Never Go Back (37 page)

‘Reacher, I’m a lawyer, not a dialogue coach. I need facts, not the way people make things sound.’

‘And I’m an interrogator, and an interrogator learns plenty by listening. He asked me what my interest was, as if he was wondering what possible interest was there left to have? Hadn’t all possible interests been exhausted years ago?’

‘Reacher, it’s the middle of the night. Do you have a point?’

‘Hang in there. It’s not like you have anything else to do. You won’t get back to sleep now. The point is, then he said, haven’t I suffered enough? And simultaneously his wife started yelling and screaming and throwing us out the door. They’re living in reduced circumstances, and they’re very unhappy about it. And the Big Dog was a hot button. Like a defining event, years ago, with ongoing negative consequences. That’s the only way to make sense of the language. So now I’m wondering whether this whole thing was actually litigated at the time, all those years ago. And maybe the lawyer got his butt kicked. And maybe he got his first ethics violation. Which might have been the first step on a rocky road that terminated four years ago, when he got disbarred. Such that neither he nor his wife can bear to hear about that case ever again, because it was the start of all their troubles. Haven’t I suffered enough? As in, I’ve had sixteen years of hell because of that case, and now you want to put me through it all again?’

‘Reacher, what are you smoking? You didn’t remember the case. Therefore you didn’t litigate it. Or you’d remember it. And if it was litigated sixteen years ago, to the point where the lawyer got his butt kicked, why are they relitigating it now?’

‘Are they relitigating it now?’

‘I’m about to hang up.’

‘What would happen if someone searched
Reacher, complaint against
, and ordered up the Big Dog affidavit, and fed it into the system at unit level? With a bit of smoke and mirrors about how serious it was?’

No answer.

Reacher said, ‘It would feel exactly like a legal case, wouldn’t it? We’d assemble a file, and we’d all start preparing and strategizing, and we’d wait for a conference with the prosecutor, and we’d hope our strategy survived it.’

No answer.

Reacher said, ‘Have you had a conference with the prosecutor?’

Sullivan said, ‘No.’

‘Maybe there is no prosecutor. Maybe this is a one-sided illusion. Designed to work for one minute only. As in, I was supposed to see your file and run like hell.’

‘It can’t be an illusion. I’m getting pressure from the Secretary’s office.’

‘Says who? Maybe you’re getting messages, but you don’t really know where they’re coming from. Do you even know the Big Dog is dead? Have you seen a death certificate?’

‘This is crazy talk.’

‘Maybe. But humour me. Suppose it really was litigated sixteen years ago. Without my knowledge. Perhaps one of hundreds, with a specimen case involving some other guy, but I was in the supporting cast. Like class action. Maybe they started some aggressive new policy against ambulance chasers. Which might account for the guy getting his butt kicked so bad. What kind of paperwork would we have seen?’

‘If it really was litigated? A lot of paperwork. You don’t want to know.’

‘So if I searched
Reacher, defence against complaint
, what would I find?’

‘Eventually you’d find everything they tagged as defence material, I suppose. Hundreds of pages, probably, in a big case.’

‘Is it like shopping on a web site? Does it link from one thing to another?’

‘No, I told you. It’s a clunky old thing. It was designed by people over thirty. This is the army, don’t forget.’

‘OK, so if I was worried about a guy called Reacher, and I wanted to scare him away, and I was in a big hurry, I could search the archive for
Reacher, complaint against
, and I could find the Big Dog’s affidavit, and I could put it back in circulation, while being completely unaware it was only a small part of a much bigger file. Because of the way the search function works. Is that correct?’

‘Hypothetically.’

‘Which is your job, starting right now. You have to test that hypothesis. See if you can find any trace of a bigger file. Search under all the tags you can think of.’

They got in the car and drove east on the freeway, back to Vineland Avenue, and then south, past the girl’s neighbourhood, to the coach diner. She was gone, inevitably, and so was the blonde waitress, and so were all the other dinner-time customers. Rush hour was definitely over. Late evening had started. There were three men in separate booths, drinking coffee, and there was a woman eating pie. The brunette waitress was talking to the counter man. Reacher and Turner stood at the door, and the waitress broke away and greeted them, and Reacher said, ‘I’m sorry, but I had to run before. There was an emergency. I didn’t pay for my cup of coffee.’

The waitress said, ‘It was taken care of.’

