space. He showed them to a matched pair of leather armchairs and stepped around his desk. Sat down and squared the files on his blotter, one on top of the other. Opened the first, which was Leon’s, and started skimming.
It took him ten minutes to see what he needed. Reacher and Jodie sat and gazed out of the window. The city baked under a white sun. Conrad finished with the files and studied the names on the request forms. Then he glanced up.
“Two very fine records,” he said. “Very, very impressive. And I get the point. You’re obviously Jack-none- Reacher himself, and I’m guessing Mrs. Jodie Jacob here is the Jodie Garber referred to in the file as the general’s daughter. Am I right?”
Jodie nodded and smiled.
“I thought so,” Conrad said. “And you think being family, so to speak, will buy you better and faster access to the archive?”
Reacher shook his head solemnly.
“It never crossed our minds,” he said. “We know all access requests are treated with absolute equality.”
Conrad smiled, and then he laughed out loud.
“You kept a straight face,” he said. “Very, very good. You play much poker? You damn well should, you know. So how can I help you folks?”
“We need what you’ve got on a Victor Truman Hobie,” Reacher said.
“Vietnam?”
“You familiar with him?” Reacher asked, surprised.
Conrad looked blank. “Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn’t he? Which makes him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf.”
Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.
“We’ll work in here,” Conrad said. “My pleasure.”
He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, bypassing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.
“That was quick,” Jodie said.
“Actually it was a little slow,” Conrad said back. “Think about it from the private’s point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army’s normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me.”
Victor Hobie’s file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.
“Requests by telephone,” he said. “General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?”
“That’s what we hope to find out,” Reacher said.
A combat soldier has a thick file, especially a combat soldier who did his fighting thirty years ago. Three decades is long enough for every report and every note to end up in exactly the right place. Victor Hobie’s paperwork was a compressed mass about two inches deep. The old furred jacket was molded tight around it. It reminded Reacher of Costello’s black leather wallet, which he’d seen in the Keys bar. He hitched his chair closer to Jodie’s and closer to the front edge of Conrad’s desk. Conrad laid the file down and reversed it on the shiny wood and opened it up, like he was displaying a rare treasure to interested connoisseurs.
MARILYN’S INSTRUCTIONS HAD been precise, and Sheryl followed them to the letter. The first step was get treatment. She went to the desk and then waited on a hard plastic chair in the triage bay. The St. Vincent’s ER was less busy than it sometimes is and she was seen within ten minutes by a woman doctor young enough to be her daughter.
“How did this happen?” the doctor asked.
“I walked into a door,” Sheryl said.
The doctor led her to a curtained area and sat her down on the examination table. Started checking the reflex responses in her limbs.
“A door? You absolutely sure about that?”
Sheryl nodded. Stuck to her story. Marilyn was counting on her to do that.
“It was half-open. I turned around, just didn’t see it.”
The doctor said nothing and shone a light into Sheryl’s left eye, then her right.
“Any blurring of your vision?”
Sheryl nodded. “A little.”
“Headache?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
The doctor paused and studied the admission form.
“OK, we need X rays of the facial bones, obviously, but I also want a full skull film and a CAT scan. We need to see what exactly happened in there. Your insurance is good, so I’m going to get a surgeon to take a look at you right away, because if you’re going to need reconstructive work it’s a lot better to start on that sooner rather than later, OK? So you need to get into a gown and lie down. Then I’ll put you on a painkiller to help with the headache.”
Sheryl heard Marilyn insist
“I need to get to a phone,” she said, worried.
“We can call your husband, if you want,” the doctor said, neutrally.
“No, I’m not married. It’s a lawyer. I need to call somebody’s lawyer.”
The doctor looked at her and shrugged.
“OK, down the hall. But be quick.”
Sheryl walked to the bank of phones opposite the triage bay. She called the operator and asked for collect, like Marilyn had told her to. Repeated the number she’d memorized. The phone was answered on the second ring.
“Forster and Abelstein,” a bright voice said. “How may we help you?”
“I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Chester Stone,” Sheryl said. “I need to speak with his attorney.”
“That would be Mr. Forster himself,” the bright voice said. “Please hold.”
While Sheryl was listening to the hold music, the doctor was twenty feet away, at the main desk, also making a call. Her call featured no music. Her call was to the NYPD’s Domestic Violence Unit.
“This is St. Vincent’s,” she was saying. ”I’ve got another one for you. This one says she walked into a damn door. Won’t even admit she’s married, much less he’s beating on her. You can come on down and talk to her anytime you want.”
THE FIRST ITEM in the file was Victor Hobie’s original application to join the Army. It was brown at the edges and crisp with age, handwritten in the same neat left-handed schoolboy script they had seen in the letters home to Brighton. It listed a summary of his education, his desire to fly helicopters, and not very much else. On the face of it, not an obvious rising star. But around that time for every one boy stepping up to volunteer, there were two dozen others buying one-way tickets on the Greyhound to Canada, so the Army recruiters had grabbed Hobie with both hands and sent him straight to the doctor.
He had been given a flight medical, which was a tougher examination than standard, especially concerning eyesight and balance. He had passed A-1. Six feet one inch, 170 pounds, twenty-twenty vision, good lung capacity, free of infectious diseases. The medical was dated early in the spring, and Reacher could picture the boy, pale from the New York winter, standing in his boxers on a bare wooden floor with a tape measure tight around his chest.
Next item in the file showed he was given travel vouchers and ordered to report to Fort Dix in two weeks’ time. The following batch of paperwork originated from down there. It started with the form he signed on his arrival,
