The captain nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He did.’
‘I need to speak to him,’ I said.
‘He went to London.’
‘London?’ I said.
‘For a short-notice meeting with the British Ministry of
Defence.’
286
‘When did he leave?’
‘He travelled to the airport with Major Marshall.’
‘Where’s Colonel Coomer?’
‘Berlin,’ the guy said. ‘Souvenir hunting.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He went to the airport with Vassell and
Marshall.’
‘No,’ the captain said. ‘He took the train.’
‘Terrific,’ I said.
Summer and I went to the O Club for breakfast. We got the
same corner table we had used the night before. We sat side by
side, backs to the wall, watching the room.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Swan’s office called for Marshall’s whereabouts
at 1810 and fifty minutes later he had orders for Irwin. An hour
after that he was off the post.’
‘And Vassell lit out for London,’ Summer said. ‘And Coomer
jumped on a train for Berlin.’
‘A night train,’ I said. ‘Who goes on a night train just for the
fun of it?’
‘Everybody’s got something to hide,’ she said.
‘Except me and my monkey.’
‘What?’
‘The Beatles,’ I said. ‘One of the sounds of the century.’
She just looked at me.
‘What are they hiding?’ she said.
‘You tell me.’
She put her hands on the table, palms down. Took a breath.
‘I can see part of it,’ she said. The too.’
‘The agenda,’ she said. ‘It was the other side of the coin from
what Colonel Simon was talking about last night. Simon was
salivating about the infantry taking Armored down a peg or two.
Kramer must have seen all of that coming. Two-star generals
aren’t stupid. So the Irwin conference on New Year’s Day was
about fighting the opposite corner. It was about resistance, I
guess. They don’t want to give up what they’ve got.’
‘Hell of a thing to give up,’ I said.
‘Believe it,’ she said. ‘Like battleship captains, way back.’
‘So what was in the agenda?’
287
‘Part defence, part offence,’ she said. ‘That’s the obvious way
to do it. Arguments against integrated units, ridicule of lightweight
armoured vehicles, advocacy for their own specialized
expertise.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘But it’s not enough. The Pentagon is going to
be neck-deep in position papers full of shit like that, starting any
day now. For, against, if, but and however, we’re going to be
bored to death with it. But there was something else in that
agenda that made them totally desperate to get Kramer’s copy
back. What was it?’
‘I don’t know.’ The either,’ I said.
‘And why did they run last night?’ Summer said. ‘By now they
must have destroyed Kramer’s copy and every other copy. So
they could have lied through their teeth about what was in it, to
put your mind at rest. They could even have given you a phony
document. They could have said, here you go, this was it, check
it out.’
‘They ran because of Mrs Kramer,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I still think Vassell and Coomer killed her.
Kramer croaks, the ball is in their court, in the circumstances
they know it’s their responsibility to go out and round up all the
loose paperwork. Mrs Kramer goes down as collateral damage.’
‘That would make perfect sense,’ I said. ‘Except that neither
one of them looked particularly tall and strong to me.’
‘They’re both a lot taller and stronger than Mrs Kramer was.
Plus, you know, heat of the moment, pumped up with panic, we
could be seeing ambiguous forensic results. And we don’t know
how good the Green Valley people are anyway. Could be some
family doctor doing a two-year term as coroner, and what the
hell would he know?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t see how it can have
happened. Take out the drive time from D.C., take out ten
minutes to find that store and steal the crowbar, they had
ten minutes to react. And they didn’t have a car, and they didn’t
call for one.’
‘They could have taken a taxi. Or a town car. Direct from the
hotel lobby. And we’d never trace it. New Year’s Eve, it was