‘They’ll have to be quick. I won’t be sticking around for long. Not if Major Turner isn’t here. I don’t remember any other real attractions in the neighbourhood.’
‘You will be sticking around,’ Morgan said. ‘You and I are due a long and interesting conversation.’
‘About what?’
‘The evidence shows it was you who beat on Mr Rodriguez sixteen years ago.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘You’ll be provided with a lawyer. If it’s bullshit, I’m sure he’ll say so.’
‘I mean, bullshit, you and I are not going to have any kind of a long conversation. Or a lawyer. I’m a civilian, and you’re an asshole wearing pyjamas.’
‘So you’re not offering voluntary cooperation?’
‘You got that right.’
‘In which case, are you familiar with Title 10 of the United States Code?’
Reacher said, ‘Parts of it, obviously.’
‘Then you may know that one particular part of it tells us when a man of your rank leaves the army, he doesn’t become a civilian. Not immediately, and not entirely. He becomes a reservist. He has no duties, but he remains subject to recall.’
‘But for how many years?’ Reacher said.
‘You had a security clearance.’
‘I remember it well.’
‘Do you remember the papers you had to sign to get it?’
‘Vaguely,’ Reacher said. He remembered a bunch of guys in a room, all grown up and serious. Lawyers, and notaries, and seals and stamps and pens.
Morgan said, ‘There was a lot of fine print. Naturally. If you’re going to know the government’s secrets, the government is going to want some control over you. Before, during, and after.’
‘How long after?’
‘Most of that stuff stays secret for sixty years.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Morgan said. ‘The fine print didn’t say you stay a reservist for sixty years.’
‘That’s good.’
‘It said worse than that. It said indefinitely. But as it happens the Supreme Court already screwed us on that. It mandated we respect the standard three bottom-line restrictions common to all cases in Title 10.’
‘Which are?’
‘To be successfully recalled, you have to be in good health, under the age of fifty-five years, and trainable.’
Reacher said nothing.
Morgan asked, ‘How’s your health?’
‘Pretty good.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I’m a long way from fifty-five.’
‘Are you trainable?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Me too. But that’s an empirical determination we make on the job.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Completely,’ Morgan said. ‘Jack Reacher, as of this moment on this day, you are formally recalled to military service.’
Reacher said nothing.
‘You’re back in the army, major,’ Morgan said. ‘And your ass is mine.’
FOUR
THERE WAS NO big ceremony. No processing-in, or reprocessing. Just Morgan’s words, and then the room darkened a little as a guy in the corridor took up station in front of the door and blocked the light coming through the reeded glass panel. Reacher saw him, all sliced up vertically, a tall, broad-shouldered sentry, standing easy, facing away.
Morgan said, ‘I’m required to tell you there’s an appeals procedure. You’ll be given full access to it. You’ll be given a lawyer.’
Reacher said, ‘I’ll be given?’
‘It’s a matter of simple logic. You’ll be trying to appeal your way out. Which implies you’re starting out in.
