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Reacher hung up the phone. The women were still in the lobby, still talking, still not going anywhere. He set off towards them, just strolling, like a man with an hour to kill, like a stranger in town drawn towards the only faces he knew. Plan A was to keep the pretence going, maybe getting into the group via Briony Walker’s interest in gunshot wounds. Maybe she was a sniper groupie. He could offer some opinions. Head shot or chest shot? Well, ma’am, I favour the throat shot. If you hit it just right you can make their heads come off.
Plan B was to abandon the pretence and come clean as an MP captain undercover for MI, and see where that road led. Which might be all the way home. If he made out Richardson had been the prime suspect, then whoever worked hardest to reinforce that conclusion would be the guilty one. If no one worked hard, then Richardson had been the guilty one all along.
He strolled on.
Plan A or Plan B?
They made the decision for him.
They handed it to him on a plate.
They were civilized women, and reflexively polite in the way that military people always are. He was heading close to them. He wasn’t going to pass by on the other side. So he had to be acknowledged. Briony Walker looked straight at him, but Darwen DeWitt was the first to speak. She said, ‘We weren’t introduced. I guess it wasn’t that kind of an afternoon.’
‘No, ma’am,’ Reacher said. ‘I guess it wasn’t.’ He said his name. He saw each of the three file it away in her memory.
He said, ‘I was sorry to hear about Colonel Richardson.’
DeWitt nodded. ‘It was a shock.’
‘Did you know her well?’
‘We all came up together. We expected to carry on together.’
‘Brother officers,’ Reacher said. ‘Or sisters, I guess.’
‘We all felt that way.’
Reacher nodded. They could all afford to feel that way. No rivalry. Not yet. They faced no significant bottleneck until the leap from Brigadier General to Major General. From one star to two. Then a little rivalry might bite.
Briony Walker said, ‘It must have happened to you, sergeant. You must have lost people.’
‘Ma’am, one or two.’
‘And what do you do on days like that?’
‘Well, ma’am, typically we would go to a bar and toast their journey. Usually starts out quiet, and ends up happy. Which is important. For the good of the unit.’
Alice Vaz said, ‘What unit?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.’
‘What bar?’
‘Whatever is close at hand.’
DeWitt said, ‘The Hyatt is a block away.’
They walked over to the Hyatt. But not exactly together. Not a foursome. More accurately a threesome and a singleton in a loose association, held together only by Reacher playing dumb enough to miss the hints he should get lost. The women were too polite to make it more explicit. But even so the walk was excruciatingly embarrassing. Out of the grounds, across Constitution, on to New Jersey Avenue, across Louisiana and D Street, and then they were there, at the Hyatt’s door. Reacher stepped up promptly and held it open. Because immediate action was required, right there, right then. Indecisive loitering on the sidewalk would have led to heavier hints.
They shuffled past him, first Vaz, then DeWitt, and finally Walker. Reacher fell in behind them. They found the bar. Not the kind of place Reacher was used to. For one thing, there was no bar. Not as such. Just low tables, low chairs, and waiter service. It was a lounge.
Walker looked at Reacher and asked, ‘What should we drink?’
Reacher said, ‘Pitchers of beer, but I doubt if they have those here.’
A waiter came and the women ordered white wine spritzers. It was summer. Reacher ordered hot coffee, black, no sweeteners required. He preferred not to clutter a table with jugs and bowls and spoons. The women murmured among themselves, a trio, with occasional guilty glances at him, unable to get rid of him, unable to be rude to him.
He asked, ‘Do those meetings usually go like that? Apart from the thing with Colonel Richardson, I mean.’
Vaz said, ‘Your first?’
Reacher said, ‘And hopefully my last, ma’am.’
Walker said, ‘No, it was worth it. It was a good at-bat. They can’t say no to everything. So we just made it fractionally more likely they’ll say yes to something else, sometime soon.’
‘You like your job?’
‘Do you like yours, sergeant?’
‘Yes, ma’am, most of the time.’
‘I could give the same answer.’
The waiter brought the drinks, and the women returned to their three-way private conversation. Reacher’s coffee was in a wide, shallow cup, and there wasn’t much of it. He was a couple of mouthfuls away from the next awkward moment. They hadn’t gotten rid of him leaving the Capitol, and they hadn’t gotten rid of him entering the hotel. The end of the first round of drinks was their next obvious opportunity. All it would take was an order: Sergeant, you’re dismissed. No way of fighting that, not even under Plan B. Captain, you’re dismissed worked just as well, when said by majors and lieutenant colonels.
But it was Darwen DeWitt who left after the first round of drinks. She was still not talking much, and she clearly wasn’t enjoying herself. She was finding no catharsis. She said she had work to do, and she got up. There were no hugs. Just tight nods and brave smiles and meaningful glances, and then she was gone. Vaz and Walker looked at Reacher, and Reacher looked right back at Walker and Vaz. No one spoke. Then the waiter came back right on cue, and Vaz and Walker ordered more spritzers, and Reacher ordered more coffee.
The second spritzer loosened Walker up a little. She asked Reacher what he felt when he pulled the trigger on a live human being. Reacher quoted a guy he knew. He said recoil against his shoulder. Walker asked what was the longest kill he had ever made. Truth was about eleven feet, at that stage, because he was a cop, but he said six hundred yards, because he was supposed to be a sniper. She asked with what. Truth was a Beretta M9, but he said an M21, an ART II scope, and a 7.62 NATO round.
Alice Vaz asked, ‘Where was this?’
Reacher said, ‘Ma’am, I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Which sounds like a Special Forces scenario.’
‘I guess it does.’
‘Six hundred yards is fairly close range for you guys.’
‘Practically point blank, ma’am.’
‘Black bag for CIA, or legitimate, for us?’
‘Ma’am, I’m not at liberty to say.’
And those twin denials seemed to create some credibility. Both women gradually abandoned their defensive body language. Not that it was replaced by personal interest. It was replaced by professional interest, which came across in a poignant way. Neither woman had a realistic hope in her lifetime of becoming a battlefield commander. Both were forced to take a different route. But both seemed to look across the divide with concern. In an ideal world they would be fighting. In which case they would want the best available weapons. No question about that. In which case simple ethics demanded the best available weapons for those currently doing the fighting in the less than perfect world. Simple justice. And simple preparedness, too. Their sisters might never get there, but their daughters would one day.
Walker asked Reacher his private opinion about the rifle design. Were there things that should be added? Taken away? Reacher said, ‘Ma’am, I think they got it about right,’ partly because that was the kind of thing a sergeant would say to an officer, and partly because it was true. Walker seemed happy with the answer.
Then both Walker and Vaz got up to use the restroom. Reacher could have used a pit stop too, but he didn’t want to follow directly behind them. That would have been too weird, right after the walk from the Capitol. So he waited. He saw Vaz use a pay phone on her way. There was a line of them in wooden hutches on the lounge’s back wall. Vaz used the centre phone. Walker didn’t wait for her. She went on ahead. Vaz spoke for less
than ten seconds and then hung up and continued on her way to the restroom.
Walker never came back from the restroom. Vaz sat down alone and unconcerned and said Walker had gone back to the office. She had used the D Street door. She had a lot to do. And did Reacher want another drink?
Reacher and Vaz, alone together. Walker, on her own, on the loose.
Reacher said, ‘You buying?’
Vaz said, ‘Sure.’
Reacher said, ‘Then yes.’
‘Then follow me,’ Vaz said. ‘I know a better place than this.’
