The Affair: A Reacher Novel Read online

  I was looking at them, and they were looking at me, but no one spoke. I looped around them and headed deeper into the building. I used the E ring counterclockwise and turned left at the first radial hallway.

  The four guys followed.

  They stayed about sixty feet behind me, close enough to keep me in sight, far enough back not to crowd me. A maximum seven minutes between any two points. I was the meat in a sandwich. I figured there would be another crew waiting outside 3C315, or as close to it as they decided to let me get. I was heading straight for them. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  I used some stairs on the D ring and went up two flights to the third floor. I changed to a clockwise direction, just for the fun of it, and passed radial corridor number five, and then four. The D ring was busy. People were bustling from place to place with armfuls of khaki files. Blank-eyed men and women in uniform were stepping smartly. The place was congested. I dodged and sidestepped and kept on going. People looked at me every step of the way. The hair, and the beard. I stopped at a water fountain and bent down and took a drink. People passed me by. Sixty feet behind me the four spare DPS guys were nowhere to be seen. But then, they didn’t really need to tail me. They knew where I was going, and they knew what time I was supposed to get there.

  I straightened up and got going again and turned right into radial number three. I made it to the C ring. The air smelled of uniform wool and linoleum polish and very faintly of cigars. The paint on the walls was thick and institutional. I looked left and right. There were people in the corridor, but no big cluster outside bay fifteen. Maybe they were waiting for me inside. I was already five minutes late.

  I didn’t turn. I stuck with radial three and walked all the way across the B ring to the A ring. The heart of the building, where the radial corridors finish. Or start, depending on your rank and perspective. Beyond the A ring is nothing but a five-acre pentagonal open courtyard, like the hole in an angular doughnut. Back in the day people called it Ground Zero, because they figured the Soviets had their biggest and best missile permanently targeted on it, like a big fat bull’s-eye. I think they were wrong. I think the Soviets had their five biggest and best missiles targeted on it, just in case strikes one through four didn’t work. The smart money says the Soviets didn’t always get what they paid for, either.

  I waited in the A ring until I was ten minutes late. Better to keep them guessing. Maybe they were already searching. Maybe the four spare guys were already getting their butts kicked for losing me. I took another big breath and pushed off a wall and tracked back along radial three, across the B ring, to the C. I turned without breaking stride and headed for bay fifteen.

  Chapter

  3

  There was no one waiting outside bay fifteen. No special crew. No one at all. The corridor was entirely empty, too, both ways, as far as the eye could see. And quiet. I guessed everyone else was already where they wanted to be. Twelve o’clock meetings were in full swing.

  Bay fifteen’s door was open. I knocked on it once, as a courtesy, as an announcement, as a warning, and then I stepped inside. Originally most of the Pentagon’s office space was open plan, boxed off by file cabinets and furniture into bays, hence the name, but over the years walls had gone up and private spaces had been created. Frazer’s billet in 3C315 was pretty typical. It was a small square space with a window without a view, and a rug on the floor, and photographs on the walls, and a metal DoD desk, and a chair with arms and two without, and a credenza and a double-wide storage unit.

  And it was a small square space entirely empty of people, apart from Frazer himself in the chair behind the desk. He looked up at me and smiled.

  He said, “Hello, Reacher.”

  I looked left and right. No one there. No one at all. There was no private bathroom. No large closet. No other door of any kind. The corridor behind me was empty. The giant building was quiet.

  Frazer said, “Close the door.”

  I closed the door.

  Frazer said, “Sit down, if you like.”

  I sat down.

  Frazer said, “You’re late.”

  “I apologize,” I said. “I got hung up.”

  Frazer nodded. “This place is a nightmare at twelve o’clock. Lunch breaks, shift changes, you name it. It’s a zoo. I never plan to go anywhere at twelve o’clock. I just hunker down in here.” He was about five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds, wide in the shoulders, solid through the chest, red-faced, black-haired, in his middle forties. Plenty of old Scottish blood in his veins, filtered through the rich earth of Tennessee, which was where he was from. He had been in Vietnam as a teenager and the Gulf as an older man. He had combat pips all over him like a rash. He was an old-fashioned warrior, but unfortunately for him he could talk and smile as well as he could fight, so he had been posted to Senate Liaison, because the guys with the purse strings were now the real enemy.

  He said, “So what have you got for me?”

  I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.

  He said, “Good news, I hope.”

  “No news,” I said.

  “Nothing?”

  I nodded. “Nothing.”

  “You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”

  “I don’t have the name.”

  “Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”

  I paused a beat.

  “It was a shortcut,” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “I put it around that I had the name. I wondered who might crawl out from under a rock, to shut me up.”

  “And no one has?”

