Lee Child - The Enemy

“You can.”

She sighed. “OK, in a minute.”

But she blew it. She waited too long. The nun opened the foil and started to eat the sandwich.

“Damn,” I said.

“Sorry,” Summer said.

I looked at her. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“No, before that. The last thing you said.”

“I said I can’t just ask her.”

I shook my head. “No, before the breakfasts came.”

“I said it’s a very weak case.”

“Before that.”

I saw her rewind the tape in her head. “I said Vassell and Coomer would have gotten away with it if you hadn’t ignored Willard.”

I nodded. Thought about that fact for a minute. Then I closed my eyes.

I openedthem again in Los Angeles. The plane touched down and the thump and screech of tires on tarmac woke me up. Then the reverse thrust screamed and the brakes jerked me forward against my belt. It was first light outside. The dawn looked brown, like it often did there. A voice on the PA told us it was seven o’clock in the morning in California. We had been heading west for two solid days and each twenty-four-hour period was averaging more like twenty-eight. I had slept for a while and I didn’t feel tired. But I still felt hungry.

We shuffled off the plane and walked down to the baggage claim. That was where drivers met people. I scanned around. Saw that Calvin Franz hadn’t sent anyone. He had come himself instead. I was happy about that. He was a welcome sight. I felt like we were going to be in good hands.

“I’ve got news for you,” he said.

I introduced him to Summer. He shook her hand and took her bag and carried it. I guessed it was partly a courtly gesture and partly his way of hustling us out to his Humvee a little bit faster. It was parked there in the no-waiting zone. But the cops were staying well away from it. Camouflaged black-and-green Humvees tend to have that effect. We all piled in. I let Summer ride in front. Partly a courtly gesture of my own, and partly because I wanted to sprawl in the back. I was cramped from the plane.

“They found the Grand Marquis,” Franz said.

He gunned the big turbodiesel and moved off the curb. Irwin was just north of Barstow, which was about thirty miles away across the breadth of the city. I figured it would take him about an hour to get us there through the morning traffic. I saw Summer watching how he drove. Professional appraisal in her eyes. It would probably have taken her about thirty-five minutes.

“It was at Andrews,” Franz said. “Dumped there on the fifth.”

“When Marshall was recalled to Germany,” I said.

Franz nodded at the wheel. “That’s what their gate log says. Parked by Marshall with a Transportation Corps reference on the docket. Our guys trailered it to the FBI. Faster that way. They had to call in a few favors. The Bureau worked on it all night. Reluctantly at first, but then they got interested in a big hurry. It seems to be tied in with a case they’re working.”

“Brubaker,” I said.

He nodded again. “The trunk mat had parts of Brubaker on it. Blood and brain matter, to be specific. It had been scrubbed with a paper towel, but not well enough.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Lots of things. There was blood from a different source, just trace evidence of a transfer smear, maybe from a jacket sleeve or a knife blade.”

“Carbone’s,” I said. “From when Marshall was riding in the trunk afterward. Did they find a knife?”

“No,” Franz said. “But Marshall’s prints are all over the inside of the trunk.”

“They would be,” I said. “He spent several hours in there.”

“There was a single dog tag under the mat,” Franz said. “Like the chain had been broken and one of them had slipped off and gotten away.”

“Carbone’s?” I said.

“None other.”

“Amateur hour,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Mostly normal stuff. It was an untidy car. Lots of hair and fiber, fast-food wrappers, soda cans, stuff like that.”

“Any yogurt pots?”

“One,” Franz said. “In the trunk.”

“Strawberry or raspberry?”

“Strawberry. Marshall’s prints on the foil tab. Seems like he had a snack.”

“He opened it,” I said. “But he didn’t eat it.”

“There was an empty envelope,” Franz said. “Addressed to Kramer at XII Corps in Germany. Airmail, postmarked a year ago. No return address. Like a photo mailer, but it didn’t have anything in it.”

I said nothing. He was looking at me in the mirror.

“Is any of this good news?” he said.

I smiled. “It just moved us up from speculative to circumstantial.”

“A giant leap for mankind,” he said.

Then I stopped smiling and looked away. I started thinking about Carbone, and Brubaker, and Mrs. Kramer. And Mrs. Reacher. All over the world people were dying, in the early part of January 1990.

In theend it took us more than an hour to get to Irwin. I guessed it was true what people said about LA highways. The post looked the same as it usually did. As busy as always. It occupied a huge acreage of the Mojave Desert. One or the other of the armored cavalry regiments lived there on a rotating basis and acted as the home team when other units came in to exercise. There was a real spring-training atmosphere. The weather was always good, people always had fun in the sunshine playing with the big expensive toys.

“You want to take care of business right away?” Franz asked.

“Are you keeping an eye on them?”

He nodded. “Discreetly.”

“So let’s have breakfast first.”

A U.S. Army O Club was the perfect destination for people half-starved on airline food. The buffet was a mile long. Same menu as in Germany, but the orange juice and the fruit platters looked more authentic in California. I ate as much as an average rifle company and Summer ate more. Franz had already eaten. I fueled up on as much coffee as I could take. Then I pushed back from the table. Took a deep breath.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go do it.”

We went back to Franz’s office and he made a call to his guys. They told him Marshall was already out on the range, but Vassell and Coomer were sitting tight in a VOQ rec room. Franz drove us there in his Humvee. We got out on the sidewalk. The sun was bright. The air was warm and dusty. I could smell all the prickly little desert plants that were growing as far as the eye could see.

Irwin’s VOQ looked like it had been built by the same motel contractor that had gotten the XII Corps contract in Germany. There were rows of identical rooms around a sandy courtyard. On one side was a shared facility. TV rooms, table tennis, lounges. Franz led us in through a door and stepped to one side and we found Vassell and Coomer sitting knee to knee in a pair of leather armchairs. I realized I had seen them only once before, when they came to my office at Bird. That seemed disproportionate, considering how much time I had spent thinking about them.

They were both wearing crisp new BDUs in the revised desert camouflage, the pattern people were calling chocolate chip. They both looked just as fake as they had in their woodland greens. They still looked like Rotary Club members. Vassell was still bald and Coomer was still wearing eyeglasses.

They both looked up at me.

I took a breath.

Senior officers.

Harassment.

It could be you that goes to jail.

“General Vassell,” I said. “And Colonel Coomer. You are under arrest on a charge of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice in that you conspired together and with other persons to commit homicide.”

I held my breath.

But neither one of them had a reaction. Neither one of them spoke. They just gave it up. They just looked resigned. Like the other shoe had finally dropped and the inevitable had finally happened. Like they had been expecting this moment from the start. Like they had known for sure it was coming all along. I breathed out. There were supposed to be all kinds of stages in a person’s reaction to bad news. Grief, anger, denial. But these guys were already through all of that. That was clear. They were right there at the end of the process, butted hard up against acceptance.