Small Wars (5 page)

“With Crawford? Is there something weird?”

“Many things. I need to run an idea by you.”

Neagley drove. Back on I-95. Hundreds of miles. As far as from Fort Smith to Myrtle Beach, all over again. They stayed on the left of the Potomac and got to Alexandria ninety minutes after dark. They were five minutes late to the restaurant. There was a guy near the door, doing nothing. Plain clothes. Almost convincing.

Neagley went in and got a table for one. Then Reacher went in and sat with Joe. White linen, dim candlelight, ruby wines, a hushed atmosphere. There was another guy in plain clothes all alone at a table, on the other side of the room from Neagley. Symmetrical.

Joe said, “I see you brought your attack dog with you.”

Reacher said, “I see you brought two of yours.”

“Crawford is serious shit. Immediate action might be required.”

“That's why Neagley is here.”

They ordered. Onion soup and a rib-eye for Reacher, foie gras and a filet mignon for Joe. Fries for both, red wine for Joe, coffee for Reacher. Plus tap water. No small talk.

Reacher said, “I was worried about the road from the beginning. It doesn't go anywhere. Stupid place to set a trap. Can't have been random. But deliberate makes no sense either. She had a choice of three or four destinations, and about forty different ways of getting there. Then I figured it out. A truly smart guy would ignore the destinations. He wouldn't try to predict how she would get from A to B or C or D. He would figure all roads were equal. At least in terms of transportation. But not equal in other ways. Not emotionally, for instance. Sometimes I forget that normal people like driving more than I do. So a smart guy would ask, which road would she use just for the hell of it? A young woman with a brand-new sports car? No contest. That was a great road. Straightaways, nice bends, trees, sunshine, the smell of fresh air. Great noise, too, probably. A windows-down kind of a road. A smart guy would be able to predict it.”

Joe said, “A smart guy with military training.”

“Because of the triple shot? I agree. It's a high-stress moment. That was automatic. Muscle memory. Years at the gun range. The guy was one of ours.”

“But which one of ours, and why?”

“This is where it gets highly speculative. She wasn't rich. I know that now. I should have known long ago. It was right there in the fine print from the autopsy. She had recent cosmetic dentistry. A rich girl would have had it years before. As a teenager. So, no family money. I met her parents. They had thirty-five dollars in her college fund. There are no rich uncles. They think she earned it all. Government job. They think she earned a fortune. But we know she didn't. Ten light colonels couldn't afford a brand-new Porsche. But she got one. With what?”

“You tell me.”

“She was in War Plans. Suppose she was selling information to a foreign government? Iraq, maybe. They'd pay a fortune. She's writing the plan. They'd be getting it straight from the horse's mouth.”

“Possible,” Joe said. “Theoretically. As a worst-case scenario.”

“Are we going to have a problem with Iraq?”

“Likely,” Joe said. “He wants Kuwait. Next year, or the year after. We'll have to throw him out. Probably stage in Saudi, put the Navy in the Gulf. The whole nine yards.”

“So he wants that plan. And he pays for it, word for word. From a woman who maybe didn't want to be poor anymore. Scuttlebutt says she came out of her shell in War Plans. Finally started spending some of her money. Except maybe it wasn't finally. Maybe that was the first money she ever had.”

Joe said nothing.

Reacher said, “Counterintelligence must have been keeping an eye on such things. But for some reason they missed her, and so it went on for a long time. It became the legend. Family money. The richest woman. It was hiding in plain sight. Then something changed. Suddenly they figured her out.”

Joe said, “How?”

Reacher said, “Could be a number of reasons. Could be dumb luck.”

“Or?”

“Could be counterintelligence got a new commander. Maybe the new commander brought with him the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly two plus two made four. Which would be dumb luck of a different kind. But it happens.”

Joe said nothing.

