get from her?”

  “We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged to take possession of the briefcase last night. That would prove they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs. Kramer.”

  “They made no calls from the hotel, and they didn’t have time to get down there themselves. So I don’t see how we can put them in the frame. What else can we get?”

  “We can be certain about what happened to the agenda. We can know that Vassell and Coomer got it back. Then at least the army can relax because we’ll know for sure it isn’t going to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to find.”

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  “And maybe Norton saw it,” Summer said. “Maybe she read it. Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about.”

  “That’s tempting.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Can we just walk in and ask her?”

  “You’re from the 110th. You can ask anyone anything.”

  “I have to stay under Willard’s radar.”

  “She doesn’t know he warned you off.”

  “She does. He spoke to her after the Carbone thing.”

  “I think we have to talk to her.”

  “Difficult kind of a talk to have,” I said. “She’s likely to get offended.”