Agent Carlos Gaspar flashed his badge at the entrance to the Pentagon, provided appropriate identification and after his approved visitor status was confirmed, he was flagged through.
As he expected, the building was busy even though it was five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Gaspar had slept an hour on the plane; Tylenol, the strongest pain killer he allowed himself, never lasted longer. He'd stopped for coffee after he passed security.
No one knew him here, but both civilians and military personnel were busy with more pressing matters. He’d passed security so they ignored him, likely accepting that his clearance was high enough. Which it was.
He glanced at the digital clock on the wall. Two hours before he’d meet Otto in the coffee shop. Plenty of time.
The first step in any follow-up investigation was to review and analyze all the previous reports. Because Otto and Gaspar were tasked by one of the FBI’s most powerful leaders and assigned a rush under-the-radar project, this step hadn’t been completed.
He knew where he was going, what to look for, and what he should find there.
He also knew he wouldn't find it. The absence of what should be present would speak volumes.
Archived service records, defined as records for veterans sixty-two years or more post-separation, were stored and open to the public at the new National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Nothing pertaining to Reacher would be archived there because he’d been discharged in March 1997.
All inactive personnel records for veterans with a discharge date less than sixty-two years ago remained the property of the Department of Defense and its individual branches. In Reacher’s case, that meant the Army.
Gaspar was an active, practicing Catholic. He believed in divine providence. At first, it felt like he was on the right investigative path and he might find what he sought, even without an official archive. A fire had destroyed service records at the prior St. Louis center in 1973, but Reacher was only thirteen then.
But then Gaspar ran into several official gaps that concealed Reacher’s history more effectively than youth or fire.
The Army didn’t begin retaining records electronically until 2002, five years after Reacher’s separation. This meant his files weren’t retained in electronic format by the Army or electronically shared with the NPRC.
Worse, the Army’s policies on maintaining and releasing service records were changed in April, 1997 and several times thereafter. The rules filled more than fifty-five pages, regularly revised, of course.
All of which meant that Reacher’s records were once and should remain hard copies, resting in files owned by the Army that could be and probably were buried so deep in bullshit that no one would ever find them.
Unless.
Unless Reacher did something to get himself inscribed by bits and bytes into the electronic records after he left the army.
Which, Gaspar was betting, Reacher had done. Probably many times. For sure, at least once barely six months after the army let him go. If Gaspar could find that record, he’d have verified hard proof and Reacher’s trail might begin to unravel.
Gaspar knew Reacher had been arrested in Margrave, Georgia, and his fingerprints were taken and sent to FBI headquarters. A report was returned to the Margrave Police Department. Margrave PD records were also destroyed in a fire, which Gaspar was as sure as he could possibly be was no coincidence.
Even so, the initial fingerprint request should exist in FBI files. Gaspar had checked. The request did not exist in FBI files. Which Gaspar was sure, but could not prove, was no coincidence, either.
This was where the government’s redundancy and repetitive nature might be harnessed, Gaspar hoped. The Margrave PD request and FBI reply should also have been noted in Reacher’s military file, as should any request and reply about Reacher at any time from the date of his discharge until this very moment and into the future. Anything after 2002 should be electronically recorded for sure. And anything before 1997 might also have been updated because of the later electronic entries.
It was this army record Gaspar sought now. Positive paper trail proof of the legally admissible kind that Jack Reacher had been present in Margrave in September 1997, six months after his Army discharge, that Reacher was there. Not a shadow. Not a ghost. Not a rumor. But a real person.
Tangible proof of Reacher’s Margrave presence was important because it provided the immovable, rock hard foundation he needed to nail down. Gaspar’s training said it was required and his gut said it mattered and that was enough for him. He and Otto were assigned to build the Reacher file and by God, he’d do it right, and he wouldn’t make his wife a widow or his five children orphans in the process if he could possibly help it.
First things first. The Margrave PD print request and the Army’s reply.
Then they would take the next steps.
Whatever those steps were.
And if the print request and reply documents were missing from the army files?
Starting here and now, he would confirm one way or the other.
Gaspar was a practicing Catholic. He believed in divine intervention. But he was an FBI Special Agent who also believed in hard proof and his gut. So he knew. He knew before he opened the box marked Jack (none) Reacher and sifted through the paperwork.
Relevant records ended when Reacher separated from the army in March 1997.
After Gaspar confirmed it, he and Otto could move forward. But to where?