“We had no alternative. We couldn’t put it in the public domain. Journalists would have gotten it five minutes after local law enforcement. We couldn’t allow that.”
“Now it sounds like you’re telling me it belonged to a Bravo Company guy.”
“I’m not telling you anything. But believe me, we had no choice. The consequences would have been catastrophic.”
Something in his voice.
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Because right now you’re making it sound like it was Reed Riley’s own personal vehicle.”
No response.
I asked, “Was it?”
No answer.
“Was it?”
“I can’t confirm or deny,” Frazer said. “And don’t ask again. And don’t use that name again, either. Not on an unsecured line.”
“Does the officer in question have an explanation?”
“I can’t comment on that.”
I said, “This is getting out of control, Frazer. You need to rethink. The cover up is always worse than the crime. You need to stop it now.”
“Negative on that, Reacher. There’s a plan in place, and it will stay in place.”
“Does the plan include an exclusion zone around Kelham? Maybe for journalists especially?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve got circumstantial evidence here of boots on the ground outside of Kelham’s fence. Part of the circumstantial evidence is a corpse. I’m telling you, this thing is out of control now.”
“Who’s the corpse?”
“A scrappy middle-aged guy.”
“A journalist?”
“I don’t know how to recognize a journalist by sight alone. Maybe that’s a skill they teach to the infantry, but they don’t teach it to MPs.”
“No ID on him?”
“We haven’t looked yet. The doctor hasn’t finished with him.”
Frazer said, “There is no exclusion zone around Fort Kelham. That would be a major policy shift.”
“And illegal.”
“Agreed. And stupid. And counterproductive. It isn’t happening. It never has.”
“I think the Marine Corps did it once.”
“When?”
“Within the last twenty years.”
“Well, Marines. They do all kinds of things.”
“You should check it out.”
“How? You think they put it in their official history?”
“Do it obliquely. Look for an officer who got canned overnight with no other explanation. Maybe a colonel.”
I hung up with Frazer and ate my burger and drank some coffee and then I set out to do what Garber had ordered me to do mid-morning, which was to return to the wreck and destroy the offending license plate. I turned east on the Kelham road and then north on the railroad ties. I passed by the old water tower. Its elephant’s trunk was made from some kind of black rubberized canvas, gone all perished and patchy with age. The whole thing was swaying a little in a soft southerly breeze. I walked on fifty yards and then stepped off the line and headed for where I had seen the half-buried bumper.
The half-buried bumper was gone.
It was nowhere to be seen. It had been dug up and taken away. The hole its lance-like point had made had been filled with earth, which had been stamped down by boot soles and then tamped flat by the backs of shovels.
The boot prints were like nothing I had ever seen in the military. But the shovel marks could have been made by GI entrenching tools. It was difficult to be sure. Couldn’t rule it out, couldn’t rule it in.
I walked on, deeper into the debris field. It had all been tampered with. It had been sifted, and examined, and turned over, and checked, and evaluated. Almost two hundred linear yards. Maybe a thousand individual fragments had been displaced. No doubt ten times as many smaller items had been eyeballed. A wide area. A big task. A lot of work. Slow and painstaking. Six men, I figured. Maybe eight. I pictured them advancing in a line, under effective command, working with great precision.
With military precision.
I walked back the way I had come. I got to the middle of the railroad crossing and saw a car in the east, coming from the direction of Kelham. It was still far away on the straight road. Small to the eye, but not a small car. At first I thought it might be Deveraux coming back after lunch, but it wasn’t. It was a black car, and big, and fast, and smooth. A town car. A limousine. It was right out on the crown of the road, straddling the line, staying well away from the ragged shoulders. It was swaying and wafting and wandering.
I came off the track on the Kelham side and stood in the middle of the road, feet apart, arms out, big and obvious. I let the car get within a hundred yards and then I crossed my arms above my head and waved the universal distress semaphore. I knew the driver would stop. This was 1997, remember. Four and a half years before the new rules. A long time ago. A much less suspicious world.
The car slowed and stopped in front of me. I went to my right, around the hood, down the flank, toward the driver’s window, holding back a little, trying to perfect my angle. I wanted to get a look at the passenger. I figured he would be in the back, on the far side, with the front passenger seat scooted forward for leg room. I knew how these things were done. I had been in town cars before. Once or twice.
The driver’s window came down. I bent forward from the waist. Took a look. The driver was a big fat guy with the kind of belly that forced his knees wide apart. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s cap and a black jacket and a black tie. He had watery eyes. He said, “Can we help you?”
I said, “I’m sorry. My mistake. I thought you were someone else. But thanks anyway for stopping.”
“Sure,” the guy said. “No problem.” His window went back up and I stepped aside and the car drove on.
The passenger had been male, older than me, gray haired, prosperous, in a fine suit made of wool. There had been a leather briefcase on the seat beside him.
He was a lawyer, I thought.
Chapter 31
I was facing east, toward the black part of town, and there were things over there that I wanted to see again, so I set off walking in that direction. The road felt good under my feet. I guessed once upon a time during the glory days of the railroad it had been a simple dirt track, but it had been updated since then, almost certainly in the 1950s, almost certainly on the DoD’s dime. The foundation had been dug down, for armor on flat- bed transporters, and the line had been straightened, because if an army engineer sees a ruled line on a map, then a straight road is what appears on the ground. I had walked on many DoD roads. There are a lot of them, all around the world, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self confidence, when there was nothing we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.
Then I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, talking about want ads in the hamburger place near where we were based. Changes were coming, for sure, but I wasn’t unhappy. That straight road through the low Mississippi forest was helping me. The sun was out, and the air was warm. There were miles behind me, and miles ahead, and
