Tripwire
Chapter 14

FOR THE FIRST time in his life, Reacher was truly comfortable in an airplane. He had been flying since birth, first as a soldier's kid and then as a soldier himself, millions of miles in total, but all of them hunched in roaring spartan military transports or folded into hard civilian seats narrower than his shoulders. Traveling first-class on a scheduled airline was a completely new luxury.
The cabin was dramatic. It was a calculated insult to the passengers who filed down the jetway and glanced into it before shuffling along the aisle to their own mean accommodations. It was cool and pastel in first class, with four seats to a row where there were ten in coach. Arithmetically, Reacher figured that made each seat two and a half times as wide, but they felt better than that. They felt enormous. They felt like sofas, wide enough for him to squirm left and right without bruising his hips against the arms. And the legroom was amazing. He could slide right down and stretch right out without touching the seat in front. He could hit the button and recline almost horizontally without bothering the guy behind. He operated the mechanism a couple of times like a kid with a toy, and then he settled on a sensible halfway position and opened the in-flight magazine, which was crisp and new and not creased and sticky like the ones they were reading forty rows back.
Jodie was lost in her own seat, with her shoes off and her feet tucked up under her, the same magazine open on her lap and a glass of chilled champagne at her elbow. The cabin was quiet. They were a long way forward of the engines, and their noise was muted to a hiss no louder than the hiss of the air coming through the vents in the overhead. There was no vibration. Reacher was watching the sparkling gold wine in Jodie's glass, and he saw no tremor on its surface.
"I could get accustomed to this," he said.
She looked up and smiled.
"Not on your wages," she said.
He nodded and went back to his arithmetic. He figured a day's earnings from digging swimming pools would buy him fifty miles of first-class air travel. Cruising speed, that was about five minutes' worth of progress. Ten hours of work, all gone in five minutes. He was spending money 120 times faster than he had been earning it.
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "When this is all over?"
"I don't know," he said.
The question had been in the back of his mind ever since she told him about the house. The house itself sat there in his imagination, sometimes benign, sometimes threatening, like a trick picture that changed depending on how you tilted it against the light. Sometimes it sat there in the glow of the sun, comfortable, low and spreading, surrounded by its amiable jungle of a yard, and it looked like home. Other times, it looked like a gigantic millstone, requiring him to run and run and run just to stay level with the starting line. He knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions. Houses forced you into a certain lifestyle. Even if somebody gave you one for nothing, like Leon had, it committed you to a whole lot of different things. There were property taxes. He knew that. There was insurance, in case the place burned down or was blown away in a high wind. There was maintenance. People he knew with houses were always doing something to them. They would be replacing the heating system at the start of the winter, because it had failed. Or the basement would be leaking water, and complicated things with excavations would be required. Roofs were a problem. He knew that. People had told him. Roofs had a finite life span, which surprised him. The shingles needed stripping off and replacing with new. Siding, also. Windows, too. He had known people who had put new windows in their houses. They had deliberated long and hard about what type to buy.
"Are you going to get a job?" Jodie asked.
He stared out through the oval window at southern California, dry and brown seven miles below him. What sort of a job? The house was going to cost him maybe ten thousand dollars a year in taxes and premiums and maintenance. And it was an isolated house, so he would have to keep Rutter's car, too. It was a free car, like the house, but it would cost him money just to own. Insurance, oil changes, inspections, title, gasoline. Maybe another three grand a year. Food and clothes and utilities were on top of all of that. And if he had a house, he would want other things. He would want a stereo. He would want Wynonna Judd's record, and a whole lot of others, too. He thought back to old Mrs. Hobie's handwritten calculations. She had settled on a certain sum of money she needed every year, and he couldn't see getting it any lower than she had gotten it. The whole deal added up to maybe thirty thousand dollars a year, which meant earning maybe fifty, to take account of income taxes and the cost of five days a week traveling back and forth to wherever the hell he was going to earn it.
"I don't know," he said again.
"Plenty of things you could do."
"Like what?"
"You've got talents. You're a hell of an investigator, for instance. Dad always used to say you're the best he ever saw."
"That was in the Army." he said. "That's all over now."
"Skills are portable, Reacher. There's always demand for the best."
Then she looked up, a big idea in her face. "You could take over Costello's business. He's going to leave a void. We used him all the time."
"That's great. First I get the guy killed, then I steal his business."
"It wasn't your fault," she said. "You should think about it."
So he looked back down at California and thought about it. Thought about Costello's well-worn leather chair and his aging, comfortable body. Thought about sitting in his pastel room with its pebble glass windows, spending his whole life on the telephone. Thought about the cost of running the Greenwich Avenue office and hiring a secretary and providing her with new computers and telephone consoles and health insurance and paid vacations. All on top of running the Garrison place. He would be working ten months of the year before he got ahead by a single dollar.
"I don't know," he said again. "I'm not sure I want to think about it."
"You're going to have to."
"Maybe," he said. "But not necessarily right now."
She smiled like she understood and they lapsed back into silence. The plane hissed onward and the stewardess came back with the drinks cart. Jodie got a refill of champagne and Reacher took a can of beer. He flipped through the airline magazine. It was full of bland articles about nothing much in particular. There were advertisements for financial services and small, complicated gadgets, all of which were black and ran on batteries. He arrived at the section where the airline's operational fleet was pictured in little colored drawings. He found the plane they were on and read about its passenger capacity and its range and the power of its engines. Then he arrived at the crossword in back. It filled a page and looked pretty hard. Jodie was already there in her own copy, ahead of him.
"Look at eleven down," she said.
He looked.
"They can weigh heavy," he read. "Sixteen letters."
"Responsibilities," she said.
MARILYN AND CHESTER Stone were huddled together on the left-hand sofa in front of the desk, because Hobie was in the bathroom, alone with the two cops. The thickset man in the dark suit sat on the opposite sofa with the shotgun resting in his lap. Tony was sprawled out next to him with his feet on the coffee table. Chester was inert, just staring into the gloom. Marilyn was cold and hungry, and terrified. Her eyes were darting all around the room. There was total silence from the bathroom.
"What's he doing in there with them?" she whispered.
Tony shrugged. "Probably just talking to them right now."
"About what?"
"Well, asking them questions about what they like and what they don't. In terms of physical pain, you understand. He likes to do that."
"God, why?"
Tony smiled. "He feels it's more democratic, you know, letting the victims decide their own fate."
Marilyn shuddered. "Oh God, can't he just let them go? They thought Sheryl was a battered wife, that's all. They didn't know anything about him."
"Well, they'll know something about him soon," Tony said. "He makes them pick a number. They never know whether to pick high or low, because they don't know what it's for. They think they might please him, you know, if they pick right. They spend forever trying to figure it out."
"Can't he just let them go? Maybe later?"
Tony shook his head.
"No," he said. "He's very tense right now. This will relax him. Like therapy."
Marilyn was silent for a long moment. But then she had to ask.
"What is the number for?" she whispered.
"How many hours it takes them to die," Tony said. "The ones who pick high get real pissed when they find that out."
"You bastards."
"Some guy once picked a hundred, but we let him off with ten."
"You bastards."
