The guest list was a thousand people long. November weather meant they couldn’t line up on the sidewalk and the tenor of the event meant security had to be pleasantly unobtrusive, so the standard winter protocol applied, which was to get the guests in off the street and into the lobby immediately through a temporary metal detector placed inside the frame of the entrance door. Then they milled around inside the lobby and eventually made their way to the ballroom door. Once there, their printed invitations were checked and they were asked for photo ID. The invitations were laid facedown on a glass sheet for a moment, and then handed back as souvenirs. Under the glass sheet was a video camera working to the same timecode as the others, so names and faces were permanently tied together in the visual record. Finally, they passed through a second metal detector and onward into the ballroom. Froelich’s crew were serious but good-humored, and made it seem more like they were protecting the guests themselves from some thrilling unspecified danger, rather than protecting Armstrong from them.
Froelich spent her time staring at the video monitors, looking for faces that didn’t fit. She saw none, but she kept on worrying anyway. She saw no sign of Reacher. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed about that. Was he doing it or not? She thought about cheating and issuing his description to her team. Then she thought better of it. Win or lose, I need to know, she thought.
Armstrong’s two-car convoy entered the loading dock a half hour later, by which time the guests had drunk a couple of glasses of cheap sparkling wine and eaten as many soggy canapés as they wanted. His personal three-man detail brought him in through a rear passageway and kept to a ten-foot radius for the duration. His appearance was timed to last two hours, which gave him an average of a little over seven seconds per guest. On a rope line seven seconds would be an eternity, but this situation was different, primarily in the handshaking method. A campaigning politician learns very quickly to fumble a handshake and grip the back of the recipient’s hand, not the palm. It creates a breathless so-much-support-here-I’ve-got-to-be-quick type of drama, and better still it means it’s strictly the pol’s choice when he lets go, not the supporter’s. But in an event of this nature, Armstrong couldn’t use that tactic. So he had to shake properly and work fast to keep to seven seconds each. Some guests were content with brevity and others hung on a little longer, gushing their congratulations like maybe he hadn’t experienced any before. There were some men who went for the two-handed forearm grip. Some put their arms around his shoulders for private photographs. Some were disappointed that his wife wasn’t there. Some weren’t. There was one woman in particular who took his hand in a firm grip and held on for ten or twelve seconds, even pulling him nice and close and whispering something in his ear. She was surprisingly strong and nearly pulled him off balance. He didn’t really hear what she whispered. Maybe her room number. But she was slim and pretty, with dark hair and a great smile, so he wasn’t too upset about it. He just smiled back gratefully and moved on. His Secret Service detail didn’t bat an eye.
He worked a complete circle around the room, eating nothing, drinking nothing, and made it back out of the rear door after two hours and eleven minutes. His personal detail put him back in his car and drove him home. The sidewalk crossing was completely uneventful and another eight minutes later his house was locked down for the night and secure. Back at the hotel the rest of the security detail withdrew unnoticed and the thousand guests left over the next hour or so.
Froelich drove straight back to her office and called Stuyvesant at home just before midnight. He answered right away and sounded like he had been holding his breath and waiting for the phone to ring.
“Secure,” she said.
“OK,” he replied. “Any problems?”
“None that I saw.”
“You should review the video anyway. Look for faces.”
“I plan to.”
“Happy about tomorrow?”
“I’m not happy about anything.”
“Your outsider working yet?”
“Waste of time. Three full days and he’s nowhere to be seen.”
“What did I tell you? It wasn’t necessary.”
There was nothing to accomplish in D.C. on the Friday morning so Armstrong stayed home and had his CIA guy come in for two hours’ teaching. Then his detail rehearsed the full motorcade exfiltration. They used an armored Cadillac with two escort Suburbans flanked by two cop cars and a motorcycle escort. They drove him to Andrews Air Force Base for a midday flight to New York City. As a courtesy the defeated incumbents had allowed him the use of Air Force Two, although technically it couldn’t use that call sign until it had a real inaugurated Vice President in it, so for the moment it was just a comfortable private airplane. It flew into La Guardia and three cars from the Secret Service’s New York Field Office picked the party up and drove them south to Wall Street, with an NYPD motorcycle escort riding ahead of them.
