They had a stare-off, which Puller ended up winning.
She picked up her phone and made some calls.
As Puller rose to leave she said, “Maybe I was wrong about you.”
“In what way?”
“Maybe you do have what it takes to lead.”
“Maybe,” said Puller.
CHAPTER
50
They left the J2’s office, grabbed a left on Corridor 9, and took the escalator to the basement. The lower level at the Pentagon was a bewildering maze of sterile white corridors that not a drop of sunlight would ever touch. It was Pentagon lore that there were DoD employees from the 1950s still wandering around down here trying to find their way out.
The personnel of J23 were analysts and graphic artists, about two dozen in total, who methodically built the briefing book each week, using intelligence input not only from DIA but also from other agencies like CIA and NSA. Then they would tweak it to the current Chairman’s intelligence preferences. It was a PowerPoint presentation set in hard paper and was succinct in getting to the meat of the matter without delay. In the Army brevity was a virtue beyond all others.
The people in J23 were a mix of uniforms and civilians. Thus Puller saw fatigues, old green uniforms, new blue uniforms, slacks, button-down shirts, and the occasional tie. The unit operated around the clock and the perk for the night crew was that they got to wear polo shirts. Reynolds had been the highest-ranking officer here.
Since J23 was housed in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, room, Puller and Bolling had to put their cell phones and other electronic devices inside a locker on the wall outside the entrance. No picture-taking or outside communications capabilities were allowed in an SCIF.
They were buzzed in and Puller eyed the reception area. It looked like many others he’d seen in the Pentagon. This was the only way in or out, except for possibly a fire emergency exit somewhere in the back. At the end of the corridor was an open bay. Here individual cubicles were lined up and analysts and artists toiled away on the product that General Carson would be poring over tomorrow at 0500. The lights in here were dim. The lights at the cubicles were better. Still, Puller thought, half the people here probably needed eyeglasses after less than a year fighting terrorists from their desks mostly in the dark.
Puller and Bolling showed their creds and were granted access to Reynolds’s coworkers, the highest ranking of whom was a lieutenant colonel. There was a small conference room where Puller conducted his interviews. Each person was spoken with separately, a common enough interview tactic. Witnesses questioned together tended to tell the same story, even if they had different information and perceptions to begin with. They were informed by Puller and confirmed by Bolling that Puller was cleared for everything up to “TS/SCI with polygraph” and had a “valid need to know.” In the intelligence world those phrases opened many a locked door and mouth.
The coworkers expressed more shock and sorrow over the death of Matthew Reynolds than his commanding officer had. However, they also could not provide any useful information or leads about why Reynolds had been murdered. His work, while classified, did not involve anything that would have led to his death, they told Puller. When he was done he was no further along with his investigation than he had been when he’d entered the building.
Next, he searched Reynolds’s office, which had been secured ever since he had left for West Virginia and been murdered. While J23 was technically open storage space, meaning if you put something somewhere, there it would stay safely, Reynolds might still have had a safe in his office. As it turned out, he didn’t. Neither could Puller find anything in the man’s office that would assist the investigation. It was clean and sparsely furnished, and computer files, which he went over in Bolling’s presence, yielded no clues.
He exited J23, retrieved his cell phone from the locker, walked back to one of the main exits with Bolling, and left the DIA man there. He returned to his car in the vast parking lot. But instead of driving off right away, he sat on the hood of his green Army Ford and studied the five-sided building that was the single biggest office space in the world. It had received a sharp punch in the face on September 11, 2001, but had come back stronger than ever.
The Pentagon had started a long renovation of the then nearly sixty-year-old building back in the late 1990s. The first wedge finished, ironically enough, had been the part hit by the American Airlines jumbo jet temporarily flown by madmen. More than ten years later the entire renovation of the building was nearly complete. It was a testament to American resilience.
Puller looked the other way and watched as kids of Pentagon personnel played inside the fence of a daycare center within the Pentagon grounds. He guessed that was what the military was always fighting for, the rights and freedoms of the next generation. Watching little boys and girls sailing down plastic slides and riding toy horses somehow made Puller feel a bit better about things. But only a bit. He still had a killer to catch and he felt no closer to doing so than he had when he had first been given the assignment.
His cell phone vibrated and he slipped it from his pocket. The text message was brief but intriguing: ARMY NAVY CLUB DOWNTOWN TONIGHT 1900 I’LL FIND YOU.
He didn’t know whom it was from, but the sender obviously knew how to contact him. He studied the words for a few more seconds before putting the phone back. He checked his watch. He would have enough time. He’d been meaning to do this when he came back east anyway. And after spending time with the dysfunctional Cole family, it seemed more important still.
He punched the gas and left the Pentagon in his rearview mirror.
CHAPTER
51
"What are you doing here, XO?”
Puller stood at attention as he gazed down at the man.
“Reporting in, sir,” he said.
His father sat in a chair next to his bed. He was wearing pajama bottoms, a white T-shirt, and a pale blue cotton robe cinched at the waist. He had socks and slippers on his long, narrow feet. He had once been over six-three, but gravity and infirmity had sliced two inches off him. Now when he stood he no longer towered over most people, not that he stood that often anymore. The fact was, his father almost never left his room at the VA hospital. His hair was nearly gone. What was left was cottony white, like Q-tips stitched together, and nearly encircled his head, just nicking his ears.
“At ease,” said Puller Sr.
Puller relaxed but remained standing.
“How was the trip to Hong Kong, sir?” he asked.
Puller hated playing this fictional game, but the doctors said it was better that way. While Puller didn’t put much creed in the shrinks, he had deferred to their expertise, but his patience was growing thin.
“Transport plane blew a tire on takeoff. Never made it. Almost ended up in the drink.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Not half as sorry as I was, XO. Needed some R and R.”
“Yes, sir.”
As his father looked at him, the first thing Puller noted was his eyes. It was also part of Army lore that Puller Sr. could kill you with a look that would induce such a deep sense of shame at your having failed him that you would just curl up and die. It wasn’t true, of course. But Puller had talked to many men who had served with his father, and every one of them had been on the receiving end of such a look. And every one of them said they would remember it to their final day on earth.
But now the eyes were just pupils in the head. Not lifeless, but no longer full of life. They were blue, but hollow, flattened. Puller looked around the confines of the small, featureless room, just like hundreds of others here, and concluded that in many important ways his father was already dead.