by Lee Child
“Truman was like that.”
“You bet he was. You should hear some of the old stories.”
“Would Armstrong be like that?”
“Maybe. Depends how the moment struck him, I guess. He’s pretty gentle physically, but he’s not a coward. And I’ve seen him very angry.”
“And he looks tough enough.”
Froelich nodded. Checked her watch. “We should get back to the office now. See if anything’s happened anyplace else. You call Neagley while I clear up here. Tell her to be ready to roll in twenty minutes.”
They were back in the office before eleven-fifteen. The message logs were blank. Nothing of significance from the D.C. police department. Nothing from North Dakota, nothing from the FBI. Updates were still streaming into the National Crime Information Center’s database. Froelich started combing through the day’s reports. She found nothing of interest. Her cell phone rang at eleven-thirty. All was quiet and peaceful in Georgetown. She turned back to the computer. Nothing doing. Time ticked around to midnight. Monday finished and Tuesday started. Stuyvesant showed up again. He just appeared in the doorway like he had before. Said nothing. The only chair in the room was Froelich’s own. Stuyvesant leaned against the door frame. Reacher sat on the floor. Neagley perched on a file cabinet.
Froelich waited ten minutes and called the D.C. cops. They had nothing to report. She called the Hoover Building and the FBI told her nothing significant had happened before midnight in the East. She turned back to the computer screen. Called out occasional incoming stories but neither Stuyvesant nor Reacher nor Neagley could twist them into any kind of a connection with a potential threat to Armstrong. The clock moved on to one in the morning. Midnight, Central time. She called the police department in Bismarck. They had nothing for her. She called the North Dakota State Police. Nothing at all. She tried the FBI again. Nothing reported from their field offices in the last sixty minutes. She put the phone down and scooted her chair back from her desk. Breathed out.
“Well, that’s it,” she said. “Nothing happened.”
“Excellent,” Stuyvesant said.
“No,” Reacher said. “Not excellent. Not excellent at all. It’s the worst possible news we could have gotten.”
8
Stuyvesant led them straight back toward the conference room. Neagley walked next to Reacher, close by his shoulder in the narrow corridors.
“Great suit,” she whispered.
“First one I ever wore,” he whispered back. “We on the same page with this?”
“On the same page and out of a job, probably,” she said. “That is, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
They turned a corner. Walked on. Stuyvesant stopped and shepherded them into the conference room and came in after them and hit the lights and closed the door. Reacher and Neagley sat together on one side of the long table and Stuyvesant sat next to Froelich on the other, like he foresaw an adversarial element to the conversation.
“Explain,” he said.
Silence for a second.
“This is definitely not an inside job,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “Although we were fooling ourselves by ever thinking it was entirely one thing or the other. It was always both. But it was useful shorthand. The real question was where the balance lay. Was it fundamentally an inside job with trivial help from the outside? Or was it basically an outside job with trivial help from the inside?”
“The trivial help being what?” Stuyvesant asked.
“A potential insider needed a thumbprint that wasn’t his. A potential outsider needed a way to get the second message inside this building.”
“And you’ve concluded that it’s the outsider?”
Reacher nodded again. “Which is absolutely the worst news we could have gotten. Because whereas an insider messing around is merely a pain in the ass, an outsider is truly dangerous.”
Stuyvesant looked away. “Who?”
“No idea,” Reacher said. “Just some outsider with a loose one-time connection to an insider, sufficient to get the message in and nothing more.”
“The insider being one of the cleaners.”
“Or all of them,” Froelich said.
“I assume so, yes,” Reacher said.
“You sure about this?”
“Completely.”
“How?” Stuyvesant asked.
Reacher shrugged.
“Lots of reasons,” he said. “Some of them small, one of them big.”
“Explain,” Stuyvesant said again.
“I look for simplicity,” Reacher said.
Stuyvesant nodded. “So do I. I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not zebras. But the simple explanation here is an insider trying to get under Froelich’s skin.”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “The chosen method is way too complex for that. They’d be doing all the usual stuff instead. The easy stuff. I’m sure we’ve all seen it before. Mysterious communications failures, computer crashes, bogus alarm calls to nonexistent addresses in the bad part of town, she arrives, calls in for backup, nobody shows, she gets scared, she panics on the radio, a recording gets made and starts to circulate. Any law enforcement department has got a stack of examples a yard high.”
“Including the military police?”
“Sure. Especially with women officers.”
Stuyvesant shook his head.
“No,” he said. “That’s conjecture. I’m asking how you know.”
“I know because nothing happened today.”
“Explain,” Stuyvesant said for the third time.
“This is a smart opponent,” Reacher said. “He’s bright and he’s confident. He’s in command. But he threatened something and he didn’t deliver.”
“So? He failed, is all.”
“No,” Reacher said. “He didn’t even try. Because he didn’t know he had to. Because he didn’t know his letter arrived today.”
Silence in the room.