Froelich was already in position inside the Stock Exchange. The New York Field Office had plenty of experience working with the NYPD and she was comfortable that the building was adequately secure. Armstrong’s reassurance meetings were held in a back office and lasted two hours, so she relaxed until the photo call. The transition team’s media handlers wanted news pictures on the sidewalk in front of the building’s pillars, sometime after the closing bell. She had no chance whatsoever of persuading them otherwise, because they desperately needed the positive exposure. But she was profoundly unhappy about her guy standing still in the open air for any period of time. She had agents video the photographers for the record and check their press credentials twice and search every camera bag and every pocket of every vest. She checked in by radio with the local NYPD lieutenant and confirmed that the perimeter was definitively secured to a thousand feet on the ground and five hundred vertically. Then she allowed Armstrong out with the assorted brokers and bankers and they posed for five whole agonizing minutes. The photographers crouched on the sidewalk right at Armstrong’s feet so they could get group head-and-shoulders shots with the New York Stock Exchange lintel inscription floating overhead. Too much proximity, Froelich thought. Armstrong and the financial guys stared optimistically and resolutely into the middle distance, endlessly. Then, mercifully, it was over. Armstrong gave his patented “I’d love to stay” wave and backed away into the building. The financiers followed him and the photographers dispersed. Froelich relaxed again. Next up was a routine road trip back to Air Force Two and a flight to North Dakota for the first of Armstrong’s handover rallies the next day, which meant she had maybe fourteen hours without major pressure.
Her cell phone rang in the car as they got close to La Guardia. It was her senior colleague from the Treasury side of the organization, at his desk in D.C.
“That bank account we’re tracking?” he said. “The customer just called in again. He’s wiring twenty grand to Western Union in Chicago.”
“In cash?”
“No, cashier’s check.”
“A Western Union cashier’s check? For twenty grand? He’s paying somebody for something. Goods or services. Got to be.”
Her colleague made no reply, and she clicked her phone off and just held it in her hand for a second. Chicago? Armstrong wasn’t going anywhere near Chicago.
Air Force Two landed in Bismarck and Armstrong went home to join his wife and spend the night in his own bed in the family house in the lake country south of the city. It was a big old place with an apartment above the garage block that the Secret Service took over as its own. Froelich withdrew Mrs. Armstrong’s personal detail to give the couple some privacy. She gave all the personal agents the rest of the night off and tasked four more to stake out the house, two in front, two behind. State troopers made up the numbers, parked in cars on a three-hundred-yard radius. She walked the whole area herself as a final check, and her cell phone rang as she came back into the driveway.
“Froelich?” Reacher said.
“How did you get this number?�
��
“I was a military cop. I can get numbers.”
“Where are you?”
“Don’t forget those musicians, OK? In Atlantic City? Tonight’s the night.”
Then the phone went dead. She walked up to the apartment above the garage and idled some time away. She called the Atlantic City office at one in the morning and was told that the old couple had been paid the right money at the right time and escorted to their car and all the way out to I-95, where they had turned north. She clicked off her phone and sat for a spell in a window seat, just thinking. It was a quiet night, very dark. Very lonely. Cold. Distant dogs barked occasionally. No moon, no stars. She hated nights like this. The family-house situations were always the trickiest. Eventually anybody got thoroughly sick of being guarded, and even though Armstrong was still amused by the novelty she could tell he was ready for some down time. And certainly his wife was. So she had nobody at all in the interior and was relying exclusively on perimeter defense. She knew she should be doing more, but she had no real option, at least not until they explained the extent of the present danger to Armstrong himself, which they hadn’t yet done, because the Secret Service never does.
Saturday dawned bright and cold in North Dakota, and preparations began immediately after breakfast. The rally was scheduled for one o’clock on the grounds of a church community center on the south side of the city. Froelich had been surprised that it was an outdoors event, but Armstrong had told her that it would be heavy overcoat weather, nothing more. He told her that North Dakotans usually didn’t retreat indoors until well after Thanksgiving. At which point she was almost overcome by an irrational desire to cancel the whole event. But she knew the transition team would oppose her, and she didn’t want to fight losing battles this early. So she said nothing. Then she almost proposed Armstrong wear a Kevlar vest under his heavy overcoat, but eventually she decided against it. Poor guy’s got four years of this, maybe eight, she thought. He’s not even inaugurated yet. Too early. Later, she wished she’d gone with her first instinct.
The church community center’s grounds were about the size of a soccer field and were bordered to the north by the church itself, which was a handsome white clapboard structure traditional in every way. The other three sides were well fenced and two of them backed onto established housing subdivisions, with the third fronting onto the street. There was a wide gateway that opened into a small parking lot. Froelich banned parking for the day and put two agents and a local cop car on the gate, with twelve more cops on foot on the grass just inside the perimeter. She put two cop cars in each of the surrounding streets and had the church itself searched by the local police canine unit and then closed and locked. She doubled the personal detail to six agents, because Armstrong’s wife was accompanying him. She told the detail to stick close to the couple at all times. Armstrong didn’t argue with that. Being seen in the center of a prowling pack of six tough guys looked very high-level. His successor-designate would be happy about it, too. Some of that D.C. power-elite status might rub off on him.
