The Enemy

now or months from now or years from now I would walk into a dark alley somewhere and a shadow would step out and a K-bar would slip between my ribs or my neck would snap with a loud crack that would echo off the bricks around me, and that would be the end of it.

“You’ve got a week,” the guy said.

“To do what?”

“To show us it wasn’t you.”

I said nothing.

“Your choice,” the guy said. “Show us, or make those seven days count. Make sure you cover all your lifetime ambitions. Don’t start a long book.”

eleven

I drove the Humvee back to my office. Left it parked right outside my door. The sergeant with the baby son had gone. The small dark corporal who I thought was from Louisiana was there in her place. The coffeepot was cold and empty. There were two message slips on my desk. The first was: Major Franz called. Please call him back. The second said: Detective Clark returned your call. I dialed Franz in California first.

“Reacher?” he said. “I asked about the Armored agenda.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t one. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.”

“But?”

“We both know that’s bullshit. There’s always an agenda.”

“So did you get anywhere?”

“Not really,” he said. “But I can prove an incoming secure fax from Germany late on December thirtieth, and I can prove significant Xeroxing activity on the thirty-first, in the afternoon. And then there was some shredding and burning on New Year’s Day, after the Kramer news broke. I spoke to the incinerator guy. One burn bag, full of paper shreds, maybe enough for about sixty sheets.”

“How secure is their secure fax line?”

“How secure do you want it to be?”

“Extremely secure. Because the only way I can make sense out of this is if the agenda was really secret. I mean, really secret. And if it was really secret, would they have put it on paper in the first place?”

“They’re XII Corps, Reacher. They’ve been living on the front line for forty years. All they’ve got is secrets.”

“How many people were scheduled to attend the conference?”

“I spoke to the mess. There were fifteen bag lunches booked.”

“Sixty pages, fifteen people, that’s a four-page agenda, then.”

“Looks that way. But they went up in smoke.”

“Not the original that was faxed from Germany,” I said.

“They’ll have burned that one over there.”

“No, my guess is Kramer was hand-carrying it when he died.”

“So where is it now?”

“Nobody knows. It got away.”

“Is it worth chasing?”

“Nobody knows,” I said again. “Except the guy who wrote it, and he’s dead. And Vassell and Coomer. They must have seen it. They probably helped with it.”

“Vassell and Coomer went back to Germany. This morning. First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about it.”

“You ever met this new guy Willard?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Try not to. He’s an asshole.”

“Thanks for the warning. What did we do to deserve him?”

“I have no idea,” I said. We hung up and I dialed the Virginia number and asked for Detective Clark. I got put on hold. Then I heard a click and a second’s worth of squad room sounds and a voice came on the line.

“Clark,” it said.

“Reacher,” I said. “U.S. Army, down at Fort Bird. Did you want me?”

“You wanted me, as I recall,” Clark said. “You wanted a progress report on Mrs. Kramer. But there isn’t any progress. We’re looking at a brick wall here. We’re looking for help, actually.”

“Nothing I can do. It’s your case.”

“I wish it wasn’t,” he said.

“What have you got?”

“Lots of nothing. The perp was in and out without maybe touching a thing. Gloves, obviously. There was a light frost on the ground. We’ve got some residual grit from the driveway and the path, but we’re not even close to a footprint.”

“Neighbors see anything?”

“Most of them were out, or drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. I’ve had people up and down the street canvassing, but nothing’s jumping out at me. There were some cars around, but there would be anyway, on New Year’s Eve, with folks heading back and forth to parties.”

“Any tire tracks on the driveway?”

“None that mean anything.”

I said nothing.

“The victim was killed with a crowbar,” Clark said. “Probably the same tool as was used on the door.”

“I figured that,” I said.

“After the attack the perp wiped it on the rug and then washed it clean in the kitchen sink. We found stuff in the pipe. No prints on the faucet. Gloves, again.”

I said nothing.

“Something else we haven’t got,” Clark said. “There’s nothing much to say your general ever really lived there.”

“Why?”

“We gave it the full-court press, forensically. We printed the whole place, we took hair and fiber from everywhere including the sink and shower traps, like I said. Everything belonged to the victim except a couple of stray prints. Bingo, we thought, but the database brought them back as the husband’s. And the ratio of hers to his suggests he was hardly there over the last five years or so. Is that usual?”

“He’ll have stayed on-post a lot,” I said. “But he should have been home for the holidays every year. The story here is that the marriage wasn’t so great.”

“People like that should just go ahead and get divorced,” Clark said. “I mean, that’s not a deal-breaker even for a general, right?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “Not anymore.”

Then he went quiet for a minute. He was thinking.

“How bad was the marriage?” he asked. “Bad enough that we should be looking at the husband for the doer?”

“The timing doesn’t work,” I said. “He was dead when it happened.”

“Was there money involved?”

“Nice house,” I said. “Probably hers.”

“So what about a paid hit, maybe set up way ahead of time?”

Now he was really clutching at straws.

“He’d have arranged it for when he was away in Germany.”