by Lee Child
“Not that there’s much doubt about what they’ll find,” she said, to nobody in particular. Then Nendick knocked and came in, carrying two videotapes.
“Two cameras,” he said. “One is inside the booth, high up, looking down and sideways, supposed to ID individual drivers in their cars. The other is outside, looking straight up the alley, supposed to pick up approaching vehicles.”
He put both cassettes on the desk and went back out. Froelich picked up the first tape and scooted her chair over to her television set. Put the tape in and pressed play. It was the sideways view from inside the booth. The angle was high, but it was about right to catch a driver framed in a car window. She wound back thirty-five minutes. Pressed play again. The guard was shown sitting on his stool with the back of his left shoulder in shot. Doing nothing. She fast-wound forward until he stood up. He touched a couple of buttons and disappeared. Nothing happened for thirty seconds. Then an arm snaked into view from the extreme right edge of the picture. Just an arm, in a heavy soft sleeve. A tweed overcoat, maybe. The hand on the end of it was gloved in leather. There was an envelope in the hand. It was pushed through the half-closed sliding window and dropped onto the ledge. Then the arm disappeared.
“He knew about the camera,” Froelich said.
“Clearly,” Neagley said. “He was a yard shy of the booth, stretching out.”
“But did he know about the other camera?” Reacher asked.
Froelich ejected the first tape and inserted the second. Wound backward thirty-five minutes. Pressed play. The view was straight up the alley. The quality was poor. There were pools of light from outdoor spotlights and the contrast with areas of darkness was vivid. The shadows lacked detail. The angle was high and tight. The top of the picture cut off well before the street end of the alley. The bottom of the shot stopped maybe six feet in front of the booth. But the width was good. Very good. Both walls of the alley were clearly in view. There was no way of approaching the garage entrance without passing through the camera’s field of vision.
The tape ran. Nothing happened. They watched the timecode counter until it reached a point twenty seconds before the arm had appeared. Then they watched the screen. A figure appeared at the top. Definitely male. No doubt about it. There was no mistaking the shoulders or the walk. He was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat, maybe gray or dark brown. Dark pants, heavy shoes, a muffler around his neck. And a hat on his head. A wide-brimmed hat, dark in color, tilted way down in front. He walked with his chin tucked down. The video picked up a perfect view of the crown of his hat, all the way down the alley.
“He knew about the second camera,” Reacher said.
The tape ran on. The guy walked fast, but purposefully, not hurrying, not running, not out of control. He had the envelope in his right hand, holding it flat against his body. He disappeared out of the bottom of the shot and reappeared three seconds later. Without the envelope. He walked at the same purposeful pace all the way back up the alley and out of shot at the top of the screen.
Froelich froze the tape. “Description?”
“Impossible,” Neagley said. “Male, a little short and squat. Right-handed, probably. No visible limp. Apart from that we don’t know diddly. We saw nothing.”
“Maybe not too squat,” Reacher said. “The angle foreshortens things a little.”
“He had inside knowledge,” Froelich said. “He knew about the cameras and the bathroom breaks. So he’s one of us.”
“Not necessarily,” Reacher said. “He could be an outsider who staked you out. The exterior camera must be visible if you’re looking for it. And he could assume the interior camera. Most places have them. And a couple of nights’ surveillance would teach him the bathroom break procedure. But you know what? Insider or outsider, we drove right past him. We must have. When we went out to see the cleaners. Because even if he’s an insider, he needed to time the bathroom break exactly right. So he needed to be watching. He must have been across the street for a couple of hours, looking down the alley. Maybe with binoculars.”
The office went quiet.
“I didn’t see anybody,” Froelich said.
“Me neither,” Neagley said.
“I had my eyes closed,” Reacher said.
“We wouldn’t have seen him,” Froelich said. “He hears a vehicle coming up the ramp, he ducks out of sight, surely.”
“I guess so,” Reacher said. “But we were real close to him, temporarily.”
“Shit,” Froelich said.
