Lee Child - The Enemy

“Am I going to get past your main gate?” I asked him.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Willard’s chasing me. He’s liable to warn any place he thinks I’m going.”

“I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“Maybe you could switch your telex off for a day or two.”

“What’s your ETA?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

“Your buddies are already here. They just got in.”

“I haven’t got any buddies.”

“Vassell and Coomer. They’re fresh in from Europe.”

“Why?”

“Exercises.”

“Is Marshall still there?”

“Sure. He drove out to LAX to pick them up. They all came back together. One big happy family.”

“I need you to do two things for me,” I said.

“Two more things, you mean.”

“I need a ride from LAX myself. Tomorrow, first morning arrival from D.C. I need you to send someone.”

“And?”

“And I need you to get someone to locate the staff car Vassell and Coomer used back here. It’s a black Mercury Grand Marquis. Marshall signed it out on New Year’s Eve. By now it’s either back in the Pentagon garage or parked at Andrews. I need someone to find it and to do a full-court press on it, forensically. And fast.”

“What would they be looking for?”

“Anything at all.”

“OK,” Franz said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

I hung up and turned the pages in the army directory all the way from F for Fort Irwin to P for Pentagon . Slid my finger down the subsection to C for Chief of Staff’s Office . I left it there, briefly.

“Vassell and Coomer are at Irwin,” I said.

“Why?” Summer said.

“Hiding out,” I said. “They think we’re still in Europe. They know Willard is watching the airports. They’re sitting ducks.”

“Do we want them?” Summer said. “They didn’t know about Mrs. Kramer. That was clear. They were shocked when you told them, that night in your office. So I guess they authorized the burglary, but not the collateral damage.”

I nodded. She was right. They had been surprised, that night in my office. Coomer had gone pale and asked: Was it a burglary ? It was a question that came straight from a guilty conscience. That meant Marshall hadn’t told them yet. He had kept the really bad news to himself. He had come back to the D.C. hotel at twenty past three in the morning, and he had told them the briefcase hadn’t been there, but he hadn’t told them what else had gone down. Vassell and Coomer must have been piecing it together on the fly, that night in my office, in the dark and after the event. It must have been an interesting ride home. Harsh words must have been exchanged.

“It’s down to Marshall alone,” Summer said. “He panicked, is all.”

“Technically it was a conspiracy,” I said. “Legally they all share the blame.”

“Hard to prosecute.”

“That’s JAG Corps’ problem.”

“It’s a weak case. Hard to prove.”

“They did other stuff,” I said. “Believe me, Mrs. Kramer is the least of their worries.”

I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless. I guessed she was a senior administrator, working late. I guessed she was about fifty, blonde going gray, powder on her face.

“Write this down,” I said to her. “I am a military police major called Reacher. I was recently transferred out of Panama and into Fort Bird, North Carolina. I will be standing at the E-ring checkpoint inside your building at midnight tonight. It is entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets me there.”

I paused.

“Is that it?” the woman said.

“Yes,” I said, and hung up. I scooped fifteen remaining cents back into my pocket. Closed the phone book and wedged it under my arm.

“Let’s go,” I said. We drove through the gas station and topped off the tank with eight bucks’ worth of gas. Then we headed north.

“It’s entirelyup to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you there?” Summer said. “What the hell is that about?”

We were on I-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The whole world was back at work.

“There’s something heavy-duty going on,” I said. “Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it’s heavy-duty, with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on the same day?”

“You’re a major,” she said. “So are Franz and Sanchez and all the others. Any colonel could have moved you.”

“But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.”

“OK then, any Brigadier General could have done it.”

“With forged signatures on the orders?”

“Anyone can forge a signature.”

“And hope to get away with it afterward? No, this whole thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with impunity. Someone untouchable.”

“The Chief of Staff?”

I shook my head. “No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry. And we can assume he’s a reasonably smart guy. They don’t put dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized that pretty soon everything else would be coming down too. The whole established order.”

“And?”

“And he started to worry about some kind of a move by Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don’t want integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about starting something dramatic. Something bad. That’s why they were so worried about the agenda getting out.”

“But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.”

“Nobody ever accepts that fact,” I said. “Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of newfangled junk. There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises, putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that their way is the only way.”

Summer said nothing.

I smiled. “Go back in our records and you’ll probably find Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.”

“What exactly were they planning?”

I shrugged. “We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously. Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with defense industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say that lightweight armored vehicles can’t be made safe, that would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”