by Lee Child
He turned a corner and came out at the top of Armstrong’s street. Looked up at the high windows again. A mere demonstration wouldn’t require an actual missile. A rifle would be functionally ineffective, but it would make a point. A couple of chips in the limo’s bulletproof glass would serve some kind of notice. A paintball gun would do the trick. A couple of red splatters on the rear window would be a message. But the upper-floor windows were quiet as far as the eye could see. They were clean and neat and draped and closed against the cold. The houses themselves were quiet and calm, serene and prosperous.
There was a small crowd of onlookers watching the Secret Service team erect an awning between Armstrong’s house and the curb. It was like a long narrow white tent. Heavy white canvas, completely opaque. The house end fitted flat against the brick around Armstrong’s front door. The curb end had a radius like a jetway at an airport. It would hug the profile of the limo. The limo’s door would open right inside it. Armstrong would pass from the safety of his house straight into the armored car without ever being visible to an observer.
Reacher walked a circle around the group of curious people. They looked unthreatening. Neighbors, mostly, he guessed. Dressed like they weren’t going far. He moved back up the street and continued the search for open upper-story windows. That would be inappropriate, because of the weather. But there weren’t any. He looked for people loitering. There were plenty of those. There was a block where every second storefront was a coffee shop, and there were people passing time in every one of them. Sipping espresso, reading papers, talking on cell phones, writing in cramped notebooks, playing with electronic organizers.
He picked a coffee shop that gave him a good view south down the street and a marginal view east and west and bought a tall regular, black, and took a table. Sat down to wait and watch. At ten fifty-five a black Suburban came up the street and parked tight against the curb just north of the tent. It was followed by a black Cadillac stretch that parked tight against the tent’s opening. Behind that was a black Town Car. All three vehicles looked very heavy. All three had reinforced window frames and one-way glass. Four agents spilled out of the lead Suburban and took up stations on the sidewalk, two of them north of the house and two of them south. Two Metro Police cruisers snuffled up the street and the first stopped right in the center of the road well ahead of the Secret Service convoy and the second hung back well behind it. They lit up their light bars to hold the traffic. There wasn’t much. A blue Chevy Malibu and a gold Lexus SUV waited to get by. Reacher had seen neither vehicle before. Neither had been out cruising the area. He looked at the tent and tried to guess when Armstrong was passing through it. Impossible. He was still gazing at the house end when he heard the faint thump of an armored door closing and the four agents stepped back to their Suburban and the whole convoy took off. The lead cop car leapt forward and the Suburban and the Cadillac and the Town Car fell in behind it and moved fast up the street. The second police cruiser brought up the rear. All five vehicles turned east right in front of Reacher’s coffee shop. Tires squealed on the pavement. The cars accelerated. He watched them disappear. Then he turned back and watched the small crowd in the street disperse. The whole neighborhood went quiet and still.
They watched the motorcade drive away from a vantage point about eighty yards from where Reacher was sitting. Their surveillance confirmed what they already knew. Professional pride prevented them from writing off his commute to work as actually impossible, but as a viable opportunity it was going to be way down on their list. Way, way down. Right there at the bottom. Which made it all the more fortunate that the transition website offered so many other tempting choices.
They walked a circuitous route through the streets and made it back to their rented red Sable without incident.
Reacher finished his last mouthful of coffee and walked down toward Armstrong’s house. He stepped off the sidewalk where the tent blocked it. It was a white canvas tunnel leading directly to Armstrong’s front door. The door was closed. He walked on and stepped back on the sidewalk and met Neagley coming up from the opposite direction.
“OK?” he asked her.
“Opportunities,” she said. “Didn’t see anybody about to exploit any of them.”
“Me neither.”
“I like the tent and the armored car.”
Reacher nodded. “Takes rifles out of the equation.”
“Not entirely,” Neagley said. “A .50 sniper rifle would get through the armor. With the Browning AP round, or the API.”
He made a face. Either bullet was a formidable proposition. The standard armor-piercing item just blasted through steel plate, and the alternative armor-piercing incendiary burned its way through. But in the end he shook his head.
“No chance to aim,” he said. “First you’d have to wait until the car was rolling, to be sure he was in it. Then you’re putting a bullet into a large moving vehicle with dark windows. Hundred-to-one you’d hit Armstrong himself inside.”
“So you’d need an AT-4.”
“What I thought.”
“Either with the high-explosive against the car, or else you could use it to put a phosphorous bomb into the house.”
“From where?”
“I’d use an upper-floor window in a house behind Armstrong’s. Across the alley, in back. Their defense is mostly concentrated on the front.”
“How would you get in?”
“Phony utility guy, water company, electric company. Anybody who could get in carrying a big toolbox.”
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“It’s going to be a hell of a four years,” Neagley said.
“Or eight.”
Then there was the hiss of tires and the sound of a big engine behind them and they turned to see Froelich easing up in her Suburban. She stopped alongside them, twenty yards short of Armstrong’s house. Gestured them into the vehicle. Neagley got in the front and Reacher sprawled in the back.
