Lee Child - Tripwire

“Sit down,” Newman said. “Let’s talk.”

“So you’re a sort of pathologist?” Jodie asked him.

Newman took his place behind his desk and rocked his hand from side to side, indicating a disparity. “Well, a pathologist has a medical degree, and we anthropologists don’t. We studied anthropology, pure and simple. The physical structure of the human body, that’s our field. We both work postmortem, of course, but generally speaking if a corpse is relatively fresh, it’s a pathologist’s job, and if there’s only a skeleton left, then it’s our job. So I’m a bone doctor.”

Jodie nodded.

“Of course, that’s a slight simplification,” Newman said. “A fresh corpse can raise questions concerning its bones. Suppose there’s dismemberment involved? The pathologist would refer to us for help. We can look at the saw marks on the bones and help out. We can say how weak or strong the perpetrator was, what kind of saw he used, was he left-handed or right-handed, things like that. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’m working on skeletons. Dry old bones.”

Then he smiled again. A private, amused smile. “And pathologists are useless with dry old bones. Really, really hopeless. They don’t know the first thing about them. Sometimes I wonder what the hell they teach them in medical school.”

The office was quiet and cool. No windows, indirect lighting from concealed fixtures, carpet on the floor. A rosewood desk, comfortable leather chairs for the visitors. And an elegant clock on a low shelf, ticking quietly, already showing three-thirty in the afternoon. Just three and a half hours until the return flight.

“We’re here for a reason, General,” Reacher said. “This isn’t entirely a social call, I’m afraid.”

“Social enough to stop calling me General and start calling me Nash, OK? And tell me what’s on your mind.”

Reacher nodded. “We need your help, Nash.”

Newman looked up. “With the MIA lists?”

Then he turned to Jodie, to explain.

“That’s what I do here,” he said. “Twenty years, I’ve done nothing else.”

She nodded. “It’s about a particular case. We sort of got involved in it.”

Newman nodded back, slowly, but this time the light was gone from his eyes.

“Yes, I was afraid of that,” he said. “There are eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty MIA cases here, but I bet I know which one you’re interested in.”

“Eighty-nine thousand?” Jodie repeated, surprised.

“And a hundred twenty. Two thousand, two hundred missing from Vietnam, eight thousand, one hundred seventy missing from Korea, and seventy-eight thousand, seven hundred fifty missing from World War Two. We haven’t given up on any single one of them, and I promise you we never will.”

“God, why so many?”

Newman shrugged, a bitter sadness suddenly there in his face.

“Wars,” he said. “High explosive, tactical movement, airplanes. Wars are fought, some combatants live, some die. Some of the dead are recovered, some of them aren’t. Sometimes there’s nothing left to recover. A direct hit on a man by an artillery shell will reduce him to his constituent molecules. He’s just not there anymore. Maybe a fine red mist drifting through the air, maybe not even that, maybe he’s completely boiled off to vapor. A near miss will blow him to pieces. And fighting is about territory, isn’t it? So even if the pieces of him are relatively large, enemy tank movement or friendly tank movement back and forth across the disputed territory will plow the pieces of him into the earth, and then he’s gone forever.”

He sat in silence, and the clock ticked slowly around.

“And airplanes are worse. Many of our air campaigns have been fought over oceans. A plane goes down in the ocean and the crew is missing until the end of time, no matter how much effort we expend in a place like this.”

He waved his arm in a vague gesture that took in the office and all the unseen space beyond and ended up resting toward Jodie, palm up, like a mute appeal.

“Eighty-nine thousand,” she said. “I thought the MIA stuff was just about Vietnam. Two thousand or so.”

“Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty,” Newman said again. “We still get a few from Korea, the occasional one from World War Two, the Japanese islands. But you’re right, this is mostly about Vietnam. Two thousand, two hundred missing. Not so very many, really. They lost more than that in a single morning during World War One, every morning for four long years. Men and boys blown apart and mashed into the mud. But Vietnam was different. Partly because of things like World War One. We won’t take that wholesale slaughter anymore, and quite rightly. We’ve moved on. The population just won’t stand for those old attitudes now.”

Jodie nodded quietly.

“And partly because we lost the war in Vietnam,” Newman said quietly. “That makes it very different. The only war we ever lost. Makes it all feel a hell of a lot worse. So we try harder to resolve things.”

He made the gesture with his hand again, indicating the unseen complex beyond the office door, and his voice ended on a brighter note.

“So that’s what you do here?” Jodie asked. “Wait for skeletons to be discovered overseas and then bring them back here to identify? So you can finally tick the names off the missing lists?”

Newman rocked his hand again, equivocating. “Well, we don’t wait, exactly. Where we can, we go out searching for them. And we don’t always identify them, although we sure as hell try hard.”

“It must be difficult,” she said.

He nodded. “Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field-workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we’ve got. Which sometimes isn’t very much. Sometimes all that’s left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box.”

“Impossible,” she said.

“Often,” he said back. “We’ve got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can’t afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can’t meet it.”

“Where do you start?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA. If he’d broken his arm as a boy, we’d be able to match the old X ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts.”

Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.

“Leon came here in April,” Reacher said.

Newman nodded. “Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him.”

Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.

“He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot.”

She nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“He asked you about Victor Hobie,” Reacher said.

Newman nodded again. “Victor Truman Hobie.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Newman said. “And I’m going to tell you nothing, too.”

The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.

“Why not?” Reacher asked.

“Surely you know why not.”

“It’s classified?”

“Twice over,” Newman said.

Reacher moved in the silence, restless with frustration. “You’re our last hope, Nash. We’ve already been all over everything else.”