Reacher said, “But let's freeze the action right there. Let's look at it from the new commander's point of view. Right then he's the only one with all the pieces. He's the only one who can see the whole picture. In the world. It's a lonely position. No one else knows. But it's all about who else knows. Because no one else must know. It's only Iraq, but who will believe that? You'll have mass panic. Every plan will be called compromised. The Soviet strategy will fall apart. Nothing will be believed ever again. So it's vital no one else knows. Literally. Not ever. No one. Two can't keep a secret. But she has to be stopped. And treason gets the death penalty. The new commander concludes he has to do it himself. It's the only way to contain it. Almost a historic moment. The world will be saved. That big of a deal. But the world will never know. So it's ironic, and strategically astute, and noble and ethical. Like a patriotic duty.”

Joe said nothing.

Reacher said, “I imagine a new commander of such a unit would be smart enough to figure out the thing with the sports car and the road.”

Joe said, “The guy had size fifteen feet.”

“He had a maximum size fifteen. You can't make your footprints smaller, but you can make them bigger. I figure I could put on a tennis shoe, something tight, and get my whole foot inside a size fifteen boot. Tight and solid. Not like clown shoes. I could stomp around making footprints like an astronaut on the moon. You know where I got that idea?”

Joe said, “No.”

“The second time we lived on Okinawa. You were six. Maybe seven. You got into a thing where you would get up early in the morning and clump around in Dad's boots. I didn't know why. Maybe it's a first-born thing. Maybe you were trying to fill his shoes, literally. But I would hear you. And once you got him in trouble with Mom for making marks on the rug. That's where I got the idea.”

“Lots of people must have done that.”

“How many grew up to be recently promoted commanders of counterespionage units?”

Joe said nothing.

Reacher said, “Thinking back, you did pretty well on the phone. You must have been very shocked. But you didn't forget to ask the obvious questions, like who died. And you asked how, which was good, and I said shot on a lonely road, but then you should have asked shot on a lonely road how, because a sniper in the trees was just as plausible as a stationary ambush. On the back roads. But you didn't ask shot on a lonely road how. You could have scripted that part a little better. And you got nervous. You wouldn't let it go. You asked me what I was going to do about her. And you totally blew it with the six hundred and ninety-three miles. You're a pedantic guy, Joe. You wouldn't get it wrong. And I'm sure you didn't. You figured Benning was on a level with a distance you knew for sure. The same radius. And the distance you knew for sure was your office to Fort Smith. Because you'd just driven it. Twice. There and back.”

Joe said, “Interesting hypothetical. What would a hypothetical policeman do about it?”

“He would feel hypothetically better without a guy in the lobby and a guy in the room.”

“Just Neagley?”

“She's driving the car. She's entitled to eat.”

“Crawford is serious shit.”

Reacher said, “Relax. The hypothetical policeman doesn't see a problem. He's a real-world person. I'm sure his analysis would have been the same as the hypothetical unit commander's. But there's a problem. I suppose the hypothetical size fifteens were supposed to be a dealbreaker, a cold case forever, but they didn't work. They're railroading a guy. Size fifteen feet, the same ammo as the hypothetical unit commander doing it himself, and the same tires, all a pure coincidence, but they're calling it three cherries on a slot machine. The guy is going down.”

“What should a hypothetical unit commander do about that?”

“I'm sure there's a code word. Probably through the office of the president. Things get shut down. Guys get let go.”

Joe said nothing.

“Then cases stay cold forever.”

Joe said, “OK.”

Then he said, “You're a hell of a policeman, to figure all that out.”

Reacher said, “No, I'm a hell of a policeman to not quite figure it out, but get you to confirm it for me anyway. And I'm proud of you. It had to be contained. No choice. You did well. Good thinking, and almost perfect performance.”

“Almost?”

“The three shots were bad. An obvious execution. You should have made it messy. The throat, maybe. Everyone assumes a round in the throat is a miss from someplace else. Automatic amateur hour. You can add a head shot if it makes you feel better, but make it weird, like in the eye or the ear.”

“That sounds like the voice of experience.”

“What do you think I've been doing in Central America?”

They talked about other things for the rest of the meal. Gossip, people they knew, things they had read, politics, and family. Joe was worried about their mother. She wasn't herself.

Reacher and Neagley got back to Smith late the next day. Ellsbury's sergeant told them the State Police's suspect had been released without charge, that day at noon, and driven home. The case itself had been withdrawn from all concerned, and assigned as a bedding-in trial for a brand-new investigative unit deep inside the Pentagon. No one had ever heard of it. Conclusions would be announced within a year or two, if available.