“See anybody?” Froelich asked.
“Lots of people,” Reacher said. “Wouldn’t buy a cheap watch from any of them.”
Froelich took her foot off the brake and let the engine’s idle speed crawl the car along the road. She kept it tight in the gutter and stopped it again when the nearside rear door was exactly level with the end of the tent. Lifted her hand from the wheel and spoke into the microphone wired to her wrist.
“One, ready,” she said.
Reacher looked to his right down the length of the canvas tunnel and saw the front door open and a man step out. It was Brook Armstrong. No doubt about it. His photograph had been all over the papers for five solid months and Reacher had spent four whole days watching his every move. He was wearing a khaki raincoat and carrying a leather briefcase. He walked through the tent, not fast, not slow. An agent in a suit watched him from the door.
“The convoy was a decoy,” Froelich said. “We do it that way, time to time.”
“Fooled me,” Reacher said.
“Don’t tell him this isn’t a rehearsal,” Froelich said. “Remember he’s not aware of anything yet.”
Reacher sat up straight and moved over to make room. Armstrong opened the door and climbed in beside him.
“Morning, M. E.,” he said.
“Morning, sir,” she replied. “These are associates of mine, Jack Reacher and Frances Neagley.”
Neagley half-turned and Armstrong threaded a long arm over the seat to shake her hand.
“I know you,” he said. “I met you at the party on Thursday evening. You’re a contributor, aren’t you?”
“She’s a security person, actually,” Froelich said. “We had a little cloak-and-dagger stuff going there. An efficiency analysis.”
“I was impressed,” Neagley said.
“Excellent,” Armstrong said to her. “Believe me, ma’am, I’m very grateful for the care everybody takes of me. Way more than I deserve. Really.”
He was magnificent, Reacher thought. His voice and his face and his eye
s spoke of nothing but boundless fascination with Neagley alone. Like he would rather talk to her than do anything else in the whole world. And he had one hell of a visual memory, to place one face in a thousand from four days ago. That was clear. A born politician. He turned and shook Reacher’s hand and lit up the car with a smile of genuine pleasure.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Reacher,” he said.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” Reacher said. Then he found himself smiling back. He liked the guy, immediately. He had charm to burn. There was charisma coming off him like heat. And even if you discounted ninety-nine percent of it as political bullshit you could still like the fragment that was left. You could like it a lot.
“You in security too?” Armstrong asked him.
“Adviser,” Reacher said.
“Well, you guys do a hell of a great job. Glad to have you aboard.”
There was a tiny sound from Froelich’s earpiece and she took off down the street and made her way toward Wisconsin Avenue. Merged into the traffic stream and headed south and east for the center of town. The sun had disappeared again and the city looked gray through the deep tint in the windows. Armstrong made a little sound like a happy sigh and looked out at it, like he was still thrilled with it. Under the raincoat he was immaculate in a suit and a broadcloth shirt and a silk tie. He looked larger than life. Reacher had five years and three inches and fifty pounds on him but felt small and dull and shabby in comparison. But the guy also looked real. Very genuine. You could forget the suit and the tie and picture him in a torn old plaid jacket, out there splitting logs in his yard. He looked like a very serious politician, but a fun guy, too. He was tall and wired with energy. Blue eyes, plain features, unruly hair flecked with gold. He looked fit. Not with the kind of polish a gym gives you, but like he was just born strong. He had good hands. A slim gold wedding ring and no others. Cracked, untidy nails.
“Ex-military, am I right?” he asked.
“Me?” Neagley said.
“Both of you, I should think. You’re both a little wary. He’s checking me out and you’re checking the windows, especially at the lights. I recognize the signs. My dad was military.”
“Career guy?”
Armstrong smiled. “You didn’t read my campaign bios? He planned on a career, but he was invalided out before I was born and started a lumber business. Never lost the look, though. He always walked the walk, that’s for sure.”
Froelich came off M Street and headed parallel with Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Executive Office Building, past the front of the White House. Armstrong craned to look out at it. Smiled, with the laugh lines deepening around his eyes.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” he said. “Out of everybody who’s surprised I’m going to be a part of that, I’m the most surprised of all, believe me.”
Froelich drove straight past her own office in the Treasury Building and headed for the Capitol dome in the distance.
“Wasn’t there a Reacher at Treasury?” Armstrong asked.
Hell of a memory for names, too, Reacher thought.
“My elder brother,” he said.
“Small world,” Armstrong said.
Froelich made it onto Constitution Avenue and drove past the side of the Capitol. Made a left onto First Street and headed for a white tent leading to a side door in the Senate Offices. There were two Secret Service Town Cars flanking the tent. Four agents out on the sidewalks, looking cautious and cold. Froelich drove straight for the tent and eased to a stop tight against the curb. Checked her position and rolled forward a foot to put Armstrong’s door right inside the canvas shelter. Reacher saw a group of three agents waiting inside the tunnel. One of them stepped forward and opened the Suburban’s door. Armstrong raised his eyebrows, like he was bemused by all the attention.
“Good meeting you both,” he said. “And thanks, M.E.”
