twenty-one

I kept tight hold on the ten-dollar bill and took her through it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But none of them knew anything. None of them had any information at all, either firsthand or secondhand. There were no rumors going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room. There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before. Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had been stunned by the blows. She hadn’t seen them coming. She sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting hit.

“Tell me again,” I said. “It was the soldier, not the owner.”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“The owner never hits us,” she said. “We’re his meal ticket.”

I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet table.

 

“What does it mean?” Summer said.

“Everything,” I said.

“How did you know?”

I shrugged. We were back in Kramer’s motel room, folding stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last time.

“I saw it wrong,” I said. “I guess I started to realize in Paris. When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They were watching people coming out and they were kind of half-prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them, depending. That’s how it was in the bar that night. I walked in, I’m a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for a split second. But they didn’t know me and they didn’t like what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn’t shut me out. He turned toward me. I thought it was just random, but it wasn’t. I thought I was selecting him, but he was selecting me just as much.”

“It had to be random. He didn’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw them. He’d been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he was looking at.”

“So why turn toward you?”

“It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to know why I was there.”

“Did you tell him?”

I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”

“Why would he care?”

“Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart. Delta doesn’t hire dumb guys, that’s for sure. He went in and smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything. And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it. He didn’t even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met him before.”

“Why did he want you dead-ended? What was his motive?”

“He didn’t want me to find out who took the briefcase.”

“Why not?”

I sat down on the bed.

“Why did we never find the woman Kramer met in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there never was a woman,” I said. “Kramer met Carbone in here.”

She just stared at me.

“Kramer was gay too,” I said. “He and Carbone were getting it on.”

 

“Carbone took the briefcase,” I said. “Right out of this room. Because he had to keep the relationship secret. Just like we thought about the phantom woman, maybe he was worried there was something personal to him in it. Or maybe Kramer had been bragging about the Irwin conference. Talking about how Armored was going to fight its corner. So maybe Carbone was curious. Or even concerned. He’d been an infantryman for sixteen years. And the type of guy who gets into Delta, he’s got a lot of unit loyalty. Maybe more loyalty to his unit than to his lover.”

“I don’t believe it,” Summer said.

“You should,” I said. “It all fits. Andrea Norton more or less told us. I think she knew about Kramer. Either consciously or subconsciously, I’m not sure which. We accused her, and she wasn’t annoyed, remember? She was amused instead. Or bewildered, maybe. She was a sexual psychologist, she’d met the guy, maybe she’d picked up a vibe, professionally. Or the absence of a vibe, personally. So in our minds we had her in bed with Kramer, and she just couldn’t make it compute. So she didn’t get mad. It just didn’t connect. And we know Kramer’s marriage was a sham. No kids. He hadn’t lived at home for five years. Detective Clark wondered why he wasn’t divorced. He once asked me, Divorce isn’t a deal-breaker for a general, is it? I said, No, it isn’t. But being gay is. That’s for damn sure. Being gay is a big-time deal-breaker for a general. That’s why he kept the marriage going. It was cover, for the army. Just like the girlfriend photo in Carbone’s wallet.”

“We have no proof.”

“But we can get close. Carbone had a condom in his wallet, as well as the girlfriend photo. A buck gets ten it’s from the same pack as the one Walter Reed took off Kramer’s body. And another buck gets ten we can comb old assignment orders and find out where and when they met. Some joint exercise somewhere, like we thought all along. Plus Carbone was a vehicle guy for Delta. Their adjutant told me that. He had access to their whole stable of Humvees, any old time he wanted it. So another buck gets ten we’ll find Carbone was out in one, alone, on New Year’s Eve.”

“Was he killed for the briefcase? In the end? Like Mrs. Kramer?”

I shook my head. “Neither one of them was killed just for the briefcase.”

She just looked at me.

“Later,” I said. “One step at a time.”

“But Carbone had the briefcase. You said so. He ran off with it.”

