Lee Child: Night School

His off-duty T-shirts were no more civilian, being old army items, gone pale and thin with washing. Only his jacket was definitively non-military. It was a tan denim Levi’s item, totally authentic in every respect, including the label, but sewn by an old girlfriend’s mother, in a basement in Seoul.

He changed and packed the rest of his stuff into a duffel and a suit carrier, which he heaved out to the curb, where a black Chevy Caprice was parked. He guessed it was an old MP black-and-white, now retired, with the decals peeled off, and the holes for the light bar and the antennas all sealed up with rubber plugs. The key was in. The seat was worn. But the engine started, and the transmission worked, and the brakes were fine. Reacher swung the thing around like a battleship maneuvering, and headed out toward McLean, Virginia, with the windows down and the radio playing.

–

The corporate park was one of many, all of them the same, brown and beige, discreet typefaces, neat lawns, some evergreen planting, low two- and three-building campuses spreading outward across empty land, servicing folks who hid behind bland and modest names and tinted glass in their office windows. Reacher found the right place by the street number, and pulled in past a knee-high sign that said Educational Solutions Incorporated, in a typeface so plain it looked childish.

Parked at the door were two more Chevy Caprices. One was black and one was navy blue. They were both newer than Reacher’s. And they were both properly civilian, in that they didn’t have rubber plugs and brush-painted doors. They were government sedans, no doubt about it, clean and shiny, each one with two more antennas than a person needed for listening to the ball game. But the extra two antennas were not the same in both cases. The black car had short needles and the blue car had longer whips, in a different configuration. On a different wavelength. Two separate organizations.

Inter-Agency Cooperation .

Reacher parked alongside, and left his bags in the car. He went in the door, to an empty lobby, which had durable gray carpet underfoot and green potted ferns here and there against the walls. There was a door marked Office . And a door marked Classroom . Which Reacher opened. There was a green chalkboard at the head of the room, and twenty college desks, in four rows of five, each one with a little ledge on the right, for paper and pencil.

Sitting on two of the desks were two guys, both in suits. One suit was black, and one suit was navy blue. Like the cars. Both guys were looking straight ahead, like they had been talking, but had run out of things to say. They were about Reacher’s own age. The one in the black suit was pale with dark hair worn dangerously long for a guy with a government car. The one in the blue suit was pale with colorless hair buzzed short. Like an astronaut. Built like an astronaut, too, or a gymnast not long out of the game.

Reacher stepped in, and they both turned to look.

The dark haired guy said, “Who are you?”

Reacher said, “That depends on who you are.”

“Your identity depends on mine?”

“Whether I tell you or not. Are those your cars outside?”

“Is that significant?”

“Suggestive.”

“How?”

“Because they’re different.”

“Yes,” the guy said. “Those are our cars. And yes, you’re in a classroom with two different representatives of two different government agencies. At cooperation school. Where they’re going to teach us all about how to get along with other organizations. Please don’t tell me you’re from one of them.”

“Military police,” Reacher said. “But don’t worry. I’m sure by five o’clock we’ll have plenty of civilized people here. You can give up on me and get along with them instead.”

The guy with the buzz cut looked up and said, “No, I think we’re it. I think we’re the whole ball game. There are only three bedrooms made up. I took a look around.”

Reacher said, “What kind of a government school has three students only? I never heard of that before.”

“Maybe we’re faculty. Maybe the students live elsewhere.”

The guy with the dark hair said, “Yes, that would make more sense.”

Reacher thought back, to the conversation in Garber’s office. He said, “My guy called it career development. I got the strong impression I would be on the receiving end, not the giving end. Then he seemed to suggest I could get through fast if I worked hard. All in all, I don’t think I’m faculty. Did your orders sound any different?”

The guy with the buzz cut said, “Not really.”

The guy with the hair didn’t answer, except for a big speculative shrug that seemed to concede a person with a strong imagination could interpret his orders as less than impressive.

The guy with the buzz cut said, “I’m Casey Waterman, FBI.”

“Jack Reacher, United States Army.”

The guy with the hair said, “John White, CIA.”

They all shook hands, and then they lapsed into the same kind of silence Reacher had heard when he stepped in. They had run out of things to say. He sat on a desk near the back of the room. Waterman was ahead of him on the left, and White was ahead of him on the right. Waterman was very still. But watchful. He was passing the time and conserving his energy. He had done so before. He was an experienced agent. No kind of a rookie. And neither was White, despite being different in every other way. White was never still. He was twitching and writhing and wringing his hands, and squinting into space, variably, focusing long, focusing short, sometimes narrowing his eyes and grimacing, looking left, looking right, as if caught in a tortuous sequence of thoughts, with no way out. An analyst, Reacher guessed, after many years in a world of unreliable data and double, triple, and quadruple bluffs. The guy was entitled to look a little agitated.

No one spoke.

Five minutes later Reacher broke the silence and asked, “Is there a history of us not getting along? The FBI, I mean, and the CIA and the MPs. I’m not aware of any kind of a big deal. Are you?”

Waterman said, “I think you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. This is not about history. It’s about the future. They know we’re already cooperative. Which allows them to exploit us. Think about the first half of the course title. This is about forensic innovation just as much as cooperation. And innovation means they’re going to save money. We’re all going to cooperate even more in the future. By sharing lab space. They’re going to build one new place and we’re all going to use it. That’s my bet. We’re here to be told how to make it work.”

“That’s nuts,” Reacher said. “I don’t know anything about labs or scheduling. I’m the last person for that.”

“Me too,” Waterman said. “Not a strength, to be honest.”

“This is worse than nuts,” White said. “This is a colossal waste of time. There are far too many far more important things going on.”

Twitching and writhing and wringing his hands.

Reacher asked, “Did they pull you off a job to bring you here? You got unfinished business?”

“No, actually. I was due a rotation. I just closed out a thing. Successfully, I thought, but this was my reward.”

“Look on the sunny side of the street. You can relax. Take it easy. Go play golf. You don’t need to learn how to make it work. CIA doesn’t give a damn about labs. You hardly use them.”

“I’ll be three months behind on the job I should be starting right now.”

“Which is what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Who is doing it instead?”

“I can’t tell you that, either.”

“A good analyst?”

“Not good enough. He’ll miss things. They might be vital. This stuff is impossible to predict.”