Page 105

Julia didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “General Turner’s deputy commander is a colonel named Elwood. He’s army through and through. He’s a rules guy. He wouldn’t let me drive his rental car because I don’t have a license. He has a stick up his ass the size of a baseball bat. But even he talks to his wife about work. He admitted it. Everyone takes work home.”

“My husband didn’t talk to me about work.”

“You were two very smart people. You knew his work was classified. Maybe yours was, too. You both knew the consequences. So you both agreed that whatever the circumstances, all either of you would ever say was a stone cold denial. You agreed that whatever promises or reassurances you were offered, however many times you were told it was OK now, you would still give them nothing but the same denial. When you were told the other one had confessed and ratted you out, you would still give them the same denial. I get it. It was smart to have a plan, and the resolute denial was definitely the way to go. It was a very good decision.”

“My husband didn’t talk to me about work,” Julia said again.

“But these are not normal circumstances. They’re way beyond what you could have contemplated. There’s a hacker out there who can penetrate a walled-off system built by the NSA. We’re pretty sure we know who it is, but we need to know what they’re hiding. The implications could be very serious.”

Julia didn’t answer.

“We want you to revisit your agreement. There’s no longer a need for it. It’s time-expired. Your husband can’t be court martialed anymore. You can’t be prosecuted, because this is all under the radar and off the record. You would be absolutely safe.”

No response.

“We think he did talk to you about work,” Turner said. “It would have been totally natural. I bet discussing such things was a big part of your relationship from the first day you met at M.I.T. Maybe he needed your advice or opinion. Maybe he just wanted to vent. Two lawyers would. Two doctors would. It’s how good marriages work. The two of you against the world.”

Julia said nothing. The baby put down the colorful thing she was holding. It was a teething ring, bright red, with swirls of yellow. She looked up at her mother. She twisted sideways and looked at Turner, with an open, curious gaze, taking her time, solemnly inspecting every detail. Then she twisted the other way and looked at Reacher, at first with the same blank inquiring stare, and then with a sudden spark of recognition. She made a sound he hoped was a happy chortle, and she pitched forward on her hands and knees and scampered over the rug to him, fast and lively, and then she tried to haul herself up on his pants leg.

“Hey kid,” he said.

No answer, obviously.

To Julia he said, “May I?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

He picked the baby up and sat her in his lap. She was soft and insubstantial. She was warm and fragrant. She batted at his hand. He held out his forefinger. She grabbed it by the knuckle. The knuckle was the size of an unshelled walnut. Her tiny hand had to stretch as wide as it would go just to grasp it.

“OK,” Julia said. “I’ll tell you what we talked about.”

Chapter 36

Julia went to the kitchen to get bottles of water, and when she got back she said, “I really don’t mean to be rude, but how simple do you need me to make this?”

“Like you’re Usain Bolt talking to a jogger in the park,” Turner said.

“Like you’re teaching Hindi to a beagle,” Reacher said.

“OK, there were two men named John.”

“That’s good so far,” Reacher said.

“One was my husband John, and one was John the boss of the cybercrime unit. He was one grade higher, whatever you call it.”

“Chief Warrant Officer 4,” Reacher said. “Typically a senior status technical expert offering support at brigade level.”

“OK, they were dealing with two threats. One was foreign intelligence services, in the traditional way. The other was domestic mischief makers and white-hat hackers who wanted to shine a light on certain secrets and scandals. That kind of product was showing up on the internet all the time. John the boss told my John to fix the problem.”

“When was this?” Reacher asked.

“A year ago,” Julia said. “I was still pregnant. But getting close. John built a really fast web crawler. I helped him with the code. The idea was to compare web content with army files you hold internally. If there was a match, then he knew a document had been stolen.”

“Did he find any?”

“He found one the day before Amanda was born. The text matched perfectly. But it was a photograph of an actual paper document, obviously quite old. The content was about Vietnam. John the boss dismissed it as obviously not the product of cybercrime. It was obviously a physical theft or a bribe from sixty years ago, still around somehow, recently discovered in someone’s granddad’s attic, and no one cared about Vietnam anymore anyway.”