The Enemy (39 page)

I read on a little more. Like most French books it used a weird construction called the past historic tense, which was reserved for written stuff only. It made it hard for a non-native to read. And the first part of the story was not very gripping. It made the point very laboriously that trains incoming from the north disgorged their passengers at the Gare du Nord terminal, and if those passengers wanted to carry on south they had to cross Paris on foot or by car or subway or taxi to another terminal like the Gare d'Austerlitz or the Gare de Lyon before joining a southbound train.

"It's about something called the human railroad," I said. "Except there aren't many humans in it so far."

I passed the book to Summer and she flipped through it again.

"It's signed," she said.

She showed me the first blank page. There was an old faded inscription on it. Blue ink, neat penmanship. Someone had written: A Bdatrice de Pierre. To Beatrice from Pierre.

"Was your mother called Beatrice?" Summer asked.

"No," I said. "Her name was Josephine. Josephine Moutier, and then Josephine Reacher."

She passed the book back to me.

"I think I've heard of the human railroad," she said. "It was a World War Two thing. It was about rescuing bomber crews that were shot down over Belgium and Holland. Local Resistance cells scooped them up and passed them along a chain all the way down to the Spanish border. Then they could get back home and get back in action. It was important because trained crews were valuable. Plus it saved people from years in a POW camp."

"That would explain Lamonnier's medals," I said. "One from each Allied government."

I put the book down on the bed and thought about packing. I figured I would throw the Samaritaine jeans and sweatshirt and jacket away. I didn't need them. Didn't want them. Then I looked at the book again and saw that some of the pages had different edges from some of the others. I picked it up and opened it and found some half-tone photographs. Most of them were posed studio portraits, reproduced head-and-shoulders six to a page. The others were clandestine action shots. They showed Allied airmen hiding in cellars lit by candles placed on barrels, and small groups of furtive men dressed in borrowed peasant clothing on country tracks, and Pyrenean guides amid snowy mountainous terrain. One of the action shots showed two men with a young girl between them. The girl was not much more than a child. She was holding both men's hands, smiling gaily, leading them down a street in a city. Paris, almost certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Batrice de service a ses travaux. Beatrice on duty, doing her work. Beatrice looked to be about thirteen years old.

I was pretty sure Beatrice was my mother.

I flipped back to the pages of studio portraits and found her. It was some kind of a school photograph. She looked to be about sixteen in it. The caption was Batrice en 1947. Beatrice in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced together Lamonnier's narrative thesis. There were two main tactical problems with the human railroad. Finding the downed airmen was not one of them. They fell out of the sky, literally, all over the Low Countries, dozens of them every moonless night. If the Resistance got to them first, they stood a chance. If the Wehrmacht got to them first, they didn't. It was a matter of pure luck. If they got lucky and the Resistance got to them ahead of the Germans, they would be hidden out, their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible disguises, forged papers would be issued, rail tickets would be bought, and a courier would escort them on a train to Paris, and they would be on their way home.

Maybe.

The first tactical problem was the possibility of a spot check on the train itself, sometime during the initial journey. These were blond corn-fed farm boys from America, or red-headed British boys from Scotland, or anything else that didn't look dark and pinched and wartime French. They stood out. They didn't speak the language. Lots of subterfuges were developed. They would pretend to be asleep, or sick, or mute, or deaf. The couriers would do all the talking.

The second tactical problem was transiting Paris itself. Paris was crawling with Germans. There were random check points everywhere. Clumsy lost foreigners stuck out like sore thumbs. Private cars had disappeared completely. Taxis were hard to find. There was no gasoline. Men walking in the company of other men became targets. So women were used as couriers. And then one of the dodges Lamonnier dreamed up was to use a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and lead them through the streets to the Gare de Lyon. She would laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and disarming. She got people through check points like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.

Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Batrice. Lamonnier's was Pierre.

I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it up. Inside was a medal. It was La Medaille de la Rsistance. The Resistance Medal. It had a fancy red white and blue ribbon and the medal itself was gold. I turned it over. On the back it was neatly engraved: Josephine Moutier. My mother.

