Page 12 (1/2)

Summer drove We took the Humvee I had left at the curb We didn&039;t want to take tin out a sedan It cra slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn&039;t one of them She looked tiny behind the wheel The vehicle was full of noise The engine was thrashing and the tires hining loud It was four o&039;clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark

We drove north to Krah the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself We covered fifteen ht State Police building We found it twelvelow 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 linoleuht 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 uniforh the doors, so he h He didn&039;t ask for ID or inquire ere there He didn&039;t speculate as to why General Kralanced atat Summer and then leaned down under his counter and ca Not an evidence bag Just so It had a store&039;s name printed across it in red

The briefcase itself matched Kran, saram 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 Su myself," he said "I wanted to keep it clean I wasn&039;t sure how soon soet here"

"Where exactly was it found?" I asked him

He paused a beat and looked away froer and across a line to a ertip on a e-scale plan of North Carolina&039;s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide It showed every hway froain into Virginia The guy&039;s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively

"Here," he said "Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven ht now"

"Any way of knowing how long it had been there?"

"Not really," he said "We&039;re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders Stuff can be there a month"

"So hoas 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&039;t there a month," I said

"When did he lose it?"

"New Year&039;s Eve," I said

"Where?"

"It was stolen fro?"

"A motel about thirty uys were couess," I said

The guy looked atpermission 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 froot a little night dew right now And it&039;s cold enough that we&039;re worried about ice So we&039;ve got salt down Things age fast, this tihway shoulder And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated It&039;s got sorit on it, in the weave of the canvas But not very much It hasn&039;t been out there since New Year&039;s Eve, that much is for daht, 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&039;ll have to sign for it"

I nodded He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward ht breast pocket, but I figured he hadn&039;t paidat Summer&039;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&039;s an Amex card and money still in the wallet We inventoried the contents"

I didn&039;t reply Just went out through the doors, back to the Huap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass e ditch and straight up the other side Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south That was the kind of thing a Huood for

"Try this," she said "Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o&039;clock with the briefcase They head north for Dulles or DC They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car "

"They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird"

"So one of their dinner companions passed it on We should check who they ate with Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there"

"They were all alibied"

"Only superficially New Year&039;s Eve parties are pretty chaotic"

I looked out theAfternoon was fading fast Evening was co on The world looked dark and cold

"Sixty miles," I said "The case was found sixty rabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that"

Su

"And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it They would have put the case in a garbage can That would have been safer Throwing a briefcase out of a caris pretty conspicuous"

"Maybe there really wasn&039;t an agenda"

"It would be the first time in military history"

"Then maybe it really wasn&039;t i lunches at Irwin Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour That ht be the first time in military history too That was an important conference, Su

"Do that U-turn thing again," I said "Across the o back north a little I want to look at the rest area"

The rest area was the same as on hway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the s were shared by both sets of travelers Therefore they had two fronts and no backs They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around theht then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy It was the end of the holidays Fa ho slots were maybe one-third filled with cars Their distribution was interesting People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing soht have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms Maybe it was human nature Some kind of insecurity

There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility&039;s ns inside at the food stations Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out

"Too public," Suain "I&039;d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn&039;t for Mrs Kramer"

"Carbone is more important We should prioritize"

"That feels like we&039;re giving up"

We went north out of the rest area and Suain and turned south I got as coet in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back Darkness unspooled on ht The road looked damp Summer didn&039;t seem very worried about the possibility of ice

I did nothing for the first twenty ht on and searched Krahly I didn&039;t expect to find anything, and I wasn&039;t proved wrong His passport was a standard item, seven years old He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not ium The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively He hadn&039;t been anywhere else He was a true specialist For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world&039;s last great tank arena and its command structure

The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date

The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly There were seat assigne was affecting his bladder There was a reservation for a single roo Officers&039; Quarters, which he had never reached

His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German reen item, due to expire in a year and a half He had carried one since 1964, according to the Meured that was pretty early for an arot by with cash and uy, financially

There was a Virginia driver&039;s license He had been using Green Valley as his per time there There was a standard raph of Mrs Kraer version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor It was at least twenty years old She had been pretty back then She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange froe

There was nothing else in the wallet No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper I wasn&039;t surprised Generals are often neat, organized people They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too I guessed Kramer&039;s office and desk and quarters would be the sa he needed and nothing he didn&039;t

