The Enemy

quiet.
    “You met Willard yet?” I asked him.
    “He’s on his way here right now. Seems to be a real hands-on type of asshole.”
    “What was the alley like?”
    “Whores and crack dealers. Nothing that the Columbia city fathers are likely to put in their tourism brochures.”
    “Willard hates embarrassment,” I said. “He’s going to be nervous about image.”
    “Columbia’s image? What does he care?”
    “The army’s image,” I said. “Willard won’t want Brubaker put next to whores and crack dealers. Not an elite colonel. He figures this Soviet stuff is going to shake things up. He figures we need good PR right now. He figures he can see the big picture.”
    “The big picture is I can’t get near this case anyway. So what kind of pull does he have with the Columbia PD and the FBI? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”
    “Just be ready for trouble,” I said.
    “Are we in for seven lean years?”
    “Not that long.”
    “Why not?”
    “Just a feeling,” I said.
    “You happy with me handling liaison down here? Or should I get them to call you direct? Brubaker is your dead guy, technically.”
    “You do it,” I said. “I’ve got other things to do.”
    We hung up and I went back to Summer’s lists.
Nine hundred seventy-three.
Nine hundred seventy-two innocent, one guilty. But which one?

    Summer came back inside another hour. She walked in and gave me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a weapons requisition that Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone had made four months ago. It was for a Heckler & Koch P7 handgun. Maybe he had liked the H&K submachine guns Delta was using, and therefore he wanted the P7 for his personal sidearm. He had asked for it to be chambered for the standard nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge. He had asked for the thirteen-round magazine, and three spares. It was a perfectly standard requisition form, and a perfectly reasonable request. I was sure it had been granted. There would have been no political sensitivities. H&K was a German outfit and Germany was a NATO country, last time I checked. There would have been no compatibility issues either. Nine-millimeter Parabellums were standard NATO loads. The U.S. Army had no shortage of them. We had warehouses crammed full of them. We could have filled thirteen-round magazines with them a million times over, every day for the rest of history.
    “So?” I said.
    “Look at the signature on it,” Summer said. She took my copy of Carbone’s complaint out of her inside pocket and handed it over. I spread it out on my desk, side by side with the requisition form. Looked from one to the other.
    The two signatures were identical.
    “We’re not handwriting experts,” I said.
    “We don’t need to be. They’re the same, Reacher. Believe it.”
    I nodded. Both signatures read
C. Carbone,
and the four capital letter
C
s were very distinctive. They were fast, elongated, curling flourishes. The lower-case
e
on the end of each sample was distinctive too. It made a small round shape, and then the tail of the letter whipped way out to the right of the page, well beyond the name itself, horizontally, and exuberantly. The
a-r-b-o-n
in the middle was fast and fluid and linear. As a whole it was a bold, proud, legible, self-confident signature, developed no doubt by long years of signing checks and bar bills and leases and car papers. No signature was impossible to forge, of course, but I figured this one would have been a real challenge. A challenge that I guessed would have been impossible to meet between midnight and 0845 on a North Carolina army post.
    “OK,” I said. “The complaint is genuine.”
    I left it on the desk. Summer reversed it and read it through, although she must have read it plenty of times already.
    “It’s cold,” she said. “It’s like a knife in the back.”
    “It’s weird,” I said. “That’s what it is. I never met this guy before. I’m absolutely sure of that. And he was Delta. Not too many gentle pacifist souls over there. Why would he be offended? It wasn’t
his
leg I broke.”
    “Maybe it was personal. Maybe the fat guy was his friend.”
    I shook my head. “He’d have stepped in. He’d have stopped the fight.”
    “It’s the only complaint he ever made in a sixteen-year career.”
    “You been talking to people?”
    “All kinds of people. Right here, and by phone far and wide.”
    “Were you careful?”
    “Very. And it’s the only complaint you ever had made