"But he won't make you pick a number. He's got other plans for you."
Total silence from the bathroom.
"He's insane," Marilyn whispered.
Tony shrugged. "A little, maybe. But I like him. He's had a lot of pain in his life. I think that's why he's so interested in it."
Marilyn stared on at him in horror. Then the buzzer sounded at the oak door out to the elevator lobby. Very loud in the awful silence. Tony and the thickset man with the shotgun spun around and stared in that direction.
"Check it out," Tony said.
He went into his jacket and came out with his gun. He held it steady on Chester and Marilyn. His partner with the shotgun jacked himself up out of the low sofa and stepped around the table to the door. He closed it behind him and the office went quiet again. Tony stood up and walked to the bathroom door. Knocked on it with the butt of his gun and opened it a fraction and ducked his head inside.
"Visitors," he whispered.
Marilyn glanced left and right. Tony was twenty feet from her, and he was the nearest. She jumped to her feet and snatched a deep breath. Hurdled the coffee table and scrambled around the opposite sofa and made it all the way to the office door. She wrenched it open. The thickset man in the dark suit was on the far side of the reception area, talking to a short man framed in the doorway out to the elevator lobby.
"Help us!" she screamed to him.
The man stared over at her. He was dressed in dark blue pants and a blue shirt, with a short jacket open over it, the same blue as the pants. Some kind of uniform. There was a small design on the jacket, left side of the chest. He was carrying a brown grocery sack cradled in his arms.
"Help us!" she screamed again.
Two things happened. The thickset man in the dark suit darted forward and bundled the visitor all the way inside and slammed the door after him. And Tony grabbed Marilyn from behind with a strong arm around her waist. He dragged her backward into the office. She arched forward against the pressure of his arm. She was bending herself double and fighting.
"God's sake, help us!"
Tony lifted her off her feet. His arm was bunching under her breasts. The short dress was riding up over her thighs. She was kicking and struggling. The short man in the blue uniform was staring. Her shoes came off. Then the short man was smiling. He walked forward into the office after her, stepping carefully over her abandoned shoes, carrying his grocery sack.
"Hey, I'd like to get me a piece of that," he said.
"Forget it," Tony gasped from behind her. "This one's off limits, time being."
"Pity," the new guy said. "Not every day you see a thing like that."
Tony struggled with her all the way back to the sofa. Dumped her down next to Chester. The new guy shrugged wistfully and emptied the grocery sack on the desk. Bricks of cash money thumped out on the wood. The bathroom door opened and Hobie stepped into the room. His jacket was off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow. On the left was a forearm. It was knotted with muscle and thick with dark hair. On the right was a heavy leather cup, dark brown, worn and shiny, with straps riveted to it running away up into the shirtsleeve. The bottom of the cup was narrowed to a neck, with the bright steel hook coming down out of it, running straight for six or eight inches and then curving around to the point.
"Count the money, Tony," Hobie said.
Marilyn jerked upright. Turned to face the new guy.
"He's got two cops in there," she said urgently. "He's going to kill them."
The guy shrugged at her.
"Suits me," he said. "Kill them all, is what I say."
She stared at him blankly. Tony moved behind the desk and sorted through the bricks of money. He stacked them neatly and counted out loud, moving them from one end of the desk to the other.
"Forty thousand dollars."
"So where are the keys?" the new guy asked.
Tony rolled open the desk drawer. "These are for the Benz."
He tossed them to the guy and went into his pocket for another bunch.
"And these are for the Tahoe. It's in the garage downstairs."
"What about the BMW?" the guy asked.
"Still up in Pound Ridge," Hobie called across the room.
"Keys?" the guy asked.
"In the house, I guess," Hobie said. "She didn't bring a pocketbook, and it doesn't look like she's concealing them about her person, does it?"
The guy stared at Marilyn's dress and smiled an ugly smile, all lips and tongue.
"There's something in there, that's for damn sure. But it don't look like keys."
She looked at him in disgust. The design on his jacket read Mo's Motors. It was embroidered in red silk. Hobie walked across the room and stood directly behind her. He leaned forward and brought the hook around into her line of vision. She stared at it, close up. She shuddered.
"Where are the keys?" he asked.
"The BMW is mine," she said.
"Not anymore it isn't."
He moved the hook closer. She could smell the metal and the leather.
"I could search her," the new guy called. "Maybe she is concealing them after all. I can think of a couple of interesting places to look."
She shuddered.
"Keys," Hobie said to her softly.
"Kitchen counter," she whispered back.
Hobie took the hook away and walked around in front of her, smiling. The new guy looked disappointed. He nodded to confirm he'd heard the whisper and walked slowly to the door, jingling the Benz keys and the Tahoe keys in his hand.
"Pleasure doing business," he said as he walked.
Then he paused at the door and looked back, straight at Marilyn.
"You completely sure that's off limits, Hobie? Seeing as how we're old friends and all? Done a lot of business together?"
Hobie shook his head like he meant it. "Forget about it. This one's mine."
The guy shrugged and walked out of the office, swinging the keys. The door closed behind him and they heard the second thump of the lobby door a moment later. Then there was elevator whine and the office fell silent again. Hobie glanced at the stacks of dollar bills on the desk and headed back to the bathroom. Marilyn and Chester were kept side by side on the sofa, cold, sick, and hungry. The light coming in through the chinks in the blinds faded away to the yellow dullness of evening, and the silence from the bathroom continued until a point Marilyn guessed was around eight o'clock in the evening. Then it was shattered by screaming.
I HE PLANE CHASED the sun west but lost time all the way and arrived on Oahu three hours in arrears, in the middle of the afternoon. The first-class cabin was emptied ahead of business class and coach, which meant Reacher and Jodie were the first people outside the terminal and into the taxi line. The temperature and the humidity out there were similar to Texas, but the damp had a saline quality to it because of the Pacific close by. And the light was calmer. The jagged green mountains and the blue of the sea bathed the island with the jeweled glow of the tropics. Jodie put her dark glasses on again and gazed beyond the airport fences with the mild curiosity of somebody who had passed through Hawaii a dozen times in her father's service days without ever really stopping there. Reacher did the same. He had used it as a Pacific stepping-stone more times than he could count, but he had never served in Hawaii.
The taxi waiting at the head of the line was a replica of the one they'd used at Dallas-Fort Worth, a clean Caprice with the air roaring full blast and the driver's compartment decorated halfway between a religious shrine and a living room. They disappointed the guy by asking him for the shortest ride available on Oahu, which was the half-mile hop around the perimeter road to the Hickam Air Force Base entrance. The guy glanced backward at the line of cars behind him, and Reacher saw him thinking about the better fares the other drivers would get.
"Ten-dollar tip in it for you," he said.
The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy's family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark, smiling children and a dark, smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.
"Twenty dollars," he said. "If we get going right now, OK?"
"Twenty dollars?" the guy repeated, amazed.
"Thirty. For your kids. They look nice."
The guy grinned in the mirror and touched his fingers to his lips and laid them gently on the shiny surface of the photograph. He swung the cab through the lane changes onto the perimeter track and came off again more or less immediately, eight hundred yards into the journey, outside a military gate which looked identical to the one fronting Fort Wolters. Jodie opened the door and stepped out into the heat and Reacher went into his pocket and came out with his roll of cash. Top bill was a fifty, and he peeled it off and pushed it through the little hinged door in the Plexiglas.
