“The file is completely genuine, Reacher.”
“Can you read, senator? If so, read this for me.” I slid the folded diner check from my pocket and tossed it in his lap.
He said, “I’m not allowed to move.”
I said, “You can pick it up.”
He picked it up. It shook in his hand. He looked at the back. He looked at the front. He turned it right way up. He took a breath. He asked, “Have you read it? Do you know what it says?”
I said, “No, I haven’t looked at it. I don’t need to know. Either way I’ve got enough to nail you.”
He hesitated.
I said, “But don’t fake anything. I’ll read it right after you, just to check.”
He took a breath.
He read out, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command.”
He stopped.
He said, “I need to know this is not classified material.”
“Does it matter?”
“You’re not cleared for classified material. Neither is my son.”
“It’s not classified material,” I said. “Keep reading.”
He said, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command there was no Marine named Alice Bouton.”
I smiled.
“They invented her,” I said. “She didn’t exist. Very sloppy work. It makes me wonder if I was wrong. Maybe you watered down the subtlety in two separate stages. And maybe the car came first. Maybe it was Alice Bouton you wrote in at the last minute. Without enough time to steal a real identity.”
The old guy said, “The army had to be protected. You must understand that.”
“The army’s loss is the Marine Corps’ gain. And you’re their granddaddy too. So professionally you didn’t give a damn. It was your son you were protecting.”
“It could have been anyone in his unit. We’d do this for anyone at all.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “This was a fantastic amount of corruption. This was exceptional. This was unprecedented. This was about the two of you, and no one else.”
No answer.
I said, “By the way, it’s me who’s protecting the army.”
I didn’t want to shoot them, obviously. Not that there would be much left for the pathologist to examine, but a cautious man takes no unnecessary risks. So I dropped the gun on the seat beside me and came forward with my right hand open, and I got it flat on the back of the senator’s head, and I heaved it forward and bounced it off the dashboard rail. Pretty hard. The human arm can pitch a baseball at a hundred miles an hour, so it might get close to thirty with a human head. And the seat belt people tell us that an untethered impact at thirty miles an hour can kill you. Not that I needed the senator dead. I just needed him out of action for a minute and a half.
I moved my right hand over and got it under Reed Riley’s chin. His hands came down off his head to tear at my wrist and I replaced them with my own left hand, open, jamming down hard on the top of his head. Push and pull, up and down, left hand and right hand, like a vise. I was crushing his head. Then I slid my right hand up over his chiseled chin until the heel of my hand lodged there and I clamped my palm over his mouth. His skin was like fine sandpaper. He had shaved early that morning, and now it was close to midnight. I slid my left hand over his brow until its heel caught on the ridge below his hairline. I stretched down and clamped his nose between my finger and thumb.
And then it was all about human nature.
He thought he was suffocating. First he tried to bite my palm, but he couldn’t get his mouth open. I was clamping too hard. Jaw muscles are strong, but only when they’re closing. Opening was never an evolutionary priority. I waited him out. He clawed at my hands. I waited him out. He scrabbled in his seat and drummed his heels. I waited him out. He arched his back. I waited him out. He stretched his head up toward me.
I changed my grip and twisted hard and broke his neck.
It was a move I had learned from Leon Garber. Maybe he had seen it somewhere. Maybe he had done it somewhere. He was capable of it. The suffocation part makes it easy. They always stretch their heads up. Some kind of a bad instinct. They put their necks on the line all by themselves. Garber said it never fails, and it never has for me.
And it succeeded again a minute later, with the senator. He was weaker, but his face was slick with blood from where I had broken his nose on the dashboard rail, so the effort expended was very much the same.
Chapter 88
I got out of the car at eleven twenty-eight exactly. The train was thirty-two miles south of us. Maybe just crossing under Route 78 east of Tupelo. I closed my door but left all the windows open. I tossed the key into Reed Riley’s lap. I turned away.
And sensed a figure wide on my left.
And another, wide on my right.
Good moves by someone. I had the Beretta, and I could hit one or the other of them, but not both of them. Too much lateral travel between rounds.
I waited.
Then the figure on my right spoke.
She said, “Reacher?”
I said, “Deveraux?”
The figure on my left said, “And Munro.”
I said, “What the hell are you two doing here?”
They converged on me, and I tried to push them away from the car. I said, “Why are you here?”
Deveraux said, “Did you really think I was going to let him keep me in the diner?”
“I wish he had,” I said. “I didn’t want either of you to hear anything about this.”
“You made Riley open the windows. You wanted us to hear.”
“No, I wanted fresh air. I didn’t know you were there.”
“Why shouldn’t we hear?”
“I didn’t want you to know what they were saying about you. And I wanted Munro to go back to Germany with a clear conscience.”
Munro said, “My conscience is always clear.”
“But it’s easier to play dumb if you really don’t know the answer.”
“I never had a problem playing dumb. Some folks think I am.”
Deveraux said, “I’m glad I heard what they were saying about me.”
Eleven thirty-one. The train was twenty-nine miles south of us. We walked away, on the ties, between the rails, leaving the flat green staff car and its passengers behind us. We walked past the old water tower and made it to the crossing. We turned west. Forty yards away Deveraux’s cruiser was parked on the shoulder. Munro wouldn’t get in. He said he would walk on down to Brannan’s bar, where he had left a car he had borrowed. He said he needed to get back to Kelham as soon as possible, to square things away with the captured mortarmen, and then to hit the sack ahead of his early start the next morning. We shook hands quite formally, and I thanked him most sincerely for his help, and then he moved away and within ten paces he was lost to sight in the dark.
Deveraux drove me back to Main Street and parked outside the hotel. Eleven thirty-six in the evening. The train was twenty-four miles away.
I said, “I checked out of my room.”
She said, “I still have mine.”
“I need to make a phone call first.”
We used the office behind the reception counter. I put a dollar bill on the desk and dialed Garber’s office. Maybe the tap was still in place, and maybe it wasn’t. It made no difference to me. I got a lieutenant on the line. He said
