Without Fail - Lee Child [147]
“And?”
“They let him get away with it twice. It wasn’t constant. It was purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote it up as generic battle stress, even though he’d never been a combat officer.”
Reacher made a face. “He must have had friends. And so must you, to get that deep into the records.”
“I’ve been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant’s going to have a coronary when he sees the motel bill.”
“How many individual victims?”
“My first thought, but we can forget them. There were three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died ten years ago in Palm Springs, and the third is more than seventy years old, lives in Florida.”
“Dry hole,” Reacher said.
“But it explains why they left it out of the campaign.”
Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. “Any chance Armstrong himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she’d seen him angry.”
“That was my second thought,” Neagley said. “It’s conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was insisting on going to her service, wasn’t there? But I assume the broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The guy’s been running for office at one level or another his whole life. And this all started with the campaign this summer. We already agreed on that.”
Reacher nodded, vaguely.
“The campaign,” he repeated. He sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at the wall, one full minute, then two.
“What?” Neagley asked.
He didn’t reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C. under the gray dawn sky.
“What did Armstrong do in the campaign?” he asked.
“Lots of things.”
“How many Representatives does New Mexico have?”
“I don’t know,” Neagley said.
“I think it’s three. Can you name them?”
“No.”
“Would you recognize any of them on the street?”
“No.”
“Oklahoma?”
“Don’t know. Five?”
“Six, I think. Can you name them?”
“One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can’t remember his name.”
“Senators from Tennessee?”
“What’s your point?”
Reacher stared out of the window.
“We’ve got Beltway disease,” he said. “We’re all caught up in it. We’re not looking at this thing like real people. To almost everybody else out there in the country all these politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said you’re interested in politics but you couldn’t name all hundred senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested than you. Most people wouldn’t recognize another state’s junior senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard of Armstrong before.”
“So?”
“So Armstrong did one absolutely basic, fundamental, elemental thing in the campaign. He put himself in the public eye, nationally. For the very first time in his life ordinary people outside of his home state and outside of his circle of friends saw his face. Heard his name. For the first time ever. I think this all could be as basic as that.”
“In what way?”
“Suppose his face came back at somebody from way in the past. Completely out of the blue. Like a sudden shock.”
“Like who?”
“Like you’re some guy somewhere and long ago some young man lost his temper and smacked you around. Some situation like that. Maybe in a bar, maybe over a girl. Maybe he humiliated you by doing so. You never see the guy again, but the incident festers in your mind. Years pass, and suddenly there’s the guy all over the papers and the TV. He’s a politician, running for Vice President. You never heard of him in the years before, because you don’t watch C-SPAN or CNN. But now, there he is, everywhere, in your face. So what do you do? If you’re politically aware you might call the opposing campaign and dish the dirt. But you’re not politically aware, because this is the first time you’ve ever seen him since the fight in the bar a lifetime