“He expected it to arrive tomorrow,” Reacher said. “It was mailed on Friday. Friday to Monday is pretty fast for the U.S. mail. It was a fluke. He banked on Friday to Tuesday.”
Nobody spoke.
“He’s an outsider,” Reacher said. “He’s got no direct connection to the department and therefore he’s unaware his threat showed up a day early, or he’d have delivered today for sure. Because he’s an arrogant son of a bitch, and he wouldn’t have wanted to let himself down. Count on it. So he’s out there somewhere, waiting to deliver on his threat tomorrow, which is exactly when he expected he’d have to all along.”
“Great,” Froelich said. “There’ll be another contributor reception tomorrow.”
Stuyvesant was quiet for a beat.
“So what do you suggest?” he asked.
“We have to cancel,” Froelich said.
“No, I meant long-term strategy,” Stuyvesant said. “And we can’t cancel anything. We can’t just give up and say we can’t protect our principal.”
“You have to tough it out,” Reacher said. “It’ll only be a demonstration. Designed to torment you. My guess is it’ll specifically avoid Armstrong altogether. It’ll penetrate somewhere he has been or will be some other time.”
“Like where?” Froelich asked.
“His house, maybe,” Reacher said. “Either here or in Bismarck. His office. Somewhere. It’ll be theatrical, like these damn messages. It’ll be some spectacular thing in a place Armstrong just was or is heading for next. Because right now this whole thing is a contest, and the guy promised a demonstration, and I think he’ll keep his word, but I’m betting the next move will be parallel somehow. Otherwise why phrase the message the way he did? Why talk about a demonstration? Why not just go ahead and say, Armstrong, you’re going to die today?”
Froelich made no reply.
“We have to identify this guy,” Stuyvesant said. “What do we know about him?”
Silence in the room.
“Well, we know we’re fooling
ourselves again,” Reacher said. “Or else still speaking in shorthand. Because it’s not a him. It’s them. It’s a team. It always is. It’s two people.”
“That’s a guess,” Stuyvesant said.
“You wish,” Reacher said back. “It’s provable.”
“How?”
“It bothered me way back that there was the thumbprint on the letter along with clear evidence of latex gloves. Why would he swing both ways? Either his prints are on file or they aren’t. But it’s two people. The thumbprint guy has never been printed. The gloves guy has been. It’s two people, working together.”
Stuyvesant looked very tired. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.
“You don’t really need us anymore,” Neagley said. “This isn’t an internal investigation now. This is out there in the world.”
“No,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s still internal as long as there’s something to get from the cleaners. They must have met with these people. They must know who they are.”
Neagley shrugged. “You gave them lawyers. You made it very difficult.”
“They had to have counsel, for God’s sake,” Stuyvesant said. “They were arrested. That’s the law. It’s their Sixth Amendment right.”
“I guess it is,” Neagley said. “So tell me, is there a law for when the Vice President gets killed before his inauguration?”
“Yes, there is,” Froelich said quietly. “The Twentieth Amendment. Congress chooses another one.”
Neagley nodded. “Well, I sure hope they’ve got their short list ready.”
Silence in the room.
“You should bring in the FBI,” Reacher said.
“I will,” Stuyvesant replied. “When we’ve got names. Not before.”
“They’ve already seen the letters.”
“Only in the labs. Their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing.”
“You need their help.”
“And I’ll ask for it. Soon as we’ve gotten names, I’m going to give them to the Bureau on a silver platter. But I’m not going to tell them where they came from. I’m not going to tell them we were internally compromised. And I’m sure as hell not bringing them in while we still are internally compromised.”
“Is it that big of a deal?”
“Are you kidding? CIA had a problem with that Ames guy, remember? The Bureau got hold of it and they laughed up their sleeves for years. Then they had their own problems with that Hanssen guy, and they didn’t look so smart after all. This is the big leagues, Reacher. Right now the Secret Service is number one, by a very healthy margin. We’ve only recorded one defeat in our entire history, and that was almost forty years ago. So we’re not about to take a dive down the league table just for the fun of it.”
Reacher said nothing.
“And don’t get all superior with me,” Stuyvesant said. “Don’t tell me the Army reacted any different. I don’t recall you guys running to the Bureau for assistance. I don’t recall your embarrassing little secrets all over the Washington Post.”
Reacher nodded. Most of the Army’s embarrassments were cremated. Or six feet under. Or sitting in a stockade somewhere, too scared even to open their mouths. Or back home, too scared to tell their own mothers why. He had arranged some of those circumstances himself.
“So we’ll take it a step at a time,” Stuyvesant said. “Prove these guys are outsiders. Get their names from the cleaners. Lawyers or no lawyers.”
Froelich shook her head. “First priority is getting Armstrong to midnight alive.”
“It’s only going to be a demonstration,” Reacher said.
