The Enemy

She said nothing.

"You should have left it to me," I said.

"You weren’t doing anything."

"I’m glad you thought so," I said. "That was the plan."

"What?"

"I’m going to take Willard on," I said. "It’s going to be him or me."

She said nothing.

"I work for the army," I said. "Not for Willard. I believe in the army. I don’t believe in Willard. I’m not going to let him trash everything."

She said nothing.

"I told him not to make an enemy out of me. But he didn’t listen."

"Big step," she said.

"One that you already took," I said.

"Why did you cut me out?"

"Because if I blow it I don’t want to take anyone down with me."

"You were protecting me."

I nodded.

"Well, don’t," she said. "I can think for myself."

I said nothing.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Twenty-nine," I said.

"So next year you’ll be thirty. You’ll be a thirty-year-old white man with a dishonorable discharge from the only job you’ve ever had. And whereas I’m young enough to start over, you’re not. You’re institutionalized, you’ve got no social skills, you’ve never been in the civilian world, and you’re good for nothing. So maybe it should be you laying in the weeds, not me."

I said nothing.

"You should have talked it over," she said.

"It’s a personal choice," I said.

"I already made my personal choice," she said. "Seems like you know that now. Seems like Detective Clark accidentally ratted me out."

"That’s exactly what I mean," I said. "One stray phone call and you could be out on the street. This is a high-stakes game."

"And I’m right here in it with you, Reacher. So bring me up to speed."

Five minutes later she knew what I knew. All questions, no answers.

"Garber’s signature was a forgery," she said.

I nodded.

"So what about Carbone’s, on the complaint? Is that forged too?"

"Maybe," I said. I took the copy that Willard had given me out of my desk drawer. Smoothed it out on the blotter and passed it across to her. She folded it neatly and put it in her inside pocket.

"I’ll get the writing checked," she said. "Easier for me than you, now."

"Nothing’s easy for either of us now," I said. "You need to be very clear about that. So you need to be very clear about what you’re doing."

"I’m clear," she said. "Bring it on."

I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent progress, of a sort, in her life.

"Thank you," I said. "For being on my side."

"I’m not on your side," she said. "You’re on mine."

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal, calling from his desk outside my door.

"North Carolina State Police on the line," he said. "They want a duty officer. You want to take it?"

"Not really," I said. "But I guess I better."

There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an I-95 patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S. Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase was currently being held, in case I was interested in having someone sent out to pick it up.

Chapter Twelve

Summer drove. We took the Humvee I had left at the curb. We didn’t want to take time to sign out a sedan. It cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn’t one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tires were whining loud. It was four o’clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark.

We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.

We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors. Summer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built for function and floored with linoleum, which was shined every night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.

There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He didn’t ask for ID or inquire why we were there. He didn’t speculate as to why General Kramer hadn’t shown up himself. He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store’s name printed across it in red.

The briefcase itself matched Kramer’s suit carrier in every way. Same color, same design, same age, same level of wear and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport. There was a paper-clipped itinerary three sheets thick. There was a hardcover book.

There was no conference agenda.

I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter. Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

"Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?" I asked.

The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer, not me.

"I put it in the bag myself," he said. "I wanted to keep it clean. I wasn’t sure how soon someone would get here."

"Where exactly was it found?" I asked him.

He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina’s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia. The guy’s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively.

"Here," he said. "Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now."

"Any way of knowing how long it had been there?"

"Not really," he said. "We’re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month."