"Keep it."
Then he pointed at the photograph. "That your house?"
The driver nodded.
"Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?"
The guy shook his head. "Tip-top condition."
"The roof OK?"
"No problems at all."
Reacher nodded. "Just checking."
He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back toward the civilian terminal. There was a breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.
"Where are we going?"
"CIL-HI," Reacher said. "It's right inside here."
He pronounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.
"Silly?" she repeated. "So what's that?"
"C,I,L,H,I," he said. "Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It's the Department of the Army's main facility."
"For what?"
"I'll show you for what," he said.
Then he paused. "At least I hope I will."
They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.
"We're here to see Nash Newman," he said.
The sergeant looked surprised and picked up a clipboard and peeled thin sheets of paper back. He slid a thick finger along a line and nodded. Picked up a phone and dialed a number. Four digits. An internal call. He announced the visitors and listened to the reply, and then he looked puzzled. He covered the phone with his palm and turned back to Jodie.
"How old are you, miss?" he asked.
"Thirty," Jodie said, puzzled in turn.
"Thirty," the MP repeated into the phone. Then he listened again and hung it up and wrote something on the clipboard. Turned back to the window.
"He'll be right out, so come on through."
They squeezed through the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the heavy counterweight on the end of the vehicle barrier and waited on the hot pavement six feet away from where they had started, but now it was military pavement, not Hawaii Department of Transportation pavement, and that made a lot of difference to the look on the sergeant's face. The suspicion was all gone, replaced by frank curiosity about why the legendary Nash Newman was in such a big hurry to get these two civilians inside the base.
There was a low concrete building maybe sixty yards away with a plain personnel door set in the blank end wall. The door opened up and a silver-haired man stepped out. He turned back to close it and lock it and then set out at a fast walk toward the gatehouse. He was in the pants and the shirt of an Army tropical-issue uniform, with a white lab coat flapping open over them. There was enough metal punched through the collar of the shirt to indicate he was a high-ranking officer, and nothing in his distinguished bearing to contradict that impression. Reacher moved to meet him and Jodie followed. The silver-haired guy was maybe fifty-five, and up close he was tall, with a handsome patrician face and a natural athletic grace in his body that was just beginning to yield to the stiffness of age.
"General Newman," Reacher said. "This is Jodie Garber."
Newman glanced at Reacher and took Jodie's hand, smiling.
"Pleased to meet you, General," she said.
"We already met," Newman said.
"We did?" she said, surprised.
"You wouldn't recall it," he said. "At least I'd be terribly surprised if you did. You were three years old at the time, I guess. In the Philippines. It was in your father's backyard. I remember you brought me a glass of planter's punch. It was a big glass, and a big yard, and you were a very little girl. You carried it in both hands, with your tongue sticking out, concentrating. I watched you all the way, with my heart in my mouth in case you dropped it."
She smiled. "Well, you're right, I'm afraid I don't recall it. I was three? That's an awful long time ago now."
Newman nodded. "That's why I checked how old you looked. I didn't mean for the sergeant to come right out and ask you straight. I wanted his subjective impression, is all. It's not the sort of thing one should ask a lady, is it? But I was wondering if you could really be Leon's daughter, come to visit me."
He squeezed her hand and let it go. Turned to Reacher and punched him lightly on the shoulder.
"Jack Reacher," he said. "Damn, it's good to see you again."
Reacher caught Newman's hand and shook it hard, sharing the pleasure.
"General Newman was my teacher," he said to Jodie. "He did a spell at staff college about a million years ago. Advanced forensics, taught me everything I know."
"He was a pretty good student," Newman said to her. "Paid attention at least, which is more than most of them did."
"So what is it you do, General?" she asked.
"Well, I do a little forensic anthropology," Newman said.
"He's the best in the world," Reacher said.
Newman waved away the compliment. "Well, I don't know about that."
"Anthropology?" Jodie said. "But isn't that studying remote tribes and things? How they live? Their rituals and beliefs and so on?"
"No, that's cultural anthropology," Newman said. "There are many different disciplines. Mine is forensic anthropology, which is a part of physical anthropology."
"Studying human remains for clues," Reacher said.
"A bone doctor," Newman said. "That's about what it amounts to."
They were drifting down the sidewalk as they talked, getting nearer the plain door in the blank wall. It opened up and a younger man was standing there waiting for them in the entrance corridor. A nondescript guy, maybe thirty years old, in a lieutenant's uniform under a white lab coat. Newman nodded toward him. "This is Lieutenant Simon. He runs the lab for me. Couldn't manage without him."
He introduced Reacher and Jodie and they shook hands all around. Simon was quiet and reserved. Reacher figured him for a typical lab guy, annoyed at the disruption to the measured routine of his work. Newman led them inside and down the corridor to his office, and Simon nodded silently to him and disappeared.
"Sit down," Newman said. "Let's talk."
"So you're a sort of pathologist?" Jodie asked him.
Newman took his place behind his desk and rocked his hand from side to side, indicating a disparity. "Well, a pathologist has a medical degree, and we anthropologists don't. We studied anthropology, pure and simple. The physical structure of the human body, that's our field. We both work postmortem, of course, but generally speaking if a corpse is relatively fresh, it's a pathologist's job, and if there's only a skeleton left, then it's our job. So I'm a bone doctor."
Jodie nodded.
"Of course, that's a slight simplification," Newman said. "A fresh corpse can raise questions concerning its bones. Suppose there's dismemberment involved? The pathologist would refer to us for help. We can look at the saw marks on the bones and help out. We can say how weak or strong the perpetrator was, what kind of saw he used, was he left-handed or right-handed, things like that. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I'm working on skeletons. Dry old bones."
Then he smiled again. A private, amused smile. "And pathologists are useless with dry old bones. Really, really hopeless. They don't know the first thing about them. Sometimes I wonder what the hell they teach them in medical school."
The office was quiet and cool. No windows, indirect lighting from concealed fixtures, carpet on the floor. A rosewood desk, comfortable leather chairs for the visitors. And an elegant clock on a low shelf, ticking quietly, already showing three-thirty in the afternoon. Just three and a half hours until the return flight.
"We're here for a reason, General," Reacher said. "This isn't entirely a social call, I'm afraid."
"Social enough to stop calling me General and start calling me Nash, OK? And tell me what's on your mind."
Reacher nodded. "We need your help, Nash."
Newman looked up. "With the MIA lists?"
Then he turned to Jodie, to explain.
"That's what I do here," he said. "Twenty years, I've done nothing else."
She nodded. "It's about a particular case. We sort of got involved in it."
Newman nodded back, slowly, but this time the light was gone from his eyes.
"Yes, I was afraid of that," he said. "There are eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty MIA cases here, but I bet I know which one you're interested in."
"Eighty-nine thousand?" Jodie repeated, surprised.
"And a hundred twenty. Two thousand, two hundred missing from Vietnam, eight thousand, one hundred seventy missing from Korea, and seventy-eight thousand, seven hundred fifty missing from World War Two. We haven't given up on any single one of them, and I promise you we never will."