“I heard you before,” she said. “But it’s my call. And you’re just guessing. All we’ve got is nine words on a piece of paper. And your interpretation might be plain wrong. I mean, what better demonstration would there be than actually doing it? Really getting to him would demonstrate his vulnerability, wouldn’t it? I mean, what better way is there of demonstrating it?”
Neagley nodded. “And it would be a way of hedging their bets, also. An attempt that fails could be passed off as a demonstration, maybe. You know, to save face.”
“If you’re right to begin with,” Stuyvesant said.
Reacher said nothing. The meeting came to an end a couple of minutes later. Stuyvesant made Froelich run through Armstrong’s schedule for the day. It was an amalgam of familiar parts. First, intelligence briefings from the CIA at home, like on Friday morning. Then afternoon transition meetings on the Hill, the same as most days. Then the evening reception at the same hotel as Thursday. Stuyvesant noted it all down and went home just before two-thirty in the morning. Left Froelich on her own at the long table in the bright light and the silence, opposite Reacher and Neagley.
“Advice?” she said.
“Go home and sleep,” Reacher said.
“Great.”
“And then do exactly what you’ve been doing,” Neagley said. “He’s OK in his house. He’s OK in his office. Keep the tents in place and the transfers are OK too.”
“What about the hotel reception?”
“Keep it short and take a lot of care.”
Froelich nodded. “All I can do, I guess.”
“Are you good at your job?” Neagley asked.
Froelich paused.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty good.”
“No, you’re not,” Reacher said. “You’re the best. The absolute best there has ever been. You’re so damn good it’s unbelievable.”
“That’s how you’ve got to think,” Neagley said. “Pump yourself up. Get to the point where it’s impossible to think that these jerky guys with their silly notes are going to get within a million miles of you.”
Froelich smiled, briefly. “Is this military-style training?”
“For me it was,” Neagley said. “Reacher was born thinking that way.”
Froelich smiled again.
“OK,” she said. “Home and sleep. Big day tomorrow.”
Washington, D.C. , is quiet and empty in the middle of the night and it took just two minutes to reach Neagley’s hotel and only another ten to get back to Froelich’s house. Her street was crowded with parked cars. They looked like they were asleep, dark and still and inert and heavily dewed with cold mist. The Suburban was more than eighteen feet long and they had to go two whole blocks before they found a space big enough for it. They locked it up and walked back together in the chill. Made it to the house and opened the door and stepped inside. The lights were still on. The heating was still running hard. Froelich paused in the hallway.
“Are we OK?” she asked. “About earlier?”
“We’re fine,” he said.
“I just don’t want us to get our signals mixed.”
“I don’t think they’re mixed.”
“I’m sorry I disagreed with you,” she said. “About the demonstration.”
“It’s your call,” he said. “Only you can make it.”
“I had other boyfriends,” she said. “You know, after.”
He said nothing.
“And Joe had other girlfriends,” she said. “He wasn’t all that shy, really.”
“But he left his stuff here.”
“Does that matter?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Got to mean something.”
“He’s dead, Reacher. Nothing can affect him now.”
“I know.”
She was quiet for a second.
“I’m going to make tea,” she said. “You want some?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to bed.”
She stepped into the living room on her way to the kitchen and he walked upstairs. Closed the guest room door quietly behind him and opened up the closet. Stripped off Joe’s suit and put it back on the wire dry-cleaner’s hanger. Hung it on the rail. Took off the tie and rolled it and put it back on the shelf. Took off the shirt and dropped it on the closet floor. He didn’t need to save it. There were four more on the rail, and he didn’t expect to be
around longer than four more days. He peeled off the socks and dropped them on top of the shirt. Walked into the bathroom wearing only his boxers.
He took his time in there and when he came out Froelich was standing in the guest room doorway. Wearing a nightgown. It was white cotton. Longer than a T-shirt, but not a whole lot longer. The hallway light behind her made it transparent. Her hair was tousled. Without shoes she looked smaller. Without makeup she looked younger. She had great legs. A wonderful shape. She looked soft and firm, all at the same time.
“He broke up with me,” she said. “It was his choice, not mine.”
“Why?”
“He met somebody he preferred.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter who. Nobody you ever heard of. Just somebody.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Denial, I guess,” she said. “Trying to protect myself, maybe. And trying to protect his memory in front of his brother.”
“He wasn’t nice about it?”
“Not very.”
“How did it happen?”
“He just told me one day.”
“And walked out?”
“We weren’t really living together. He spent time here, I spent time there, but we always kept separate places. His stuff is still here because I wouldn’t let him come back to get it. I wouldn’t let him in the door. I was hurt and angry with him.”
“I guess you would be.”
She shrugged. The hem of her nightgown rode up an inch on her thigh.
“No, it was silly of me,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like things like that never happen, is it? It was just a relationship that started and then finished. Hardly unique in human history. Hardly unique in my history. And half the times it was me who did the walking away.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“You know why,” she said.