all night.
‘OK, Armstrong’s father?’ she said, like she was asking the
question for him. ‘He was drafted right at the end of Korea.
Never saw active service. But he went through officer training
and came out a second lieutenant and was assigned to an
infantry company. They were stationed in Alabama, some place
that’s long gone. They were ordered to achieve battle readiness
for a fight everybody knew was already over. And you know
how that stuff went, right?’
Reacher nodded sleepily. Sipped his coffee.
‘Some idiot captain running endless competitions,’ he said.
‘Points for this, points for that, deductions all over the place, at
the end of the month Company B gets to keep a flag in its
barracks for kicking Company A’s ass.’
‘And Armstrong senior usually won,’ Neagley said. ‘He ran a
tight unit. But he had a temper problem. It was unpredictable. If
somebody screwed up and lost points he could fly into a rage.
Happened a couple of times. Not just the usual officer bullshit.
It’s described in the records as serious uncontrolled temper
tantrums. He went way too far, like he couldn’t stop himself.’
‘And?’
They let him get away with it twice. It wasn’t constant. It was
purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious
physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered
it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote
it up as generic battle stress, even though he’d never been a
combat officer.’
Reacher made a face. ‘He must have had friends. And so must
you, to get that deep into the records.’
‘I’ve been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant’s going to have a
coronary when he sees the motel bill.’
‘How many individual victims?’
‘My first thought, but we can forget them. There were
three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died
323
ten years ago in Palm Springs and the third is more than
seventy years old, lives in Florida.’
‘Dry hole,’ Reacher said.
‘But it explains why they left it out of the campaign.’
Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. ‘Any chance Armstrong
himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she’d seen him
angry.’
I’hat was my second thought,’ Neagley said. ‘It’s conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was
insisting on going to her service, wasn’t there? But I assume the
broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The
guy’s been running for office at one level or another his whole
life. And this all started with the campaign this summer. We
already agreed on that.’
Reacher nodded, vaguely. 2-ae campaign,’ he repeated. He
sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at
the wall, one full minute, then two.
‘What?’ Neagley asked.
He didn’t reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled
back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C.
under the grey dawn sky.
‘What did Armstrong do in the campaign?’ he asked.
‘Lots of things.’
‘How many representatives does New Mexico have?’
‘I don’t know,’ Neagley said.
‘I think it’s three. Can you name them?’
‘No.’
‘Would you recognize any of them on the street?’
‘No.’
‘Oklahoma?’
‘Don’t know. Five?’
‘Six, I think. Can you name them?’
‘One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can’t remember his
name.’
‘Senators from Tennessee?’
‘What’s your point?’
Reacher stared out of the window.
‘We’ve got Beltway disease,’ he said. ‘We’re all caught
up in it. We’re not looking at this thing like real people. To
324
almost everybody else out there in the country all these
politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said
you’re interested in politics but you couldn’t name all hundred
senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested
than you. Most people wouldn’t recognize another state’s junior
senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich
would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard
of Armstrong before.’
‘So?’
‘So Armstrong did one absolutely basic, fundamental,
elemental thing in the campaign. He put himself in the public
eye, nationally. For the very first time in his life ordinary people