I nodded. “And he searched it as soon as he got back to Bird. He found the agenda. He read it. And something in it made him call his CO immediately.”

“He called Brubaker? How could he do that? He couldn’t say, Hey, I was just sleeping with a general and guess what I found?”

“He could have said he found it somewhere else. On the sidewalk, maybe. But actually I’m wondering if Brubaker knew about Carbone and Kramer all along. It’s possible. Delta is a family and Brubaker was a very hands-on type of CO. It’s possible he knew. And maybe he exploited the situation. For intelligence purposes. These guys are incredibly competitive. And Sanchez told me Brubaker never missed any angle or any advantage or any wrinkle. So maybe the price of Brubaker’s tolerance was that Carbone had to pass stuff on, from the pillow talk.”

“That’s awful.”

I nodded. “Like being a whore. I told you there would be no winners here. Everyone’s going to come out looking bad.”

“Except us. If we get the results.”

“You’re going to be OK. I’m not.”

“Why?”

“Wait and see,” I said.

 

We carried our bags to the Chevy, which was still hidden behind the lounge bar. We put them in the trunk. The lot was fuller than it had been before. The night was heating up. I checked my watch. Almost eight o’clock on the East Coast, almost five on the West Coast. I stood still, trying to decide. If we pause for breath even for a second, we’ll be overrun again.

“I need to make two more calls,” I said.

I took the army phone book with me and we walked back to the greasy spoon. I checked every pocket for loose change and came up with a small pile. Summer contributed a quarter and a nickel. The counterman changed the pennies for silver. I fed the phone and dialed Franz at Fort Irwin. Five o’clock in the afternoon, it was the middle of his workday.

“Am I going to get past your main gate?” I asked him.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Willard’s chasing me. He’s liable to warn any place he thinks I’m going.”

“I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“Maybe you could switch your telex off for a day or two.”

“What’s your ETA?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

“Your buddies are already here. They just got in.”

“I haven’t got any buddies.”

“Vassell and Coomer. They’re fresh in from Europe.”

“Why?”

“Exercises.”

“Is Marshall still there?”

“Sure. He drove out to LAX to pick them up. They all came back together. One big happy family.”

“I need you to do two things for me,” I said.

“Two more things, you mean.”

“I need a ride from LAX myself. Tomorrow, first morning arrival from D.C. I need you to send someone.”

“And?”

“And I need you to get someone to locate the staff car Vassell and Coomer used back here. It’s a black Mercury Grand Marquis. Marshall signed it out on New Year’s Eve. By now it’s either back in the Pentagon garage or parked at Andrews. I need someone to find it and to do a full-court press on it, forensically. And fast.”

“What would they be looking for?”

“Anything at all.”

“OK,” Franz said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

I hung up and turned the pages in the army directory all the way from F for Fort Irwin to P for Pentagon. Slid my finger down the subsection to C for Chief of Staff’s Office. I left it there, briefly.

“Vassell and Coomer are at Irwin,” I said.

“Why?” Summer said.

“Hiding out,” I said. “They think we’re still in Europe. They know Willard is watching the airports. They’re sitting ducks.”

“Do we want them?” Summer said. “They didn’t know about Mrs. Kramer. That was clear. They were shocked when you told them, that night in your office. So I guess they authorized the burglary, but not the collateral damage.”

I nodded. She was right. They had been surprised, that night in my office. Coomer had gone pale and asked: Was it a burglary? It was a question that came straight from a guilty conscience. That meant Marshall hadn’t told them yet. He had kept the really bad news to himself. He had come back to the D.C. hotel at twenty past three in the morning, and he had told them the briefcase hadn’t been there, but he hadn’t told them what else had gone down. Vassell and Coomer must have been piecing it together on the fly, that night in my office, in the dark and after the event. It must have been an interesting ride home. Harsh words must have been exchanged.

“It’s down to Marshall alone,” Summer said. “He panicked, is all.”

