better.’
I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to
interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive
evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex
neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the
army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure.
But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow, too.
Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution.
And from what I knew about the people whose names I
recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was
exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically,
those light units that looked ahead towards the twenty-first
century rather than those that looked backward at the
nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a
million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There
had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision
targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the
planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen
people whose presence or absence would make a difference to
the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.
My phone rang. I hit speaker and we heard my sergeant’s
voice.
396
‘Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,’ she said. ‘You
know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating
that particular drum?’
‘Was?’ I said.
‘He died the day before New Year’s Eve. Car versus pedes
trian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit and run.’
I clicked the phone off.
‘Swan mentioned that,’ I said. ‘In passing. Now that I think
about it.’
‘The check mark,’ Summer said.
I nodded. ‘One down, seventeen to go.’
‘What does T.E.P. mean?’
‘It’s old CIA jargon,’ I said. ‘It means terminate with extreme
prejudice.’
She said nothing.
‘Assassinate, in other words,’ I said.
We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous
quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The
supreme proof of a commander’s courage. The surest test of his
strength of will. I tried to imagine what kind of crazy isolated
ego-driven fever could drive people to add grandiose quotations
like those to a list of men they wanted to kill so they could
keep their jobs and their prestige. I couldn’t even begin to
figure it out. So I just gave it up and butted the four typewritten
sheets back together and threaded the staple back through the
original holes. I took an envelope from my drawer and slipped
them inside it.
‘It’s been out in the world since the first of the year,’ I said.
‘And they knew it was gone for good on the fourth. It wasn’t in
the briefcase, and it wasn’t on Brubaker’s body. That’s why they
were resigned. They gave up on it a week ago. They killed three
people looking for it, but they never found it. So they were just
sitting there, knowing for sure sooner or later it was going to
come back and bite them in the ass.’
I slid the envelope across the desk.
‘Use it,’ I said. ‘Use it in D.C. Use it to nail their hides to the
damn wall.’
397
By then it was already four o’clock in the morning and Summer
left for the Pentagon immediately. I went to bed and got
four hours’ sleep. Woke myself up at eight. I had one thing
left to do, and I knew for sure there was one thing left to be
done to me.
398
TWENTY-FIVE
l
GOT TO MY OFFICE AT NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. THE WOMAN with the baby son was gone by then. The Louisiana corporal
had taken her place.
‘JAG Corps is here for you,’ he said. He jerked his thumb at
my inner door. ‘I let them go straight in.’
I nodded. Looked around for coffee. There wasn’t any. Bad
start. I opened my door and stepped inside. Found two guys in
there. One of them was in a visitor chair. One of them was at
my desk. Both of them were in Class As. Both of them had JAG
Corps badges on their lapels. A small gold wreath, crossed with
a sabre and an arrow. The guy in the visitor chair was a captain.