“Yeah, shit,” Neagley echoed.
“So what do we do?” Froelich asked.
“Nothing,” Reacher said. “Nothing we can do. This was more than forty minutes ago. If he’s an insider, he’s back home by now. Maybe tucked up in bed. If he’s an outsider, he’s already on I-95 or something, west or north or south, maybe thirty miles away. We can’t call the troopers in four states and ask them to look for a right-handed man in a car who doesn’t limp, no better description than that.”
“They could look for an overcoat and a hat on the backseat or in the trunk.”
“It’s November, Froelich. Everybody’s got a hat and a coat with them.”
“So what do we do?” she asked again.
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case this whole thing is for real. Keep him wrapped up tight. Like Stuyvesant said, threatening isn’t necessarily the same thing as succeeding.”
“What’s his schedule?” Neagley asked.
“Home tonight, the Hill tomorrow,” Froelich said.
“So you’ll be OK. You scored perfect around the Capitol. If Reacher and I couldn’t get to him there, no squat guy in an overcoat is going to. Assuming a squat guy in an overcoat wants to, instead of just shaking you up for the fun of it.”
“You think?”
“Like Stuyvesant said, take a deep breath and tough it out. Be confident.”
“Doesn’t feel good. I need to know who this guy is.”
“We’ll find out who he is, sooner or later. Until then, if you can’t attack at one end you have to defend at the other.”
“She’s right,” Reacher said. “Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case.”
Froelich nodded vaguely and took the tape out of the machine and put the first one back in. Restarted it and stared at the screen until the garage guard came back from his bathroom break and noticed the envelope and picked it up and hurried out of shot with it.
“Doesn’t feel good,” she said again.
An FBI forensic crew came by an hour later and photographed the sheet of paper on the conference room table. They used an office ruler for a scale reference and then used a pair of sterile plastic tweezers to lift the paper and the envelope into separate evidence bags. Froelich signed a form to keep the chain of evidence intact and they took both items away for examination. Then she got on the phone for twenty minutes and tracked Armstrong all the way out of the Marine helicopter at Andrews and all the way home.
“OK, we’re secure,” she said. “For now.”
Neagley yawned and stretched. “So take a break. Be ready for a hard week.”
“I feel stupid,” Froelich said. “I don’t know if this is a game or for real.”
“You feel too much,” Neagley said.
Froelich looked at the ceiling. “What would Joe do now?”
Reacher paused and smiled. “Go to the store and buy a suit, probably.”
“No, seriously.”
“He’d close his eyes for a minute and work it all out like it was a chess puzzle. He read Karl Marx, you know that? He said Marx had this trick of explaining everything with one single question, which was, who benefits?”
“So?”
“Let’s say it is an insider doing this. Karl Marx would say, OK, the insider plans to benefit from it. Joe would ask, OK, how does he plan to benefit from it?”
“By making me look bad in front of Stuyvesant.”
“And getting you demoted or fired or whatever
, because that rewards him in some way. That would be his aim. But that would be his only aim. Situation like that, there’s no serious threat against Armstrong. That’s an important point. And then Joe would say, OK, suppose it’s not an insider, suppose it’s an outsider. How does he plan to benefit?”
“By assassinating Armstrong.”
“Which gratifies him in some other way. So Joe would say what you’ve got to do is proceed as if it’s an outsider, and proceed very calmly and without panicking, and above all successfully. That’s two birds with one stone. If you’re calm, you deny the insider his benefit. If you’re successful, you deny the outsider his benefit.”
Froelich nodded, frustrated. “But which is it? What did the cleaners tell you?”
“Nothing,” Reacher said. “My read is somebody they know persuaded them to smuggle it in, but they aren’t admitting to anything.”
“I’ll tell Armstrong to stay home tomorrow.”
Reacher shook his head. “You can’t. You do that, you’ll be seeing shadows every day and he’ll be in hiding for the next four years. Just stay calm and tough it out.”
