‘Then tell Reacher. He’s no one’s CO.’
Leach paused a beat, and weighed up the artifice. And came out in favour, apparently, because she turned to Reacher and said, ‘Sir, I have a longstanding concern about the duty captain.’
Reacher said, ‘How longstanding?’
‘Permanent.’
‘Why haven’t you done anything about it?’
‘I don’t know how. He’s a captain and I’m a sergeant.’
‘What’s the issue?’
‘He’s a doodler. He draws and scribbles all the time he’s on the phone.’
Reacher nodded.
‘I’ve seen the results,’ he said. ‘On his desk. An old legal pad.’
‘Do you know why he does it?’
‘Because he’s bored.’
‘But sometimes he’s not bored. When big news comes through. He changes. Suddenly he’s happy.’
‘No law against that.’
‘But the pen is still in his hand. He changes, and the drawings change too. Sometimes they’re not even drawings. Sometimes he jots things down. Key words.’
Reacher said nothing.
Leach said, ‘Don’t you see? He deals with classified information, which is supposed to exist in physical form in one place only, which is the Rock Creek file room. For the information or parts of the information to exist in physical form elsewhere is dead against regulations.’
Turner said, ‘Oh please, tell me.’
Reacher said, ‘He wrote the number down?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Leach said. ‘Yes, sir. He wrote the number down.’
Leach pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. It was a page from the yellow legal pad Reacher had seen. It was curled at the top, wide and generous, from several days of being rolled over. It was practically covered in black ink, from a ballpoint pen. There were shapes and whorls and boxes and machines and spirals, with occasional plain-text times and names and words, some of them heavily underlined, some of them boxed in and shaded over almost to the point of illegibility.
Leach put her fingertip on the first legible word, which was a little less than a third of the way down the page. The word was Kandahar. A proper noun. The name of a place. It had a vivid arrow sketched next to it. The arrow was pointing away from the word, emphatically. Leach said, ‘This is the last signal before the one that’s missing. This is Weeks and Edwards moving out of Kandahar, going back to Bagram on standby, as ordered. That all is still in the file room, exactly where it should be.’
Then she jumped her fingertip to the bottom third of the page, where two words stood out, separated by a dash: Hood – Days. The H of Hood was enhanced after the fact, with baroque curlicues. A man on the phone, bored. Leach said, ‘This is the next signal after the one that’s missing. It’s still in the file room too, immediately after the Kandahar thing. This is our guys checking in from Fort Hood in Texas, reporting that they expect to be all wrapped up in a matter of days.’
Then she moved her hand upward again and bracketed her fingers over the middle third of the page. She said, ‘So this part here is what corresponds to the gap in the record.’
The middle third of the page was a mass of bleak doodles, with shapes and whorls repeated endlessly, and boxes and mazes and spirals. But buried right in the centre of it all were the letters A and M, followed by a four- digit number. The whole thing had been first scrawled, and then gone over carefully, with more precise lines, squared up, and sharpened, and underlined, and then abandoned.
A.M. 3435.
Turner smiled and said, ‘He’s technically in the wrong, sergeant, but we’re going to overlook it this one time.’
A.M. 3435.
Which was a number that Reacher might have remembered pretty well, because it was mildly engaging, in the sense that 3 and 4 and 3 and 5, if raised to the powers of 3 and 4 and 3 and 5 respectively, would collectively add up to exactly 3435. Which was slightly interesting. Such numbers had been much discussed by a guy called Joseph Madachy, who once upon a time had been the owner, publisher and editor of a magazine called
‘Directly, sir?’
‘Person to person.’
‘When, sir?’
‘Right now.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘Right this minute.’
Leach pulled another piece of paper from her pocket. Smaller. A sheet from a scratch pad, torn in half. She
