"So how was it found?"
"Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking from his car to the car he had stopped."
"When was this exactly?"
"Today," the guy said. "Start of the second watch. Not long after noon."
"It wasn't there a month," I said.
"When did he lose it?"
"New Year's Eve," I said.
"Where?"
"It was stolen from where he was staying."
"Where was he staying?"
"A motel about thirty miles south of here."
"So the bad guys were coming back north."
"I guess," I said.
The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light and stared at it from every angle.
"January," he said. "We've got a little night dew right now. And it's cold enough that we're worried about ice. So we've got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated. It's got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas. But not very much. It hasn't been out there since New Year's Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours, I'd say. One night, not more."
"Can you be certain?" Summer asked.
He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.
"Just a guess," he said.
"OK," I said. "Thanks."
"You'll have to sign for it."
I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right breast pocket, but I figured he hadn't paid much attention to it. He had spent most of his time looking at Summer's pockets. So I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and picked up the briefcase and turned away.
"Funny sort of burglary," the desk guy said. "There's an Amex card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents."
I didn't reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the Humvee.
Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median. She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of thing a Humvee was good for.
"Try this," she said. "Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o'clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car window."
"They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird."
"So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there."
"They were all alibied."
"Only superficially. New Year's Eve parties are pretty chaotic."
I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.
"Sixty miles," I said. "The case was found sixty miles north of Bird. That's an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that."
Summer said nothing.
"And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty conspicuous."
"Maybe there really wasn't an agenda."
"It would be the first time in military history."
"Then maybe it really wasn't important."
"They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That might be the first time in military history too. That was an important conference, Summer, believe me."
She said nothing.
"Do that U-turn thing again," I said. "Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area."
The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The buildings were shared by both sets of travelers. Therefore they had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting. People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing something farther on, even though that might have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms. Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.
There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility's main entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out.
"Too public," Summer said. "This is going nowhere."
I nodded again. "I'd forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn't for Mrs. Kramer."
"Carbone is more important. We should prioritize."
"That feels like we're giving up."
We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off-roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left. There was a vague sunset in the West, to my right. The road looked damp. Summer didn't seem very worried about the possibility of ice.
I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched the dome light on and searched Kramer's briefcase, thoroughly. I didn't expect to find anything, and I wasn't proved wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively. He hadn't been anywhere else. He was a true specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world's last great tank arena and its command structure.
The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be. Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip. They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date.
The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly. There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin's Visiting Officers' Quarters, which he had never reached.
His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must have been a sophisticated guy, financially.
There was a Virginia driver's license. He had been using Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.