"God, why so many?"
Newman shrugged, a bitter sadness suddenly there in his face.
"Wars," he said. "High explosive, tactical movement, airplanes. Wars are fought, some combatants live, some die. Some of the dead are recovered, some of them aren't. Sometimes there's nothing left to recover. A direct hit on a man by an artillery shell will reduce him to his constituent molecules. He's just not there anymore. Maybe a fine red mist drifting through the air, maybe not even that, maybe he's completely boiled off to vapor. A near miss will blow him to pieces. And fighting is about territory, isn't it? So even if the pieces of him are relatively large, enemy tank movement or friendly tank movement back and forth across the disputed territory will plow the pieces of him into the earth, and then he's gone forever."
He sat in silence, and the clock ticked slowly around.
"And airplanes are worse. Many of our air campaigns have been fought over oceans. A plane goes down in the ocean and the crew is missing until the end of time, no matter how much effort we expend in a place like this."
He waved his arm in a vague gesture that took in the office and all the unseen space beyond and ended up resting toward Jodie, palm up, like a mute appeal.
"Eighty-nine thousand," she said. "I thought the MIA stuff was just about Vietnam. Two thousand or so."
"Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty," Newman said again. "We still get a few from Korea, the occasional one from World War Two, the Japanese islands. But you're right, this is mostly about Vietnam. Two thousand, two hundred missing. Not so very many, really. They lost more than that in a single morning during World War One, every morning for four long years. Men and boys blown apart and mashed into the mud. But Vietnam was different. Partly because of things like World War One. We won't take that wholesale slaughter anymore, and quite rightly. We've moved on. The population just won't stand for those old attitudes now."
Jodie nodded quietly.
"And partly because we lost the war in Vietnam," Newman said quietly. "That makes it very different. The only war we ever lost. Makes it all feel a hell of a lot worse. So we try harder to resolve things."
He made the gesture with his hand again, indicating the unseen complex beyond the office door, and his voice ended on a brighter note.
"So that's what you do here?" Jodie asked. "Wait for skeletons to be discovered overseas and then bring them back here to identify? So you can finally tick the names off the missing lists?"
Newman rocked his hand again, equivocating. "Well, we don't wait, exactly. Where we can, we go out searching for them. And we don't always identify them, although we sure as hell try hard."
"It must be difficult," she said.
He nodded. "Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field-workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we've got. Which sometimes isn't very much. Sometimes all that's left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box."
"Impossible," she said.
"Often," he said back. "We've got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can't afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can't meet it."
"Where do you start?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA. If he'd broken his arm as a boy, we'd be able to match the old X ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts."
Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.
"Leon came here in April," Reacher said.
Newman nodded. "Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him."
Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.
"He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot."
She nodded. It wasn't the first time she'd heard it, and it wouldn't be the last.
"He asked you about Victor Hobie," Reacher said.
Newman nodded again. "Victor Truman Hobie."
"What did you tell him?"
"Nothing," Newman said. "And I'm going to tell you nothing, too."
The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.
"Why not?" Reacher asked.
"Surely you know why not."
"It's classified?"
"Twice over," Newman said.
Reacher moved in the silence, restless with frustration. "You're our last hope, Nash. We've already been all over everything else."
Newman shook his head. "You know how it is, Reacher. I'm an officer in the U.S. Army, damn it. I'm not going to reveal classified information."
"Please, Nash," Reacher said. "We came all this way."
"I can't," Newman said.
"No such word," Reacher said.
Silence.
"Well, I guess you could ask me questions," he said. "If a former student of mine comes in here and asks me questions based on his own skills and observations, and I answer them in a purely academic fashion, I don't see that any harm can come to anybody."
It was like the clouds shifting away from the sun. Jodie glanced at Reacher. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes to four. Less than three hours to go.
"OK, Nash, thanks," he said. "You're familiar with this case?"
"I'm familiar with all of them. This one especially, since April."
"And it's classified twice over?"
Newman just nodded.
"At a level that kept Leon out of the loop?"
"That's a pretty high level," Newman hinted. "Wouldn't you agree?"
Reacher nodded. Thought hard. "What did Leon want you to do?"
"He was in the dark," Newman said. "You need to bear that in mind, right?"
"OK," Reacher said. "What did he want you to do?"
"He wanted us to find the crash site."
"Four miles west of An Khe."
Newman nodded. "I felt badly for Leon. No real reason for him to be out of the loop on this, and there was nothing I could do to alter the classification code. But I owed that man a lot, way more than I can tell you about, so I agreed to find the site."
Jodie leaned forward. "But why wasn't it found before? People seem to know roughly where it is."
Newman shrugged. "It's all incredibly difficult. You have no idea. The terrain, the bureaucracy. We lost the war, remember. The Vietnamese dictate the terms over there. We run a joint recovery effort, but they control it. The whole thing is constant manipulation and humiliation. We're not allowed to wear our uniforms over there, because they say the sight of a U.S. Army uniform will traumatize the village populations. They make us rent their own helicopters to get around, millions and millions of dollars a year for ratty old rust buckets with half the capability of our own machines. Truth is, we're buying those old bones back, and they set the price and the availability. Bottom line right now is the United States is paying more than three million dollars for every single identification we make, and it burns me up."
Four minutes to four. Newman sighed again, lost in thought.
"But you found the site?" Reacher prompted.
"It was scheduled for sometime in the future," Newman said. "We knew roughly where it was, and we knew exactly what we'd find when we got there, so it wasn't much of a high priority. But as a favor to Leon, I went over there and bargained to move it up the schedule. I wanted it next item on the list. It was a real bitch to negotiate. They get wind you want something in particular, they go stubborn as all hell. You've got no idea. Inscrutable? Tell me about it."
"But you found it?" Jodie asked.
"It was a bitch, geographically," Newman said. "We talked to DeWitt over at Wolters, and he helped us pin down the exact location, more or less. Remotest place you ever saw. Mountainous and inaccessible. I can guarantee you no human being has ever set foot there, no time in the history of the planet. It was a nightmare trip. But it was a great site. Completely inaccessible, so it wasn't mined."
"Mined?" Jodie repeated. "You mean they booby-trap the sites?"
Newman shook his head. "No, mined, as in excavated. Anything accessible, the population was all over it thirty years ago. They took dog tags, ID cards, helmets, souvenirs, but mostly they were after the metals. Fixed-wing sites, mostly, because of the gold and platinum."
"What gold?" she asked.
"In the electrical circuits," Newman said. "The F-4 Phantoms, for instance, they had about five thousand dollars' worth of precious metals in the connections. Population used to hack it all out and sell it. You buy cheap jewelry in Bangkok, probably it's made out of old U.S. fighter-bomber electronics."
"What did you find up there?" Reacher asked.
"A relatively good state of preservation," Newman said. "The Huey was smashed up and rusted, but it was recognizable. The bodies were completely skeletonized, of course. Clothing was rotted and gone, long ago. But nothing else was missing. They all had dog tags. We packed them up and helicoptered them to Hanoi. Then we flew them back here in the Starlifter, full honors. We only just got back. Three months, beginning to end, one of the best we've ever done in terms of time scale. And the IDs are going to be a total formality, because we've got the dog tags. No role for a bone doctor on this one. Open and shut. I'm just sorry Leon didn't live to see it. It would have put his mind at rest."
