CHAPTER FOUR

A routine background check of the type I was allegedly performing on this assignment always began with an existing file. Reacher’s file was thin. Too thin. It had obviously been sanitized and someone on the inside of the FBI and Homeland Security and maybe the Army and probably a few other three-letter agencies was making sure it stayed that way.

Every search I’d tried to conduct had been blocked by someone much higher up the food chain. I had no leverage to improve the situation. Which was how I came to be sitting here in Fort Bird, North Carolina, discussing ancient history on a nasty November morning.

According to the few records I’d been able to unearth, in January 1990, Jack Reacher suffered two serious blows. The strong left hook to the jaw was delivered to his profession. The straight right to the gut was personal. Either could have buckled even a man of Reacher’s size and strength, and both hits had indeed caused significant damage.

Sergeant Major Jones was carrying a grudge against Reacher, but Reacher probably toted a few against Fort Bird and its personnel, too. Add a few thousand soldiers trained as weapons and combat experts and that volatile combination was bound to lead to trouble.

While Clifton was gone, I ran quickly through the information the Boss had provided. Everything had been looking good for Reacher on December 28, 1989. He was large and in charge. Thirty years old. Out of West Point for more than six years. One of the Army’s best.

Already a Major and on his way up in the elite 110 Special Investigative Unit. The way things were going, Reacher might have been the commanding officer of the 110th in due course, instead of Summer. Any man basking in those circumstances would have believed the world was his oyster. He’d have been right.

Then everything changed.

He’d been transferred from a high-profile assignment without notice the next day.

Posted to sleepy Fort Bird, North Carolina, where nothing exciting ever happened.

Except it did, to Reacher: Twenty days later, he was demoted to Captain and shipped out to Panama.

And at the same time his career was falling apart, Reacher’s mother died.

Then-Lieutenant Eunice Summer had been right next to Reacher the whole time. Whatever happened during those three weeks catapulted her career even as it blew Reacher’s a giant leap backward.

Summer might have been responsible for Reacher’s troubles, or the beneficiary of his misfortune. Either way, she had firsthand experience with Reacher that no one I’d met so far was willing to talk about. Experience that might just lead me where I needed to go.

I was close. Very close. Closer than I’d been since that 4:00 a.m. phone call from the Boss pulled me out of my warm bed in Detroit eighteen days ago and sent me chasing after a ghost who, I’d believed until recently, might not even exist anymore.

As Jones said, my cover assignment is to build the Reacher file for some top secret project and keep everything under the radar. I’m number one. Gaspar, my number two, was temporarily out of touch.

I’d quickly discovered that the Boss was hunting Reacher and using me like a submarine uses sonar. I still didn’t know why. But I would.

This was the Army. There should be records and files and witnesses in triplicate to everything Reacher did here at Bird, at the very least. All I had to do was find them.

Major Clifton returned with two mugs full of coffee. He kicked the door closed with his heel, handed me one of the mugs, and returned to his seat behind the desk with the second mug.

I watched him carefully this time, trying to peer beyond his handsome façade. Colonel Summer knew what I wanted and she’d been ordered to give it to me, she said. She wouldn’t have disobeyed a direct order from that high up. She’d have saluted and prepared. She’d been on her way to do as she’d been told when she called me from her car.

Summer might have asked someone to gather information to refresh her memory for our meeting. That someone was probably seated directly across the desk from me right now. “Major Clifton—”

“Tony.” Out flashed the blinding dazzler, his go-to weapon of choice, perhaps his all-purpose shield.

I nodded. “Did Colonel Summer brief you on my mission here today?”

“She said you were interested in a former executive officer who served briefly here at Bird back in 1990 when I was still in junior high school.” He leaned back in the chair and rested his coffee on the battered wooden chair arm.

“You are the executive officer here now, though. You hold the job Reacher held back then. Right?”

“I am and I do.”

“Did you pull the files on whatever cases Major Reacher was handling at the time? You must have. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have known that Sergeant Major Jones was also active duty during Reacher’s brief stint here.”

He shook his head. “Jones spent her whole career here. It was a safe bet that she worked with Reacher. No file review necessary.”

“But you did pull the files.” I was guessing, but that’s what any XO worth his salt would have done. “And?”

“And what?”

“What was the big case about? And how did Reacher screw it up?”

“What makes you think he screwed up a big case?”

“Something got him demoted to Captain and sent to Panama after less than three weeks here. I’m guessing that something was related to his work while he was here. Are you telling me it wasn’t?”

He didn’t squirm or blush or even blink, but I sensed he was uncomfortable with the questions and probably with the answers as well. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not telling you anything at all. Colonel Summer’s orders were very clear. She’ll handle this interview herself.”

“That would be great. If she were present. But she isn’t. Which means the job falls to you, doesn’t it?”

“Have you ever been in the Army, Agent Otto?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t get to be a major in the U.S. Army by disobeying orders from a superior officer, especially one who is directly in your chain of command.” He took a breath, paused, and seemed to make up his mind about something. “In fact, that’s the sort of thing that can get you busted back to Captain and sent off to the front of the fighting pretty quickly. Probably take less than three weeks, start to finish.”

I nodded again, wondering why he was so reluctant to directly address Reacher’s old story. “What other kinds of things can get an officer demoted and transferred like that?”

“Conduct unbecoming would do it. Civilian complaints and officer complaints of a significant nature. Unauthorized absence. Away without leave. Misuse of resources.” He listed them slowly as if he had to think about the options, which I was pretty sure he did not. I had the clear impression that these particular offenses came straight out of the facts in Reacher’s old case files.

He hesitated a moment and leveled his gaze my way. “This is the Army. There’s a long list of don’ts that can get a guy in big trouble pretty fast.”

I considered each option he’d offered.

If Reacher had done all that, Jones was right. He was the farthest thing from a team player.

Crazy thing was, busting him back and sending him out of here was a puny slap on the wrist that Reacher would have barely noticed.