‘Are you a friend of hers?’
‘I was hoping that might be a future development. Or not, depending on what I think of her when I meet her.’
‘You haven’t met her yet?’
‘Is she here?’
Weiss said, ‘In a cell. Since yesterday afternoon.’
‘What’s the charge?’
‘She took a bribe.’
‘From who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How much of a bribe?’
‘I’m just a jailer,’ Weiss said. ‘You know how it is. They don’t give me chapter and verse.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘Visiting hours are over.’
‘How many guests have you got tonight?’
‘Just her.’
‘So you’re not busy. And we’re off the record, right? So no one will know.’
Weiss opened up a green three-ring binder. Notes, procedures, standing orders, some of them printed, some of them handwritten. He said, ‘She seems to have been expecting you. She passed on a request through her lawyer. She mentioned you by name.’
‘What’s the request?’
‘It’s more of an instruction, really.’
‘Saying what?’
‘She doesn’t want to see you.’
Reacher said nothing.
Weiss looked down at the three-ring binder and said, ‘Quote, per the accused’s explicit request, under no circumstances is Major Jack Reacher, U.S. Army, Retired, former commander of the 110th MP, to be granted visitation privileges.’
SEVEN
GETTING OUT OF the Joint Base was only marginally quicker than getting in. Each of the three guard shacks checked ID and conducted a trunk search, to make sure Reacher was who he said he was, and hadn’t stolen anything. Then after clearing the last of the barriers he threaded his way along the same route the local bus had taken. But he stopped early, and pulled in at the kerb. There were plenty of highway ramps all around. There was I-395, spearing south and west. There was the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading north and west. There was I-66, heading due west. There was I- 395 going east, if he wanted it. All of them quiet and flowing fast. There was a big country out there. There was I-95, all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, and the West Coast, five days away, and the vast interior, empty and lonely.
Reacher moved off the kerb and drove back to the motel.
The two guys with the T-shirts were gone. Evidently they had gotten up and staggered off somewhere. Reacher left their car on the kerb two hundred yards away. He left the key in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Either it would be stolen by a couple of punks, or the two guys would come back to get it. He really didn’t care which.
He walked the last of the distance and let himself into his dismal room. He had been right. The shower was weak and strangled, and the towels were thin, and the soap was small, and the shampoo was cheap. But he cleaned up as well as he could, and then he went to bed. The mattress felt like a sack stuffed with balled-up plastic, and the sheets felt damp with disuse. But he fell asleep just fine. He set the alarm in his head for seven, and he breathed in, and he breathed out, and that was it.
Romeo dialled Juliet again and said, ‘He just tried to make contact with Turner over at Dyer. And failed, of course.’
Juliet said, ‘Our boys must have missed him at the motel.’
‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘I hope not.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Yes, you too.’