  “Not so far. But ten minutes ago I thought it was a different story. There were four spare men in the lobby. In DPS uniforms. They followed me. I thought they were an arrest team.”

  “Followed you where?”

  “Around the E ring to the D. Then I lost them on the stairs.”

  Frazer smiled again.

  “You’re paranoid,” he said. “You didn’t lose them. I told you, there are shift changes at twelve o’clock. They come in on the Metro like everyone else, they shoot the shit for a minute or two, and then they head for their squad room. It’s on the B ring. They weren’t following you.”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “There are always groups of them hanging around. There are always groups of everyone hanging around. We’re seriously overmanned. Something is going to have to be done. It’s inevitable. That’s all I hear about on the Hill, all day, every day. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We should all bear that in mind. People like you, especially.”

  “Like me?” I said.

  “There are lots of majors in this man’s army. Too many, probably.”

  “Lots of colonels too,” I said.

  “Fewer colonels than majors.”

  I said nothing.

  He asked, “Was I on your list of things that might crawl out from under a rock?”

  You were the list, I thought.

  He said, “Was I?”

  “No,” I lied.

  He smiled again. “Good answer. If I had a beef with you, I’d have you killed down there in Mississippi. Maybe I’d come on down and take care of it myself.”

  I said nothing. He looked at me for a moment, and then a smile started on his face, and the smile turned into a laugh, which he tried very hard to suppress, but he couldn’t. It came out like a bark, like a sneeze, and he had to lean back and look up at the ceiling.

  I said, “What?”

  His gaze came back level. He was still smiling. He said, “I’m sorry. I was thinking about that phrase people use. You know, they say, that guy? He couldn’t even get arrested.”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “You look terrible. There are barbershops here, you know. You should go use one.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to look like this.”

  Five days earlier my hair had been five days shorter, but apparently still long enough to
attract attention. Leon Garber, who at that point was once again my commanding officer, summoned me to his office, and because his message read in part without, repeat, without attending to any matters of personal grooming I figured he wanted to strike while the iron was hot and dress me down right then, while the evidence was still in existence, right there on my head. And that was exactly how the meeting started out. He asked me, “Which army regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance?”

  Which I thought was a pretty rich question, coming from him. Garber was without a doubt the scruffiest officer I had ever seen. He could take a brand new Class A coat from the quartermaster’s stores and an hour later it would look like he had fought two wars in it, then slept in it, then survived three bar fights in it.

  I said, “I can’t remember which regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance.”

  He said, “Neither can I. But I seem to recall that whichever, the hair and the fingernail standards and the grooming policies are in chapter one, section eight. I can picture it all quite clearly, right there on the page. Can you remember what it says?”

  I said, “No.”

  “It tells us that hair grooming standards are necessary to maintain uniformity within a military population.”

  “Understood.”

  “It mandates those standards. Do you know what they are?”

  “I’ve been very busy,” I said. “I just got back from Korea.”

  “I heard Japan.”

  “That was a stopover on the way.”

  “How long?”

  “Twelve hours.”

  “Do they have barbers in Japan?”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “Do Japanese barbers take more than twelve hours to cut a man’s hair?”

  “I’m sure they don’t.”

  “Chapter one, section eight, paragraph two, says the hair on the top of the head must be neatly groomed, and that the length and the bulk of the hair may not be excessive or present a ragged, unkempt, or extreme appearance. It says that instead, the hair must present a tapered appearance.”

  I said, “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It says a tapered appearance is one where the outline of the soldier’s hair conforms to the shape of his head, curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of his neck.”

  I said, “I’ll get it taken care of.”

  “These are mandates, you understand. Not suggestions.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Section two says that when the hair is combed, it will not fall over the ears or the eyebrows, and it will not touch the collar.”

  “OK,” I said again.

  “Would you not describe your current hairstyle as ragged, unkempt, or extreme?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “And how are you doing in relation to the thing with the comb and the ears and the eyebrows and the collar?”

  “I’ll get it taken care of,” I said again.

  Then Garber smiled, and the tone of the meeting changed completely.

  He asked, “How fast does your hair grow, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A normal kind of speed, I suppose. Same as anyone else, probably. Why?”

  “We have a problem,” he said. “Down in Mississippi.”

  Chapter

  4

  Garber said the problem down in Mississippi concerned a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Janice May Chapman. She was a problem because she was dead. She had been unlawfully killed a block behind the main street of a town called Carter Crossing.

  “Was she one of ours?” I asked.

  “No,” Garber said. “She was a civilian.”

  “So how is she a problem?”

  “I’ll get to that,” Garber said. “But first you need the story. It’s the back of beyond down there. Northeastern corner of the state, over near the Alabama line, and Tennessee. There’s a north–south railroad track, and a little backwoods dirt road that crosses it east–west near a place that has a spring. The locomotives would stop there to take on water, and the passengers would get out to eat, so the town grew up. But since the end of World War Two there’s only been about two trains a day, both freight, no passengers, so the town was on its way back down again.”

