Page 4 of The Secret

Reacher looked down at the guns on the bench. “These would be considered end-of-life?”

The sergeant shrugged again. “I wouldn’t say so. Ask me, the condition’s acceptable for weapons that would generally be held in reserve. Nothing stood out when the crate was opened. Only when a malfunction was reported. Then I stripped the first one down. Saw the problem right away. Just like you did.”

“Who decides which weapons get destroyed?”

“A dedicated team. It’s a special procedure. Temporary. Lasted a year, so far. Result of Desert Storm. The war was a great opportunity for units to reequip. Assets that are designated surplus as a result come back from the Gulf and get sent here for evaluation.Firearms are our responsibility. We test them and give them a category. Green: fully serviceable, to be retained. Amber: marginally serviceable, to be sold or allocated to civilian gun safety programs. Doesn’t apply to fully automatic weapons, obviously. And red: unserviceable, to be destroyed.”

“You got sent a red crate when you should have gotten a green one?”

“Correct.”

Reacher paused for a moment. The account was plausible. There wasn’t a kind of equipment the army owned that hadn’t been sent to the wrong place, some time or other. Which was usually totally innocent. Like the sergeant said, an admin error. But Reacher was wondering if there could be a broader connection. Something to do with the recent report of stolen M16s. Someone could designate good weapons as unserviceable, fill their crates with the right weight of whatever trash came to hand, send that to the crusher or the furnace, and sell the guns on the black market. Officially the weapons would no longer exist, so no one would be looking for them. It was a feasible method. A loophole someone needed to close. But it wasn’t what had happened here. Reacher had read the report. The inspection was unannounced. A full crack-of-dawn, shock-and-awe operation. And it had been thorough. All the weapons crates on the entire base had been opened. All had the correct number of weapons inside. Not so much as a pocket knife was missing.

Not so much as acompletepocket knife…

Reacher said, “When did these guns get delivered to you in error?”

The sergeant looked away while he did the math, then said, “Fifteen days ago. And I know what you’re going to ask me next. You’re not going to like the answer.”

“What am I going to ask?”

“How you can trace which unit owned these weapons in the Gulf. Before they were sent back.”

“Why would I want to know that?”

“So you can figure out who’s stealing the lower receivers. Someone is stealing them, right? And selling them. So that gangbangers or whoever can make their AR-15s fully automatic. The Gulf’s the perfect place to swap parts out. Officially every last paperclip is tracked. But in reality? Different units have different systems. A few have switched to computers. Most are still paper-based. Paper gets lost. It gets wet. It gets ripped. Digits get transposed. People have handwriting that’s impossible to read. Long story short, you’d have a better chance of selling bikinis at a Mormon convention than tracking that crate.”

“You don’t think I have a future as a swimwear salesman?”

The sergeant blinked. “Sir?”

Reacher said, “No matter. I don’t care who had these guns in the Gulf. Because that’s not where the parts were stolen.”

—

Roberta and VeronicaSanson heard the impact all the way from the street outside. They heard the first of the screams over the background grumble of traffic. Then the cardiac monitor at the head of the bed started to howl again. Its lines had slumped back down to the horizontal. Its display read 00. No heart activity. Only this time the machine was correct. At least as far as Keith Bridgeman was concerned.

Roberta turned left into the corridor and made her way to the hospital’s central elevator bank. Veronica went right and looped around to the emergency staircase. Roberta reached the first floor before her sister. She strolled through the reception area, past thecafé and the store that sold balloons and flowers, and continued out of the main exit. She walked a block west then ducked into a phone booth. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and called American Airlines. She asked for information about their routes and schedules. Next she called United. Then TWA. She weighed the options. Then she tossed the gloves in a trash can and made her way to the public parking lot in the center of the next block.

—

The sergeant ledthe way to a storeroom that was tacked onto the side of a large, squat building near the center of the site. The wind had picked up while they were at the range which made it hard for him to heave the metal door all the way open, and after Reacher had gone through the guy struggled to close it again without getting blown over. He finally wrestled it into place then locked it. Inside, the space was square, eighteen feet by eighteen. The floor was bare concrete. So was the ceiling. It was held up by metal girders that were coated with some kind of knobby fire retardant material and flanked by strip lights in protective cages. There was a phone mounted by the door and a set of shelves against each wall. They were made of heavy-duty steel, painted gray. Each had a stenciled sign attached—Intake, Green, Amber, Red—and a clipboard with a sheaf of papers hanging from its right-hand upright. There were no windows and the air was heavy with the smell of oil and solvents.

The shelves held crates of weapons. Short at the top, long at the bottom. There were fourteen crates on the Red shelves. Reacher pulled one of the long ones out onto the floor and cracked it open. He lifted out an M16. It was in much worse shape than the one he had fired earlier. That was for sure. He field-stripped it, checked its lower receiver, and shook his head.

He said, “It’s original.”

The sergeant opened another crate and examined one of its rifles. It was also pretty scuffed and scraped. He said, “This one’s the same.”

Each crate had a number stenciled on the side. Reacher took the Red clipboard off its hook and turned to the last sheet. It showed that the crate he’d picked had been signed off by someone with the initials UE. The crate the sergeant had chosen had been initialed by DS. Reacher could only see one other set: LH. He picked a crate with a corresponding number, removed the lower receiver from one of the guns inside it, and held the part up for the sergeant to see.

The sergeant said, “Jackpot.”

Reacher said, “LH signed off on this. Who’s LH?”

“Sergeant Hall. In charge of the inspection team.”

“Sergeant Hall’s a woman.”

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