‘Who by? Not the kid, I hope. That wouldn’t be right.’

‘It was taken care of,’ the woman said again.

‘It’s all good,’ the counter man said. Arthur. He was wiping his counter.

‘How much is a cup of coffee?’ Reacher asked him.

‘Two bucks and a penny,’ the guy said. ‘With tax.’

‘Good to know,’ Reacher said. He dug out two bills and a lone cent, and he put them on the counter, and he said, ‘To return the favour, to whoever it was. Very much appreciated. What goes around comes around.’

‘OK,’ the guy said. He left the money where it was.

‘She told me she came in often.’

‘Who did?’

‘Samantha. The kid.’

The guy nodded. ‘She’s pretty much a regular.’

‘Tell her I was sorry I had to run. I don’t want her to think I was rude.’

‘She’s a kid. What do you care?’

‘She thinks I work for the government. I don’t want to give her a negative impression. She’s a bright girl. Public service is something she could think about.’

‘Who do you work for really?’

‘The government,’ Reacher said. ‘But not the part she guessed.’

‘I’ll pass on the message.’

‘How long have you known her?’

‘Longer than I’ve known you. So if there’s a choice between her privacy and your questions, I guess I’m going to go with her privacy.’

‘I understand,’ Reacher said. ‘I would expect nothing less. But would you tell her one more thing for me?’

‘Which would be what?’

‘Tell her to remember what I said about the hexagons.’

‘The hexagons?’

‘The little hexagons,’ Reacher said. ‘Tell her it’s important.’

They got back in the car and they started it up, but they didn’t go anywhere. They sat in the diner’s lot, their faces lit up pink and blue by the Art Deco neon, and Turner said, ‘Do you think she’s safe?’

Reacher said, ‘She’s got the 75th MP and the FBI staring at her bedroom window all night long, both of them specifically on the alert for an intruder, which they expect to be me, except it won’t be, because I’m not going there, and neither is Shrago, in my opinion, because he knows what I know. Neither one of us could get in that house tonight. So, yes, I think she’s safe. Almost by accident.’

‘Then we should go find ourselves a place to stay. Got a preference?’

‘You’re the CO.’

‘I’d like to go to the Four Seasons. But we should keep radio silence on the credit cards, as far as our overnight location is concerned. So it’s cash only, which means motels only, which means we should go back to that hot-sheets place in Burbank, where we met Emily the hooker. All part of the authentic experience.’

‘Like driving a car on Mulholland Drive.’

‘Or shooting a man on Mulholland Drive. That’s in the movies too.’

‘You OK?’

She said, ‘If I have a problem, you’ll be the first to know.’

The motel was certainly authentic. It had a wire grille over the reception window, and cash was all it took. The room looked like it should feel cold and damp, but it was in Los Angeles, where nothing was cold and damp. Instead it felt brittle and papery, as if it had been baked too long. But it was functional, and not far from comfortable.

The car was parked five rooms away. No place else to hide it. But safe enough, even if Shrago saw it. He would watch the room in front of it, and then he would break in, and find the wrong people, and assume the car was one step to the side of where it should have been, but left or right was a fifty-fifty chance, which meant if he called it wrong he would have committed three separate burglaries before he even laid eyes on the target, and suppose the car was two steps from where it should have been? How many rooms was that? His head would explode long before he got to five steps. His tiny ears would ping off into the far distance, like shrapnel.

Reacher figured he had about four hours to sleep. He was sure Edmonds was busting a gut in Virginia, on East Coast time, gathering information, so she could call early and wake him up.

FIFTY-SEVEN

EDMONDS’ FIRST CALL
came in at two in the morning local time, which was five o’clock Eastern. Reacher and Turner both woke up. Reacher put the open phone between their pillows, and they rolled over forehead to forehead, so they could both hear. Edmonds said, ‘You asked me earlier, about Jason Kenneth Rickard, and a guy called Shrago. Got a pen?’

Reacher said, ‘No.’

‘Then listen carefully. They’re the same as the first two. They’re all deployed with the same company at Fort Bragg. Three teams to a squad, and they’re a team. What that means exactly, I don’t know. Possibly this is skilled work, and they learn to rely on each other.’

‘And to keep their mutual secrets,’ Reacher said. ‘Tell me about Shrago.’

