“I need to get home,” Swain said. “It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve got kids and my wife is going to kill me.”
Reacher looked ahead at the rest of the file. Armstrong was just starting in on his first minor election and there were six more inches of paperwork to go. He fanned through it with his thumb.
“Nothing here to worry us?” he asked.
“Nothing anywhere,” Swain said.
“Does this level of detail continue throughout?”
“It gets worse.”
“Am I going to find anything if I read all night?”
“No.”
“Was all of it used in this summer’s campaign?”
Swain nodded. “Sure. It’s a great bio. That’s why he was picked in the first place. Actually we got a lot of the detail from the campaign.”
“And you’re sure nobody in particular was upset by the campaign?”
“I’m sure.”
“So where exactly does your feeling come from? Who hates Armstrong that bad and why?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Swain said. “It’s just a feeling.”
Reacher nodded.
“OK,” he said. “Go home.”
Swain picked up his coat and left in a hurry and Reacher sampled his way through the remaining years. Neagley leafed through the endless source material. They both gave it up after an hour.
“Conclusions?” Neagley asked.
“Swain has got a very boring job,” Reacher said.
She smiled.
“Agreed,” she said.
“But something kind of jumps out at me. Something that’s not here, rather than something that is here. Campaigns are cynical, right? These people will use any old thing that puts them in a good light. So for instance, we’ve got his mother. We’ve got endless detail about her college degrees and her pharmacy thing. Why?”
“To appeal to independent women and small-business people.”
“OK, and then we’ve got stuff about her getting sick. Why?”
“So Armstrong looks like a caring son. Very dutiful and full of family values. It humanizes him. And it authenticates his issues about health care.”
“And we’ve got plenty of stuff about his dad’s lumber company.”
“For the business lobby again. And it touches on environmental concerns. You know, trees and logging and all that kind of thing. Armstrong can say he’s got practical knowledge. He’s walked the walk, at one remove.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Whatever the issue, whatever the constituency, they find a bone to throw.”
“So?”
“They took a pass on military service. And usually they love all that stuff, in a campaign. Normally if your dad was in the Army, you’d shout it from the rooftops to wrap up another whole bunch of issues. But there’s no detail at all. He joined, he got discharged. That’s all we know. See what I mean? We’re drowning in detail everywhere else, but not there. It stands out.”
“The father died ages ago.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’d have been all over it if there was something to be gained. And what was the medical discharge for? If it had been a wound they’d have made something out of it, for sure. Even a training accident. The guy would have been a big hero. And you know what? I don’t like to see unexplained medical discharges. You know how it was. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does. But it can’t be connected. It happened before Armstrong was even born. Then the guy died nearly thirty years ago. And you said it yourself, this all was triggered by something Armstrong did in the campaign.”
Reacher nodded. “But I’d still like to know more about it. We could ask Armstrong direct, I guess.”
“Don’t need to,” Neagley said. “I can find out, if you really need me to. I can make some calls. We’ve got plenty of contacts. People who figure on getting a job with us when they quit are generally interested in making a good impression beforehand.”
Reacher yawned. “OK, do it. First thing tomorrow.”
“I’ll do it tonight. The military is still twenty-four/seven. Hasn’t changed any since we quit.”
“You should sleep. It can wait.”
“I never sleep anymore.”
Reacher yawned again. “Well, I’m going to.”
“Bad day,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “As bad as they get. So make the calls if you want to, but don’t wake me up to tell me about them. Tell me about them tomorrow.”
The night duty officer fixed them a ride back to the Georgetown motel and Reacher went straight to his room. It was quiet and still and empty. It had been cleaned and tidied. The bed was made. Joe’s box had gone. He sat in the chair for a moment and wondered if Stuyvesant had thought to cancel Froelich’s booking. Then the nighttime silence pressed in on him and he was overcome by a sense of something not there. A sense of absence. Things that should be there and weren’t. What exactly? Froelich, of course. He had an ache for her. She should be there, and she wasn’t. She had been there the last time he was in the room. Early that morning. Today’s the day we win or lose, she had said. Losing is not an option, he had replied.
Something not there. Maybe Joe himself. Maybe lots of things. There were lots of things missing from his life. Things not done, things not said. What exactly? Maybe it was just Armstrong’s father’s service career on his mind. But maybe it was more than that. Was something else missing? He closed his eyes and chased it hard but all he saw was the pink spray of Froelich’s blood arcing backward into the sunlight. So he opened his eyes again and stripped off his clothes and showered for the third time that day. He found himself staring down at the tray like he was still expecting to see it run red. But it stayed clear and white.