“Technically it was a conspiracy,” I said. “Legally they all share the blame.”

“Hard to prosecute.”

“That’s JAG Corps’ problem.”

“It’s a weak case. Hard to prove.”

“They did other stuff,” I said. “Believe me, Mrs. Kramer is the least of their worries.”

I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless. I guessed she was a senior administrator, working late. I guessed she was about fifty, blonde going gray, powder on her face.

“Write this down,” I said to her. “I am a military police major called Reacher. I was recently transferred out of Panama and into Fort Bird, North Carolina. I will be standing at the E-ring checkpoint inside your building at midnight tonight. It is entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets me there.”

I paused.

“Is that it?” the woman said.

“Yes,” I said, and hung up. I scooped fifteen remaining cents back into my pocket. Closed the phone book and wedged it under my arm.

“Let’s go,” I said. We drove through the gas station and topped off the tank with eight bucks’ worth of gas. Then we headed north.

 

“It’s entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you there?” Summer said. “What the hell is that about?”

We were on I-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The whole world was back at work.

“There’s something heavy-duty going on,” I said. “Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it’s heavy-duty, with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on the same day?”

“You’re a major,” she said. “So are Franz and Sanchez and all the others. Any colonel could have moved you.”

“But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.”

“OK then, any Brigadier General could have done it.”

“With forged signatures on the orders?”

“Anyone can forge a signature.”

“And hope to get away with it afterward? No, this whole thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with impunity. Someone untouchable.”

“The Chief of Staff?”

I shook my head. “No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry. And we can assume he’s a reasonably smart guy. They don’t put dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized that pretty soon everything else would be coming down too. The whole established order.”

“And?”

“And he started to worry about some kind of a move by Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don’t want integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about starting something dramatic. Something bad. That’s why they were so worried about the agenda getting out.”

“But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.”

“Nobody ever accepts that fact,” I said. “Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of newfangled junk. There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises, putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that their way is the only way.”

Summer said nothing.

I smiled. “Go back in our records and you’ll probably find Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.”

“What exactly were they planning?”

I shrugged. “We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously. Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with defense industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say that lightweight armored vehicles can’t be made safe, that would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“That’s just standard-issue bitching.”

“So maybe there’s more. We don’t know yet. Kramer’s heart attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.”

“You think they’ll start it up again?”

“Wouldn’t you? If you had everything to lose?”

She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned slightly and looked at me.

“So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?” she asked. “If you’re right, then it’s the Vice-Chief who’s on your side. He brought you here. He’s the one who’s been protecting you.”

“Game of chess,” I said. “Tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. The good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away. Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.”

“The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?”

I nodded.

“So why demand to see him?”

“Because we’re in the army, Summer,” I said. “We’re supposed to confront our enemies, not our friends.”

 

We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff’s face was a whole other ball game. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above it. There had been three of them during my years of service and I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart. Something made them different from the rest of us.

But they started out the same. I could have been one of them, theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get sent on somewhere else afterward. Somewhere better. You had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere overseas like Oxford or Cambridge in England. You had to get a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a master’s or a Ph.D. in economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a White House Fellow. That’s where my career path diverged. Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books. Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military. So they went their way and I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to my turf, they’d be crawling on their bellies. How I was going to do on their turf remained to be seen.

“I’m going in by myself,” I said.

“You are not,” Summer said.

“I am,” I said. “You can call it what you like. Advice from a friend, or a direct order from a superior officer. But you’re staying in the car. That’s for sure. I’ll handcuff you to the steering wheel if I have to.”

“We’re in this together.”

“But we’re allowed to be intelligent. This isn’t like going to see Andrea Norton. This is as risky as it gets. No reason for both of us to go down in flames.”

“Would you stay in the car? If you were me?”

“I’d hide underneath it,” I said.

She said nothing. Just drove, as fast as ever. We hit the Beltway. Started the long clockwise quarter-circle up toward Arlington.

