Reacher folded the Post-it note and slipped it into his shirt pocket. "I'll head over there now. Beat the traffic."
"You want me to come with you?"
"No. If they wanted you, they would have asked for you."
Jenkins nodded. "Keep me posted?"
"If I can."
Reacher left the office, walked back to his desk, and locked his files in his desk drawer and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. A few people glanced up as he walked past, but nobody asked where he was going. In a building full of accountants and analysts, people came and went all the time. Meetings, interviews, court appearances.
Reacher took the elevator down to the lobby, signed out at the security desk, and pushed through the heavy glass doors into the November afternoon. The sky was the color of old concrete, and the wind carried the smell of car exhaust and dead leaves. He walked two blocks to where he'd parked.
The drive to Arlington took thirty minutes. Traffic on the Roosevelt Bridge was heavy but moving, and Reacher used the time to think.
Someone from the intelligence community wanted to meet with him. Someone who knew about his military service, about his investigative work, about cases that were supposed to be sealed. That narrowed it down, but not by much. The intelligence world was a sprawling ecosystem of agencies and sub-agencies and special access programs, most of which operated in shadows so deep that even other parts of the government didn't know they existed.
The question was: what did they want?
The address led him to a neighborhood in Arlington that was neither residential nor commercial, but something in between. Office parks and apartment complexes and chain restaurants, all of it built in the last decade, all of it designed to be forgettable.
The building itself was four stories of tan brick and tinted windows, with a small parking lot in front and a larger one in back. A sign near the entrance listed the tenants: a law firm, an IT consulting company, an accounting practice, a medical billing service.
Normal businesses.
Boring businesses.
Reacher parked in the back lot and sat for a moment, watching. A few cars were scattered around, but nobody was coming or going. The building looked half-empty, the way office buildingsalways did in the late afternoon. He checked his watch: 3:52 PM. Eight minutes early.
He got out of the car and walked around to the front entrance. The lobby was small and generic—tile floor, potted plants, a directory on the wall, an elevator at the far end. No security desk, no cameras that he could see.
He checked the directory. The law firm was on the second floor, the IT company on the third, the accounting practice on the fourth. The medical billing service was listed as Suite 110, ground floor.
But there was no Suite 110 on the ground floor. Just the lobby and a hallway that led to a restroom and an emergency exit.
Reacher stood there, reading the directory again, when the elevator dinged.
The doors opened. A woman stepped out. Mid-forties, dark suit, short hair, no jewelry. She looked at Reacher with a neutral expression.
"Mr. Reacher?" she said.
"That's right."
"Follow me, please."
She didn't offer her name. Didn't shake his hand. Just turned and walked back into the elevator. Reacher followed. She pressed the button for the fourth floor, and the doors closed.
They rode in silence. The elevator was old and slow, and Reacher could hear the cables creaking. The woman stood with her hands clasped in front of her, staring at the doors. She had the posture of someone with military training—straight back, weight balanced, ready to move. But she wasn't military. Not anymore, if she ever had been. She was something else now.
The elevator stopped. The doors opened onto a hallway that looked like every other office building hallway in America. There was beige carpet, white walls, fluorescent lights, numbered doors. The woman turned left and walked to the end of the hall, to a door marked "Storage." She pulled out a key, unlocked it, and pushed it open.
"Inside," she said.
Reacher stepped through.
It wasn't a storage room.
It was a small office, maybe twelve by fifteen feet, with a single window that looked out onto the parking lot. The room was furnished with a folding table, the kind you'd see at a church bake sale, and three mismatched chairs. The walls were bare. No pictures, no posters, no calendar. The overhead light was harsh and flickering slightly.