"The bodies are here?" Reacher asked.
Newman nodded. "Right next door."
"Can we see them?" Reacher asked.
Newman nodded again. "You shouldn't, but you need to."
The office went quiet and Newman stood up and gestured toward the door with both hands. Lieutenant Simon walked past. He nodded a greeting.
"We're going into the lab," Newman said to him.
"Yes, sir," Simon said back. He moved away into his own office cubicle and Reacher and Jodie and Newman walked in the other direction and paused in front of a plain door set in a blank cinder block wall. Newman took keys from his pocket and unlocked it. He pulled it open and repeated the same formal gesture with both his hands. Reacher and Jodie preceded him into the lab.
SIMON WATCHED THEM go inside from his cubicle. When the door closed and locked behind them, he picked up his phone and dialed nine for a line and then a ten-figure number starting with the New York City area code. The number rang for a long time because it was already the middle of the evening six thousand miles to the east. Then it was answered.
"Reacher's here," Simon whispered. "Right now, with a woman. They're in the lab, right now. Looking."
Hobie's voice came back low and controlled. "Who's the woman?"
"Jodie Garber," Simon said. "General Garber's daughter."
"Alias Mrs. Jacob."
"What do you want me to do?"
There was silence on the line. Just the whistle of the long-distance satellite.
"You could give them a ride back to the airport, maybe. The woman's got an appointment in New York tomorrow afternoon, so I guess they'll be trying to make the seven o'clock flight. Just make sure they don't miss it."
"OK," Simon said, and Hobie broke the connection.
THE LAB WAS a wide, low room, maybe forty feet by fifty. There were no windows. The lighting was the bland wash of fluorescent tubes. There was the faint hiss of efficient air circulation, but there was a smell in the room, somewhere between the sharp tang of strong disinfectant and the warm odor of earth. At the far end of the space was an alcove filled with racks. On the racks were rows of cardboard boxes, marked with reference numbers in black. Maybe a hundred boxes.
"The unidentified," Reacher said.
Newman nodded at his side.
"As of now," he said, quietly. "We won't give up on them."
Between them and the distant alcove was the main body of the room. The floor was tile, swabbed to a shine. Standing on it were twenty neat wooden tables set in precise rows. The tables were waist high and topped with heavy polished slabs. Each table was a little shorter and a little narrower than an Army cot. They looked like sturdy versions of the tables decorators use for wallpaper pasting. Six of them were completely empty. Seven of them had the lids of seven polished aluminum caskets laid across them. The final seven tables held the seven aluminum caskets themselves, in neat alternate rows, each one adjacent to the table bearing its lid. Reacher stood silent with his head bowed, and then he drew himself up to attention and held a long, silent salute for the first time in more than two years.
"Awful," Jodie whispered.
She was standing with her hands clasped behind her, head bowed, like she was at a graveside ceremony. Reacher released his salute and squeezed her hand.
"Thank you," Newman said quietly. "I like people to show respect in here."
"How could we not?" Jodie whispered.
She was staring at the caskets, with tears starting in her eyes.
"So, Reacher, what do you see?" Newman asked in the silence.
Reacher's eyes were wandering around the bright room. He was too shocked to move.
"I see seven caskets," he said quietly. "Where I expected to see eight. There were eight people in that Huey. Crew of five, and they picked up three. It's in DeWitt's report. Five and three make eight."
"And eight minus one makes seven," Newman said.
"Did you search the site? Thoroughly?"
Newman shook his head. "No."
"Why not?"
"You'll have to figure that out."
Reacher shook himself and took a step forward. "May I?"
"Be my guest," Newman replied. "Tell me what you see. Concentrate hard, and we'll see what you've remembered, and what you've forgotten."
Reacher walked to the nearest casket and turned so that he was looking down into it along its length. The casket held a rough wooden box, six inches smaller in every dimension than the casket itself.
"That's what the Vietnamese make us use," Newman said. "They sell those boxes to us and make us use them. We put them in our own caskets in the hangar at the airfield in Hanoi."
The wooden box had no lid. It was just a shallow tray. There was a jumble of bones in it. Somebody had arranged them in roughly the correct anatomical sequence. There was a skull at the top, yellowed and old. It grinned up with a grotesque smile. There was a gold tooth in the mouth. The empty eye sockets stared. The vertebrae of the neck were lined up neatly. Below them the shoulder blades and the collarbones and the ribs were laid out in their correct places above the pelvis. The arm bones and the leg bones were stacked to the sides. There was the dull glint of a metal chain draped over the vertebrae of the neck, running away under the flatness of the left shoulder blade.
"May I?" Reacher asked again.
Newman nodded. "Please."
Reacher stood silent for a long moment and then leaned in and hooked his finger under the chain and eased it out. The bones stirred and clicked and moved as the dog tags caught. He pulled them out and brought them up and rubbed the ball of his thumb across their faces. Bent down to read the stamped name.
"Kaplan," he said. "The copilot."
"How did he die?" Newman asked.
Reacher draped the tags back across the bony ribs and looked hard for the evidence. The skull was OK. No trace of damage to the arms or legs or chest. But the pelvis was smashed. The vertebrae toward the bottom of the spine were crushed. And the ribs at the back were fractured, eight of them on both sides, counting upward from the bottom.
"Impact, when the Huey hit the ground. He took a big hit in the lower back. Massive internal trauma and hemorrhage. Probably fatal within a minute."
"But he was strapped in his seat," Newman said. "Head-on crash into the ground, how does that injure him from behind?"
Reacher looked again. He felt the way he had years before in the classroom, nervous about screwing up in front of the legendary Nash Newman. He looked hard, and he put his hands lightly on the dry bones, feeling them. But he had to be right. This was a crushing impact to the lower back. There was no other explanation.
"The Huey spun," he said. "It came in at a shallow angle and the trees spun it around. It separated between the cabin and the tail and the cabin hit the ground traveling backward."
Newman nodded. "Excellent. That's exactly how we found it. It hit backward. Instead of his harness saving him, his chair killed him."
Reacher moved on to the next casket. There was the same shallow wooden tray, the same jumble of yellow bones. The same grotesque, accusing, grinning skull. Below it, the neck was broken. He eased the dog tags out from between the shards of cracked bone.
"Tardelli," he read.
"The starboard side gunner," Newman said.
Tardelli's skeleton was a mess. The gunners stood on a slick stand in the open doorway, basically unsecured, juggling with the heavy machine gun swinging on a bungee cord. When the Huey went down, Tardelli had been thrown all over the cabin.
"Broken neck," Reacher said. "Crushing to the upper chest."
He turned the awful yellow skull over. It was fractured like an eggshell.
"Head trauma also. I'd say he died instantaneously. Wouldn't like to say which exact injury killed him."
"Neither would I," Newman said. "He was nineteen years old."
There was silence. Nothing in the air except the faint sweet aroma of loam.
"Look at the next one," Newman said.
