Lee Child - The Enemy

Summer andI spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list of who was on-post and who wasn’t at Carbone’s time of death. She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank, and number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost every name had a check mark next to it.

“What are the marks?” I asked her. “Here or not here?”

“Here,” she said.

I nodded. I was afraid of that. I riffed through the concertina with my thumb.

“How many?” I asked.

“Nearly twelve hundred.”

I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S. military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources. And they require everybody’s total cooperation. They can’t be handled behind a CO’s back, in secret, by two people acting alone.

“Impossible,” I said.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Summer said.

“We have to go at it a different way.”

“How?”

“What did he take to the scene?”

“Nothing.”

“Wrong,” I said. “He took himself.”

Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges of her paper. The stack thickened and then thinned back down as the air sighed out from between the pages.

“Pick a name,” she said.

“He took a K-bar,” I said.

“Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.”

“He took a tire iron or a crowbar.”

She nodded.

“And he took yogurt,” I said.

She said nothing.

“Four things,” I said. “Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?”

“His refrigerator in his quarters,” Summer said. “Or one of the mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary, or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off-post.”

I pictured a man breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating, a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot, hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket, slipping the crowbar under his coat.

“We should look for the container,” I said.

Summer said nothing.

“He’ll have ditched it,” I said. “Not close to the scene, but not far from it either.”

“Will it help us?”

“It’ll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was bought.”

Then I paused.

“And it might have prints on it,” I said.

“He’ll have worn gloves.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen people opening yogurt containers. But I’ve never seen anyone do it with gloves on. There’s a foil closure. With a tiny little tab to pull.”

“We’re on a hundred thousand acres here.”

I nodded. Square one . Normally a couple of phone calls would get me all the grunts on the post lined up a yard apart on their knees, crawling slowly across the terrain like a giant human comb, staring down at the ground and parting every blade of grass by hand. And then doing it again the next day, and the next, until one of them found what we were looking for. With manpower like the army has, you can find a needle in a haystack. You can find both halves of a broken needle. You can find the tiny chip of chrome that flaked off the break.

Summer looked at the clock on the wall.

“Our thirty minutes are up,” she said.

We usedthe Humvee to get over to Psy-Ops and parked in a slot that was probably reserved for someone else. It was nine o’clock. Summer killed the motor and we opened the doors and slipped out into the cold.

I took Kramer’s briefcase with me.

We walked through the old tiled corridors and came to Norton’s door. Her light was on. I knocked and we went in. Norton was behind her desk. All her textbooks were back on her shelves. There were no legal pads on view. No pens or pencils. Her desktop was clear. The pool of light from her lamp was a perfect circle on the empty wood.

She had three visitor’s chairs. She waved us toward them. Summer sat on the right. I sat on the left. I propped Kramer’s briefcase on the center chair, facing Norton, like a ghost at the feast. She didn’t look at it.

“How can I help you?” she said.

I made a point of adjusting the briefcase’s position so that it was completely upright on the chair.

“Tell us about the dinner party last night,” I said.

“What dinner party?”

“You ate with some Armored staffers who were visiting.”

She nodded.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “So?”

“They worked for General Kramer.”

She nodded again. “So I believe.”

“Tell us about the meal.”

“The food?”

“The atmosphere,” I said. “The conversation. The mood.”

“It was just dinner in the O Club,” she said.

“Someone gave Vassell and Coomer a briefcase.”

“Did they? What, like a present?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t remember that,” Norton said. “When?”

“During dinner,” I said. “Or as they were leaving.”

Nobody spoke.

“A briefcase?” Norton said.

“Was it you?” Summer asked.

Norton looked at her, blankly. She was either genuinely puzzled, or she was a superb actress. “Was it me what?”

“Who gave them the briefcase.”

“Why would I give them a briefcase? I hardly knew them.”

“How well did you know them?”

“I met them once or twice, years ago.”

“At Irwin?”

“I believe so.”

“Why did you eat with them?”

“I was in the bar. They asked me. It would have been rude to decline.”

“Did you know they were coming?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I had no idea. I was surprised they weren’t in Germany.”

“So you knew them well enough to know where they’re based.”

“Kramer was an Armored Branch commander in Europe. They were his staffers. I wouldn’t expect to find them based in Hawaii.”

Nobody spoke. I watched Norton’s eyes. She hadn’t looked at Kramer’s briefcase longer than about half a second. Just long enough to figure I was some guy who carried a briefcase, and then to forget all about it.

“What’s going on here?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Tell me.”

I pointed to the briefcase. “This is General Kramer’s. He lost it on New Year’s Eve and it showed up again today. We’re trying to figure out where it’s been.”

“Where did he lose it?”

Summer moved in her chair.

“In a motel,” she said. “During a sexual assignation with a woman from this post. The woman was driving a Humvee. Therefore we’re looking for women who knew Kramer, and who have permanent access to Humvees, and who were off-post on New Year’s Eve, and who were at dinner last night.”

“I was the only woman at dinner last night.”

Silence.

Summer nodded. “We know that. And we promise we can keep the whole thing quiet, but first we need you to confirm who you gave the briefcase to.”

The room stayed quiet. Norton looked at Summer like she had told a joke with a punch line she didn’t quite understand.

“You think I was sleeping with General Kramer?” she said.

Summer said nothing.

“Well, I wasn’t,” Norton said. “God forbid.”

Nobody spoke.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said. “I’m seriously conflicted. That’s a completely absurd accusation. I’m astonished you made it.”