Part 22 (1/2)

'I still want to hear that story.'

'Then get me my answers. A fair exchange is no robbery.'

'We're close. We can see the money coming out of Congress. But we can't see it arriving at the Department of the Army. It's dropping out of sight somewhere along the way. We're narrowing it down. We'll get there.'

'When?'

'Give me the rest of the night. Call me at eight o'clock in the morning.'

'You're good, too.'

'I try.'

Reacher said, 'There's a local rumour about a scandal. Word on the street is the place was never used because its purpose was too revolting.'

'On the street?'

'In an old lady's parlour, anyway.'

'OK. But old ladies get revolted by all kinds of things.'

'I guess.'

'Anything else?'

'You can search with your Google thing, right?'

'That's what it's for.'

'Check a Florida cop called Kapler for me. He left the state two years ago. I want to know why.'

'Why?'

'I like to know things. He moved from Florida to South Dakota. Who does that?'

'First name?'

'I don't know.'

'That's helpful.'

'How many Florida cops called Kapler can there be?'

'Probably more than ten, and less than a hundred.'

'With employment problems two years ago?'

'Anything else?'

Reacher asked, 'What are you wearing?'

'What is this, a dirty phone call now?'

Reacher smiled. 'No, I'm just trying to picture the scene. For old times' sake. I know the desk. Same office?'

'I a.s.sume so. Upstairs, third on the left.'

'That's the one.' Reacher saw it in his mind. Stone stairs, a metal handrail, a narrow corridor floored with linoleum, lines of doors left and right with fluted gla.s.s windows in them, offices behind each one, each office equipped according to some complex DoD protocol. His had had the metal desk, two phones with a total of three lines, a vinyl chair on casters, file cabinets, and two visitor chairs with springy bent-tube legs. Plus a gla.s.s light shade shaped like a bowl and hung from the ceiling on three metal chains. Plus an out-of-date map of the United States on the wall, made after Hawaii and Alaska had joined the Union but before the interstate highway system had been completed.

Made, in fact, around the same time that the strange installation near Bolton, South Dakota, was being put in.

The voice said, 'I'm wearing my ACUs with a T-s.h.i.+rt. I've got the jacket on, because it's cold tonight.'

Reacher said, 'You're in Virginia. You don't know what cold is.'

'Quit whining. You're still in double figures up there. Negative, but hey. Minus eleven degrees. But the radar shows colder air moving in from the west.'

'How could it get colder?'

'You're going to get what Wyoming just had, that's how.'

'You talking to meteorologists?'

'No, I'm looking at the Weather Channel.'

'What did Wyoming just have?'

'They were thirty below zero.'

'Terrific.'

'You can take it. You're a big guy. Probably a Norseman way back, by the look of you.'

'What, Google Earth can see through roof tiles now?'

'No, there's a photo of you in your file.'

'What about you?'

'Yes, there's a photo of me in my file, too.'

'Not what I meant, smarta.s.s. I don't have your file.'

'I'm a one-eyed fifty-year-old hunchback.'