The next one was different. There was a single injury to the chest. The dog tags were tangled into splintered bones. Reacher couldn't free them. He had to bend his head to get the name.
"Bamford."
"The crew chief," Newman said. "He would have been sitting on the cabin bench, facing the rear, opposite the three guys they picked up."
Bamford's bony face grinned up at him. Below it, his skeleton was complete and undamaged, except for the narrow crushing injury sideways across the upper body. It was like a three-inch trench in his chest. The sternum had been punched down to the level of the spine and had gone on and knocked three vertebrae out of line. Three ribs had gone with it.
"So what do you think?" Newman asked.
Reacher put his hand into the box and felt the dimensions of the injury. It was narrow and horizontal. Three fingers wouldn't fit into it, but two would.
"Some kind of an impact," he said. "Something between a sharp instrument and a blunt instrument. Hit him sideways in the chest, obviously. It would have stopped his heart immediately. Was it the rotor blade?"
Newman nodded. "Very good. The way it looked, the rotor folded up against the trees and came down into the cabin. It must have struck him across the upper body. As you say, a blow like that would have stopped his heart instantaneously."
In the next casket, the bones were very different. Some of them were the same dull yellow, but most of them were white and brittle and eroded. The dog tags were bent and blackened. Reacher turned them to throw the embossing into relief against the ceiling lights and read: Soper.
"The port side gunner," Newman said.
"'There was a fire," Reacher said.
"How can you tell?" Newman asked, like the teacher he was.
"Dog tags are burned."
"And?"
"The bones are calcinated," Reacher said. "At least, most of them are."
"Calcinated?" Newman repeated.
Reacher nodded and went back fifteen years to his textbooks.
"The organic components burned off, leaving only the inorganic compounds behind. Burning leaves the bones smaller, whiter, veined, brittle, and eroded."
"Good," Newman said.
"The explosion DeWitt saw," Jodie said. "It was the fuel tank."
Newman nodded. "Classic evidence. Not a slow fire. A fuel explosion. It spills randomly and bums quickly, which explains the random nature of the burned bones. Looks to me like Soper caught the fuel across his lower body, but his upper body was lying outside of the fire."
His quiet words died to silence and the three of them were lost in imagining the terror. The bellowing engines, the hostile bullets smashing into the airframe, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smashing impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smashing of frail human bodies into the indifferent jungle floor where no person had ever walked since the dawn of time. Soper's empty eye sockets stared up into the light, challenging them to imagine.
"Look at the next one," Newman said.
The next casket held the remains of a man called Allen. No burning. Just a yellow skeleton with bright dog tags around the broken neck. A noble, grinning skull. Even, white teeth. A high, round, undamaged cranium. The product of good nutrition and careful upbringing in the America of the fifties. His whole back was smashed, like a dead crab.
"Allen was one of the three they picked up," Newman said.
Reacher nodded, sadly. The sixth casket was a burn victim. His name was Zabrinski. His bones were calcinated and small.
"He was probably a big guy in life," Newman said. "Burning can shrink your bones by fifty percent, sometimes. So don't write him off as a midget."
Reacher nodded again. Stirred through the bones with his hand. They were light and brittle. Like husks. The veining left them sharp with microscopic ribbing.
"Injuries?" Newman asked.
Reacher looked again, but he found nothing.
"He burned to death," he said.
Newman nodded.
"Yes, I'm afraid he did," he said.
"Awful," Jodie whispered.
The seventh and final casket held the remains of a man named Gunston. They were terrible remains. At first Reacher thought there was no skull. Then he saw it was lying in the bottom of the wooden box. It was smashed into a hundred pieces. Most of them were no bigger than his thumbnail.
"What do you think?" Newman asked.
Reacher shook his head.
"I don't want to think," he whispered. "I'm all done thinking."
Newman nodded, sympathetic. "Rotor blade hit him in the head. He was one of the three they picked up. He was sitting opposite Bamford."
"Five and three," Jodie said quietly. "So the crew was Hobie and Kaplan, pilot and copilot, Bamford the crew chief, Soper and Tardelli the gunners, and they went down and picked up Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston."
Newman nodded. "That's what the files tell us."
"So where's Hobie?" Reacher asked.
"You're missing something," Newman said. "Sloppy work, Reacher, for somebody who used to be good at this."
Reacher glanced at him. DeWitt had said something similar. He had said sloppy work for somebody who was once an MP major. And he had said look closer to home.
"They were MPs, right?" he said suddenly.
Newman smiled. "Who were?"
"Two of them," Reacher said. "Two out of Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston. Two of them were arresting the other one. It was a special mission. Kaplan had put two MPs in the field the day before. His last-but-one mission, flying solo, the one I didn't read. They were going back to pick them up, plus the guy they'd arrested."
Newman nodded. "Correct."
"Which was which?"
"Pete Zabrinski and Joey Gunston were the cops. Carl Allen was the bad guy."
Reacher nodded. "What had he done?"
"The details are classified," Newman said. "Your guess?"
"In and out like that, a quick arrest? Fragging, I suppose."
"What's fragging?" Jodie asked.
"Killing your officer," Reacher said. "It happened, time to time. Some gung ho lieutenant, probably new in-country, gets all keen on advancing into dangerous positions. The grunts don't like it, figure he's after a medal, figure they'd rather keep their asses in one piece. So he says 'charge,' and somebody shoots him in the back, or throws a grenade at him, which was more efficient, because it didn't need aiming and it disguised the whole thing better. That's where the name comes from, fragging, fragmentation device, a grenade."
"So was it fragging?" Jodie asked.
"The details are classified," Newman said again. "But certainly there was fragging involved, at the end of a long and vicious career. According to the files, Carl Allen was definitely not flavor of the month."
Jodie nodded. "But why on earth is that classified? Whatever he did, he's been dead thirty years. Justice is done, right?"
Reacher had stepped back to Allen's casket. He was staring down into it.
"Caution," he said. "Whoever the gung ho lieutenant was, his family was told he died a hero, fighting the enemy. If they ever find out any different, it's a scandal. And the Department of the Army doesn't like scandals."
"Correct," Newman said again.
"But where's Hobie?" Reacher asked again.
"You're still missing something. One step at a time, OK?"
"But what is it?" Reacher asked. "Where is it?"
"In the bones," Newman said.
The clock on the laboratory wall showed five-thirty. Not much more than an hour to go. Reacher took a breath and walked back around the caskets in reverse order. Gunston, Zabrinski, Allen, Soper, Bamford, Tardelli, Kaplan. Six grinning skulls and one headless bony set of shoulders stared back up at him. He did the round again. The clock ticked on. He stopped next to each casket and gripped the cold aluminum sides and leaned over and stared in, desperate to spot what he was missing. In the bones. He started each search at the top. The skull, the neck, the collarbones, the ribs, the arms, the pelvis, the legs, the feet. He took to rummaging through the boxes, lightly, delicately sorting the dry bones, looking for it. A quarter to six. Ten to six. Jodie was watching him, anxiously. He did the round for the third time, starting again with Gunston, the cop. He moved on to Zabrinski, the other cop. On to Allen, the criminal. On to Soper, the gunner. On to Bamford, the crew chief. He found it right there in Bamford's box. He closed his eyes. It was obvious. It was so obvious it was like it was painted in Day-Glo paint and lit up with a searchlight. He ran back around the other six boxes, counting, double-checking. He was right. He had found it. Six o'clock in the evening in Hawaii.
