“You sound just the same.”
“Brothers often do.”
The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.
“People liked him,” Froelich said.
“He was OK, I guess.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s a compliment, one brother to another.”
He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.
“You drink it black,” Froelich said. “Just like Joe.”
Reacher nodded. “Thing I can’t get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I’m three years older than he ever got to be.”
Froelich looked away. “I know. He just stopped being there, but the world carried on anyway. It should have changed, just a little bit.”
She sipped her coffee. Black, no sugar. Just like Joe.
“Nobody ever think of doing it, apart from him?” Reacher asked. “Using an outsider for a security audit?”
“Nobody.”
“Secret Service is a relatively old organization.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to ask you an obvious question.”
She nodded. “President Lincoln signed us into existence just after lunch on April fourteenth, 1865. Then he went to the theater that same night and got assassinated.”
“Ironic.”
“From our perspective, now. But back then we were only supposed to protect the currency. Then McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they figured they should have somebody looking out for the President full-time, and we got the job.”
“Because there was no FBI until the 1930s.”
She shook her head. “Actually there was an early incarnation called the Office of the Chief Examiner, founded in 1908. It became the FBI in 1935.”
“That sounds like the sort of pedantic stuff Joe would know.”
“I think it was him who told me.”
“He would. He loved all that historical stuff.”
He saw her make an effort not to go quiet again.
“So what was your obvious question?” she said.
“You use an outsider for the very first time in a hundred and one years, got to be because of something more than you’re a perfectionist.”
She started to answer, and then she stopped. She paused a beat. He saw her decide to lie. He could sense it, in the angle of her shoulder.
“I’m under big pressure,” she said. “You know, professionally. There are a lot of people waiting for me to screw up. I need to be sure.”
He said nothing. Waited for the embellishments. Liars always embellish.
“I wasn’t an easy choice,” she said. “It’s still rare for a woman to head up a team. There’s a gender thing going on, same as anywhere else, I guess, same as always. Some of my colleagues are a little Neanderthal.”
He nodded. Said nothing.
“It’s always on my mind,” she said. “I’ve got to slam-dunk the whole thing.”
“Which Vice President?” he asked. “The new one or the old one?”
“The new one,” she said. “Brook Armstrong. The Vice President–elect, strictly speaking. I was assigned to lead his team back when he joined the ticket, and we want continuity, so it’s a little bit like an election for us, too. If our guy wins, we stay on the job. If our guy loses, we’re back to being footsoldiers.”
Reacher smiled. “So did you vote for him?”
She didn’t answer.
“What did Joe say about me?” he asked.
“He said you’d relish the challenge. You’d beat your brains out to find a way of getting it done. He said you had a lot of ingenuity and you’d find three or four ways of doing it and we’d learn a lot from you.”
“And you said?”
“This was eight years ago, don’t forget. I was kind of full of myself, I guess. I said no way would you even get close.”
“And he said?”
“He said plenty of people had made that same mistake.”
Reacher shrugged. “I was in the Army eight years ago. I was probably ten thousand miles away, up to my eyes in bullshit.”
She nodded. “Joe knew that. It was kind of theoretical.”
He looked at her. “But now it’s not theoretical, apparently. Eight years later you’re going ahead with it. And I’m still wondering why.”
“Like I said, now it’s my call. And I’m under big-time pressure to perform well.”
He said nothing.
“Would you consider doing it?” Froelich asked.
“I don’t know much about Armstrong. Never heard much about him before.”
She nodded. “Nobody has. He was a surprise choice. Junior senator from North Dakota, standard-issue family man, wife, grown-up daughter, cares long-distance for his sick old mother, never made any kind of national impact. But he’s an OK guy, for a politician. Better than most. I like him a lot, so far.”
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“We would pay you, obviously,” Froelich said. “That’s not a problem. You know, a professional fee, as long as it’s reasonable.”
“I’m not very interested in money,” Reacher said. “I don’t need a job.”
“You could volunteer.”
“I was a soldier. Soldiers never volunteer for anything.”
“That’s not what Joe said about you. He said you did all kinds of stuff.”
“I don’t like to be employed.”
“Well, if you want to do it for free we certainly wouldn’t object.”
He was quiet for a beat. “There would be expenses, probably, if a person did this sort of a thing properly.”
“We’d reimburse them, naturally. Whatever the person needed. All official and aboveboard, afterward.”
He looked down at the table. “Exactly what would you want the person to do?”
“I want you, not a person. Just to act the part of an assassin. To scrutinize things from an outside perspective. Find the holes. Prove to me if he’s vulnerable, with times, dates, places. I could start you off with some schedule information, if you want.”
“You offer that to all assassins? If you’re going to do this you should do it for real, don’t you think?”
“OK,” she said.