  “Until?”

  “Federal spending. You know how it was. Washington couldn’t let large parts of the South turn into the Third World, so we threw some money down there. A lot of money, actually. You ever notice how the folks who talk loudest about small government always seem to live in the states with the biggest subsidies? Small government would kill them dead.”

  I asked, “What did Carter Crossing get?”

  Garber said, “Carter Crossing got an army base called Fort Kelham.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ve heard of Kelham. Never knew where it was, exactly.”

  “It used to be huge,” Garber said. “Ground was broken in about 1950, I think. It could have ended up as big as Fort Hood, but ultimately it was too far east of I-55 and too far west of I-65 to be useful. You have to drive a long way on small roads just to get there. Or maybe Texas politicians have louder voices than Mississippi politicians. Either way, Hood got the attention and Kelham withered on the vine. It struggled on until the end of Vietnam, and then they turned it into a Ranger school. Which it still is.”

  “I thought Ranger training was at Benning.”

  “The 75th sends their best guys to Kelham for a time. It’s not far. Something to do with the terrain.”

  “The 75th is a special ops regiment.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Are there enough special ops Rangers in training to keep a whole town going?”

  “Almost,” Garber said. “It’s not a very big town.”

  “So what are we saying? An Army Ranger killed Janice May Chapman?”

  “I doubt it,” Garber said. “It was probably some local hillbilly thing.”

  “Do they have hillbillies in Mississippi? Do they even have hills?”

  “Backwoodsmen, then. They have a lot of trees.”

  “Whichever, why are we even talking about it?”

  At that point Garber got up and came out from behind his desk and crossed the room and closed the door. He was older than me, naturally, and much shorter, but about as wide. And he was worried. It was rare for him to close his door, and rarer still for him to go more than five minutes without a tortured little homily or aphorism or slogan, designed to sum up a point he was trying to make in an easily remembered form. He stepped back and sat down again with a hiss of air from his cushion, and he asked, “Have you ever heard of a place called Kosovo?”

  “Balkans,” I said. “Like Serbia and Croatia.”

  “There’s going to be a war there. Apparently we’re going to try to stop it. Apparently we’ll probably fail, and we’ll end up just bombing the shit out of one side or the other instead.”

  “OK,” I said. “Always good to have a plan B.”

  “The Serbo-Croat thing was a disaster. Like Rwanda. A total embarrassment. This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake.”

  “Seemed to me to fit right in with the twentieth century.”

  “It’s supposed to be different now.”

  “Wait for the twenty-first. That’s my advice.”

  “We’re not going to wait for anything. We’re going to try to do Kosovo right.”

  “Well, good luck with that. Don’t come to me for help. I’m just a policeman.”

  “We’ve already got people over there. You know, intermittently, in and out.”

  I asked, “Who?”

  Garber said, “Peacekeepers.”

  “What, the United Nations?”

  “Not exactly. Our guys only.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You didn’t know because nobody is supposed to know.”

  “How long has this been happening?”

  “Twelve months.”

  I said, “We’ve been deploy
ing ground troops to the Balkans in secret for a whole year?”

  “It’s not such a big deal,” Garber said. “It’s about reconnaissance, partly. In case something has to happen later. But mostly it’s about calming things down. There are a lot of factions over there. If anyone asks, we always say it was the other guy who invited us. That way everyone thinks everyone else has got our backing. It’s a deterrent.”

  I asked, “Who did we send?”

  Garber said, “Army Rangers.”

  * * *

  Garber told me that Fort Kelham was still operating as a legitimate Ranger training school, but in addition was being used to house two full companies of grown-up Rangers, both hand picked from the 75th Ranger Regiment, designated Alpha Company and Bravo Company, who deployed covertly to Kosovo on a rotating basis, a month at a time. Kelham’s relative isolation made it a perfect clandestine location. Not, Garber said, that we should really feel the need to hide anything. Very few personnel were involved, and it was a humanitarian mission driven by the purest of motives. But Washington was Washington, and some things were better left unsaid.

  I asked, “Does Carter Crossing have a police department?”

  Garber said, “Yes, it does.”

  “So let me guess. They’re getting nowhere with their homicide investigation, so they want to go fishing. They want to list some Kelham personnel in their suspect pool.”

  Garber said, “Yes, they do.”

  “Including members of Alpha Company and Bravo Company.”

  Garber said, “Yes.”

  “They want to ask them all kinds of questions.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we can’t afford to let them ask anyone any questions, because we have to hide all the covert comings and goings.”

  “Correct.”

  “Do they have probable cause?”