in there, certainly. I know French blood when I see it.
‘Your brother called again,’ he 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
lO-this and lO-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
30
three hangers. They were hung one in front of the other on my
coat rack. I walked past them to my borrowed desk and dialled
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. I looked at the clock on the wall. It
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. The ? Isn’t she in Germany?’
31
‘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