"She never told you?" Summer said.

I shook my head. "Not a word. Not one, ever."

Then I looked back in the box. What the hell was the garrotte about?

"Call Joe," I said. "Tell him we're coming over. Tell him to get Lamonnier back there." We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been, because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph. Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures. Looked at me.

"She ever mention any of this to you?" he said.

"Never. You?"

"Never," he said.

I looked at Lamonnier. "What was the garrotte for?" Lamonnier said nothing.

"Tell us," I said.

"She was found out," he said. "By a boy at her school. A boy of her own age. An unpleasant boy, the son of collaborators. He teased and tormented her about what he was going to do."

"What did he do?"

"At first, nothing. That was extremely unsettling for your mother. Then he demanded certain indignities as the price of his continued silence. Naturally, your mother refused. He told her he would inform on her. So she pretended to relent. She arranged to meet him under the Pont des Invalides, late one night. She had to slip out of her house. But first she took her mother's cheese cutter from the kitchen. She replaced the wire with a string from her father's piano. It was the G below middle C, I think. It was still missing, years later. She met the boy and she strangled him."

"She what?" Joe said.

"She strangled him."

"She was thirteen years old."

Lamonnier nodded. "At that age the physical differences between girls and boys are not a significant handicap."

"She was thirteen years old and she killed a guy?"

"They were desperate times."

"What exactly happened?" I said.

"She used the garrotte. As she had planned. It's not a difficult instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone and she was safe. The human railroad was safe."

Joe stared at him. "You let her do that?"

Lamonnier shrugged. An expressive, Gallic shrug, just like my mother's.

"I didn't know about it," he said. "She didn't tell me until afterwards. I suppose at first my instinct would have been to forbid it. But I couldn't have taken care of it myself. I had no legs. I couldn't have climbed down under the bridge and I wouldn't have been steady enough for fighting. I had a man loosely employed as an assassin, but he was busy elsewhere. In Belgium, I think. I couldn't have afforded the risk of waiting for him to get back. So on balance I think I would have told her to go ahead. They were desperate times, and we were doing vital work."

"Did this really happen?" Joe said.

"I know it did," Lamonnier said. "Fish ate through the boy's belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance down stream. We passed a nervous week. But nothing came of it."

"How long did she work for you?" I asked.

"All through 1943," he said. "She was extremely good. But her face became well known. At first her face was her guardian. It was so young and so innocent. How could anyone suspect a face like that? Then it became a liability. She became familiar to les boches. And how many brothers and cousins and uncles could one girl have? So I had to stand her down."

"Did you recruit her?"

"She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help."

"How many people did she save?"

"Eighty men," Lamonnier said. "She was my best Paris courier. She was a phenomenon. The consequences of discovery didn't bear thinking about. She lived with the worst kind of fear in her gut for a whole year, but never once did she let me down."

We all sat quiet.

"How did you start?" I asked.

"I was a war cripple," he said. "One of many. We were too medically burdensome for them to want us as hostage prisoners. We were useless as forced labourers. So they left us in Paris. But I wanted to do something. I wasn't physically capable of fighting. But I could organize. Those are not physical skills. I knew that trained bomber crews were worth their weight in gold. So I decided to get them home."

"Why would my mother go her whole life without mentioning this stuff?"

Lamonnier shrugged again. Weary, unsure, still mystified all those years later.

"Many reasons, I think," he said. "France was a conflicted country in 1945. Many had resisted, many had collaborated, many had done neither. Most preferred a clean slate. And she was ashamed of killing the boy, I think. It weighed on her conscience. I told her it hadn't been a choice. It wasn't a voluntary action. I told her it had been the right thing to do. But she preferred to forget the whole thing. I had to beg her to accept her medal."

Joe and I and Summer said nothing. We all sat quiet.

