entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food
stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the
doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking
out.
‘Too public,’ Summer said. ‘This is going nowhere.’
I nodded again. ‘I’d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Mrs
Kramer.’
‘Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.’
‘That feels like we’re giving up.’
We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off
roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got
as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and
166
settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left.
There was a vague sunset in the west, to my right. The road
looked damp. Summer didn’t seem very worried about the
possibility of ice.
I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched
the dome light on and searched Kramer’s briefcase,
thoroughly. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I wasn’t proved
wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He
looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the
motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of
Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ,
respectively. He hadn’t been anywhere else. He was a true
specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively
on the world’s last great tank arena and its command
structure.
The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they
should be. Frankfurt to Dul]es, and Washington National to
Los Angeles, both round trip. They were all coach class and
government rate, booked three days before the first departure
date.
The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly.
There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred
the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a
reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin’s Visiting Officers’
Quarters, which he had never reached.
His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty
seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card
was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He
had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back
then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must
have been a sophisticated guy, financially.
There was a Virginia driver’s licence. He had been using
Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he
avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID
card. There was a photograph of Mrs Kramer, behind a plastic
window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had
seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old.
She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that
167
showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had
faded with age.
There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant
checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of
paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized
people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic
talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters
would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything
he needed and nothing he didn’t.
The hardcover book was an academic monograph from
a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk
happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand
offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an
open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world
has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer
himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his
choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have
feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action
was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and
T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust
all those years ago.
There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred
paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was
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