“And I’m right here in it with you, Reacher. So bring me up to speed.”

Five minutes later she knew what I knew. All questions, no answers.

“Garber’s signature was a forgery,” she said.

I nodded.

“So what about Carbone’s, on the complaint? Is that forged too?”

“Maybe,” I said. I took the copy that Willard had given me out of my desk drawer. Smoothed it out on the blotter and passed it across to her. She folded it neatly and put it in her inside pocket.

“I’ll get the writing checked,” she said. “Easier for me than you, now.”

“Nothing’s easy for either of us now,” I said. “You need to be very clear about that. So you need to be very clear about what you’re doing.”

“I’m clear,” she said. “Bring it on.”

I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent progress, of a sort, in her life.

“Thank you,” I said. “For being on my side.”

“I’m not on your side,” she said. “You’re on mine.”

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal, calling from his desk outside my door.

“North Carolina State Police on the line,” he said. “They want a duty officer. You want to take it?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I guess I better.”

There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an I-95 patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S. Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase was currently being held, in case I was interested in having someone sent out to pick it up.

twelve

Summer drove. We took the Humvee I had left at the curb. We didn’t want to take time to sign out a sedan. It cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn’t one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tires were whining loud. It was four o’clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark.

We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.

We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors. Summer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built for function and floored with linoleum, which was shined every night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.

There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He didn’t ask for ID or inquire why we were there. He didn’t speculate as to why General Kramer hadn’t shown up himself. He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store’s name printed across it in red.

The briefcase itself matched Kramer’s suit carrier in every way. Same color, same design, same age, same level of wear and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport. There was a paper-clipped itinerary three sheets thick. There was a hardcover book.

There was no conference agenda.

I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter. Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

“Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?” I asked.

The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer, not me.

“I put it in the bag myself,” he said. “I wanted to keep it clean. I wasn’t sure how soon someone would get here.”

“Where exactly was it found?” I asked him.

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.