Lee Child - The Enemy

Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north toward Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-story and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.

“What was the guy’s name?” I asked him.

“Pickles,” he said.

The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is, it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.

“Early morning of January fifth,” I said. “Sometime after three o’clock, there was an admission here.”

The guy riffed through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.

“Male or female?” he said.

“Male.”

He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.

“John Doe,” he said. “Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.”

“That’s our guy,” I said.

“Your guy?” he said, looking at my uniform.

“We might be able to take care of his bill,” I said.

He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking, One down, two hundred to go .

“He’s in post-op,” he said. He pointed toward the elevator. “Second floor.”

He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.

“Pickles,” I said.

She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.

“Five minutes only,” she said. “He’s very sick.”

Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by himself.

I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.

“You two wait outside,” I said.

Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.

“How are you, asshole?” I said.

The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.

“That was the man,” he said. “Right there. He did this to me.”

“Did what to you?”

“He shot me in the legs.”

I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.

“Front or side?” I said.

“Side,” he said.

“Front is worse,” I said. “You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you? I just met your wife.”

“Foreign bitch.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am. Watch.”

I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.

“He is very sick,” I said.

We rodedown in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.

“I apologize,” I said.

“Am I in trouble?” he said.

“Not with me,” I said. “You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different.”

He smiled, briefly. He was calm.

“I trained five years with GRU,” he said. “I know how to kill people. And I know how not to.”

We gave Trifonov his Steyr backand let him out at the Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and then legged it to his room and picked up his book. Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We parked the Humvee and walked back to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log. It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They were the only other people who left the post that night.”

“They went north,” I said. “If you want to say they threw the briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north. They didn’t go south to Columbia.”

“OK,” she said. “So the same guy didn’t do Carbone and Brubaker. There’s no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.”

“Welcome to the real world,” I said.

The realworld got a whole lot worse when my phone rang twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort Jackson. She put him through.

“Willard has been and gone,” he said. “Unbelievable.”

“Told you so.”

“He pitched all kinds of hissy fits.”

“But you’re fireproof.”

“Thank God.”

I paused. “Did you tell him about my guy?”

He paused. “You told me to. Shouldn’t I have?”

“It was a dry hole. Looked good at first, but it wasn’t in the end.”

“Well, he’s on his way up to see you about it. He left here two hours ago. He’s going to be very disappointed.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“What areyou going to do?” Summer asked.

“What is Willard?” I said. “Fundamentally?”

“A careerist,” she said.

“Correct,” I said.

Technically the army has a total of twenty-six separate ranks. A grunt comes in as an E-1 private, and as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid he is automatically promoted to an E-2 private after a year, and to an E-3 private first class after another year, or even a little earlier if he’s any good. Then the ladder stretches all the way up to a five-star General of the Army, although I wasn’t aware of anyone except George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower who ever made it that far. If you count the E-9 sergeant major grade as three separate steps to acknowledge the Command Sergeant Majors and the Sergeant Major of the Army, and if you count all four warrant officer grades, then a major like me has seven steps above him and eighteen steps below him. Which gives a major like me considerable experience of insubordination, going both ways, up and down, giving and taking. With a million people on twenty-six separate rungs on the ladder, insubordination was a true art form. And the canvas was one-on-one privacy.