Then he stepped out into the canvas gloom and shut the door and the agents surrounded him and walked him down the length of the tent toward the building. Reacher glimpsed uniformed Capitol security people waiting inside. Armstrong stepped through the door and it closed solidly behind him. Froelich pulled away from the curb and eased around the parked cars and headed north in the direction of Union Station.
“OK,” she said, like she was very relieved. “So far so good.”
“You took a chance there,” Reacher said.
“Two in two hundred eighty-one million,” Neagley said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Could have been one of us who sent the letters.”
Froelich smiled. “My guess is it wasn’t. What did you think of him?”
“I liked him,” Reacher said. “I really did.”
“Me too,” Neagley said. “I’ve liked him since Thursday. So now what?”
“He’s in there all day for meetings. Lunch in the dining room. We’ll take him home around seven o’clock. His wife is home. So we’ll rent them a video or something. Keep them locked up tight all evening.”
“We need intelligence,” Reacher said. “We don’t know what exact form this demonstration might take. Or where it will be. Could be anything from graffiti upward. We don’t want to let it pass us by without noticing. If it happens at all.”
Froelich nodded. “We’ll check at midnight. Assuming we get to midnight.”
“And I want Neagley to interview the cleaners again. We get what we need from them, we can put our minds at rest.”
“I’d like to do that,” Froelich said.
They dropped Neagley at the Federal lockup and then drove back to Froelich’s office. Written FBI forensic reports were in on the latest two messages. They were identical to the first two in every respect. But there was a supplementary report from a Bureau chemist. He had detected something unusual about the thumbprints.
“Squalene,” Froelich said. “You ever heard of that?”
Reacher shook his head.
“It’s an acyclic hydrocarbon. A type of oil. There are traces of it present in the thumbprints. Slightly more on the third and fourth than the first and second.”
“Prints always have oils. That’s how they get made.”
“But usually it’s regular human finger oil. This stuff is different. C-thirty-H-fifty. It’s a fish oil. Shark-liver oil, basically.”
She passed the paper across her desk. It was covered in complicated stuff about organic chemistry. Squalene was a natural oil used as an old-fashioned lubricant for delicate machinery, like clockwork watches. There was an addendum at the bottom which said that when hydrogenated, squalene with an e becomes squalane with an a.
“What’s hydrogenated?” Reacher asked.
“You add water?” Froelich said. “Like hydroelectric power?”
He shrugged and she pulled a dictionary off the shelf and flicked through to H.
“No,” she said. “It means you add extra hydrogen atoms to the molecule.”
“Well, that makes everything clear as mud. I scored pretty low in chemistry.”
“It means this guy could be a shark fisherman.”
“Or he guts fish for a living,” Reacher said. “Or he works in a fish store. Or he’s an antique watchmaker with his hands dirty from lubricating something.”
Froelich opened a drawer and flipped through a file and pulled a single sheet. Passed it across. It was a life-size fluoroscope photograph of a thumbprint.
“This our guy?” Reacher asked.
Froelich nodded. It was a very clear print. Maybe the clearest print Reacher had ever seen. All the ridges and whorls were exactly delineated. It was bold and astonishingly provocative. And it was big. Very big. The pad of the thumb measured nearly an inch and a half across. Reacher pressed his own thumb alongside it. His thumb was smaller, and he didn’t have the most delicate hands in the world.
“That’s not a watchmaker’s thumb,” Froelich said.
Reacher nodded slowly. The guy must have hands like bunches of bananas. And rough skin, to print with that degree o
f clarity.
“Manual worker,” he said.
“Shark fisherman,” Froelich said. “Where do they catch a lot of sharks?”
“Florida, maybe.”
“Orlando’s in Florida.”
Her phone rang. She picked it up and her face fell. She looked up at the ceiling and pressed the phone into her shoulder.
“Armstrong needs to go over to the Department of Labor,” she said. “And he wants to walk.”
7
It was exactly two miles from the Treasury Building to the Senate Offices and Froelich drove the whole way one-handed while she talked on her phone. The weather was gray and the traffic was heavy and the trip was slow. She parked at the mouth of the white tent on First Street and killed the motor and snapped her phone closed all at the same time.
“Can’t the Labor guys come over here?” Reacher asked.
She shook her head. “It’s a political thing. There are going to be changes over there and it’s more polite if Armstrong makes the effort himself.”
“Why does he want to walk?”
“Because he’s an outdoors type. He likes fresh air. And he’s stubborn.”
“Where does he have to go, exactly?”
She pointed due west. “Less than half a mile that way. Call it six or seven hundred yards across Capitol Plaza.”
“Did he call them or did they call him?”
“He called them. It’s going to leak so he’s trying to preempt the bad news.”
“Can you stop him going?”
“Theoretically,” she said. “But I really don’t want to. That’s not the sort of argument I want to have right now.”
Reacher turned and looked down the street behind them. Nothing there except gray weather and speeding cars on Constitution Avenue.
“So let him do it,” he said. “He called them. Nobody’s luring him out into the open. It’s not a trick.”