by Lee Child
“They get the guys who did it?”
“No.”
“That’s awful.”
“Not really. I got them instead.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think?”
“OK, how?”
“It was a father-and-son team. I drowned the son in a swimming pool. I burned the father to death in a fire. After shooting him in the chest with a hollow-point .44.”
“That ought to do it.”
“Moral of the story, don’t mess with me or mine. I just wish they’d known that ahead of time.”
“Any comeback?”
“I exfiltrated fast. Stayed out of circulation. Had to miss the funeral.”
“Bad business.”
“The guy he was meeting with got it, too. Bled to death under a highway ramp. There was a woman, as well. From Joe’s office. His assistant, Molly Beth Gordon. They knifed her at the Atlanta airport.”
“I saw her name. On the roll of honor.”
Reacher was quiet a beat. The video sped backward. Three in the morning, then two-fifty-something. Then two-forty. Nothing happening.
“The whole thing was a can of worms,” he said. “It was his own fault, really.”
“That’s harsh.”
“It was a stretch for him. I mean, would you get ambushed at a rendezvous?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“I’d do all the usual stuff,” Neagley said. “You know, arrive three hours early, stake it out, surveil, block the approaches.”
“But Joe didn’t do any of that. He was out of his depth. Thing about Joe, he looked tough. He was six-six, two-fifty, built like a brick outhouse. Hands like shovels, face like a catcher’s mitt. We were clones, physically, the two of us. But we had different brains. Deep down, he was a cerebral guy. Kind of pure. Naive, even. He never thought dirty. Everything was a game of chess with him. He gets a call, he sets up a meet, he drives down there. Like he’s moving his knight or his bishop around. He just didn’t expect somebody to come along and blow the whole chessboard away.”
Neagley said nothing. The tape sped on backward. Nothing was happening on it. The square office area just sat there, dim and steady.
“Afterward I was angry he was so careless,” Reacher said. “But then I figured I couldn’t blame him for that. To be careless, first of all you’ve got to know what you’re supposed to be careful about. And he just didn’t. He didn’t know. He didn’t see stuff like that. Didn’t think that way.”
“So?”
“So I guess I was angry I didn’t do it for him.”
“Could you have?”
He shook his head. “I hadn’t seen him for seven years. I had no idea where he was. He had no idea where I was. But somebody like me should have done it for him. He should have asked for help.”
“Too proud?”
“No, too naive. That’s the bottom line.”
“Could he have reacted? At the scene?”
Reacher made a face. “They were pretty good, I guess. Semiproficient, by our standards. There must have been some chance. But it would have been a split-second thing, purely instinctive. And Joe’s instincts were all buried under the cerebral stuff. He probably stopped to think. He always did. Just enough to make him come out timid.”
“Naive and timid,” Neagley said. “They don’t share that opinion around here.”
“Around here he must have looked like a wild man. Everything’s comparative.”
Neagley shifted in her chair and watched the screen.
“Stand by,” she said. “The witching hour approaches.”
The timer spun back through half past midnight. The office was undisturbed. Then at sixteen minutes past midnight the cleaning crew rushed backward out of the gloom of the exit corridor. Reacher watched them at high speed until they reversed into Stuyvesant’s office at seven minutes past. Then he ran the tape forward at normal speed and watched them come out again and clean the secretarial station.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“They look pretty normal,” Neagley said.
“If they’d just left the letter in there, would they look so composed?”
They weren’t hurrying. They weren’t furtive or anxious or stressed or excited. They weren’t glancing backward at Stuyvesant’s door. They were just cleaning, efficiently and speedily. He reversed the tape again and sped back through seven minutes past midnight and onward until it jammed to a stop at midnight exactly. He ejected it and inserted the first tape. Wound to the far end and scanned backward until they first entered the picture just before eleven fifty-two. Ran the tape forward and watched them walk into shot and froze the tape when they were all clearly visible.
“So where would it be?” he asked.
“Like Froelich speculated,” Neagley said. “Could be anywhere.”
He nodded. She was right. Between the three of them and the cleaning cart, they could have concealed a dozen letters.
“Do they look worried?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Run the tape. See how they move.”
He let them walk onward. They headed straight for Stuyvesant’s door and disappeared from view inside, eleven fifty-two exactly.
“Show me again,” Neagley said.
He ran the segment again. Neagley leaned back and half-closed her eyes.
“Their energy level is a little different than when they came out,” she said.
“You think?”
She nodded. “A little slower? Like they’re hesitant?”
“Or like they’re dreading having to do something bad in there?”
He ran it again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Kind of hard to interpret. And it’s no kind of evidence, that’s for sure. Just a subjective feeling.”
He ran it again. There was no real overt difference. Maybe they looked a little less wired going in than coming out. Or more tired. But then, they spent fifteen minutes in there. And it was a relatively small office. Already quite clean and neat. Maybe it was their habit to take a ten-minute rest in there, out of sight of the camera. Cleaners weren’t dumb. Maybe they put their feet on the desk, not a letter.