 

Pentagon security was a little tighter than usual. Maybe someone was worried about Noriega’s leftover forces staging a two-thousand-mile northward penetration. But we got into the parking lot with no trouble at all. It was almost deserted. Summer drove a long slow circuit and came to rest near the main entrance. She killed the motor and jammed the parking brake on. She did it a little harder than she really needed to. I guessed she was making a point. I checked my watch. It was five minutes before midnight.

“Are we going to argue?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Good luck,” she said. “And give him hell.”

I slid out into the cold. Closed the door behind me and stood still for a second. The bulk of the building loomed up over me in the dark. People said it was the world’s largest office complex and right then I believed them. I started walking. There was a long ramp up to the doors. Then there was a guarded lobby the size of a basketball court. My special unit badge got me through that. Then I headed for the heart of the complex. There were five concentric pentagon-shaped corridors, called rings. Each one of them was protected by a separate checkpoint. My badge was good enough to get me through B, C, and D. Nothing on earth was going to get me into the E-ring. I stopped outside the final checkpoint and nodded to the guard. He nodded back. He was used to people waiting there.

I leaned against the wall. It was smooth-painted concrete and it felt cold and slick. The building was silent. I could hear nothing except water in pipes and the faint rush of forced-air heating and the guard’s steady breathing. The floors were shined linoleum tile and they reflected the ceiling fluorescents in a long double image that ran away to a distant vanishing point.

I waited. I could see a clock in the guard’s booth. It rolled past midnight. Past five after midnight. Then ten after. I waited. I started to figure my challenge had been ignored. These guys were political. Maybe they played a smarter game than I could conceive. Maybe they had more gloss and sophistication and patience. Maybe I was more than a little bit out of my league.

Or maybe the woman with the voice had thrown my message in the trash.

I waited.

Then at fifteen minutes past midnight I heard faraway heels echoing on the linoleum. Dress shoes, a staccato little rhythm that was part urgent and part relaxed. Like a man who was busy but not panicked. I couldn’t see him. The rap of his heels on the floor was billowing out at me around an angled corner. It ran ahead of him down the deserted corridor like an early warning signal.

I listened to the sound and watched the spot where it told me he would appear, which was right where the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling met their reflections in the floor. The sound kept on coming. Then a man stepped around the corner and walked through the flare of light. He kept on walking straight toward me, the rhythm of his heels unbroken, not slowing, not speeding up, still busy, not panicked. He came closer. He was the Chief of Staff of the Army. He was in formal evening mess dress. He was wearing a short blue jacket nipped in at the waist. Blue pants with two gold stripes. A bow tie. Gold studs and cuff links. Elaborate knots and swirls of gold braid all over his sleeves and his shoulders. He was covered with gold insignia and badges and sashes and miniature versions of his medals. He had a full head of gray hair. He was about five-nine and one-eighty. Exactly average size for the modern army.

He got within ten feet of me and I snapped to attention and saluted. It was a pure reflex action. Like a Catholic meeting the Pope. He didn’t salute back. He just looked at me. Maybe there was a protocol that forbade saluting while wearing the evening mess uniform. Or while bareheaded in the Pentagon. Or maybe he was just rude.

He put his hand out to shake.

“Very sorry I’m late,” he said. “Good of you to wait. I was at the White House. For a state dinner with some foreign friends.”

I shook his hand.

“Let’s go to my office,” he said.

He led me past the E-ring guard and we turned left into the corridor and walked a little way. Then we stepped into a suite and I met the woman with the voice. She looked more or less like I had predicted. She was wearing civilian clothes. A dark suit so severe it was more formal than a uniform. But she sounded even better in person than she had on the phone.

“Coffee, Major?” she said.

She had a fresh pot brewed. I guessed she had clicked the switch at about eleven fifty-three, so it had finished perking at midnight exactly. I guessed the Chief of Staff’s suite was that sort of place. She gave me a saucer and a cup made of transparent bone china. I was afraid of crushing it like an eggshell.