The bed was cold and hard and the new sheets were stiff with starch. He slipped in alone and stared at the ceiling for an hour and thought hard. Then he switched off abruptly and made himself sleep. He dreamed of his brother strolling hand in hand with Froelich all the way around the Tidal Basin in summer. The light was soft and golden and the blood streaming from her neck hung in the still warm air like a shimmering red ribbon five feet above the ground. It hung there undisturbed by the passing crowds and it made a full mile-wide circle when she and Joe arrived back where they had started. Then she changed into Swain and Joe changed into the Bismarck cop. The cop’s coat flapped open as he walked and Swain said I think we miscounted to everybody he met. Then Swain changed into Armstrong. Armstrong smiled his brilliant politician’s smile and said I’m so sorry and the cop turned and threaded a long gun out from under his flapping coat and slowly racked the bolt and shot Armstrong in the head. There was no sound, because the gun was silenced. No sound, even as Armstrong hit the water and floated away.
There was an alarm call from the desk at six o’clock and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Reacher rolled out of bed and wrapped a towel around his waist and checked the spy hole. It was Neagley, with coffee for him. She was all dressed and ready to go. He let her in and sat on the bed and started the coffee and she paced the narrow alley that led to the window. She was wired. Looked like she’d been drinking coffee all night.
“OK, Armstrong’s father?” she said, like she was asking the question for him. “He was drafted right at the end of Korea. Never saw active service. But he went through officer training and came out a second lieutenant and was assigned to an infantry company. They were stationed in Alabama, some place that’s long gone. They were ordered to achieve battle readiness for a fight everybody knew was already over. And you know how that stuff went, right?”
Reacher nodded sleepily. Sipped his coffee.
“Some idiot captain running endless competitions,” he said. “Points for this, points for that, deductions all over the place, at the end of the month Company B gets to keep a flag in its barracks for kicking Company A’s ass.”
“And Armstrong senior usually won,” Neagley said. “He ran a tight unit. But he had a temper problem. It was
unpredictable. If somebody screwed up and lost points he could fly into a rage. Happened a couple of times. Not just the usual officer bullshit. It’s described in the records as serious uncontrolled temper tantrums. He went way too far, like he couldn’t stop himself.”
“And?”
“They let him get away with it twice. It wasn’t constant. It was purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote it up as generic battle stress, even though he’d never been a combat officer.”
Reacher made a face. “He must have had friends. And so must you, to get that deep into the records.”
“I’ve been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant’s going to have a coronary when he sees the motel bill.”
“How many individual victims?”
“My first thought, but we can forget them. There were three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died ten years ago in Palm Springs, and the third is more than seventy years old, lives in Florida.”
“Dry hole,” Reacher said.
“But it explains why they left it out of the campaign.”
Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. “Any chance Armstrong himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she’d seen him angry.”
“That was my second thought,” Neagley said. “It’s conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was insisting on going to her service, wasn’t there? But I assume the broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The guy’s been running for office at one level or another his whole life. And this all started with the campaign this summer. We already agreed on that.”
Reacher nodded, vaguely.
“The campaign,” he repeated. He sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at the wall, one full minute, then two.
“What?” Neagley asked.
He didn’t reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C. under the gray dawn sky.
“What did Armstrong do in the campaign?” he asked.
“Lots of things.”
“How many Representatives does New Mexico have?”
“I don’t know,” Neagley said.
“I think it’s three. Can you name them?”
“No.”
“Would you recognize any of them on the street?”
“No.”
“Oklahoma?”
“Don’t know. Five?”
“Six, I think. Can you name them?”
“One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can’t remember his name.”
“Senators from Tennessee?”
“What’s your point?”
Reacher stared out of the window.
“We’ve got Beltway disease,” he said. “We’re all caught up in it. We’re not looking at this thing like real people. To almost everybody else out there in the country all these politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said you’re interested in politics but you couldn’t name all hundred senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested than you. Most people wouldn’t recognize another state’s junior senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard of Armstrong before.”
“So?”
“So Armstrong did one absolutely basic, fundamental, elemental thing in the campaign. He put himself in the public eye, nationally. For the very first time in his life ordinary people outside of his home state and outside of his circle of friends saw his face. Heard his name. For the first time ever. I think this all could be as basic as that.”
“In what way?”
“Suppose his face came back at somebody from way in the past. Completely out of the blue. Like a sudden shock.”
“Like who?”
“Like you’re some guy somewhere and long ago some young man lost his temper and smacked you around. Some situation like that. Maybe in a bar, maybe over a girl. Maybe he humiliated you by doing so. You never see the guy again, but the incident festers in your mind. Years pass, and suddenly there’s the guy all over the papers and the TV. He’s a politician, running for Vice President. You never heard of him in the years before, because you don’t watch C-SPAN or CNN. But now, there he is, everywhere, in your face. So what do you do? If you’re politically aware you might call the opposing campaign and dish the dirt. But you’re not politically aware, because this is the first time you’ve ever seen him since the fight in the bar a lifetime ago. So what do you do? The sight of him brings it all back. It’s been festering.”