“I don’t know,” Neagley said again.
“Inconclusive?” Reacher said.
“Naturally. But who else have we got?”
“Nobody at all.”
He hit fast rewind and stared at nothing until he found eight o’clock in the evening. The secretary got up from her desk, put her head around Stuyvesant’s door, and went home. He wound back to seven thirty-one and watched Stuyvesant himself leave.
“OK,” he said. “The cleaners did it. On their own initiative?”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“So who told them to?”
They stopped in the foyer and found Nendick and sent him back to tidy up his equipment room. Then they went in search of Froelich and found her deep in a stack of paperwork at her desk, on the phone, coordinating Brook Armstrong’s return from Camp David.
“We need to speak with the cleaners,” Reacher said.
“Now?” Froelich said.
“No better time. Late-night interrogation always works best.”
She looked blank. “OK, I’ll drive you, I guess.”
“Better that you’re not there,” Neagley said.
“Why not?”
“We’re military. We’ll probably want to slap them around some.”
Froelich stared at her. “You can’t do that. They’re department members, no different than me.”
“She’s kidding,” Reacher said. “But they’re going to feel better talking to us if there’s nobody else from the department around.”
“OK, I’ll wait outside. But I’m going with you.”
She finished up her phone calls and tidied up her paperwork and then led them back to the elevator and down to the garage. They climbed into the Suburban and Reacher closed his eyes for twenty minutes as she drove. He was t
ired. He had been working hard for six days straight. Then the car came to a stop and he opened his eyes again in a mean neighborhood full of ten-year-old sedans and hurricane fencing. There was orange glow from streetlights here and there. Patched blacktop and scrawny weeds in the sidewalks. The thump of a loud car stereo blocks away.
“This is it,” Froelich said. “Number 2301.”
Number 2301 was the left-hand half of a two-family house. It was a low clapboard structure with paired front doors in the center and symmetrical windows left and right. There was a low wire fence defining a front yard. The yard had a lawn that was partly dead. No bushes or flowers or shrubs. But it was neat enough. No trash. The steps up to the door were swept clean.
“I’ll wait right here,” Froelich said.
Reacher and Neagley climbed out of the car. The night air was cold and the distant stereo was louder. They went in through the gate. Up a cracked concrete walk to the door. Reacher pressed the bell and heard it sound inside the house. They waited. Heard the slap of footsteps on what sounded like a bare floor, and then something metal being hauled out of the way. The door opened and a man stood there, holding the handle. He was the cleaner from the video, no doubt about it. They had looked at him forward and backward for hours. He was not young, not old. Not short, not tall. Just a completely average guy. He was wearing cotton pants and a Redskins sweatshirt. His skin was dark and his cheekbones were high and flat. His hair was black and glossy, with an old-fashioned cut still crisp and neat around the edges.
“Yes?” he said.
“We need to talk about the thing at the office,” Reacher said.
The guy didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t ask for ID. Just glanced at Reacher’s face and stepped backward and over the thing he had moved to get the door open. It was a child’s seesaw made out of brightly colored curved metal tubes. It had little seats at each end, like you might see on a child’s tricycle, and plastic horses’ heads with little handlebars coming out of the sides below the ears.
“Can’t leave it outside at night,” the guy said. “It would be stolen.”
Neagley and Reacher climbed over it into a narrow hallway. There were more toys neatly packed onto shelves. Bright grade-school paintings visible on the front of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The smell of cooking. There was a living room off the hallway with two silent, scared women in it. They were wearing Sunday dresses, which were very different from their work overalls.
“We need to know your names,” Neagley said.
Her voice was halfway between warm friendliness and the cold knell of doom. Reacher smiled to himself. That was Neagley’s way. He remembered it well. Nobody ever argued with her. It was one of her strengths.
“Julio,” the man said.
“Anita,” the first woman said. Reacher assumed she was Julio’s wife, by the way she glanced at him before answering.
“Maria,” the second woman said. “I’m Anita’s sister.”
There was a small sofa and two armchairs. Anita and Maria squeezed up to let Julio sit with them on the sofa. Reacher took that as an invitation and sat down in one of the armchairs. Neagley took the other. It put the two of them at a symmetrical angle, like the sofa was a television screen and they were sitting down to watch it.
“We think you guys put the letter in the office,” Neagley said.
There was no reply. No reaction at all. No expression on the three faces. Just some kind of silent blank stoicism.
“Did you?” Neagley asked.
No reply.
“The kids in bed?” Reacher asked.
“They’re not here,” Anita said.
“Are they yours or Maria’s?”
“They’re mine.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Both girls.”
“Where are they?”
She paused a beat. “With cousins.”
“Why?”
“Because we work nights.”
“Not for much longer,” Neagley said. “You won’t be working at all, unless you tell somebody something.”
No response.
“No more health insurance, no more benefits.”
No response.
“You might even go to jail.”
Silence in the room.