“This way,” the Chief of Staff said.

He led me into his office. My cup rattled on its saucer. His office was surprisingly plain. It had the same painted concrete walls as the rest of the building. The same type of steel desk I had seen in the Fort Bird pathologist’s office.

“Take a seat,” he said. “If you don’t mind, we’ll make this quick. It’s late.”

I said nothing. He watched me.

“I got your message,” he said. “Received and understood.”

I said nothing. He tried an icebreaker.

“Noriega’s top guys are still out there,” he said. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Thirty thousand square miles,” I said. “A lot of space for people to hide in.”

“Will we get them all?”

“No question,” I said. “Someone will sell them out.”

“You’re a cynic.”

“A realist,” I said.

“What have you got to tell me, Major?”

I sipped my coffee. The lights were low. I was suddenly aware that I was deep inside one of the world’s most secure buildings, late at night, face-to-face with the nation’s most powerful soldier. And I was about to make a serious accusation. And only one other person knew I was there, and maybe she was already in a cell somewhere.

“I was in Panama two weeks ago,” I said. “Then I was transferred out.”

“Why do you think that was?”

I took a breath. “I think the Vice-Chief wanted particular individuals on the ground in particular locations because he was worried about trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“An internal coup by your old buddies in Armored Branch.”

He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “Would that have been a realistic worry?”

I nodded. “There was a conference at Irwin scheduled for New Year’s Day. I believe the agenda was certainly controversial, probably illegal, maybe treasonous.”

The Chief of Staff said nothing.

“But it misfired,” I said. “Because General Kramer died. But there were potential problems from the fallout. So you personally intervened by moving Colonel Garber out of the 110th and replacing him with an incompetent.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So that nature would take its course and the investigation would misfire too.”

He sat still for another long moment. Then he smiled.

“Good analysis,” he said. “The collapse of Soviet communism was bound to lead to stresses inside the U.S. military. Those stresses were bound to manifest themselves with all kinds of internal plotting and planning. The internal plotting and planning was bound to be anticipated and steps were bound to be taken to nip potential trouble in the bud. And as you say, there were bound to be tensions at the very top that led to moves and countermoves.”

I said nothing.

“Like a game of chess,” he said. “The Vice-Chief moves, and I countermove. An inevitable conclusion, I suppose, because you were looking for a pair of senior individuals in which one outranks the other.”

I looked straight at him.

“Am I wrong?” I said.

“Only in two particulars,” he said. “Obviously you’re right in that there are huge changes coming. CIA was a little slow to spot Ivan’s imminent demise, so we’ve had less than a year to think things through. But believe me, we’ve thought them through. We’re in a unique situation now. We’re like a heavyweight boxer who’s trained for years for a shot at the world title, and then we wake up one morning and find our intended opponent has dropped dead. It’s a very bewildering sensation. But we’ve done our homework.”

He leaned down and opened a drawer and struggled out with an enormous loose-leaf file. It was at least three inches thick. It thumped down on his desktop. It had a green jacket with a long word stenciled on it in black. He reversed it so I could read it. It said: Transformation.

“Your first mistake is that your focus was too close,” he said. “You need to stand back and look at it from our perspective. From above. It’s not just Armored Branch that is going to change. Everyone is going to change. Obviously we’re going to move toward highly mobile integrated units. But it’s a bad mistake to see them as infantry units with a few bells and whistles tacked on. They’re going to be a completely new concept. They’ll be something that has never existed before. Maybe we’ll integrate attack helicopters too, and give the command to the guys in the sky. Maybe we’ll move into electronic warfare and give the command to the guys with the computers.”

I said nothing.

He laid his hand on the file, palm down. “My point is that nobody is going to come out of this unscathed. Yes, Armored is going to be professionally devastated. No question about that. But so is the infantry and so is the artillery, and so is transport, and so is logistics support, and so is everyone else, equally, just as much. Maybe more, for some people. Including the military police, probably. Everything is going to change, Major. There will be no stone unturned.”

