The Escape (John Puller, #3)(16)

Escaped prisoners from an Army installation could certainly be within the purview of the CID regardless of which branch they’d been in. Technically, his brother was no longer a member of the military. Along with his conviction had come a dishonorable discharge—standard procedure. Bad guys didn’t get to wear the uniform anymore.

Yet because Robert Puller had been convicted of national security crimes, responsibility for his case fell largely to the special agents of Army Counterintelligence and the FBI. However, Puller had worked on parallel investigations with both agencies and considered them highly capable. Good for them, perhaps bad for his brother. But he had to stop thinking that way. What was bad for his brother was good for him and the rest of the country.

Easy to think, harder to execute, because the brothers had been inordinately close all their lives, due to their father’s all-consuming military career and a largely absent mother. John Puller had looked to his older brother for advice on all important decisions in his life, from asking a girl out to what position to play on the high school football team, from much-needed help on a physics exam in his junior year of college to the most appropriate way to approach their father about his decision not to go to West Point and become an officer. It was Bobby’s advice, all of it good and on point and well-intentioned, that had helped make Puller what he was today, for better or worse. And now that mentor was suddenly his enemy?

The first time he had visited Bobby at the DB it had seemed as though an enormous mistake had been committed, but that it would be corrected in the near future. The two brothers, both tall and well built, though John was the taller and stronger of the two, had sat across from each other in the visitors’ room and Puller had talked and Bobby had listened. And then Bobby had talked and Puller had listened. Then as the visits had continued over more than two years, and his brother’s status in prison had gelled to a permanency that seemed unshakable, Puller increasingly could think of nothing to say. It was as though the man he was facing had his brother’s face but that was all. The person he’d known all his life could not be in there. He could not be in this place convicted of treason. Yet there he was.

When they had last parted company, Puller had shaken his brother’s hand, but had felt no connection to him at all. It was an impersonator, he had thought at the time. It had to be.

This simply could not be his brother.

It was true that Bobby had helped his little brother, via phone, prevent a disaster of enormous proportions during his investigation into the murder of a military family in West Virginia. For that, his brother became the only prisoner at the DB ever to receive a commendation for service to his country. And when their aunt had been found murdered in Florida his brother had offered him both commiseration and counsel. That had thawed their relationship somewhat, but nothing could overcome the fact that one of them lived behind bars.

Used to live behind bars, Puller reminded himself, as he crossed the border into Kansas at around ten p.m. the night after leaving Virginia. It was dark and his options were limited. He didn’t want to stay where he usually did when visiting his brother at the DB. That would be too easy for others to find out and follow him from there.

He kept driving and about ten minutes later stopped at a motel that looked like it had been built in the fifties and then forgotten about. The small office proved this observation correct, even down to the rotary dial telephone, thick phone book, and bulky metal cash register. There was not a computer screen in sight. The woman behind the counter looked like she had been here from day one and had forgotten to change her clothes and hairstyle during that time. He paid for two nights in cash and took the old-fashioned bulky room key from her aged, shaky hand.

A few minutes later he was in his room with his cat, AWOL, huddled on a thin mattress with damp sheets because the wall air conditioner was basically a humidifier casting wisps of wet air into the room’s atmosphere where they eventually fell back to earth, or at least to the sheets. Puller stretched out on the bed, damp linens and all, and checked his emails. There was one from his CO reiterating to Puller that this case was off-limits. He didn’t answer. What would be the point?

Then he did the only thing he could after driving nearly halfway across the country—he fell asleep. He had been able to rest in the middle of both combat and murder investigations. But tonight his slumber was continually interrupted by thoughts of what he was going to do tomorrow.

By the time he woke the next morning he still wasn’t sure. He fed and watered AWOL and then let her out. Then he got into his car and drove to a diner down the street from the motel. It was from the fifties too, but its food was timeless: pancakes, bacon, eggs over easy, and hot tea. He ate his fill and then went back to his car and sat in the driver’s seat staring moodily out the window. Wherever he had been deployed, or for whatever purpose, to fight or to investigate, Puller had always been able to devise a plan, a strategy to get the job done. But none of those times had involved searching for an escaped prisoner who happened to be his brother. In many respects he felt paralyzed.

And then a partial answer walked right in front of him. It shouldn’t have been surprising, and it wasn’t. It was one reason he was sitting where he was. The coffee shop across the street was one frequented by personnel at the DB. He knew this from previous visits. He had met or seen many of them during his time here. They weren’t on a first-name basis, of course, but with his size Puller was hard to miss and harder still not to remember.