Lee Child - Night School

“And nothing from the units that do know something about the guy?”

“Not yet.”

“Is four months unusual?”

“It would be in a unit I worked for.”

Reacher said, “They’re putting people in advertisements now?”

Neagley took out the envelope’s contents for the second time. An old Army Times, and a trade show handbill. The Times had a bland piece about the ongoing drawdown out of the Fulda Gap, near Frankfurt, where once upon a time great swirling tank battles had been envisaged. Now the enemy was gone, and the border had moved hundreds of miles farther east, like an ebb tide, and front-line units had been stranded like fish on a beach. Some had pushed onward, just in case, and others had streamed back to immense storage lagers, where they were mothballed. Just five Chaparral units were still on active duty, including the AWOL’s crew, who were featured in a photograph at the top of the story.

The photograph was a posed picture, with the camera set low behind the men and their vehicle, all of which were facing away toward an imagined incoming threat. The missiles on the truck were in their launchers, aimed at a low horizon ahead, and the guys were staring at the same spot in the sky, some with binoculars, some with hands shading their eyes, as if the sun was coming up. As if the viewer of the photograph was cowering twenty yards behind their manly and vigilant protection. From the rear the men looked like a useful bunch, lean and purposeful and energetic. Reacher knew people from similar units. In his experience they acted halfway between regular artillerymen and the flight deck crews on a Navy carrier, all hustle and bustle, with a little maverick Top Gun aviator mixed in. They thought of their trucks as parked airplanes. Morale and unit cohesion tended to be high. These particular guys all had Mohawk hairstyles, with two-inch-wide tufts running front to back across otherwise shaved skulls, all spiked up with soap or wax. Not strictly legal, according to Army Regulation 670-3-2, which said that haircuts should be neat and conservative, and that extreme, eccentric, or faddish styles were not authorized. But clearly a wise commander had turned a blind eye. Some battles were not worth fighting, especially when more important battles were on the horizon, literally.

The trade show handbill had been printed up to look like a newspaper article, by a uniform manufacturer touting a new urban camouflage pattern. Aimed at the Department of Defense, possibly, or at police SWAT teams. The main picture looked like it had been shot in a giant indoor studio, and it featured the same Chaparral crew as the Army Times piece, and their vehicle, all of them decked out the same way, men and machine alike, in a design that looked like digital noise, made up of tiny printed rectangles, all different shades of gray. The men’s faces and hands and part-bald heads were painted the same way, as was the truck, and as were the missiles themselves. They were all posed in front of an artificial painted backdrop, like a theater set that showed a ruined cityscape. This time the camera was set high and in front of them, like an incoming pilot’s eye view. Like an attack helicopter coming in low and close, for a preemptive strike. In which case the new camouflage was doing an excellent job. The men and their machine were barely visible. They merged into the background more or less perfectly. They were a ghostly presence, both there and not there all at the same time. No details were clear. Even the missiles themselves were hard to make out. Only the Mohawk hairstyles were obvious, five in a line, because they were the only things not painted. Very impressive. Except the manufacturer had the luxury of designing the studio floor and the theater backdrop itself, any old way it wanted. Which in this case had been to match the camouflage exactly. Which helped. The real world might be different.

Sinclair put a fingernail on the ghostly half-hidden missiles and asked, “Could things like these be stolen and sold?”

“Not for a hundred million bucks,” Neagley said. “That’s the problem. We’ve been over and over it. It’s a Catch-22. There’s no middle ground. Everything is devalued now. There’s too much cheap old stuff coming out of Russia and China, and too much cheap new stuff for sale anyway. Arms manufacturers have been hustling ever since the Wall came down. They’re worried. They’re feeling the pinch. Every month there’s an arms fair somewhere. If you’ve got the right kind of checkbook you can get anything you want. Except nuclear. Which kind of proves my point. There’s no middle ground. To get to a hundred million, you would have to go nuclear.”

“Don’t say that word out loud.”

“We have to, ma’am. If only to dismiss it instantly. We have bombs on air bases back home, and missiles in silos in the badlands, and missiles on submarines under the sea. All of them are under heavy guard, and we’d notice if one went missing. The smallest and most accessible portable piece in our current inventory is probably a Minuteman ICBM, and selling and delivering the Brooklyn Bridge would be a thousand times easier. Plus no individual ever knows the complete arming codes. Regulations mandate that arming codes must always be split between two personnel. That’s a basic nuclear safeguard.”

“So in your opinion this is not military?”

“Unless it’s intelligence.”

“What kind of intelligence is worth a hundred million dollars?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“Should we audit our physical inventory?”

“That would take forever. And I can tell you exactly what it would find. We have a million small things missing, but no big things.”

“How do you know?”

“I would have heard.”

“The world’s most efficient grapevine,” Reacher said. “Someone just told me that.”

The table went quiet.

Reacher said, “We should watch the safe house.”

“We’d need a clandestine team,” Sinclair said. “We don’t have one in Hamburg. And it would be hard to justify bringing one in. Taking one-in-ten chances is not a policy stance.”

“Neither is running around with your hair on fire.”

“Griezman could do it for us,” Neagley said. “His guys were pretty good. They tracked us to the restaurant last night. And he owes us. He told Stuttgart about us.”

Reacher took the sketch out of his pocket. The American. The brow, the cheek bones, the deep-set eyes. The floppy hair. Recognizable. Griezman’s guys could watch for him, from strategically parked cars. With radios. Day after day. They might be successful. He said, “It would be a very big commitment. A lot of hours. We’d have to trade favors.”

Sinclair said, “What could we offer him?”

“A prostitute got strangled. He has a fingerprint. He wants us to run it through our systems.”

“We can’t do that.”

“What I told him.”

“Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of. Food, possibly. There’s a lot of him.”

The table went quiet again. Sinclair bent down and dug around in her pocketbook, and came out with her purse. It was a fat leather thing, blue in color, fastened with a tab and a popper. She scooped up her driver’s license, from the table next to her cup, and she unsnapped her purse, and made ready to slide the license into its customary slot.

Then she stopped.

She said, “I have my license. It’s right here.”

She pincered her fingertips and pulled it out from behind a plastic window.

Two licenses, side by side. Everything the same. The Commonwealth of Virginia, the number, the name, the address, the date of birth, the signature.

Even the photograph was the same.

Two licenses.

Identical.