I crossed the street and walked through the empty lot and looked at the lounge bar. It was silent and closed up tight. Its neon signs were all switched off and the little bent tubes looked cold and dead. It had its own Dumpster, close by in the lot, just sitting there like a parked vehicle. There was no briefcase in it.
I ducked inside the greasy spoon. It was still empty. I checked the floor around the tables and the banquettes in the booths. I looked on the floor behind the register. There was a cardboard box back there with a couple of forlorn umbrellas in it. But no briefcase. I checked the women's bathroom. No women in it. No briefcase in it either.
I looked at my watch and walked back to the bar. I would need to ask some face-to-face questions there. But it wouldn't be open for business for another eight hours at least. I turned around and looked across the street at the motel. There was still nobody in the office. So I headed back to my Humvee and got there in time to hear a 10-17 come in on the radio. Return to base. So I acknowledged and fired up the big diesel and drove all the way back to Bird. There was no traffic and I made it inside forty minutes. I saw Kramer's rental parked in the motor pool lot. There was a new person at the desk outside my borrowed office. A corporal. The day shift. He was a small dark guy who looked like he was from Louisiana. French blood in there, certainly. I know French blood when I see it.
"Your brother called again," the corporal said.
"Why?"
"No message."
"What was the ten-seventeen for?"
"Colonel Garber requests a ten-nineteen."
I smiled. You could live your whole life saying nothing but 10-this and 10-that. Sometimes I felt like I already had. A 10-19 was a contact by phone or radio. Less serious than a 10-16, which was a contact by secure landline. Colonel Garber requests a 10-19 meant Garber wants you to call him, was all. Some MP units get in the habit of speaking English, but clearly this one hadn't yet.
I stepped into my office and saw Kramer's suit carrier propped against the wall and a carton containing his shoes and underwear and hat sitting next to it. His uniform was still on three hangers. They were hung one in front of the other on my coatrack. I walked past them to my borrowed desk and dialed Garber's number. Listened to the purr of the ring tone and wondered what my brother wanted. Wondered how he had tracked me down. I had been in Panama sixty hours ago. Before that I had been all over the place. So he had made a big effort to find me. So maybe it was important. I picked up a pencil and wrote Joe on a slip of paper. Then I underlined it, twice.
"Yes?" Leon Garber said in my ear.
"Reacher here," I said. The clock on the wall showed a little after nine in the morning. Kramer's onward connection to LAX was already in the air.
"It was a heart attack," Garber said. "No question."
"Walter Reed worked fast."
"He was a general."
"But a general with a bad heart."
"Bad arteries, actually. Severe arteriosclerosis leading to fatal ventricular fibrillation. That's what they're telling us. And I believe them too. Probably kicked in around the time the whore took her bra off."
"He wasn't carrying any pills."
"It was probably undiagnosed. It's one of those things. You feel fine, then you feel dead. No way it could be faked, anyway. You could simulate fibrillation with an electric shock, I guess, but you can't simulate forty years' worth of crap in the arteries."
"Were we worried about it being faked?"
"There could have been KGB interest," Garber said. "Kramer and his tanks are the biggest single tactical problem the Red Army is facing."
"Right now the Red Army is facing the other way."
"Kind of early to say whether that's permanent or not."
I didn't reply. The phone went quiet.
"I can't let anyone else touch this with a stick," Garber said. "Not just yet. Because of the circumstances. You understand that, right?"
"So?"
"So you're going to have to do the widow thing," Garber said.
"Me? Isn't she in Germany?"
"She's in Virginia. She's home for the holidays. They have a house there."
He gave me the address and I wrote it on the slip of paper, directly underneath where I had underlined Joe.
"Anyone with her?" I asked.
"They don't have kids. So she's probably alone."
"OK," I said.
"She doesn't know yet," Garber said. "Took me a while to track her down."
"Want me to take a priest?"
"It isn't a combat death. You could take a female partner, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might be a hugger."
"OK."
"Spare her the details, obviously. He was en route to Irwin, is all. Croaked in a layover hotel. We need to make that the official line. Nobody except you and me knows any different yet, and that's the way we're going to keep it. Except you can tell whoever you partner with, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might ask questions, and you'll need to be on the same page. What about the local cops? Are they going to leak?"
"The guy I saw was an ex-Marine. He knows the score."
"Semper Fi," Garber said.
"I didn't find the briefcase yet," I said.
The phone went quiet again.
"Do the widow thing first," Garber said. "Then keep on looking for it."
I told the day-shift corporal to move Kramer's effects to my quarters. I wanted to keep them safe and sound. The widow would ask for them, eventually. And things can disappear, on a big base like Bird, which can be embarrassing. Then I walked over to the O Club and looked for MPs eating late breakfasts or early lunches. They usually cluster well away from everybody else, because everybody else hates them. I found a group of four, two men and two women. They were all in woodland-pattern BDUs, standard on-post dress. One of the women was a captain. She had her right arm in a sling. She was having trouble eating. She would have trouble driving too. The other woman had a lieutenant's bar on each lapel and Summer on her nametape. She looked to be about twenty-five years old and she was short and slender. She had skin the same color as the mahogany table she was eating off.
"Lieutenant Summer," I said.
"Sir?"
"Happy New Year," I said.
"Sir, you too."
"You busy today?"
"Sir, general duties."
"OK, out front in thirty minutes, Class As. I need you to hug a widow."
I put my own Class As on again and called the motor pool for a sedan. I didn't want to ride all the way to Virginia in a Humvee. Too noisy, too uncomfortable. A private brought me a new olive-green Chevrolet. I signed for it and drove it around to post headquarters and waited.
Lieutenant Summer came out halfway through the twenty-eighth minute of her allotted thirty. She paused a second and then walked toward the car. She looked good. She was very short, but she moved easily, like a willowy person. She looked like a six-foot catwalk model reduced in size to a tiny miniature. I got out of the car and left the driver's door open. Met her on the sidewalk. She was wearing an expert sharpshooter badge with bars for rifle, small bore rifle, auto rifle, pistol, small bore pistol, machine gun, and submachine gun hanging on it. They made a little ladder about two inches long. Longer than mine. I only have rifle and pistol. She stopped dead in front of me and came to attention and fired off a perfect salute.
"Sir, Lieutenant Summer reports," she said.
"Take it easy," I said. "Informal mode of address, OK? Call me Reacher, or nothing. And no saluting. I don't like it."