‘Ezra-none-Shrago, staff sergeant and team leader. Thirty-six years old. Hungarian grandparents. He’s been in the unit since the start of the war. He was in and out of Afghanistan for five years, and since then he’s been based at home, exclusively.’

‘What’s up with his ears?’

‘He was captured.’

‘In North Carolina or Afghanistan?’

‘By the Taliban. He was gone three days.’

‘Why didn’t they cut his head off?’

‘Probably for the same reason we didn’t shoot Emal Zadran. They have politicians too.’

‘When was this?’

‘Five years ago. They gave him a permanent billet at home after that. And he hasn’t been back to Afghanistan since.’

Reacher closed the phone, and Turner said, ‘I don’t like that at all. Why would he sell arms to the people who cut his ears off?’

‘He doesn’t make the deals. He’s just a cog in a machine. They don’t care what he thinks. They want his muscle, not his opinions.’

‘We should offer him immunity. We could turn him on a dime.’

‘He beat Moorcroft half to death.’

‘I said offer, not give. We could stab him in the back afterwards.’

‘So call him, and make the pitch. He’s still on speed dial, in Rickard’s phone.’

Turner got up and found the right cell, and got back in bed and dialled, but the phone company told her the number she wanted was blocking her calls.

‘Efficient,’ she said. ‘They’re cleaning house as they go, minute by minute. No more Mr Rickard. Or Baldacci, or Lozano. All consigned to history.’

‘We’ll manage without Shrago’s input,’ Reacher said. ‘We’ll figure it out. Maybe in a dream, about five minutes from now.’

She smiled, and said, ‘OK, goodnight again.’

Juliet called Romeo, because some responsibilities were his, and he said, ‘Shrago has located their car. It’s at a motel south of the Burbank airport.’

Romeo said, ‘But?’

‘Shrago feels it’s likely not in front of the right room, as a basic security measure. He’d have to check ten or a dozen, and he feels he won’t get away with that. One or two, maybe, but no more. And there’s no point in disabling the car, because they’d only rent another, on one of our own credit cards.’

‘Can’t he get to the girl?’

‘Not before she leaves the house again. It’s buttoned up tight.’

Romeo said, ‘There’s activity in the legal archive. A lone user, with JAG access, searching for something. Which is unusual, at this time of night.’

‘Captain Edmonds?’

‘No, she’s in the HRC system. She just took a good look at Rickard and Shrago, about an hour ago. They’re closing in.’

‘On Shrago, perhaps. But not on us. There’s no direct link.’

‘The link is through Zadran. It’s like a neon sign. So tell Shrago to get out of Burbank. Tell him to wait on the girl. Tell him we’re counting on him, and tell him this mess has to be cleaned up first thing in the morning, whatever it takes.’

Edmonds’ second call came at five in the morning local time, which was eight in the East. Reacher and Turner did the forehead-to-forehead thing again, and Edmonds said, ‘OK, here’s an update. Treadmill time is over, and office hours are yet to begin, so all I have is rumour and gossip, but in D.C. that’s usually more accurate than anything else.’

Reacher said, ‘And?’

‘I spoke to eight people either in or associated with the office of the Secretary.’

‘And?’

‘Rodriguez or Juan Rodriguez or Dog or Big Dog is ringing no bells. No one recognizes the name, no one is aware of an active case, no one has passed a message to Major Sullivan, and no one is aware of a senior officer doing so either.’

‘Interesting.’

‘But not definitive. Eight people is a small sample, and the feeling is a sixteen-year-old embarrassment wouldn’t be given much bandwidth. We’ll know more in an hour, when everyone is back in the office.’

‘Thank you, captain.’

‘Sleeping well?’

‘We’re in a motel that rents by the hour. We’re getting our money’s worth. Was Ezra Shrago offered counselling after the thing with his ears in Afghanistan?’

‘Psychiatric notes are eyes-only.’

‘But I’m sure you read them anyway.’

‘He was offered counselling, and he accepted, which was considered unusual. Most people seem to do it the army way, which is to bottle it up until they collapse with a nervous breakdown. But Shrago was a willing patient.’

‘And?’

‘As of three years after the incident he still retained strong feelings of anger, resentment, humiliation and hatred. The home deployment was pre-emptive, just as much as therapeutic. The feeling was he couldn’t be trusted among the native population. He was an atrocity waiting to happen. The notes say he hates the Taliban with a passion.’