The Armstrongs made it a rule never to eat at public events. It was too easy to look like idiots, greasy fingers, trying to talk while chewing. So they had an early lunch at home and drove up in convoy and got right to the business at hand. It was easy enough. Even relaxing, in a way. Local politics was not Armstrong’s problem anymore. Wouldn’t be much of a problem for his successor either, to be truthful. He had a handsome newly minted plurality and was basking in a lot of reflected glow. So the afternoon turned out to be not much more than a pleasant stroll around a pleasant piece of real estate. His wife was beautiful, his successor stayed at his side throughout, there were no awkward questions from the press, all four network affiliates and CNN were there, all the local papers had sent photographers, and stringers from The Washington Post and The New York Times showed up, too. All in all it went so well he began to wish they hadn’t bothered to schedule the follow-up event. It really wasn’t necessary.
Froelich watched the faces. She watched the perimeters. She watched the crowd, straining to sense any alteration in the herd behavior that might indicate tension or uneasiness or sudden panic. She saw nothing. Saw no sign of Reacher, either.
Armstrong stayed thirty minutes longer than anticipated, because the weak fall sun bathed the field in gold, and there was no breeze, and he was having a good time, and there was nothing scheduled for the evening except a quiet dinner with key members of the state legislature. So his wife was escorted home and his personal detail herded him back toward the cars and drove him north into the city of Bismarck itself. There was a hotel adjacent to the restaurant and Froelich had arranged rooms for the dead time before the meal. Armstrong napped for an hour and then showered and dressed. The meal was going well when his chief of staff fielded a call. The outgoing President and Vice President were formally summoning the President-elect and the Vice President–elect to a one-day transition conference at the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont, starting early the next morning. It was a conventional invitation, because inevitably there was business to discuss. And it was delivered in the traditional way, last-minute and pompous, because the lame ducks wanted to push the world around one last time. But Froelich was delighted, because the unofficial name for the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont is Camp David, and there is no safer place in the world than that particular wooded clearing in the Maryland mountains. She decided they should all fly back to Andrews immediately and take Marine helicopters straight out to the compound. If they spent all night and all day there she would be able to relax completely for twenty-four hours.
But late on the Sunday morning a Navy steward found her at breakfast in the mess hall and plugged a telephone into a baseboard socket near her chair. Nobody uses cordless or cellular phones at Camp David. Too vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping.
“Call transferred from your main office, ma’am,” the steward said.
There was empty silence for a second, and then a voice.
“We should get together,” Reacher said.
“Why?”
“Can’t tell you on the phone.”
“Where have you been?”
“Here and there.”
“Where are you now?”
“In a room at the hotel you used for the reception Thursday.”
“You got something urgent for me?”
“A conclusion.”
“Already? It’s only been five days. You said ten.”
“Five was enough.”
Froelich cupped the phone. “What’s the conclusion?”
Then she found herself holding her breath.
“It’s impossible,” Reacher said.
She breathed out and smiled. “Told you so.”
“No, your job is impossible. You should get over here, right now.”
3
She drove back to D.C. in her Suburban and argued with herself the whole way. If the news is really bad, when do I involve Stuyvesant? Now? Later? In the end she pulled over on Dupont Circle and called him at home and asked him the question direct.
“I’ll get involved when I need to,” he said. “Who did you use?”
“Joe Reacher’s brother.”
“Our Joe Reacher? I didn’t know he had a brother.”
“Well, he did.”
“What’s he like?”
“Just like Joe, maybe a little rougher.”
“Older or younger?”
“Both,” Froelich said. “He started out younger, and now he’s older.”
Stuyvesant went quiet for a moment.
“Is he as smart as Joe?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Froelich said.
Stuyvesant went quiet again. “So call me when you need to. But sooner rather than later, OK? And don’t say anything to anybody else.”
She ended the call and threaded back into the Sunday traffic and drove the last mile and parked outside the hotel. The desk was expecting her and sent her straight up to 1201, twelft
h floor. She followed a waiter through the door. He was carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two upside-down cups on saucers. No milk, no sugar, no spoons, and a single pink rose in a narrow china vase. The room was standard-issue city hotel. Two queen beds, flowery prints at the window, bland lithographs on the walls, a table, two chairs, a desk with a complicated phone, a credenza with a television, a connecting door to the next room. Reacher was sitting on the nearer bed. He was wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket with a black T-shirt and black jeans and black shoes. He had an earpiece in his ear and a pretty good fake Secret Service pin in the collar of the jacket. He was clean shaven and his hair had been cut very short and was neatly combed.
“What have you got for me?” she asked.
“Later,” he said.
The waiter put the tray on the table and backed silently out of the room. Froelich watched the door click shut behind him and turned back to Reacher. Paused a beat.
“You look just like one of us,” she said.
“You owe me lots of money,” he said.
“Twenty grand?”
He smiled. “Most of that. They told you about it?”
She nodded. “But why a cashier’s check? That puzzled me.”
“It won’t, soon.”
He stood up and stepped across to the table. Righted the cups and picked up the pot and poured the coffee.
“You timed the room service well,” she said.
He smiled again. “I knew where you were, I knew you’d be driving back. It’s Sunday, no traffic. Easy enough to derive an ETA.”
“So what have you got to tell me?”
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