"I wanted her sons to know," Lamonnier said. Summer and I walked back to the hotel. We didn't talk. I felt like a guy who suddenly finds out he was adopted. You're not the man I thought you were. All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine. Now I felt different genes stirring. My father hadn't killed the enemy at the age of thirteen. But my mother had. She had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible. At that moment I knew I would miss her for ever. I felt empty. I had lost something I never knew I had. We carried our bags down to the lobby and checked out at the desk. We gave back our keys and the multilingual girl prepared a long and detailed account. I had to countersign it. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw it. It was outrageously expensive. I had figured the army might overlook the forged vouchers in exchange for a result. But now I wasn't so sure. I figured the George V tariff might change their view. It was like adding insult to injury. We had been there one night, but we were being charged for two because we were late checking out. My room service coffee cost as much as a meal in a bistro. My phone call to Rock Creek cost as much as a three-course lunch at the best restaurant in town. My phone call to Franz in California cost as much as a five-course dinner. Summer's call to Joe less than a mile away in my mother's apartment asking him to get hold of Lamonnier was billed at less than two minutes and cost as much as the room service coffee. And we had been charged fees for taking incoming calls. One was from Franz to me and the other was from Joe to Summer, when he asked her to check I was OK. That little piece of sibling consideration was going to cost the government five bucks. Altogether it was the worst hotel bill I had ever seen.

The multilingual girl printed two copies. I signed one for her and she folded the other into an embossed George V envelope and gave it to me. For my records, she said. For my court martial, I thought. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. Took it out again about six hours later, when I finally realized who had done what, and to who, and why, and how.

TWENTY

We made the familiar trek to the Place de l'Opira and caught the airport bus. It was my sixth time on that bus in about a week. The sixth time was no more comfortable than the previous five. It was the discomfort that started me thinking.

We got out at international departures and found the Air France ticket desk. Swapped two vouchers for two seats to Dulles on the eleven o'clock red-eye. That gave us a long wait. We humped our bags across the concourse and started out in a bar. Summer wasn't conversational. I guess she couldn't think of anything to say. But the truth was I was doing OK at that point. Life was unfolding the same way it always had for everyone. Sooner or later you ended up an orphan. There was no escaping it. It had happened that way for a thousand generations. No point in getting all upset about it.

We drank bottles of beer and looked for somewhere to eat. I had missed breakfast and lunch and I guessed Summer hadn't eaten either. We walked past all the little tax-exempt boutiques and found a place that was made up to look like a sidewalk bistro. We pooled our few remaining dollars and checked the menu and worked out that we could afford one course each, plus juice for her and coffee for me, and a tip for the waiter. We ordered steak frites, which turned out to be a decent slab of meat with shoestring fries and mayonnaise. You could get good food anywhere in France. Even an airport.

After an hour we moved down to the gate. We were still early and it was almost deserted. Just a few transit passengers, all shopped out, or broke like us. We sat far away from them and stared into space.

"Feels bad, going back," Summer said. "You can forget how much trouble you're in when you're away."

"All we need is a result," I said.

"We're not going to get one. It's been ten days and we're nowhere."

I nodded. Ten days since Mrs Kramer died, six days since Carbone died. Five days since Delta had given me a week to clear my name.

"We've got nothing," Summer said. "Not even the easy stuff. We didn't even find the woman from Kramer's motel. That shouldn't have been difficult."

I nodded again. She was right. That shouldn't have been difficult. The gate filled with travellers and we boarded forty minutes before take-off. Summer and I had seats behind an old couple in an exit row. I wished we could change places with them. I would have been glad of the extra room. We took off on time and I spent the first hour getting more and more cramped and uncomfortable. The stewardess served a meal that I couldn't have eaten even if I had wanted to, because I didn't have enough room to move my elbows and operate the silverware. One thought led to another.

I thought about Joe flying in the night before. He would have flown coach. That was clear. A civil servant on a personal trip doesn't fly any other way. He would have been cramped and uncomfortable all night long, a little more than me because he was an inch taller. So I felt bad all over again about putting him in the bus to town. I recalled the hard plastic seats and his cramped position and the way his head was jerked around by the motion. I should have sprung for a cab from the city and kept it waiting at the curb. I should have found a way to scare up some cash.

