Lee Child - Tripwire

“OK, you see that?”

Stone nodded. “Yes, I saw it. She’s inside.”

Tony checked his mirror and fought his way out into the traffic stream. By the time he was a hundred yards south, Sheryl was waiting in the triage line, going over and over in her head what Marilyn had told her to do.

IT WAS A short and cheap cab ride from the St. Louis Airport to the National Personnel Records Center building, and familiar territory for Reacher. Most of his Stateside tours of duty had involved at least one trip through the archives, searching backward in time for one thing or another. But this time, it was going to be different. He would be going in as a civilian. Not the same thing as going in dressed in a major’s uniform. Not the same thing at all. He was clear on that.

Public access is controlled by the counter staff in the lobby. The whole archive is technically part of the public record, but the staff take a lot of trouble to keep that fact well obscured. In the past Reacher had agreed with that tactic, no hesitation. Military records can be very frank, and they need to be read and interpreted in strict context. He’d always been very happy they were kept away from the public. But now he was the public, and he was wondering how it was going to play. There were millions of files piled up in dozens of huge storerooms, and it would be very easy to wait days or weeks before anything got found, even with the staff running around like crazy and looking exactly like they were doing their absolute best. He had seen it happen before, from the inside, many times. It was a very plausible act. He had watched it, with a wry smile on his face.

So they paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. They walked inside and saw the big sign: One File at a Time. They lined up in front of the clerk and waited. She was a heavy woman, middle-aged, dressed in a master sergeant’s uniform, busy with the sort of work designed to achieve nothing at all except to make people wait until it was done. After a long moment she pushed two blank forms across the counter and pointed to where a pencil was tied down to a desk with a piece of string.

The forms were access requests. Jodie filled in her last name as Jacob and requested all and any information on Major Jack-none-Reacher, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division. Reacher took the pencil from her and asked for all and any information on Lieutenant General Leon Jerome Garber. He slid both forms back to the master sergeant, who glanced at them and dropped them in her out-tray. She rang a bell at her elbow and went back to work. The idea was some private would hear the bell, come pick up the forms, and start the patient search for the files.

“Who’s working supervisor today?” Reacher asked.

It was a direct question. The sergeant looked for a way to avoid answering it, but she couldn’t find one.

“Major Theodore Conrad,” she said, reluctantly.

Reacher nodded. Conrad? Not a name he recalled.

“Would you tell him we’d like to meet with him, just briefly? And would you have those files delivered to his office?”

The way he said it was exactly halfway between a pleasant, polite request and an unspoken command. It was a tone of voice he had always found very useful with master sergeants. The woman picked up the phone and made the call.

“He’ll have you shown upstairs,” she said, like in her opinion she was amazed Conrad was doing them such a massive favor.

“No need,” Reacher said. “I know where it is. I’ve been there before.”

He showed Jodie the way, up the stairs from the lobby to a spacious office on the second floor. Major Theodore Conrad was waiting at the door. Hot-weather uniform, his name on an acetate plate above his breast pocket. He looked like a friendly guy, but maybe slightly soured by his posting. He was about forty-five, and to still be a major on the second floor of the NPRC at forty-five meant he was going nowhere in a hurry. He paused, because a private was racing along the hallway toward him with two thick files in his hand. Reacher smiled to himself. They were getting the A-grade service. When this place wanted to be quick, it could be real quick. Conrad took the files and dismissed the runner.

“So what can I do for you folks?” he asked. His accent was slow and muddy, like the Mississippi where it originated, but it was hospitable enough.

“Well, we need your best help, Major,” Reacher said. “And we’re hoping if you read those files, maybe you’ll feel willing to give it up.”

Conrad glanced at the files in his hand and stood aside and ushered them into his office. It was a quiet, paneled space. He showed them to a matched pair of leather armchairs and stepped around his desk. Sat down and squared the files on his blotter, one on top of the other. Opened the first, which was Leon’s, and started skimming.

It took him ten minutes to see what he needed. Reacher and Jodie sat and gazed out of the window. The city baked under a white sun. Conrad finished with the files and studied the names on the request forms. Then he glanced up.

“Two very fine records,” he said. “Very, very impressive. And I get the point. You’re obviously Jack-none-Reacher himself, and I’m guessing Mrs. Jodie Jacob here is the Jodie Garber referred to in the file as the general’s daughter. Am I right?”

Jodie nodded and smiled.

“I thought so,” Conrad said. “And you think being family, so to speak, will buy you better and faster access to the archive?”

Reacher shook his head solemnly.

“It never crossed our minds,” he said. “We know all access requests are treated with absolute equality.”

Conrad smiled, and then he laughed out loud.

“You kept a straight face,” he said. “Very, very good. You play much poker? You damn well should, you know. So how can I help you folks?”

“We need what you’ve got on a Victor Truman Hobie,” Reacher said.

“Vietnam?”

“You familiar with him?” Reacher asked, surprised.

Conrad looked blank. “Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn’t he? Which makes him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf.”

Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.

“We’ll work in here,” Conrad said. “My pleasure.”

He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, bypassing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.

“That was quick,” Jodie said.

“Actually it was a little slow,” Conrad said back. “Think about it from the private’s point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army’s normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me.”

Victor Hobie’s file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.

“Requests by telephone,” he said. “General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?”