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"It could have been anyone in his unit. We'd do this for anyone at all. "
"Bullshit," I said. "This was a fantastic amount of corruption. This was exceptional. This was unprecedented. This was about the two of you, and no one else. "
No answer.
I said, "By the way, it's me who's protecting the army. "
I didn't want to shoot them, obviously. Not that there would be much left for the pathologist to examine, but a cautious man takes no unnecessary risks. So I dropped the gun on the seat beside me and came forward with my right hand open, and I got it flat on the back of the senator's head, and I heaved it forward and bounced it off the dashboard rail. Pretty hard. The human arm can pitch a baseball at a hundred miles an hour, so it might get close to thirty with a human head. And the seat belt people tell us that an untethered impact at thirty miles an hour can kill you. Not that I needed the senator dead. I just needed him out of action for a minute and a half.
I moved my right hand over and got it under Reed Riley's chin. His hands came down off his head to tear at my wrist and I replaced them with my own left hand, open, jamming down hard on the top of his head. Push and pull, up and down, left hand and right hand, like a vise. I was crushing his head. Then I slid my right hand up over his chiseled chin until the heel of my hand lodged there and I clamped my palm over his mouth. His skin was like fine sandpaper. He had shaved early that morning, and now it was close to midnight. I slid my left hand over his brow until its heel caught on the ridge below his hairline. I stretched down and clamped his nose between my finger and thumb.
And then it was all about human nature.
He thought he was suffocating. First he tried to bite my palm, but he couldn't get his mouth open. I was clamping too hard. Jaw muscles are strong, but only when they're closing. Opening was never an evolutionary priority. I waited him out. He clawed at my hands. I waited him out. He scrabbled in his seat and drummed his heels. I waited him out. He arched his back. I waited him out. He stretched his head up toward me.
I changed my grip and twisted hard and broke his neck.
It was a move I had learned from Leon Garber. Maybe he had seen it somewhere. Maybe he had done it somewhere. He was capable of it. The suffocation part makes it easy. They always stretch their heads up. Some kind of a bad instinct. They put their necks on the line all by themselves. Garber said it never fails, and it never has for me.
And it succeeded again a minute later, with the senator. He was weaker, but his face was slick with blood from where I had broken his nose on the dashboard rail, so the effort expended was very much the same.
88
I got out of the car at eleven twenty-eight exactly. The train was thirty-two miles south of us. Maybe just crossing under Route 78 east of Tupelo. I closed my door but left all the windows open. I tossed the key into Reed Riley's lap. I turned away.
And sensed a figure wide on my left.
And another, wide on my right.
Good moves by someone. I had the Beretta, and I could hit one or the other of them, but not both of them. Too much lateral travel between rounds.
I waited.
Then the figure on my right spoke.
She said, "Reacher?"
I said, "Deveraux?"
The figure on my left said, "And Munro. "
I said, "What the hell are you two doing here?"
They converged on me, and I tried to push them away from the car. I said, "Why are you here?"
Deveraux said, "Did you really think I was going to let him keep me in the diner?"
"I wish he had," I said. "I didn't want either of you to hear anything about this. "
"You made Riley open the windows. You wanted us to hear. "
"No, I wanted fresh air. I didn't know you were there. "
"Why shouldn't we hear?"
"I didn't want you to know what they were saying about you. And I wanted Munro to go back to Germany with a clear conscience. "
Munro said, "My conscience is always clear. "
"But it's easier to play dumb if you really don't know the answer. "
"I never had a problem playing dumb. Some folks think I am. "
Deveraux said, "I'm glad I heard what they were saying about me. "
Eleven thirty-one. The train was twenty-nine miles south of us. We walked away, on the ties, between the rails, leaving the flat green staff car and its passengers behind us. We walked past the old water tower and made it to the crossing. We turned west. Forty yards away Deveraux's cruiser was parked on the shoulder. Munro wouldn't get in. He said he would walk on down to Brannan's bar, where he had left a car he had borrowed. He said he needed to get back to Kelham as soon as possible, to square things away with the captured mortarmen, and then to hit the sack ahead of his early start the next morning. We shook hands quite formally, and I thanked him most sincerely for his help, and then he moved away and within ten paces he was lost to sight in the dark.
Deveraux drove me back to Main Street and parked outside the hotel. Eleven thirty-six in the evening. The train was twenty-four miles away.
I said, "I checked out of my room. "
She said, "I still have mine. "
"I need to make a phone call first. "
We used the office behind the reception counter. I put a dollar bill on the desk and dialed Garber's office. Maybe the tap was still in place, and maybe it wasn't. It made no difference to me. I got a lieutenant on the line. He said he was the senior person on duty. He said in fact he was the only person on duty. Night crew. I asked him if he had paper and pencil handy. He said yes to both. I told him to stand by to take dictation. I told him to mark the finished product urgent and to leave it front and center on Garber's desk, for immediate attention first thing in the morning.
"Ready?" I asked him.
He said he was.
I said, "A tragedy occurred late last night in sleepy Carter Crossing, Mississippi, when a car carrying United States Senator Carlton Riley was struck by a passing train. The car was being driven by the senator's son, U. S. Army Captain Reed Riley, who was based at nearby Fort Kelham, Mississippi. Senator Riley, of Missouri, was chairman of the Senate's Armed Services Committee, and Captain Riley, described by the army as a rising star, was in command of an infantry unit regularly deployed on missions of great sensitivity. Both men died instantly in the accident. Carter County Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux confirmed that local drivers regularly attempt to beat the train across the road junction, in order to avoid a long and inconvenient delay, and it is believed that Captain Riley, recently posted to the area and adventurous in spirit, simply mistimed his approach to the crossing. "
I paused.
