Never Go Back

time.
    Clearly the door had been trapped open by a boot applied from the other side, while decisions were being considered. Which process was taking considerable time.
    Close to a whole minute passed.
    Then an object came sailing in.
    Reacher didn’t look at it. Didn’t follow it with his conscious vision. He wasn’t born yesterday. But the brief flash he caught in the corner of his eye said envelope . A brown letter-size envelope, sealed with a metal closure, he thought, like something out of an office. Lightly loaded, with no thickness to it. And the sound it made when it fluttered to the carpet backed up the first impressions. Papery but stiff, with a faint resonant crackle, where it hit edge-on, and tiny sliding sounds, as if it carried a small number of separate items inside, each one of them thin and light.
    Reacher waited.
    Then a head came around the door.
    With a face.
    Sergeant Leach’s face.
    Leach was in her ACUs. She looked very tired. She stepped into the room, and Turner stepped out of the bathroom, and Reacher closed the door. Turner saw the envelope on the carpet and said, ‘Is it all there?’
    Leach said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘I thought you were going to overnight it.’
    ‘I think you’re going to need it sooner than FedEx can get it to you.’
    ‘So you drove out all this way?’
    ‘Well, I didn’t walk or fly.’
    ‘How long did it take?’
    ‘About four hours.’
    ‘Thank you, sergeant.’
    ‘You’re welcome.’
    ‘What time are you due on post in the morning?’
    ‘Soon enough that I really should leave right about now.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘I’m in a position I don’t want to be in.’
    ‘What position?’
    ‘I’m going to have to criticize a fellow team member, and a senior officer.’
    ‘Is that one person or two?’
    ‘One person, ma’am.’
    ‘Me?’
    ‘No, ma’am.’
    ‘Morgan?’
    ‘No, ma’am. Someone else. But you’re the CO and I’m not a snitch.’
    ‘Then tell Reacher. He’s no one’s CO.’
    Leach paused a beat, and weighed up the artifice. And came out in favour, apparently, because she turned to Reacher and said, ‘Sir, I have a longstanding concern about the duty captain.’
    Reacher said, ‘How longstanding?’
    ‘Permanent.’
    ‘Why haven’t you done anything about it?’
    ‘I don’t know how. He’s a captain and I’m a sergeant.’
    ‘What’s the issue?’
    ‘He’s a doodler. He draws and scribbles all the time he’s on the phone.’
    Reacher nodded.
    ‘I’ve seen the results,’ he said. ‘On his desk. An old legal pad.’
    ‘Do you know why he does it?’
    ‘Because he’s bored.’
    ‘But sometimes he’s not bored. When big news comes through. He changes. Suddenly he’s happy.’
    ‘No law against that.’
    ‘But the pen is still in his hand. He changes, and the drawings change too. Sometimes they’re not even drawings. Sometimes he jots things down. Key words.’
    Reacher said nothing.
    Leach said, ‘Don’t you see? He deals with classified information, which is supposed to exist in physical form in one place only, which is the Rock Creek file room. For the information or parts of the information to exist in physical form elsewhere is dead against regulations.’
    Turner said, ‘Oh please, tell me.’
    Reacher said, ‘He wrote the number down?’
    ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Leach said. ‘Yes, sir. He wrote the number down.’
    Leach pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. It was a page from the yellow legal pad Reacher had seen. It was curled at the top, wide and generous, from several days of being rolled over. It was practically covered in black ink, from a ballpoint pen. There were shapes and whorls and boxes and machines and spirals, with occasional plain-text times and names and words, some of them heavily underlined, some of them boxed in and shaded over almost to the point of illegibility.
    Leach put her fingertip on the first legible word, which was a little less than a third of the way down the page. The word was Kandahar. A proper noun. The name of a place. It had a vivid arrow sketched next to it. The arrow was pointing away from the word, emphatically. Leach said, ‘This is the last signal before the one that’s missing. This is Weeks and Edwards moving out of Kandahar, going back to Bagram on standby, as ordered. That all is still in the file room, exactly where it should be.’
    Then she jumped her fingertip to the bottom third of the page, where two words stood out, separated by a dash: Hood –