Second Son by Lee Child Read Free Book Online

on this code book thing?”
    His father said, “An Intelligence guy and two MPs.”
    “Would you call them and ask them to come over?”
    “Why?”
    “All part of the plan. Like mom told me.”
    “They should come here?”
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Right now would be good.” Reacher saw he had the word
Georgia
stamped backward across one of his knuckles. Must have been where the wire was manufactured. Raised lettering on the insulation. A place he had never been.
    His father made the call to the base and Reacher watched the street from a window. He figured with a bit of luck the timing would be perfect. And it was, more or less. Twenty minutes later a staff car pulled up and three men in uniform got out. And immediately an ambulance turned into the street behind them and maneuvered around their parked vehicle and headed on down to the smelly kid’s house. The medics loaded the kid on board, and his mother and what looked like a younger brother rode along as passengers. Reacher figured the kid’s father would head straight for the hospital, on his motorbike, at the end of his watch. Or earlier, depending on what the doctors said.
    The Intelligence guy was a major, and the MPs were Warrant Officers. All three of them were in BDUs. All three of them were still standing in the hallway. All three of them had the same expression on their faces:
why are we here?
    Reacher said, “That kid they just took away? You need to go search his house. Which is now empty, by the way. It’s ready and waiting for you.”
    The three guys looked at each other. Reacher watched their faces. Clearly none of them had any real desire to nail a good Marine like Stan Reacher. Clearly all of them wanted a happy ending. They were prepared to clutch at straws. They were prepared to go the extra mile, even if that involved taking their cues from some weird thirteen-year-old kid.
    One of the MPs asked, “What are we looking for?”
    “You’ll know it when you see it,” Reacher said. “Eleven inches long, one inch wide, gray in color.”
    The three guys stepped out to the street, and Reacher and his father sat down to wait.

CHAPTER TWENTY
    It was a reasonably short wait, as Reacher had privately predicted. The smelly kid had demonstrated a degree of animal cunning, but he was no kind of a criminal mastermind. That was for damn sure. The three men came back less than ten minutes later with a metal object that had been burned in a fire. It was ashy gray as a result. It was a once-bright alloy fillet eleven inches long and one inch wide, slightly curved across its shorter dimension, with three round appendages spaced along its length.
    It was what is left when you burn a regular three-ring binder.
    No stiff covers, no pages, no contents, just scorched metal.
    Reacher asked, “Where did you find it?”
    One of the MPs said, “Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.”
    No kind of a criminal mastermind
.
    The major from Intelligence asked, “Is it the code book?”
    Reacher shook his head.
    “No,” he said. “It’s the test answers from the school.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “So why call us?”
    “This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.”
    “What exactly happened here?”
    “It was my brother’s fault,” Reacher said. “In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he