"There are seven bodies," he said. "But there are fifteen hands."
SIX O'CLOCK IN the evening in Hawaii is eleven o'clock at night in New York City, and Hobie was alone in his apartment, thirty floors above Fifth Avenue, in the bedroom, getting ready to go to sleep. Eleven o'clock was earlier than his normal bedtime. Usually he would stay awake, reading a book or watching a film on cable until one or two in the morning. But tonight he was tired. It had been a fatiguing day. There had been a certain amount of physical activity, and some mental strain.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed. It was a king-size bed, although he slept alone, and always had. There was a thick comforter in white. The walls were white and the blinds were white. Not because he had wanted any kind of artistic consistency in his decor, but because white things were always the cheapest. Whatever you were dealing with, bed linen or paint or window coverings, the white option was always priced lowest. There was no art on the walls. No photographs, no ornaments, no souvenirs, no hangings. The floor was plain oak strips. No rug.
His feet were planted squarely on the floor. His shoes were black Oxfords, polished to a high shine, planted exactly at right angles to the oak strips. He reached down with his good hand and undid the laces, one at a time. Eased the shoes off, one at a time. Pushed them together with his feet and picked them up both together and squared them away under the bed. He slid his thumb into the top of his socks, one at a time, and eased them off his feet. Shook them out and dropped them on the floor. He unknotted his tie. He always wore a tie. It was a source of great pride to him that he could knot a tie with one hand.
He picked up the tie and stood and walked barefoot to his closet. Slid the door open and worked the thin end of the tie down behind the little brass bar where it hung at night. Then he dropped his left shoulder and let his jacket slide off his arm. Used the left hand to pull it off on the right. He reached into the closet and came out with a hanger and slid the jacket onto it, one-handed. He hung it up on the rail. Then he unbuttoned his pants and dropped the zip. Stepped out of them and crouched and straightened them on the shiny oak floor. No other way for a one-armed man to fold trousers. He put the cuffs together one on top of the other and trapped them under his foot and pulled the legs straight. Then he stood up and took a second hanger from the closet and bent down and flipped the bar under the cuffs and slid it along the floor to the knees. Then he stood up again and shook the hanger and the pants fell into perfect shape. He hung them alongside the jacket.
He curled his left wrist around the starched buttonholes and undid his shirt. He opened the right cuff. He shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and used his left hand to pull it down over his hook. Then he leaned sideways and let it fall down his left arm. Trapped the tail under his foot and pulled his arm up through the sleeve. The sleeve turned inside out as it always did and his good hand squeezed through the cuff. The only modification he had been forced to make in his entire wardrobe was to move the cuff buttons on his shirts to allow them to pass over his left hand while they were still done up.
He left the shirt on the floor and pulled at the waistband of his boxers and wriggled them down over his hips. Stepped out of them and grasped the hem of his undershirt. This was the hardest part. He stretched the hem and ducked and whipped it up over his head. Changed his grip to the neck and pulled it up over his face. He pulled it down on the right and eased his hook out through the armhole. Then he cracked his left arm like a whip until the undershirt came off it and landed on the floor. He bent and scooped it up with the shirt and the boxers and the socks and carried them into the bathroom and dumped them all in the basket.
He walked naked back to the bed and sat down again on the edge. Reached across his chest with his left hand and unbuckled the heavy leather straps around his right bicep. There were three straps, and three buckles. He eased the leather corset apart and squeezed it backward off his upper arm. It creaked in the silence as it moved. The leather was thick and heavy, much thicker and heavier than any shoe leather. It was built up in shaped layers. It was brown and shiny with wear. Over the years it had molded itself like steel to his shape. It crushed the muscle as he eased it back. He fiddled the riveted straps clear of his elbow. Then he took the cold curve of the hook in his left hand and pulled gently. The cup sucked off the stump and he pulled it away. Clamped it vertically between his knees, the hook pointing downward to the floor and the cup facing upward. He leaned over to his nightstand and took a wad of tissues from a box and a can of talc from a drawer. He crushed the tissues in his left palm and pushed them down into the cup, twisting the wad like a screw to wipe away the sweat of the day. Then he shook the can of talc and powdered all around the inside. He took more tissues and polished the leather and the steel. Then he laid the whole assembly on the floor, parallel with the bed.
He wore a thin sock on the stump of his right forearm. It was there to stop the leather from chafing the skin. It was not a specialist medical device. It was a child's sock. Just tubular, no heel, the sort of thing mothers choose before their babies can walk. He bought them a dozen pairs at a time from department stores. He always bought white ones. They were cheaper. He eased the sock off the stump and shook it out and laid it next to the box of tissues on the nightstand.
The stump itself was shriveled. There was some muscle left, but with no work to do it had wasted away to nothing. The bones were filed smooth on the cut ends, and the skin had been sewn down tight over them. The skin was white, and the stitches were red. They looked like Chinese writing. There was black hair growing on the bottom of the stump, because the skin there had been stretched down from the outside of his forearm.
He stood up again and walked to the bathroom. A previous owner had installed a wall of mirror above the sink. He looked at himself in it, and hated what he saw. His arm didn't bother him. It was just missing. It was his face he hated. The burns. The arm was a wound, but the face was a disfigurement. He turned half sideways so he didn't have to look at it. He cleaned his teeth and carried a bottle of lotion back to the bed. Squeezed a drop onto the skin of the stump and worked it in with his fingers. Then he placed the lotion next to the baby's sock on the nightstand and rolled under the covers and clicked the light off.
"LEFT OR RIGHT?" Jodie asked. "Which did he lose?"
Reacher was standing over Bamford's bright casket, sorting through bones.
"His right," he said. "The extra hand is a right hand."
Newman moved across to Reacher's shoulder and leaned in and separated two splintered shards of bone, each one about five inches in length.
"He lost more than his hand," he said. "These are the radius and the ulna from his right arm. It was severed below the elbow, probably by a fragment of the rotor blade. There would have been enough left to make a decent stump."
Reacher picked up the bones and ran his fingers across the splintered ends.
"I don't understand, Nash," he said. "Why didn't you search the area?"
"Why should we?" Newman said back, neutrally.
"Because why just assume he survived? He was grievously injured. The impact, the severed arm? Maybe other injuries, maybe internal? Massive blood loss at least? Maybe he was burned, too. There was burning fuel everywhere. Think about it, Nash. Probability is he crawled out from the wreck, bleeding from his arteries, maybe on fire, he dragged himself twenty yards away and collapsed in the undergrowth and died. Why the hell didn't you look for him?"
"Ask yourself the question," Newman said. "Why didn't we look for him?"
Reacher stared at him. Nash Newman, one of the smartest guys he had ever known. A man so picky and precise he could take a fragment of skull an inch wide and tell you who it had belonged to, how he had lived, how he had died. A man so professional and meticulous he had run the longest-lasting and most complicated forensic investigation ever known in history and had received nothing but praise and plaudits all along the way. How could Nash Newman have made such an elementary mistake? Reacher stared at him, and then he breathed out and closed his eyes.