“You still think nobody could get close?”
She considered her answer carefully, maybe ten seconds. “On balance, yes, I do. We work very hard. I think we’ve got everything covered.”
“So you think Joe was wrong back then?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why did you break up?” he asked.
She glanced away for a second and shook her head. “That’s private.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“So eight years ago you were twenty-seven.”
She smiled. “Joe was nearly thirty-six. An older man. I celebrated his birthday with him. And his thirty-seventh.”
Reacher moved sideways a little and looked at her again. Joe had good taste, he thought. Close up, she looked good. Smelled good. Perfect skin, great eyes, long lashes. Good cheekbones, a small straight nose. She looked lithe and strong. She was attractive, no doubt about it. He wondered what it would be like to hold her, kiss her. Go to bed with her. He pictured Joe wondering the same thing, the first time she walked into the office he ran. And he eventually found out. Way to go, Joe.
“I guess I forgot to send a birthday card,” he said. “Either time.”
“I don’t think he minded.”
“We weren’t very close,” he said. “I don’t really understand why not.”
“He liked you,” she said. “He made that clear. Talked about you, time to time. I think he was quite proud of you, in his own way.”
Reacher said nothing.
“So will you help me out?” she asked.
“What was he lik
e? As a boss?”
“He was terrific. He was a superstar, professionally.”
“What about as a boyfriend?”
“He was pretty good at that, too.”
Reacher said nothing. There was a long silence.
“Where have you been since you left the service?” Froelich asked. “You haven’t left much of a paper trail.”
“That was the plan,” Reacher said. “I keep myself to myself.”
Questions in her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not radioactive.”
“I know,” she said. “Because I checked. But I’m kind of curious, now that I’ve met you. You were just a name before.”
He glanced down at the table, trying to look at himself as a third party, described secondhand in occasional bits and pieces by a brother. It was an interesting perspective.
“Will you help me out?” she asked again.
She unbuttoned her coat, because of the warmth of the room. She was wearing a pure white blouse under the coat. She moved a little closer, and half-turned to face him. They were as close as lovers on a lazy afternoon.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’ll be dangerous,” she said. “I have to warn you that nobody will know you’re out there except me. That’s a big problem if you’re spotted anywhere. Maybe it’s a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking.”
“I wouldn’t be spotted anywhere,” Reacher said.
She smiled. “That’s exactly what Joe told me you’d say, eight years ago.”
He said nothing.
“It’s very important,” she said. “And urgent.”
“You want to tell me why it’s important?”
“I’ve already told you why.”
“Want to tell me why it’s urgent?”
She said nothing.
“I don’t think this is theoretical at all,” he said.
She said nothing.
“I think you’ve got a situation,” he said.
She said nothing.
“I think you know somebody is out there,” he said. “An active threat.”
She looked away. “I can’t comment on that.”
“I was in the Army,” he said. “I’ve heard answers like that before.”
“It’s just a security audit,” she said. “Will you do it for me?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“There would be two conditions,” he said.
She turned back and looked at him. “Which are?”
“One, I get to work somewhere cold.”
“Why?”
“Because I just spent a hundred and eighty-nine dollars on warm clothes.”
She smiled, briefly. “Everywhere he’s going should be cold enough for you in the middle of November.”
“OK,” he said. He dug in his pocket and slid her a matchbook and pointed to the name and address printed on it. “And there’s an old couple working a week in this particular club and they’re worried about getting ripped off for their wages. Musicians. They should be OK, but I need to be sure. I want you to talk to the cops here.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Recent.”
“When’s payday supposed to be?”
“Friday night, after the last set. Midnight, maybe. They need to pick up their money and get their stuff to their car. They’ll be heading to New York.”
“I’ll ask one of our agents to check in with them every day. Better than the cops, I think. We’ve got a field office here. Big-time money laundering in Atlantic City. It’s the casinos. So you’ll do it?”
Reacher went quiet again and thought about his brother. He’s back to haunt me, he thought. I knew he would be, one day. His coffee cup was empty but still warm. He lifted it off the saucer and tilted it and watched the sludge in the bottom flow toward him, slow and brown, like river silt.
“When does it need to be done?” he asked.
At that exact moment less than a hundred and thirty miles away in a warehouse behind Baltimore’s Inner Harbor cash was finally exchanged for two weapons and matching ammunition. A lot of cash. Good weapons. Special ammunition. The planning for the second attempt had started with an objective analysis of the first attempt’s failure. As realistic professionals they were reluctant to blame the whole debacle on inadequate hardware, but they agreed that better firepower couldn’t hurt. So they had researched their needs and located a supplier. He had what they wanted. The price was right. They negotiated a guarantee. It was their usual type of arrangement. They told the guy that if there was a problem with the merchandise they would come back and shoot him through the spinal cord, low down, put him in a wheelchair.