The hardcover book was an acaderaph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk Kursk happened in July of 1943 It was Nazi Gerrand offensive of World War Two and its first reatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose I wasn&039;t surprised by his choice of reading material Some set to truly cataclysers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking su else in the briefcase Just a few furred paper shreds trapped in the seauy who emptied his case and turned it upside down and shook it every ti back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the floor by uy," I said "When we get back Find out as at the table with Vassell and Coomer"

"OK," Suot back to Bird in time for dinner We ate in the O Club bar with a bunch of fellow MPs If Willard had spies a except a couple of tired people doing not veryBut Summer slipped away between courses and came back with news in her eyes I ate h that nobody could think I had urgent business anywhere Then I stood up and wandered out Waited in the cold on the sidewalk Summer came out fivea clandestine affair

"Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer," she said

"Who?" I asked

"Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton"

"The Psy-Ops person?"

"The very same"

"She was at a party on New Year&039;s Eve?"

Summer made a face "You knohat those parties are like A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the ti two by two She could have slipped away"

"Where was the bar?"

"Thirty minutes froone an hour, absolute minimum"

"That&039;s possible"

"Was she in the bar atSyne&039;? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure"

"People say she was there But she could have made it back by then anyway The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five She&039;d have been back with five minutes to spare It could have looked natural You know, everybody comes out of the ork, ready for the ball to drop The party kind of starts over"

I said nothing

"She would have taken the case to sanitize it Maybe her phone number was in there, or her name or her picture Or a diary She didn&039;t want the scandal But once she was through with it, she didn&039;t need the rest of the stuff anymore She&039;d have been happy to hand it back when asked"

"Hoould Vassell and Coo-standing affair in this fishbowl"

"Not logical," I said "If people knew about Krainia?"

"OK, maybe they didn&039;t know Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities Maybe way down the list Maybe it was soht was over"

I nodded "What can we get froet confired to take possession of the briefcase last night That would prove they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs Kramer"

"They made no calls froet down there themselves So I don&039;t see hoe can put theet?"

"We can be certain about what happened to the agenda We can know that Vassell and Cooot it back Then at least the aroing to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to find"

I nodded Said nothing

"And maybe Norton saw it," Summer said "Maybe she read it Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about"

"That&039;s te"

"It sure is"

"Can we just walk in and ask her?"

"You&039;re fro"

"I have to stay under Willard&039;s radar"

"She doesn&039;t knoarned you off"

"She does He spoke to her after the Carbone thing"

"I think we have to talk to her"

"Difficult kind of a talk to have," I said "She&039;s likely to get offended"

"Only if we do it wrong"

"What are the chances of doing it right?"

"We ht be able to manipulate the situation There&039;ll be an embarrassment factor She won&039;t want it broadcast"

"We can&039;t push her to the point where she calls Willard"

"You scared of him?"

"I&039;m scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically Doesn&039;t help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska"

"Your call"

I was quiet for a long ht back to Kramer&039;s hardcover book This was like July thirteenth, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of Kursk We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general If we attacked now, thisuntil the eneed down or paused for breath even for a second, ould be overrun again

"OK," I said "Let&039;s do it"

We found Andrea Norton in the O Club lounge and I asked her if she would spare us a minute in her office I could see she was puzzled as to why I told her it was a confidential matter She stayed puzzled Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed case, and she couldn&039;t see what else ould have to talk to her about But she agreed She told us she would meet us there in thirty minutes

Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list of as on-post and asn&039;t at Carbone&039;s time of death She had yards of coe concertina about an inch thick There was a name, rank, and number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink Almost every name had a check mark next to it

"What are the marks?" I asked her "Here or not here?"

"Here," she said

I nodded I was afraid of that I riffed through the concertina with my thumb

"How many?" I asked

"Nearly twelve hundred"

I nodded again There was nothing intrinsically difficult about boiling doelve hundred na one sole perpetrator Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect pools There had been cases in Korea where the entire US th had been the suspect pool But cases like that require unli staffs, and endless resources And they require everybody&039;s total cooperation They can&039;t be handled behind a CO&039;s back, in secret, by two people acting alone

"I&039;s io at it a different way"

"How?"

"What did he take to the scene?"

"Nothing"

"Wrong," I said "He took hiers up the folded edges of her paper The stack thickened and then thinned back down as the air sighed out froes

"Pick a name," she said