Then another telex came in. Apparently Major David Noble had recovered from his automobile accident, and was anxious to assume his intended command. Reacher was posted back to Central America. And Neagley back to Bragg, because Noble was bringing his own sergeant. The reorganization lasted less than a year. No one ever heard of it again.

Possibly the finest professional achievement of Joe Reacher's military career was to get the war plan for Iraq changed without ever revealing why. And a year and a half later, when boots hit the desert sand in Kuwait, it all worked out fine, all over in a hundred hours, Plan B or not.

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Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn't easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever. They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.

They started at midnight, which they thought was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of any horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. Therefore, no prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, the same way kids pimped their pick-up trucks, and together the four beams made a wide pool of halogen brightness. Therefore, visibility was not a problem either. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste.

Safe enough.

Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was not a problem either. Their backhoe's arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent articulated seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the electric light, the engine straining and roaring and pausing, the cab falling and rising, as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body with dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows.

Only one thing went wrong, and it happened right then.

The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn't know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, like a vision in a dream, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and then the tail light was swallowed by the midnight darkness, and they turned back to their task.

Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ramp in front of a grain elevator as big as an apartment house. To his left were four more elevators, all of them bigger than the first, and to his right was an enormous metal shed the size of an airplane hangar. There were vapor lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness. There was mist in the nighttime air, like a note on a calendar. The end of summer was coming. Fall was on its way.

Reacher stood still and behind him the train moved away without him, straining, grinding, settling to a slow rat-a-tat rhythm, and then accelerating, its building slipstream pulling at his clothes. He was the only passenger who had gotten out. Which was not surprising. The place was no kind of a commuter hub. It was all agricultural. What token passenger facilities it had were wedged between the last elevator and the huge shed, and were limited to a compact building, which seemed to have both a ticket window and benches for waiting. It was built in a traditional railroad style, and it looked like a child's toy, temporarily set down between two shiny oil drums.

But on a sign board running its whole length was written the reason Reacher was there:
Mother's Rest
. Which he had seen on a map, and which he thought was a great name for a railroad stop. He figured the line must cross an ancient wagon train trail, right there, where something had happened long ago. Maybe a young pregnant woman went into labor. The jostling could not have helped. Maybe the wagon train stopped for a couple of weeks. Or a month. Maybe someone remembered the place years later. A descendant, perhaps. A family legend. Maybe there was a one-room museum.

Or perhaps there was a sadder interpretation. Maybe they had buried a woman there. Too old to make it. In which case there would be a commemorative stone.

Either way Reacher figured he might as well find out. He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing. Which is why he got out of the train. To a sense of disappointment, initially. His expectations had been way off base. He had pictured a couple of dusty houses, and a lonely one-horse corral. And the one-room museum, maybe run part-time and volunteer by an old guy from one of the houses. Or the headstone, maybe marble, behind a square wrought-iron fence.

He had not expected the immense agricultural infrastructure. He should have, he supposed. Grain, meet the railroad. It had to be loaded somewhere. Billions of bushels and millions of tons each year. He stepped left and looked through a gap between structures. The view was dark, but he could sense a rough semicircle of habitation. Houses, obviously, for the depot workers. He could see lights, which he hoped were a motel, or a diner, or both.

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate. So he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool of light, too.

At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows.

She came toward him with a distinctive burst of energy, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief.

Then it wasn't. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, “Oh.”

She was Asian. But not petite. Five-nine, maybe, or even five-ten. And built to match. Not a bone in sight. No kind of a willowy waif. She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet.

He said, “Good evening, ma'am.”

She was looking past his shoulder.

He said, “I'm the only passenger.”

She looked him in the eye.

He said, “No one else got out of the train. So I guess your friend isn't coming.”

“My friend?” she said. A neutral kind of accent. Regular American. The kind he heard everywhere.

He said, “Why else would a person be here, except to meet the train? No point in coming otherwise. I guess normally there would be nothing to see at midnight.”

She didn't answer.