The Enemy

He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina’s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia. The guy’s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively.

“Here,” he said. “Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now.”

“Any way of knowing how long it had been there?”

“Not really,” he said. “We’re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month.”

“So how was it found?”

“Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking from his car to the car he had stopped.”

“When was this exactly?”

“Today,” the guy said. “Start of the second watch. Not long after noon.”

“It wasn’t there a month,” I said.

“When did he lose it?”

“New Year’s Eve,” I said.

“Where?”

“It was stolen from where he was staying.”

“Where was he staying?”

“A motel about thirty miles south of here.”

“So the bad guys were coming back north.”

“I guess,” I said.

The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light and stared at it from every angle.

“January,” he said. “We’ve got a little night dew right now. And it’s cold enough that we’re worried about ice. So we’ve got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated. It’s got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas. But not very much. It hasn’t been out there since New Year’s Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say. One night, not more.”

“Can you be certain?” Summer asked.

He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.

“Just a guess,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’ll have to sign for it.”

I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right breast pocket, but I figured he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had spent most of his time looking at Summer’s pockets. So I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and picked up the briefcase and turned away.

“Funny sort of burglary,” the desk guy said. “There’s an Amex card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents.”

I didn’t reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the Humvee.

Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median. She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of thing a Humvee was good for.

“Try this,” she said. “Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o’clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car window.”

“They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird.”

“So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there.”

“They were all alibied.”

“Only superficially. New Year’s Eve parties are pretty chaotic.”

I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.

“Sixty miles,” I said. “The case was found sixty miles north of Bird. That’s an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that.”

Summer said nothing.

“And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty conspicuous.”

“Maybe there really wasn’t an agenda.”

“It would be the first time in military history.”

“Then maybe it really wasn’t important.”

“They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That might be the first time in military history too. That was an important conference, Summer, believe me.”

She said nothing.

“Do that U-turn thing again,” I said. “Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.”