Never Go Back

And the call register showed Shrago had phoned home two minutes before stepping out of the hotel.

‘From our empty room,’ Turner said. ‘You guessed right. Your plan survived contact with the enemy.’

Reacher nodded. He said, ‘They probably sent him searching elsewhere. In which case they won’t expect a call from him, not until he has news. And they won’t call him before morning, probably. Which we won’t answer anyway. Which will leave them a little confused and anxious. We might get twelve hours before they quit on him.’

‘We better tell Espin to keep it under the radar. Or Montague will see the arrest. He’s certain to be monitoring the 75th.’ So Turner did that, with a second call to Espin, and then she dialled Sergeant Leach’s cell. She started out with the same good-conscience preamble she had used the first time, advising Leach to hang up and report the call to Morgan, but for the second time Leach didn’t, so Turner gave her the number Shrago had been calling, and asked her to hit up anyone she knew who was capable of a little freelance signals intelligence. From Turner’s tone it was clear Leach was offering a cautiously optimistic outlook. Reacher smiled in the dark. U.S. Army sergeants. There was nothing they couldn’t do.

Then a car stopped at the other end of the park, a battered sedan like the thing that had dumped Reacher at the motel on the first night, and two big guys got out, in boots and ACUs, and they hauled Shrago out of the bushes and laid him on the rear seat. Not without a little difficulty. Shrago was no lightweight.

Then the guys got back in their car and drove away. Reacher and Turner paused a decent interval, like a funeral, and then they crossed the street again, and stepped in through the hotel door, and rode up to their room in the elevator.

SIXTY-SEVEN

THEY SHOWERED AGAIN, purely as a piece of cleansing symbolism, and to use some more towels, of which there were about forty in the bathroom, most of them big enough and thick enough to sleep under. Then they waited for Leach to call back, which they figured would happen either soon or never, because either her network had the right kind of people in it, or it didn’t. But the first phone to ring was Reacher’s, with information from Edmonds. She said, ‘Seven years ago Crew Scully had just made Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, for personnel. He hasn’t changed his billet since. Back then he was based in Alexandria. Now all of HRC is at Fort Knox, in Kentucky. Except for the Deputy Chief’s office, which stayed in the Pentagon. Which is why Scully is still able to live in Georgetown.’

Reacher said, ‘He sounds like a very boring guy.’

‘But Montague doesn’t. Seven years ago Montague was in Afghanistan. He commanded our in-country intelligence effort. All of it. Not just the army’s.’

‘Big job.’

‘You bet.’

‘And?’

‘I can’t prove anything. There’s no surviving paperwork.’

‘But?’

‘He must have signed off on Zadran. That’s the way the protocol works. No way did a suspected grenade smuggler go home to the mountains without a say-so from Intelligence. So that question you asked before, about why didn’t they just shoot him anyway? Basically because Montague told them not to, that’s why. So Zadran owed Montague, big time.’

‘Or Zadran had something on Montague, big time.’

‘Whichever, we can trace the relationship back at least seven years.’

Reacher said, ‘I should have asked you to look at Morgan seven years ago.’

Edmonds said, ‘I was surprised you didn’t. So I used my own initiative. Morgan has been in and out of everywhere, basically. He’s the go-to guy for filling a gap. But we live in a random universe, and he’s been in more logistics battalions than randomness alone would predict. None of them supplying Iraq, and all of them supplying Afghanistan. Which is not entirely random either.’

‘Was it always Scully who moved him?’

‘Every single time.’

‘Thank you, captain.’

‘What side of history are we on right now?’

But Reacher hung up without answering, because another phone was ringing. Not Turner’s, but Shrago’s. Like Rickard’s had, with the crazy birdsong. The same kind of phone. Shrago’s was on the hotel dresser, loud and piercing, grinding away like a mechanical toy. The window on the front said: Incoming Call. Which was superfluous information. But then directly below it said: Home.

The phone rang eight times, and then it stopped.

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, ‘That was anxiety. Simple as that. We haven’t spent any more money, so we haven’t generated any new leads. So they’ve got nothing to tell him.’

‘I wonder how long they’ll stay anxious. Before they get real.’

‘Denial is a wonderful thing.’ Turner walked over to the window, and peered out between the drapes. She said, ‘When I get back I’m going to have my office steam-cleaned. I don’t want any trace of Morgan left behind.’

‘Why did Montague let Zadran go home to the mountains?’

‘You would want to say either political reasons or legal reasons.’