Getting their hands on the guns was the last preparatory step. Now they were ready to go fully operational.
Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong had six main tasks in the ten weeks between election and inauguration. Sixth and least important was the continuation of his duties as junior senator from North Dakota until his term officially ended. There were nearly six hundred and fifty thousand people in the state and any one of them might want attention at any time, but Armstrong assumed they all understood they were in limbo until his successor took over. Equally, Congress wasn’t doing much of anything until January. So his senatorial duties didn’t occupy much of his attention.
Fifth task was to ease his successor into place back home. He had scheduled two rallies in the state so he could hand the new guy on to his own tame media contacts. It had to be a visual thing, shoulder to shoulder, plenty of grip-and-grin for the cameras, Armstrong taking a metaphoric step backward, the new guy taking a metaphoric step forward. The first rally was planned for the twentieth of November, the other four days later. Both would be irksome, but party loyalty demanded it.
Fourth task was to learn some things. He would be a member of the National Security Council, for instance. He would be exposed to stuff a junior senator from North Dakota couldn’t be expected to know. A CIA staffer had been assigned as his personal tutor, and there were Pentagon people coming in, and Foreign Service people. It was all kept as fluid as possible, but there was a lot of work to be fitted around everything else.
And everything else was increasingly urgent. The third task was where it started to get important. There were some tens of thousands of contributors who had supported the campaign nationally. The really big donors would be taken care of in other ways, but the individual thousand-dollar-and-up supporters needed to share the success, too. So the party had scheduled a number of big receptions in D.C. where they could all mill around and feel important and at the center of things. Their local committees would invite them to fly in and dress up and rub shoulders. They would be told it wasn’t officially certain yet whether it would be the new President or the new Vice President hosting them. In practice three-quarters of the duty was already scheduled to fall to Armstrong.
The second task was where it started to get really important. Second task was to stroke Wall Street. A change of administration was a sensitive thing, financially. No real reason why there should be anything but smooth continuity, but temporary nerves and jitters could snowball fast, and market instability could cripple a new presidency from the get-go. So a lot of effort went into investor reassurance. The President-elect handled most of it himself, with the crucial players getting extensive personal face time in D.C., but Armstrong was slated to handle the second-division people up in New York. There were five separate trips planned during the ten-week period.
But Armstrong’s first and most important task of all was to run the transition team. A new administration needs a roster of nearly eight thousand people, and about eight hundred of them need confirmation by the Senate, of which about eighty are really key players. Armstrong’s job was to participate in their selection, and then use his Senate connections to grease their way through the upcoming confirmation process. The transition operation was based in the official space on G Street, but it made sense for Armstrong to lead it from
his old Senate office. All in all, it wasn’t fun. It was grunt work, but that’s the difference between being first and second on the ticket.
So the third week after the election went like this: Armstrong spent the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday inside the Beltway, working with the transition team. His wife was taking a well-earned post-election break at home in North Dakota, so he was temporarily living alone in his Georgetown row house. Froelich packed his protection detail with her best agents and kept them all on high alert.
He had four agents camping out with him in the house and four Metro cops permanently stationed outside in cars, two in front and two in the alley behind. A Secret Service limo picked him up every morning and drove him to the Senate offices, with a second car following. The gun car, it was called. There was the usual efficient transfer across the sidewalks at both ends. Then three agents stayed with him throughout the day. His personal detail, three tall men, dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties, sunglasses even in November. They kept him inside a tight unobtrusive triangle of protection, always unsmiling, eyes always roving, physical placement always subtly adjusting. Sometimes he could hear faint sounds from their radio earpieces. They wore microphones on their wrists and carried automatic weapons under their jackets. He thought the whole experience was impressive, but he knew he was in no real danger inside the office building. There were D.C. cops outside, the Hill’s own security inside, permanent metal detectors on all the street doors, and all the people he saw were either elected members or their staffers, who had been security-cleared many times over.
But Froelich wasn’t as sanguine as Armstrong was. She watched for Reacher in Georgetown and on the Hill, and saw no sign of him. He wasn’t there. Neither was anybody else worth worrying about. It should have relaxed her, but it didn’t.
The first scheduled reception for mid-level donors was held on the Thursday evening, in the ballroom of a big chain hotel. The whole building was swept by dogs during the afternoon, and key interior positions were occupied by Metro cops who would stay put until Armstrong finally left many hours later. Froelich put two Secret Service agents on the door, six in the lobby, and eight in the ballroom itself. Another four secured the loading dock, which is where Armstrong would enter. Discreet video cameras covered the whole of the lobby and the whole of the ballroom and each was connected to its own recorder. The recorders were all slaved to a master timecode generator, so there would be a permanent real-time record of the whole event.
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