"Got that," the lieutenant said, in my ear.
"Second paragraph," I said. "The senator and his son were returning to Fort Kelham after helping the nearby town celebrate Sheriff Deveraux's successful resolution of a local homicide investigation. The killing spree had lasted nine months and the five victims included three local women in their twenties, a local teenage boy, and a journalist from nearby Oxford, Mississippi. The male perpetrator, responsible for all five deaths, is described as a militia member and a white supremacist from neighboring Tennessee, and was shot to death earlier in the week, in a wooded area close to Fort Kelham, by local police, while resisting arrest. "
"Got that," the lieutenant said again.
"Start typing," I said, and hung up.
Eleven forty-two in the evening. The train was eighteen miles away.
Room seventeen was as plain as room twenty-one had been. Deveraux had made no attempt to personalize it. She had two battered suitcases propped open for clothes storage, and a spare uniform was hanging off the curtain rail, and there was a book on the night table. And that was it.
We sat side by side on her bed, a little shell shocked, and she said, "You did everything you could. Justice is done all around, and the army doesn't suffer. You're a good soldier. "
I said, "I'm sure they'll find something to complain about. "
"But I'm disappointed with the Marine Corps. They shouldn't have cooperated. They stabbed me in the back. "
"Not really," I said. "They tried their best. They were under tremendous pressure. They pretended to play ball, but they put in a bunch of coded messages. Two dead people and an invented one? That thing with your rank? Those mistakes had to be deliberate. They made it so the file wouldn't stand up. Not for long. Same with Garber. He was ranting and raving about you, but really he was acting a part. He was acting out what the reaction was supposed to be. He was challenging me to think. "
"Did you believe the file, when you first saw it?"
"Honest answer?"
"That's what I expect from you. "
"I didn't instantly reject it. It took me a few hours. "
"That's slow for you. "
"Very," I said.
"You asked me all kinds of weird questions. "
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. "
Silence.
The train was fifteen miles away.
She said, "Don't be sorry. I might have believed it myself. "
Which was kind of her. She leaned over and kissed me. I went and washed the last dry traces of Carlton Riley's blood off my hands, and then we made love for the sixth time, and it worked out perfectly. The room began to shake right on cue, and the glass on her bathroom shelf began to tinkle, and her floor quivered, and her room door creaked, and our abandoned shoes hopped and moved, and her bed shook and bounced and walked tiny fractions. And at the very end of it I was sure I heard a sound like a cymbal crash, vanishingly brief and faint and distant, like an instant metallic explosion, like molecules reduced to atoms, and then the midnight train was gone.
Afterward we showered together, and then I dressed and got ready to head home, to face the music. Deveraux smiled bravely and asked me to drop by anytime I was in the area, and I smiled bravely and said I would. I left the hotel and walked up to the silent diner and climbed into the borrowed Buick and drove east, past Fort Kelham's impressive gate, and then onward into Alabama, and then north, no traffic, nighttime hours all the way, and I was back on post before dawn.
I hid out and slept four hours and emerged to find that my hasty dictation to Garber's night crew had been adopted by the army more or less word for word as the official version of events. Tones everywhere were hushed and reverent. There was talk of a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal for Reed Riley, to recognize his time in an unspecified foreign country, and his father was to have a memorial service in a grand D. C. church the following week, to recognize who knew what.
I got neither medal nor memorial. I got thirty minutes with Leon Garber. He told me right away the news was not good. The fat staff officer from Kelham's PR squad had done the damage. His call to Benning had bounced around, mostly upward, at a very bad time, and it had been followed by a written report, and as a result of both I was on the involuntary separation list. Garber said under the circumstances it would be the work of a moment to get me taken off again. No doubt about that. I could extract a price for my silence. He would broker the deal, gladly.
Then he went quiet.
I said, "What?"
He said, "But your life wouldn't be worth living. You'd never get promoted again. You'd be terminal at major if you lived to be a hundred. You'd be deployed to a storage depot in New Jersey. You can get off the separation list, but you'll never get off the shit list. That's how the army works. You know that. "
"I covered the army's ass. "
"And the army will be reminded of that every time it sees you. "
"I have a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. "
"But what have you done for me lately?"
Garber's clerk gave me a sheet of paper explaining the procedure. I could do it in person at the Pentagon, or I could do it by mail. So I got back in the Buick and headed for D. C. I had to return the car to Neagley anyway. I got there a half hour before the banks closed, and I picked one at random and moved my account. They offered me my choice of a toaster oven or a CD player. I took neither one, but I asked for their phone number and I registered a password.
Then I headed over to the Pentagon. I chose the main concourse entrance, and I got halfway to the door, and then I stopped. The crowd carried on around me, oblivious. I didn't want to go in. I borrowed a pen from an impatient passerby and I signed my form and I dropped it in a mailbox. Then I walked through the graveyard and out the main gate to the tangle of roads between it and the river.
I was thirty-six years old, a citizen of a country I had barely seen, and there were places to go, and there were things to do. There were cities, and there was countryside. There were mountains, and there were valleys. There were rivers. There were museums, and music, and motels, and clubs, and diners, and bars, and buses. There were battlefields and birthplaces, and legends, and roads. There was company if I wanted it, and there was solitude if I didn't.
I picked a road at random, and I put one foot on the curb and one in the traffic lane, and I stuck out my thumb.