One thought led to another.

I pictured Kramer and Vassell and Coomer flying in from Frankfurt on New Year's Eve. American Airlines. A Boeing jet. No more spacious than any other jet. An early start from XII Corps. A long flight to Dulles. I pictured them walking down the jetway, stiff, airless, dehydrated, uncomfortable.

One thought led to another.

I pulled the George V bill out of my pocket. Opened the envelope. Read it through. Read it through again. Examined every line and every item.

The hotel bill, the airplane, the bus to town. The bus to town, the airplane, the hotel bill. I closed my eyes.

I thought about things that Sanchez and the Delta adjutant and Detective Clark and Andrea Norton and Summer herself had said to me. I thought about the crowd of meeters and greeters we had seen in the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle arrivals hall. I thought about Sperryville, Virginia. I thought about Mrs Kramer's house in Green Valley.

In the end dominoes fell all over the place and landed in ways that made nobody look very good. Least of all me, because I had made many mistakes, including one big one that I knew for sure was going to come right back and bite me in the ass. I kept myself so busy pondering my prior mistakes that I let my preoccupation lead me into making another one. I spent all my time thinking about the past and no time at all thinking about the future. About countermeasures. About what would be waiting for us at Dulles. We touched down at two in the morning and came out through the customs hall and landed straight in a trap set by Willard.

Standing in the same place they had stood six days earlier were the same three warrant officers from the Provost Marshal General's office. Two W3s and a W4. I saw them. They saw us. I spent a second wondering how the hell Willard had done it. Did he have guys standing by at every airport in the country all day and all night? Did he have a Europe-wide trace out on our travel vouchers? Could he do that himself? Or was the FBI involved? The Department of the Army? The State Department? Interpol? NATO? I had no idea. I made an absurd mental note that one day I should try to find out.

Then I spent another second deciding what to do about the situation.

Delay was not an option. Not now. Not in Willard's hands. I needed freedom of movement and freedom of action for twenty four or forty-eight more hours. Then I would go see Willard. I would go see him happily. Because at that point I would be ready to slap him around and arrest him.

The W4 walked up to us with his W3s at his back.

"I have orders to place you both in handcuffs," he said.

"Ignore your orders," I said.

"I can't," he said.

"Try."

"I can't," he said again.

I nodded.

"OK, we'll trade," I said. "You try it with the handcuffs, I'll break your arms. You walk us to the car, we'll go quietly."

He thought about it. He was armed. So were his guys. We weren't. But nobody wants to shoot people in the middle of an airport. Not unarmed people from your own unit. That would lead to a bad conscience. And paperwork. And he didn't want a fistfight. Not three against two. I was too big and Summer was too small to make it fair. "Deal?" he said.

"Deal," I lied. "So let's go."

Last time he had walked ahead of me and his hot-dog W3s had stayed on my shoulders. I sincerely hoped he would repeat that pattern. I guessed the W3s figured themselves for real bad-ass sons of bitches and I guessed they were close to being correct, but it was the W4 I was most worried about. He looked like the genuine article. But he didn't have eyes in the back of his head. So I hoped he would walk in front.

He did. Summer and I stayed side by side with our bags in our hands and the W3s formed up wide and behind us in an arrowhead pattern. The W4 led the way. We went out through the doors into the cold. Turned towards the restricted lane where they had parked last time. It was past two in the morning and the airport approach roads were completely deserted. There were lonely pools of yellow light from fixtures up on posts. It had been raining. The ground was wet.

We crossed the public pick-up lane and crossed the median where the bus shelters were. We headed onward into the dark. I could see the bulk of a parking garage half-left and the green Chevy Caprice far away to the right. We turned towards it. Walked in the roadway. Most other times of the day we would have been mown down by traffic. But right then the whole place was still and silent. Past two o'clock in the morning.

