Lee Child - Never Go Back

‘Eleven?’

‘That’s how long it takes me to get ready in the morning.’

‘Most people would say ten.’

‘Then either they’re faster than me or imprecise.’ He closed the door on her and padded back to the bed and took his pants off again. They looked OK. Laying them out under the mattress was as close as he ever got to ironing. He walked on to the bathroom and set the shower running. He cleaned his teeth and climbed under the weak lukewarm stream and used what was left of the soap and shampoo. He dried himself with damp towels and dressed and stepped out to the lot. Eleven minutes, dead on. He was a creature of habit.

Major Sullivan had turned her car around. It was a Ford, the same model as the silver item that had driven him across Missouri many days before. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. Sullivan sat up straight and put the car in gear and eased out of the lot, slow and cautious. Her uniform skirt was at her knee. She was wearing dark nylons and plain black lace-up shoes.

Reacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’

Sullivan said, ‘You can read, I presume.’

‘First name, I mean.’

‘Does it matter? You’re going to call me Major Sullivan.’ She said it in a way that was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Nor unexpected. A personal relationship was not on the agenda. Army defence lawyers were diligent, intelligent and professional, but they were on nobody’s side but the army’s.

The diner was indeed two blocks away, but the blocks were long. A left, and then a right, and then a ragged strip mall, on the shoulder of another three-lane road. The mall featured a hardware store, and a no-name pharmacy, and a picture-framing shop, and a gun store, and a walk-in dentist. The diner stood alone at the end of the strip, in its own lot. It was a white stucco affair with the kind of inside decor that made Reacher bet the owner was Greek and there would be a million items on the menu. Which made it a restaurant, in his opinion, not a diner. Diners were lean, mean, stripped-down places, as ruthless as combat rifles.

They took a booth in a side wing, and a waitress brought coffee before being asked, which raised Reacher’s opinion of the place a little. The menu was a multi-page laminated thing almost as big as the tabletop. Reacher saw pancakes and eggs on page two, and investigated no further.

Sullivan said, ‘I’m recommending a plea bargain. They’ll ask for five years and we’ll offer one and settle on two. You can do that. Two years won’t kill you.’

Reacher said, ‘Who was Candice Dayton?’

‘Not my case. Someone else will talk to you about that.’

‘And who was Juan Rodriguez exactly?’

‘Someone you hit in the head who died from his injuries.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

‘That’s not the best thing to say in a case like this. It makes it sound like you hit so many people in the head that you can’t distinguish one from the other. It might prompt further inquiries. Someone might be tempted to draw up a list. And from what I hear it might be a very long list. The 110th was pretty much a rogue operation back then.’

‘And what is it now?’

‘A little better, perhaps. But far from outstanding.’

‘That’s your opinion?’

‘That’s my experience.’

‘Do you know anything about Susan Turner’s situation?’

‘I know her lawyer.’

‘And?’

‘She took a bribe.’

‘Do we know that for sure?’

‘There’s enough electronic data to float a battleship. She opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday, and at eleven o’clock a hundred thousand dollars showed up in it, and then she was arrested at twelve o’clock, more or less red-handed. Seems fairly open and shut to me. And fairly typical of the 110th.’

‘Sounds like you don’t love my old unit, overall. Which might be a problem. Because I’m entitled to a competent defence. Sixth Amendment, and so on. Do you think you’re the right person for the job?’

‘I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.’

‘I should see the evidence against me, at least. Don’t you think? Isn’t there something in the Sixth Amendment about that too?’

‘You didn’t do much paperwork sixteen years ago.’

‘We did some.’

‘I know,’ Sullivan said. ‘I’ve seen what there is of it. Among other things you did daily summaries. I have one that shows you heading out for an interview with Mr Rodriguez. Then I have a document from a county hospital ER showing his admission later the same day, for a head injury, among other things.’

‘And that’s it? Where’s the connection? He could have fallen down the stairs after I left. He could have been hit by a truck.’

‘The ER doctors thought he had been.’

‘That’s a weak case,’ Reacher said. ‘In fact it’s not really a case at all. I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘Yet you remember some stairs that Mr Rodriguez might have fallen down after your interview.’

‘Speculation,’ Reacher said. ‘Hypothesis. Figure of speech. Same as the truck. They’ve got nothing.’

‘They have an affidavit,’ Sullivan said. ‘Sworn out by Mr Rodriguez himself, some time later. He names you as his attacker.’

EIGHT

SULLIVAN HAULED HER briefcase up on the booth’s vinyl bench. She took out a thick file and laid it on the table. She said, ‘Happy reading.’

Which it wasn’t, of course. It was a long and sordid record of a long and sordid investigation into a long and sordid crime. The root cause was Operation Desert Shield, all the way back in late 1990, which was the build-up phase before Operation Desert Storm, which was the Gulf War the first time around, after Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded his neighbour, the independent state of Kuwait. Half a million men and women from the free world had gathered over six long months, getting ready to kick Saddam’s ass, which in the end had taken all of one hundred hours. Then the half-million men and women had gone home again.

The material wind-down had been the problem. Armies need a lot of stuff. Six months to build it up, six months to break it down. And the build-up had received a lot more in the way of care and attention than the wind-down. The wind-down had been piecemeal and messy. Dozens of nationalities had been involved. Long story short, lots of stuff had gone missing. Which was embarrassing. But the books had to be balanced. So some of the missing stuff was written off as destroyed, and some as damaged, and some as merely lost, and the books were closed.

Until certain items started showing up on the streets of America’s cities.

Sullivan asked, ‘You remember it yet?’

‘Yes,’ Reacher said. He remembered it very well. It was the kind of crime the 110th had been created to fight. Man-portable military weapons don’t end up on the streets by accident. They’re filched and diverted and stolen and sold. By persons unknown, but by persons in certain distinct categories. In logistics companies, mostly. Guys who have to move tens of thousands of tons a week with hazy bills of lading can always find ways of making a ton or two disappear, here and there, for fun and profit. Or a hundred tons. The 110th had been tasked to find out who and how and where and when. The unit was new, with its name to make, and it had gone at it hard. Reacher had spent hundreds of hours on it, and his team had spent many times more.

He said, ‘But I still don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.’

Sullivan said, ‘Flip to the end of the file.’

Which Reacher did, where he found he remembered Juan Rodriguez pretty well.

Just not as Juan Rodriguez.

The 110th had gotten a solid tip about a gangbanger in South Central LA, who went by the street name of Dog, which was alleged to be a contraction of Big Dog, because the guy was supposedly sizeable in terms of both status and physique. The DEA wasn’t interested in him, because he wasn’t part of the drug wars. But the tip said like neutrals everywhere he was making a fortune selling black-market weapons to both sides at once. The tip said he was the go-to guy. The tip said he was angling to unload eleven crates of army SAWs. SAWs were not metal things with little teeth, good for cutting wood. SAWs were Squad Automatic Weapons, which were fearsome fully automatic machine guns, with fearsome capacities and fearsome capabilities.