I said nothing.

“This is not about Armored versus the infantry,” he said. “You need to understand that. That’s a vast oversimplification. It’s actually about everyone versus everyone else. There will be no winners, I’m afraid. But equally therefore, there will be no losers. You could choose to think about it that way. Everyone is in the same boat.”

He took his hand off the file.

“What’s my second mistake?” I said.

“I moved you out of Panama,” he said. “Not the Vice-Chief. He knew nothing about it. I selected twenty men personally and put them where I thought I needed them. I spread them around, because in my judgment it was fifty-fifty as to who was going to blink first. The light units, or the heavy units? It was impossible to predict. Once their commanders started thinking, they would all realize they have everything to lose. I sent you to Fort Bird, for instance, because I was a little worried about David Brubaker. He was a very proactive type.”

“But it was Armored who blinked first,” I said.

He nodded.

“Apparently,” he said. “If you say so. It was always going to be a fifty-fifty chance. And I guess I’m a little disappointed. Those were my boys. But I’m not defensive about them. I moved onward and upward. I left them behind. I’m perfectly happy to let the chips fall where they may.”

“So why did you move Garber?”

“I didn’t.”

“So who did?”

“Who outranks me?”

“Nobody,” I said.

“I wish,” he said.

I said nothing.

“What does an M16 rifle cost?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not a lot, I guess.”

“We get them for about four hundred dollars,” he said. “What does an Abrams M1A1 main battle tank cost?”

“About four million.”

“So think about the big defense contractors,” he said. “Whose side are they on? The light units, or the heavy units?”

I didn’t answer. I figured the question was rhetorical.

“Who outranks me?” he asked again.

“The Secretary of Defense,” I said.

He nodded. “A nasty little man. A politician. Political parties take campaign contributions. And defense contractors can see the future the same as anyone else.”

I said nothing.

“A lot for you to think about,” the Chief of Staff said. He hefted the big Transformation file back into his drawer. Replaced it on his desktop with a slimmer jacket. It was marked: Argon.

“You know what argon is?” he asked.

“It’s an inert gas,” I said. “They use it in fire extinguishers. It spreads a layer low down over a fire and prevents it from taking hold.”

“That’s why I chose the name. Operation Argon was the plan that moved you people at the end of December.”

“Why did you use Garber’s signature?”

“Like you suggested in another context, I wanted to let nature take its course. MP orders signed by the Chief of Staff would have raised a lot of eyebrows. Everyone would have switched to best behavior. Or smelled a rat and gone deeper underground. It would have made your job harder. It would have defeated my purpose.”

“Your purpose?”

“I wanted prevention, of course. That was the main priority. But I was also curious, Major. I wanted to see who would blink first.”

He handed me the file.

“You’re a special unit investigator,” he said. “By statute the 110th has extraordinary powers. You are authorized to arrest any soldier anywhere, including me, here in my office, if you so choose. So read the Argon file. I think you’ll find it clears me. If you agree, go about your business elsewhere.”

He got up from behind his desk. We shook hands again. Then he walked out of the room. Left me all alone in his office, in the heart of the Pentagon, in the middle of the night.

 

Thirty minutes later I got back in the car with Summer. She had kept the motor off to save gas and it was cold inside.

“Well?” she said.

“One crucial error,” I said. “The tug-of-war wasn’t the Vice-Chief and the Chief. It was the Chief himself and the Secretary of Defense.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I saw the file. There were memos and orders going back nine months. Different papers, different typewriters, different pens, no way to fake all that in four hours. It was the Chief of Staff’s initiative all along, and he was always kosher.”

“So how did he take it?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “Considering. But I don’t think he’ll feel like helping me.”

“With what?”

“With the trouble I’m in.”

“Which is?”

“Wait and see.”

She just looked at me.

“Where now?” she said.

“California,” I said.