Garber said, “Disappointed?”
Hence the witness, Reacher supposed. Not a private conversation. Best behavior. He said, “As always, general, I’m happy to go where the army sends me.”
“You don’t sound happy. But you should. Career development is a wonderful thing.”
“Which school?”
“Details are being delivered to your office as we speak.”
“How long will I be gone?”
“That depends on how hard you work. As long as it takes, I guess.”
—
Reacher got a bus in the Pentagon parking lot and rode two stops to the base of the hill below the Rock Creek HQ. He walked up the slope and went straight to his office. There was a slim file centered on his desk. His name was on it, and some numbers, and a course title: Impact of Recent Forensic Innovation on Inter-Agency Cooperation. Inside were sheets of paper, still warm from the Xerox machine, including a formal notice of temporary detachment to a location that seemed to be a leased facility in a corporate park in McLean, Virginia. He was to report there before five o’clock that afternoon. Civilian dress was to be worn. Residential quarters would be on-site. A personal vehicle would be provided. No driver.
Reacher tucked the file under his arm and walked out of the building. No one watched him go. He was of no interest to anyone. Not anymore. He was a disappointment. An anticlimax. The NCO grapevine had held its breath, and all it had gotten was a meaningless course with a bullshit title. Not exciting at all. So now he was a non-person. Out of circulation. Out of sight, out of mind. Like a ballplayer on the disabled list. A month from then someone might suddenly remember him for a second, and wonder when he was coming back, or if, and then forget him again just as quickly.
The desk sergeant inside the door glanced up, and glanced away, bored.
—
Reacher had very few civilian clothes, and some of them weren’t really civilian. His off-duty pants were Marine Corps khakis about thirty years old. He knew a guy who knew a guy who worked in a warehouse, where he claimed there was a bale of old stuff wrongly delivered back when LBJ was still president, and then never squared away again afterward. And apparently the point of the story was that old Marine pants looked just like new Ralph Lauren pants. Not that Reacher cared what pants looked like. But five bucks was an attractive price. And the pants were fine. Unworn, never issued, stiffly folded, a little musty, but good for another thirty years at least.
His off-duty T-shirts were no more civilian, being old army items, gone pale and thin with washing. Only his jacket was definitively non-military. It was a tan denim Levi’s item, totally authentic in every respect, including the label, but sewn by an old girlfriend’s mother, in a basement in Seoul.
He changed and packed the rest of his stuff into a duffel and a suit carrier, which he heaved out to the curb, where a black Chevy Caprice was parked. He guessed it was an old MP black-and-white, now retired, with the decals peeled off, and the holes for the light bar and the antennas all sealed up with rubber plugs. The key was in. The seat was worn. But the engine started, and the transmission worked, and the brakes were fine. Reacher swung the thing around like a battleship maneuvering, and headed out toward McLean, Virginia, with the windows down and the radio playing.
—
The corporate park was one of many, all of them the same, brown and beige, discreet typefaces, neat lawns, some evergreen planting, low two-and three-building campuses spreading outward across empty land, servicing folks who hid behind bland and modest names and tinted glass in their office windows. Reacher found the right place by the street number, and pulled in past a knee-high sign that said Educational Solutions Incorporated, in a typeface so plain it looked childish.
Parked at the door were two more Chevy Caprices. One was black and one was navy blue. They were both newer than Reacher’s. And they were both properly civilian, in that they didn’t have rubber plugs and brush-painted doors. They were government sedans, no doubt about it, clean and shiny, each one with two more antennas than a person needed for listening to the ball game. But the extra two antennas were not the same in both cases. The black car had short needles and the blue car had longer whips, in a different configuration. On a different wavelength. Two separate organizations.
Inter-Agency Cooperation.