“You think about some kind of revenge.”
Reacher nodded. “Which would explain Swain’s thing about wanting him to suffer. But maybe Swain’s been looking in the wrong place. Maybe we all have. Because maybe this isn’t personal to Armstrong the politician. Maybe it’s personal to Armstrong the man. Maybe it’s really personal.”
Neagley stopped pacing and sat down in the chair.
“It’s very tenuous,” she said. “People get over things, don’t they?”
“Do they?”
“Mostly.”
Reacher glanced down at her. “You haven’t gotten over whatever makes it that you don’t like people to touch you.”
The room went quiet.
“OK,” she said. “Normal people get over things.”
“Normal people don’t kidnap women and cut thumbs off and kill innocent bystanders.”
She nodded.
“OK,” she said again. “It’s a theory. But where can we go with it?”
“Armstrong himself, maybe,” Reacher said. “But that would be a difficult conversation to have with a Vice President–elect. And would he even remember? If he inherited the kind of temper that gets a guy thrown out of the Army he could have had dozens of fights long ago. He’s a big guy. Could have spread mayhem far and wide before he got a handle on it.”
“His wife? They’ve been together a long time.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Time to get going,” Neagley said. “We meet with Bannon at seven. Are we going to tell him?”
“No,” Reacher said. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“Go shower,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “Something else first. It kept me awake last night for an hour. It nagged at me. Something that’s not here, or something that hasn’t been done.”
Neagley shrugged.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll think about it. Now get your ass in gear.”
He dressed in the last of Joe’s suits. It was charcoal gray and as fine as silk. He used the last of the clean shirts. It was stiff with starch and as white as new snow. The last tie was dark blue with a tiny repeated pattern. When you looked very closely you saw that each element of the pattern was a diagram of a pitcher’s hand, gripping a baseball, preparing to throw a knuckleball.
He met Neagley out in the lobby and ate a muffin from the buffet and took a cup of coffee with him in the Secret Service Town Car. They were late into the conference room. Bannon and Stuyvesant were already there. Bannon was still dressed like a city cop. Stuyvesant was back in a Brooks Brothers suit. Reacher and Neagley left one seat unoccupied between themselves and Stuyvesant. Bannon stared at the empty place, like maybe it was supposed to symbolize Froelich’s absence.
“The FBI is not going to have agents in Grace, Wyoming,” he said. “Special request from Armstrong, via the director. He doesn’t want a circus out there.”
“Suits me,” Reacher said.
“You’re wasting your time,” Bannon said. “We’re complying only because we’re happy to. The bad guys know how this stuff works. They were in the business. They’ll have understood his statement was a trap. So they won’t show up.”
Reacher nodded. “Won’t be the first trip I ever wasted.”
“I’m warning you against independent action.”
“
There won’t be any action, according to you.”
Bannon nodded.
“Ballistics tests are in,” he said. “The rifle we found in the warehouse is definitely the same gun that fired the Minnesota bullet.”
“So how did it get here?” Stuyvesant asked.
“We burned more than a hundred man-hours last night,” Bannon said. “All I can tell you for sure is how it didn’t get here. It didn’t fly in. We checked all commercial arrivals into eight airports and there were no firearms manifests at all. Then we traced all private planes into the same eight airports. Nothing even remotely suspicious.”
“So they drove it in?” Reacher said.
Bannon nodded. “But Bismarck to D.C. is more than thirteen hundred miles. That’s more than twenty hours absolute minimum, even driving like a lunatic. Impossible, in the time frame. So the rifle was never in Bismarck. It came in direct from Minnesota, which was a little more than eleven hundred miles in forty-eight hours. Your grandmother could do that.”
“My grandmother couldn’t drive,” Reacher said. “Still figuring on three guys?”
Bannon shook his head. “No, on reflection we’re sticking at two. The whole thing profiles better that way. We figure the team was split one and one between Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday and it stayed split afterward. The guy pretending to be the Bismarck cop was acting solo at the church. We figure he had the submachine gun only. Which makes sense, because he knew Armstrong was going to be buried in agents as soon as the decoy rifle was discovered. And a submachine gun is better than a rifle against a cluster of people. Especially an H&K MP5. Our people say it’s as accurate as a rifle at a hundred yards and a lot more powerful. Thirty-round magazines, he would have chewed through six agents and gotten to Armstrong easy enough.”
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