“Whatever happens to us will happen,” Julio said.
“Did somebody ask you to put it there? Somebody you know in the office?”
Absolutely no response.
“Somebody you know outside the office?”
“We didn’t do anything with any letter.”
“So what did you do?” Reacher asked.
“We cleaned. That’s what we’re there for.”
“You were in there an awful long time.”
Julio looked at his wife, like he was puzzled.
“We saw the tape,” Reacher said.
“We know about the cameras,” Julio said.
“You follow the same routine every night?”
“We have to.”
“Spend that long in there every night?”
Julio shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You rest up in there?”
“No, we clean.”
“Same every night?”
“Everything’s the same every night. Unless somebody’s spilled some coffee or left a lot of trash around or something. That might slow us up some.”
“Was there something like that in Stuyvesant’s office that night?”
“No,” Julio said. “Stuyvesant is a clean guy.”
“You spent some big amount of time in there.”
“No more than usual.”
“You got an exact routine?”
“I guess so. We vacuum, wipe things off, empty the trash, put things neat, move on to the next office.”
Silence in the room. Just the faint thump of the far-off car stereo, much attenuated by the walls and the windows.
“OK,” Neagley said. “Listen up, guys. The tape shows you going in there. Afterward, there was a letter on the desk. We think you put it there because somebody asked you to. Maybe they told you it was a joke or a trick. Maybe they told you it was OK to do it. And it was OK. There’s no harm done. But we need to know who asked you. Because this is part of the game, too, us trying to find out. And now you’ve got to tell us, otherwise the game is over and we have to figure you put it there off of your own bat. And that’s not OK. That’s real bad. That’s making a threat against the Vice President-elect of the United States. And you can go to prison for that.”
No reaction. Another long silence.
“Are we going to get fired?” Maria asked.
“Aren’t you listening?” Neagley said. “You’re going to jail, unless you tell us who it was.”
Maria’s face went still, like a stone. And Anita’s, and Julio’s. Still faces, blank eyes, stoic miserable expressions straight from a thousand years of peasant experience: sooner or later, the harvest always fails.
“Let’s go,” Reacher said.
They stood up and stepped through to the hallway. Climbed over the seesaw and let themselves out into the night. Made it back to the Suburban in time to see Froelich snapping her cell phone shut. There was panic in her eyes.
“What?” Reacher asked.
“We got another one,” she said. “Ten minutes ago. And it’s worse.”
6
It was waiting for them in the center of the long table in the conference room. A small crowd of people had gathered around it. The halogen spots in the ceiling lit it perfectly. There was a brown nine-by-twelve envelope with a metal closure and a torn flap. And a single sheet of white letter-size paper. On it were printed ten words: The day upon which Armstrong will die is fast approaching. The message was split into two lines, exactly centered between the margins and set slightly above the middle of the paper. There was nothing else visible. People stared at it in silence. The guy in the suit from the reception desk pushed backward through the crowd and spoke to Froelich.
“I handled
the envelope,” he said. “I didn’t touch the letter. Just spilled it out.”
“How did it arrive?” she asked.
“The garage guard took a bathroom break. Came back and found it on the ledge inside his booth. He brought it straight up to me. So I guess his prints are on the envelope too.”
“When, exactly?”
“Half hour ago.”
“How does the garage guard work his breaks?” Reacher asked.
The room went quiet. People turned toward the new voice. The desk guy started in with a fierce who-the-hell-are-you look. But then he saw Froelich’s face and shrugged and answered obediently.
“He locks the barrier down,” he said. “That’s how. Runs to the bathroom, runs back. Maybe two or three times a shift. He’s down there eight hours at a stretch.”
Froelich nodded. “Nobody’s blaming him. Anybody call a forensic team yet?”
“We waited for you.”
“OK, leave it on the table, nobody touch it, and seal this room tight.”
“Is there a camera in the garage?” Reacher asked.
“Yes, there is.”
“So get Nendick to bring us tonight’s tape, right now.”
Neagley craned over the table. “Rather florid wording, don’t you think? And ‘fast’ definitely takes the prediction defense away, I would say. Turns the whole thing into an overt threat.”
Froelich nodded.
“You got that right,” she said slowly. “If this is somebody’s idea of a game or a joke, it just turned very serious very suddenly.”
She said it loud and clear and Reacher caught her purpose fast enough to watch the faces in the room. There was absolutely no reaction on any of them. Froelich checked her watch.
“Armstrong’s in the air,” she said. “On his way home to Georgetown.”
Then she was quiet for a beat.
“Call out an extra team,” she said. “Half to Andrews, half to Armstrong’s house. And put an extra vehicle in the convoy. And take an indirect route back.”
There was a split second of hesitation and then people started moving with the practiced efficiency of an elite team readying itself for action. Reacher watched them carefully, and he liked what he saw. Then he and Neagley followed Froelich back to her office. She called an FBI number and asked for a forensic team, urgent. Listened to the reply and hung up.