“Easy to say.”
“Easy to do. Just take a deep breath.”
Froelich was still and silent for a spell. Then she nodded.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll get you a driver. Be back here at nine in the morning. There’ll be another strategy meeting. Exactly a week after the last one.”
The morning was damp and very cold, like nature wanted to be done with fall and get started with winter. Exhaust fumes drifted down the streets in low white clouds and pedestrians hurried by on the sidewalks with their faces ducked deep into scarves. Neagley and Reacher met at eight-forty at the cab line outside the hotel and found a Secret Service Town Car waiting for them. It was double-parked with the engine running and the driver standing next to it. He was maybe thirty years old, dressed in a dark overcoat and gloves, and he was up on his toes, scanning the crowd anxiously. He was breathing hard and his breath was pluming in the air.
“He looks worried,” Neagley said.
The inside of the car was hot. The driver didn’t speak once during the journey. Didn’t even say his name. Just bulled through the morning traffic and squealed into the underground garage. Led them at a fast walk into the interior lobby and into the elevator. Up three floors and across to the reception desk. It was manned by a different guy. He pointed down the corridor toward the conference room.
“Started without you,” he said. “You better hurry.”
The conference room was empty apart from Froelich and Stuyvesant sitting face-to-face across the width of the table. They were both still and silent. Both pale. On the polished wood between them lay two photographs. One was the official FBI crime scene eight-by-ten of the previous day’s ten-word message: The day upon which Armstrong will die is fast approaching . The other was a hasty Polaroid of another sheet of paper. Reacher stepped close and bent to look.
“Shit,” he said.
The Polaroid showed a single sheet of letter-sized paper, exactly like the first three in every detail. It followed the same format, a printed message neatly centered near the middle of the page. Nine words: A demonstration of your vulnerability will be staged today.
“When did it come?” he asked.
“This morning,” Froelich said. “In the mail. Addressed to Armstrong at his office. But we’re bringing all his mail through here now.”
“Where is it from?”
“Orlando, Florida, postmarked Friday.”
“Another popular tourist destination,” Stuyvesant said.
Reacher nodded. “Forensics on yesterday’s?”
“Just got a heads-up by phone,” Froelich said. “Everything’s identical, thumbprint and all. I’m sure this one will be the same. They’re working on it now.”
Reacher stared at the pictures. The thumbprints were completely invisible, but he felt he could just about see them there, like they were glowing in the dark.
“I had the cleaners arrested,” Stuyvesant said.
Nobody spoke.
“Gut call?” Stuyvesant said. “Joke or real?”
“Real,” Neagley said. “I think.”
“Doesn’t matter yet,” Reacher said. “Because nothing’s happened yet. But we act like it’s for real until we know otherwise.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “That was Froelich’s recommendation. She quoted Karl Marx at me. The Communist Manifesto.”
“Das Kapital, actually,” Reacher said. He picked up the Polaroid and looked at it again. The focus was a little soft and the paper was very white from the strobe, but there was no mistaking what the message meant.
“Two questions,” he said. “First, how secure are his movements today?”
“As good as it gets,” Froelich said. “I’ve doubled his detail. He’s scheduled to leave home at eleven. I’m using the armored stretch again instead of the Town Car. Full motorcade. We’re using awnings across the sidewalks at both ends. He won’t see open air at any point. We’ll tell him it’s another rehearsal procedure.”
“He still doesn’t know about this yet?”
“No,” Froelich said.
“Standard practice,” Stuyvesant said. “We don’t tell them.”
“Thousands of threats a year,” Neagley said.
Stuyvesant nodded. “Exactly. Most of them are background noise. We wait until we’re absolutely sure. And even then, we don’t always make a big point out of it. They’ve got better things to do. It’s our job to worry.”
“OK, second question,” Reacher said. “Where’s his wife? And he has a grown-up kid, right? We have to assume that messing with his family would be a pretty good demonstration of his vulnerability.”
