The Enemy

the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit. Second row has the Soldier’s Medal, the Bronze Star, and my Purple Heart. The bottom two rows are the junk awards. I won all of the good stuff purely by accident and none of it means very much to me. Using it to get an upgrade out of an airline clerk is about what it’s good for. But Joe liked the top two rows. He served five years in Military Intelligence and didn’t get past the junk.
    We made it to the head of the line and he put his passport and ticket on the counter along with a Treasury Department ID. Then he stepped behind my shoulder. I put my own passport and ticket down. He nudged me in the back. I turned a little sideways and looked at the clerk.
    “Can you find us something with legroom?” I asked him.
    He was a small man, middle-aged, tired. He looked up at us. Together we measured almost thirteen feet tall and weighed about four hundred fifty pounds. He studied the Treasury ID and looked at my uniform and pattered on his keyboard and came up with a forced smile.
    “We’ll seat you gentlemen up front,” he said.
    Joe nudged me in the back again and I knew he was smiling.

    We were in the last row of the first-class cabin. We were talking, but we were avoiding the obvious subject. We talked about music, and then politics. We had another breakfast. We drank coffee. Air France makes pretty good coffee in first class.
    “Who was the general?” Joe asked.
    “Guy called Kramer,” I said. “An Armored commander in Europe.”
    “Armored? So why was he at Bird?”
    “He wasn’t on the post. He was at a motel thirty miles away. Rendezvous with a woman. We think she ran away with his briefcase.”
    “Civilian?”
    I shook my head. “We think she was an officer from Bird. He was supposed to be overnighting in D.C. on his way to California for a conference.”
    “That’s a three-hundred-mile detour.”
    “Two hundred and ninety-eight.”
    “But you don’t know who she is.”
    “She’s fairly senior. She drove her own Humvee out to the motel.”
    “She has to be fairly senior. Kramer’s known her for a good spell, to make it worth driving a five-hundred-ninety-six-mile round-trip detour.”
    I smiled. Anyone else would have said
a six-hundred-mile detour.
But not my brother. Like me he has no middle name. But it should be
Pedantic.
Joe Pedantic Reacher.
    “Bird is still all infantry, right?” he said. “Some Rangers, some Delta, but mostly grunts, as I recall. So have you got many senior women?”
    “There’s a Psy-Ops school now,” I said. “Half the instructors are women.”
    “Rank?”
    “Some captains, some majors, a couple of light colonels.”
    “What was in the briefcase?”
    “The agenda for the California conference,” I said. “Kramer’s staffers are pretending there isn’t one.”
    “There’s always an agenda,” Joe said.
    “I know.”
    “Check the majors and the light colonels,” he said. “That would be my advice.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “And find out who wanted you at Bird,” he said. “And why. This Kramer thing wasn’t the reason. We know that for sure. Kramer was alive and well when your orders were cut.”

    We read day-old copies of
Le Matin
and
Le Monde.
About halfway through the flight we started talking in French. We were pretty rusty, but we got by. Once learned, never forgotten. He asked me about girlfriends. I guess he figured it was an appropriate subject for discussion in the French language. I told him I had been seeing a girl in Korea but since then I had been moved to the Philippines and then Panama and now to North Carolina so I didn’t expect to see her again. I told him about Lieutenant Summer. He seemed interested in her. He told me he wasn’t seeing anyone.
    Then he switched back to English and asked when I had last been in Germany.
    “Six months ago,” I said.
    “It’s the end of an era,” he said. “Germany will reunify. France will renew its nuclear testing because a reunified Germany will bring back bad memories. Then it will propose a common currency for the EC as a way of keeping the new Germany inside the tent. Ten years from now Poland will be in NATO and the USSR won’t exist anymore. There’ll be some rump nation. Maybe it will be in NATO too.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will be different in the future.”
    “Probably.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “When?”
    He turned in his seat