"Christ, Nash," he said slowly. "You know he survived, don't you? You actually know it. You didn't look for him because you know it for sure."
Newman nodded. "Correct."
"But how do you know?"
Newman glanced around the lab. Lowered his voice.
"Because he turned up afterward," he said. "He crawled into a field hospital fifty miles away and three weeks later. It's all in their medical files. He was racked with fever, serious malnutrition, terrible bums to one side of his face, no arm, maggots in the stump. He was incoherent most of the time, but they identified him by his dog tags. Then he came around after treatment and told the story, no other survivors but himself. That's why I said we knew exactly what we were going to find up there. That's why it was such a low priority, until Leon got all agitated about it."
"So what happened?" Jodie asked. "Why all the secrecy?"
"The hospital was way north," Newman said. "Charlie was pushing south and we were retreating. The hospital was getting ready for evacuation."
"And?" Reacher asked.
"He disappeared the night before they were due to move him to Saigon."
"He disappeared?"
Newman nodded. "Just ran away. Got himself out of his cot and lit out. Never been seen since."
"Shit," Reacher said.
"I still don't understand the secrecy," Jodie said.
Newman shrugged. "Well, Reacher can explain it. More his area than mine."
Reacher still had hold of Hobie's bones. The radius and the ulna from his right arm, neatly socketed on the lower end like nature intended, savagely smashed and splintered at the upper end by a fragment of his own rotor blade. Hobie had studied the leading edge of that blade and seen that it was capable of smashing through tree limbs as thick as a man's arm. He had used that inspiration to save other men's lives, over and over again. Then that same blade had come folding and whirling down into his own cockpit and taken his hand away.
"He was a deserter," he said. "Technically, that's what he was. He was a serving soldier and he ran away. But a decision was taken not to go after him. Had to be that way. Because what could the Army do? If they caught him, what next? They would be prosecuting a guy with an exemplary record, nine hundred ninety-one combat missions, a guy who deserted after the trauma of a horrendous injury and disfigurement. They couldn't do that. The war was unpopular. You can't send a disfigured hero to Leavenworth for deserting under those circumstances. But equally you can't send out the message that you're letting deserters get away with it. That would have been a scandal of a different sort. They were still busting plenty of guys for deserting. The undeserving ones. They couldn't reveal they had different strokes for different folks. So Hobie's file was closed and sealed and classified secret. That's why the personnel record ends with the last mission. All the rest of it is in a vault, somewhere in the Pentagon."
Jodie nodded.
"And that's why he's not on the Wall," she said. "They know he's still alive."
Reacher was reluctant to put the arm bones down. He held them, and ran his fingers up and down their length. The good ends were smooth and perfect, ready to accept the subtle articulation of the human wrist.
"Have you logged his medical records?" he asked Newman. "His old X rays and dental charts and all that stuff?"
Newman shook his head. "He's not MIA. He survived and deserted."
Reacher turned back to Bamford's casket and laid the two yellow shards gently in one comer of the rough wooden box. He shook his head. "I just can't believe it, Nash. Everything about this guy says he didn't have a deserter's mentality. His background, his record, everything. I know about deserters. I hunted plenty of them."
"He deserted," Newman said. "It's a fact, it's in the files from the hospital."
"He survived the crash," Reacher said. "I guess I can't dispute that anymore. He was in the hospital. Can't dispute that, either. But suppose it wasn't really desertion? Suppose he was just confused, or groggy from the drugs or something? Suppose he just wandered away and got lost?"
Newman shook his head. "He wasn't confused."
"But how do you know that? Loss of blood, malnutrition, fever, morphine?"
"He deserted," Newman said.
"It doesn't add up," Reacher said.
"War changes people," Newman said.
"Not that much," Reacher said back.
Newman stepped closer and lowered his voice again.
"He killed an orderly," he whispered. "The guy spotted him on the way out and tried to stop him. It's all in the file. Hobie said 'I'm not going back,' and hit the guy in the head with a bottle. Broke his skull. They put the guy in Hobie's bed and he didn't survive the trip back to Saigon. That's what the secrecy is all about, Reacher. They didn't just let him get away with deserting. They let him get away with murder."
There was total silence in the lab. The air hissed and the loamy smell of the old bones drifted. Reacher laid his hand on the shiny lip of Bamford's casket, just to keep himself standing upright.
"I don't believe it," he said.
"You should," Newman said back. "Because it's true."
"I can't tell his folks that," Reacher said. "I just can't. It would kill them."
"Hell of a secret," Jodie said. "They let him get away with murder?"
"Politics," Newman said. "The politics over there stunk to high heaven. Still do, as a matter of fact."
"Maybe he died later," Reacher said. "Maybe he got away into the jungle and died there later. He was still very sick, right?"
"How would that help you?" Newman asked.
"I could tell his folks he was dead, you know, gloss over the exact details."
"You're clutching at straws," Newman said.
"We have to go," Jodie said. "We need to make the plane."
"Would you run his medical records?" Reacher asked. "If I got hold of them from his family? Would you do that for me?"
There was a pause.
"I've already got them," Newman said. "Leon brought them with him. The family released them to him."
"So will you run them?" Reacher asked.
"You're clutching at straws," Newman said again.
Reacher turned around and pointed at the hundred cardboard boxes stacked in the alcove at the end of the room. "He could be already here, Nash."
"He's in New York," Jodie said. "Don't you see that?"
"No, I want him to be dead," Reacher said. "I can't go back to his folks and tell them their boy is a deserter and a murderer and has been running around all this time without contacting them. I need him to be dead."
"But he isn't," Newman said.
"But he could be, right?" Reacher said. "He could have died later. Back in the jungle, someplace else, maybe faraway, on the run? Disease, malnutrition? Maybe his skeleton was found already. Will you run his records? As a favor to me?"
"Reacher, we need to go now," Jodie said.
"Will you run them?" Reacher asked again.
"I can't," Newman said. "Christ, this whole thing is classified, don't you understand that? I shouldn't have told you anything at all. And I can't add another name to the MIA lists now. The Department of the Army wouldn't stand for it. We're supposed to be reducing the numbers here, not adding to them."
"Can't you do it unofficially? Privately? You can do that, right? You run this place, Nash. Please? For me?"
Newman shook his head. "You're clutching at straws, is all."
"Please, Nash," Reacher said.
There was silence. Then Newman sighed.
"OK, damn it," he said. "For you, I'll do it, I guess."
"When?" Reacher asked.
Newman shrugged. "First thing tomorrow morning, OK?"
"Call me as soon as you've done it?"
"Sure, but you're wasting your time. Number?"
"Use the mobile," Jodie said.
She recited the number. Newman wrote it on the cuff of his lab coat.
"Thanks, Nash," Reacher said. "I really appreciate this."
"Waste of time," Newman said again.
"We need to go," Jodie called.
Reacher nodded vaguely and they all moved toward the plain door in the cinder-block wall. Lieutenant Simon was waiting on the other side of it with the offer of a ride around the perimeter road to the passenger terminals.