The Affair: A Reacher Novel

spare guys were already getting their butts kicked for losing me. I took another big breath and pushed off a wall and tracked back along radial three, across the B ring, to the C. I turned without breaking stride and headed for bay fifteen.

Chapter
3
    There was no one waiting outside bay fifteen. No special crew. No one at all. The corridor was entirely empty, too, both ways, as far as the eye could see. And quiet. I guessed everyone else was already where they wanted to be. Twelve o’clock meetings were in full swing.
    Bay fifteen’s door was open. I knocked on it once, as a courtesy, as an announcement, as a warning, and then I stepped inside. Originally most of the Pentagon’s office space was open plan, boxed off by file cabinets and furniture into bays, hence the name, but over the years walls had gone up and private spaces had been created. Frazer’s billet in 3C315 was pretty typical. It was a small square space with a window without a view, and a rug on the floor, and photographs on the walls, and a metal DoD desk, and a chair with arms and two without, and a credenza and a double-wide storage unit.
    And it was a small square space entirely empty of people, apart from Frazer himself in the chair behind the desk. He looked up at me and smiled.
    He said, “Hello, Reacher.”
    I looked left and right. No one there. No one at all. There was no private bathroom. No large closet. No other door of any kind. The corridor behind me was empty. The giant building was quiet.
    Frazer said, “Close the door.”
    I closed the door.
    Frazer said, “Sit down, if you like.”
    I sat down.
    Frazer said, “You’re late.”
    “I apologize,” I said. “I got hung up.”
    Frazer nodded. “This place is a nightmare at twelve o’clock. Lunch breaks, shift changes, you name it. It’s a zoo. I never plan to go anywhere at twelve o’clock. I just hunker down in here.” He was about five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds, wide in the shoulders, solid through the chest, red-faced, black-haired, in his middle forties. Plenty of old Scottish blood in his veins, filtered through the rich earth of Tennessee, which was where he was from. He had been in Vietnam as a teenager and the Gulf as an older man. He had combat pips all over him like a rash. He was an old-fashioned warrior, but unfortunately for him he could talk and smile as well as he could fight, so he had been posted to Senate Liaison, because the guys with the purse strings were now the real enemy.
    He said, “So what have you got for me?”
    I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.
    He said, “Good news, I hope.”
    “No news,” I said.
    “Nothing?”
    I nodded. “Nothing.”
    “You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”
    “I don’t have the name.”
    “Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”
    I paused a beat.
    “It was a shortcut,” I said.
    “In what way?”
    “I put it around that I had the name. I wondered who might crawl out from under a rock, to shut me up.”
    “And no one has?”
    “Not so far. But ten minutes ago I thought it was a different story. There were four spare men in the lobby. In DPS uniforms. They followed me. I thought they were an arrest team.”
    “Followed you where?”
    “Around the E ring to the D. Then I lost them on the stairs.”
    Frazer smiled again.
    “You’re paranoid,” he said. “You didn’t lose them. I told you, there are shift changes at twelve o’clock. They come in on the Metro like everyone else, they shoot the shit for a minute or two, and then they head for their squad room. It’s on the B ring. They weren’t following you.”
    I said nothing.
    He said, “There are always groups of them hanging around. There are always groups of everyone hanging around. We’re seriously overmanned. Something is going to have to be done. It’s inevitable. That’s all I hear about on the Hill, all day, every day. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We should all bear that in mind. People like you, especially.”
    “Like me?” I said.
    “There are lots of majors in this man’s army. Too many, probably.”
    “Lots of colonels too,” I said.
    “Fewer colonels than majors.”
    I said nothing.
    He asked, “Was I on your list of things that might crawl out from under a rock?”
    You were the list
, I thought.
    He said, “Was I?”
    “No,” I lied.
    He smiled again. “Good answer. If I had a beef with you, I’d have you killed down there in