I dropped my bag and used both hands and shoved Summer out of the way. Stopped dead and jerked my right elbow backward and smashed the right-hand W3 hard in the face. Kept my feet planted and twisted the other way like a violent calisthenic exercise and smacked the left-hand W3 with my left elbow. Then I stepped forward and met the W4 as he spun towards the noise and came in for me. I hit him with a straight left to the chest. His weight was moving and my weight was moving and the blow messed him up pretty good. I followed it with a right hook to his chin and put him on the ground. Turned back to the W3s to check how they were doing. They were both down on their backs. There was some blood on their faces. Broken noses, loosened teeth. A lot of shock and surprise. An excellent stun factor. I was pleased. They were good, and I was better. I checked the W4. He wasn't doing much. I squatted down next to the W3s and took their Berettas out of their holsters. Then I twisted away and took the W4's out of his. Threaded all three guns on my forefinger. Then I used my other hand to find the car keys. The right-hand W3 had them in his pocket. I took them out and tossed them to Summer. She was back on her feet. She was looking a little dismayed.

I gave her the three Berettas and I dragged the W4 by his collar to the nearest bus shelter. Then I went back for the W3s and dragged them over one in each hand. I got them all lined up face down on the floor. They were conscious, but they were groggy. Heavy blows to the head are a lot more consequential in real life than they are in the movies. And I was breathing hard myself. Almost panting. The adrenalin was kicking in. Some kind of a delayed reaction. Fighting has an effect on both parties to the deal.

I crouched down next to the W4.

"I apologize, chief," I said. "But you got in the way."

He said nothing. Just stared up at me. Anger, shock, wounded pride, confusion.

"Now listen," I said. "Listen carefully. You never saw us. We weren't here. We never came. You waited for hours, but we didn't show. You came back out and some thief had boosted your car in the night. That's what happened, OK?"

He tried to say something, but the words wouldn't come out right.

"Yes, I know," I said. "It's pretty weak and it makes you look real stupid. But how good does it make you look that you let us escape? That you didn't handcuff us like you were ordered to?" He said nothing.

"That's your story," I said. "We didn't show, and your car was stolen. Stick to it or I'll put it about that it was the lieutenant who took you down. A ninety-pound girl. One against three. People will love that. They'll go nuts for it. And you know how rumours can follow you around for ever." He said nothing. "Your choice," I said.

He shrugged. Said nothing.

"I apologize," I said. "Sincerely."

We left them there and grabbed our bags and ran to their car. Summer unlocked it and we slid in and she fired it up. Put it in gear and moved away from the curb.

"Go slow," I said.

I waited until we were alongside the bus shelter and then wound the window down and tossed the Berettas out on the sidewalk. Their cover story wouldn't hold up if they lost their weapons as well as their car. The three guns landed near the three guys and they all got up on their hands and knees and started to crawl towards them.

"Now go,'I said.

Summer hit the gas hard and the tyres lit up and about a second later we were well outside handgun range. She kept her foot down and we left the airport doing about ninety miles an hour.

"You OK?" I said.

"So far," she said.

"I'm sorry I had to shove you."

"We should have just run," she said. "We could have lost them in the terminal."

"We needed a car," I said. "I'm sick of taking the bus."

"But now we're way out of line."

"That's for sure," I said. I checked my watch. It was close to three in the morning. We were heading south from Dulles. Going nowhere, fast. In the dark. We needed a destination.

"You know my phone number at Bird?" I said.

"Sure," Summer said.

"OK, pull over at the next place with a phone."

She spotted an all-night gas station about five miles later. It was all lit up on the horizon. We pulled in and checked it out. There was a miniature grocery store behind the pumps but it was closed. At night you had to pay for your gas through a bulletproof window. There was a pay phone outside next to the air hose. It was in an aluminum box mounted on the wall. The box had phone shapes drilled into the sides. Summer dialled my Fort Bird office number and handed me the receiver. I heard one cycle of ring tone and then my sergeant answered.

The night-duty woman. The one with the baby son. "This is Reacher," I said.

"You're in deep shit," she said.

"And that's the good news," I said.

"What's the bad news?"