Lee Child - One Shot

“Does the name Eileen Hutton mean anything to you?”

“Why?”

“My father faxed a new witness list. He added her name.”

Reacher said nothing.

“She seems to be from the army,” Helen said. “Do you know her?”

“Should I?”

Helen came closer and turned away from the others.

“I need to know what she knows,” she said quietly.

This could complicate things , Reacher thought.

“She was the prosecutor,” he said.

“When? Fourteen years ago?”

“Yes.”

“So how much does she know?”

“I think she’s at the Pentagon now.”

“How much does she know, Reacher?”

He looked away.

“She knows it all,” he said.

“How? You never got anywhere near a courtroom.”

“Even so.”

“How?”

“Because I was sleeping with her.”

She stared at him. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You told her everything ?”

“We were in a relationship. Naturally I told her everything. We were on the same side.”

“Just two lonely people in the desert.”

“We had a good thing going. Three great months. She was a nice person. Still is, probably. We were close.”

“That’s more information than I need, Reacher.”

He said nothing.

“This is way out of control now,” Helen said.

“She can’t use what she’s got. Even less than I can. It’s still classified and she’s still in the army.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“Believe it,” Reacher said.

“Then why is she on the damn list?”

“My fault,” Reacher said. “I mentioned the Pentagon to your father. When I couldn’t understand how my name had come up. He must have poked around. I thought he might.”

“It’s over before it starts if she talks.”

“She can’t.”

“Maybe she can. Maybe she’s going to. Who knows what the hell the military is going to do?”

The elevator bell rang and the small crowd shuffled closer to the doors.

“You’re going to have to talk to her,” Helen said. “She’ll be coming here for a deposition. You’re going to have to find out what she’s going to say.”

“She’s probably a one-star general by now. I can’t make her tell me anything.”

“Find a way,” Helen said. “Exploit old memories.”

“Maybe I don’t want to. She and I are still on the same side, remember. As far as Specialist E-4 James Barr is concerned.”

Helen Rodin turned away and stepped into the elevator car.

The elevator opened into a sixth-floor lobby that was all blank, painted concrete except for a steel-and-wired-glass door that led into a security airlock. Beyond that, Reacher could see signs to an ICU and two isolation wards, one male, one female, and two general wards, and a neonatal facility. Reacher guessed the whole sixth floor had been funded by the state. It wasn’t a pleasant place. It was a perfect blend of prison and hospital, and neither thing was a fun ingredient.

A guy in a Board of Corrections uniform met the party at a reception desk. Everyone was searched and everyone signed a liability waiver. Then a doctor showed up and led them to a small waiting area. The doctor was a tired man of about thirty, and the waiting area had chairs made of tubular steel and green vinyl. They looked like they had been ripped out of 1950s Chevrolets.

“Barr is awake and reasonably lucid,” the doctor said. “We’re listing him as stable, but that doesn’t mean he’s a well man. So today we’re restricting his visitors to a maximum of two at any one time, and we want them to keep things as brief as possible.”

Reacher saw Helen Rodin smile, and he knew why. The cops would want to come in pairs, and therefore Helen’s presence as defense counsel would make three at a time. Which meant that the medical restrictions were handing her a defense-only day.

“His sister is with him right now,” the doctor said. “She’d prefer it if you would wait until they’ve finished their visit before going in.”

The doctor left them there and Helen said, “I’ll go first, on my own. I need to introduce myself and get his consent for the representation. Then Dr. Mason should see him, I think. Then we’ll decide what to do next based on her conclusions.”

She spoke fast. Reacher realized she was a little nervous. A little tense. All of them were, apart from him. None of them apart from him had ever met James Barr before. Barr had become an unknown destination for each of them, all in separate ways. He was Helen’s client, albeit one that she didn’t really want. He was an object of study for Mason and Niebuhr. Maybe the subject of future academic papers, even fame and reputation. Maybe he was a condition waiting to be named. Barr’s syndrome . Same for Alan Danuta. Maybe to him the whole thing was a Supreme Court precedent waiting to be argued. A textbook chapter. A law school class. Indiana versus Barr. Barr versus the United States . They were all investing in a man they didn’t know.

They took a green vinyl chair each and settled in. The little lobby smelled of chlorine disinfectant, and it was silent. There was no sound at all except for a faint rush of water in pipes and a distant electronic pulse from a machine in another room. Nobody said anything but everyone seemed to know they were in for a long slow process. No point in starting out impatient. Reacher sat opposite Mary Mason and watched her. She was relatively young, for an expert. She seemed warm and open. She had chosen eyeglasses with large frames so that her eyes could be clearly seen. Her eyes looked kind and welcoming, and reassuring. How much of that was bedside manner and how much was for real, Reacher didn’t know.

“How do you do this?” he asked her.

“The assessment?” she said. “I start out assuming it’s more likely to be real than fake. A brain injury bad enough for a two-day coma almost always produces amnesia. Those data were settled long ago. Then I just watch the patient. True amnesiacs are very unsettled by their condition. They’re disoriented and frightened. You can see them really trying to remember. They want to remember. Fakers show up different. You can see them avoiding the days in question. They look away from them mentally. Sometimes even physically. There’s often some distinctive body language.”

“Kind of subjective,” Reacher said.

Mason nodded. “It is basically subjective. It’s very hard to prove a negative. You can use brain scans to show differing brain activity, but what the scans actually mean is still subjective. Hypnotism is sometimes useful, but courts are scared of hypnotism, generally. So yes, I’m in the opinion business, nothing more.”

“Who does the prosecution hire?”

“Someone exactly like me. I’ve worked both sides of the fence.”

“So it’s he said, she said?”

Mason nodded again. “It’s usually about which of us has more letters after her name. That’s what juries respond to.”

“You’ve got a lot of letters.”

“More than most people,” Mason said.

“How much will he have forgotten?”

“Several days, minimum. If the trauma happened Saturday, I’d be very surprised if he remembers anything after Wednesday. Before that there’ll be a shadowy period just about as long where he remembers some things and not others. But that’s the minimum. I’ve seen cases where months are missing, sometimes after concussions, not even comas.”

“Will anything come back?”

“From the initial shadowy period, possibly. He might be able to work backward from the last thing he remembers, through the preceding few days. He might be able to pick out a few previous incidents. Working forward, he’ll be much more limited. If he remembers his last lunch, he might eventually get as far as dinner. If he remembers being out at a movie, he might eventually recall driving home. But there’ll be a hard boundary somewhere. Typically it would be when he went to sleep on the last day he’s aware of.”