Froelich nodded. “His wife is back here in D.C. She came in from North Dakota yesterday. As long as she stays in or near the house she’s OK. His daughter is doing graduate work in Antarctica. Meteorology, or something. She’s in a hut surrounded by a hundred thousand square miles of ice. Better protection than we could give her.”
Reacher put the Polaroid back down on the table.
“Are you confident?” he asked. “About today?”
“I’m nervous as hell.”
“But?”
“I’m as confident as I can be.”
“I want Neagley and me on the ground, observing.”
“Think we’re going to screw up?”
“No, but I think you’re going to have your hands full. If the guy’s in the neighborhood, you might be too busy to spot him. And he’ll have to be in the neighborhood if he’s for real and he wants to stage a demonstration of something.”
“OK,” Stuyvesant said. “You and Ms. Neagley, on the ground, observing.”
Froelich drove them to Georgetown in her Suburban. They arrived just before ten o’clock. They got out three blocks short of Armstrong’s house and Froelich drove on. It was a cold day, but a watery sun was trying its best. Neagley stood still and glanced around, all four directions.
“Deployment?” she asked.
“Circles, on a three-block radius. You go clockwise and I’ll go counterclockwise. Then you stay south and I’ll stay north. Meet back at the house after he’s gone.”
Neagley nodded and walked away west. Reacher went east into the weak morning sun. He wasn’t especially familiar with Georgetown. Apart from short periods during the previous week spent watching Armstrong’s house he had explored it only once, briefly, just after he left the service. He was familiar with the college feel and the coffee shops and the smart houses. But he didn’t know it like a cop knows his beat. A cop depends on a sense of inappropriateness. What doesn’t fit? What’s out of the ordinary? What’s the wrong type of face or the wrong type of car for the neighborhood? Impossible to answer those questions without long habituation to a place. And maybe impossible to answer them at all in a place like Georgetown. Everybody who lives there comes from somewhere else. They’re there for a reason, to study at the university o
r to work in the government. It’s a transient place. It has a temporary, shifting population. You graduate, you leave. You get voted out, you go someplace else. You get rich, you move to Chevy Chase. You go broke, you go sleep in a park.
So just about everybody he saw was suspicious. He could have made a case against any of them. Who belonged? An old Porsche with a blown muffler rumbled past him. Oklahoma plates. An unshaven driver. Who was he? A brand new Mercury Sable was parked nose-to-tail with a rusted-out Rabbit. The Sable was red and almost certainly a rental. Who was using it? Some guy just in for the day for a special purpose? He detoured next to it and glanced in through the windows at the rear seat. No overcoat, no hat. No open ream of Georgia-Pacific office paper. No box of latex medical gloves. And who owned the Rabbit? A graduate student? Or some backwoods anarchist with a Hewlett-Packard printer at home?
There were people on the sidewalks. Maybe four or five of them visible at any one time in any one direction. Young, old, white, black, brown. Men, women, young people carrying backpacks full of books. Some of them hurrying, some of them strolling. Some of them obviously on their way to the market, some of them obviously on their way back. Some of them looking like they had no particular place to go. He watched them all in the corner of his eye, but nothing special jumped out at him.
Time to time he checked upper-story windows as he walked. There were a lot of them. It was good rifle territory. A warren of houses, back gates, narrow alleys. But a rifle would be no good against an armored stretch limo. The guy would need an antitank missile for that. Of which there were plenty to choose from. The AT-4 would be favorite. It was a three-foot disposable fiberglass tube that fired a six-and-a-half pound projectile through eleven inches of armor. Then the BASE principle took over. Behind Armor Secondary Effect. The entrance hole stayed small and tight, so the explosive event stayed confined to the interior of the vehicle. Armstrong would be reduced to little floating carbon pieces not much bigger than charred wedding confetti. Reacher glanced up at the windows. He doubted that a limo would have much armor plate in the roof, anyway. He made a mental note to ask Froelich about it. And to ask if she often rode in the same car as her charge.