by Lee Child
“One, two, three, abort now, abort now.”
Two things happened simultaneously. First there was a roar of engines from the motorcade and it split apart like a star-burst. The lead cop car jumped forward and the rear cop car slewed backward and the first two stretch limos hauled through a tight turn and accelerated across the gravel and straight out onto the field. At the same time the personal detail jumped all over Armstrong and literally buried him from view. One agent took the lead and the other two took an elbow each and the backup three piled on and threw their arms up over Armstrong’s head from behind and drove him bodily forward through the crowd. It was like a football maneuver, full of speed and power. The crowd scattered in panic as the cars bumped across the grass one way and the agents rushed the other way to meet them. The cars skidded to a stop and the personal detail pushed Armstrong straight into the first and the backup crew piled into the second.
The lead cop had his lights and siren started already and was crawling forward down the exit road. The two loaded limos fishtailed on the grass and turned around on the field and headed back to the pavement. They rolled up straight behind the cop car and then all three vehicles accelerated hard and headed out while the third stretch headed straight for Froelich.
“We can get these guys,” Reacher said to her. “They’re right here, right now.”
She didn’t reply. Just grabbed him and Neagley by the arms and pulled them into the limo with her. It roared after the lead vehicles. The second cop fell in directly behind it and just twenty short seconds after the initial abort command the whole motorcade had formed up in a tight line and was screaming away from the scene at seventy miles an hour with every light flashing and every siren blaring.
Froelich slumped back in her seat.
“See?” she said. “We’re not proactive. Something happens, we run away.”
11
Froelich stood in the chill and spoke to Armstrong at the foot of the plane’s steps. It was a short conversation. She told him about the discovery of the concealed rifle and told him it was more than enough to justify the extraction. He didn’t argue. Didn’t ask any awkward leading questions. He seemed completely unaware of any larger picture. And he seemed completely unconcerned about his own safety. He was more anxious to calculate the public-relations consequences for his successor. He looked away and ran through the pluses and minuses in his head like politicians do and came back with a tentative smile. No damage done. Then he ran up the steps to the warmth inside the plane, ready to resume his agenda with the waiting journalists.
Reacher was faster with the seat selection second time around. He took a place in the forward-facing front row, next to Froelich and across the aisle from Neagley. Froelich used the taxi time doing the rounds of her team, quietly congratu lating them on their performance. She spoke to each of them in turn, leaning close, talking, listening, finishing with discreet fist-to-fist contact like ballplayers after a vital hit. Reacher watched her. Good leader, he thought. She came back to her seat and buckled her belt. Smoothed her hair and pressed her fingertips hard into her temples like she was clearing her mind of past events and preparing to concentrate on the future.
“We should have stayed around,” Reacher said.
“The place is swarming with cops,” Froelich said. “FBI will join them. That’s their job. We focus on Armstrong. And I don’t like it any better than you do.”
“What was the rifle? Did you see it?”
She shook her head. “We’ll get a report. They said it was in a bag. Some kind of vinyl carrying case.”
“Hidden in the grass?”
She nodded. “Where it’s long at the base of the fence.”
“When was the church locked?”
“Last thing Sunday. More than sixty hours ago.”
“So I guess our guys picked the lock. It’s a crude old mechanism. The keyhole’s so big you can practically get your whole hand in there.”
“You sure you didn’t see them?”
Reacher shook his head. “But they saw me. They were in there with me. They saw where I hid the key. They let themselves out.”
“You probably saved Armstrong’s life. And my ass. Although I don’t understand their plan. They were in the church and their rifle was a hundred yards away?”
“Wait until we know what the rifle was. Then maybe we’ll understand.”
The plane turned at the end of the runway and accelerated immediately. Took off and climbed hard. The engine noise throttled back after five minutes and Reacher heard the journalists starting their foreign-relations conversation again. They didn’t ask any questions about the early return.
They touched down at Andrews at six-thirty local time. The city was quiet. The long Thanksgiving weekend had already started, halfway through the afternoon. The motorcade headed straight in on Branch Avenue and drove through the heart of the capital and out again to Georgetown. Armstrong was shepherded into his house through the white tent. Then the cars turned listlessly and headed back to base. Stuyvesant wasn’t around. Reacher and Neagley followed Froelich to her desk and she accessed her NCIC search results. They were hopeless. There was a small proud rubric at the top of the screen that claimed the software had compiled for five hours and twenty-three minutes and come up with no less than 243,791 matches. Anything that ever mentioned any two of a thumbprint or a document or a letter or a signature was neatly listed. The sequence began exactly twenty years ago and averaged more than thirty entries for each of the 7,305 days since. Froelich sampled the first dozen reports and then skipped ahead to random interim dates. There was nothing even remotely useful.
“We need to refine the parameters,” Neagley said. She squatted next to Froelich and moved the keyboard closer. Cleared the screen and called up the inquiry box and typed thumbprint-as-signature. Reached for the mouse and clicked on search. The hard drive chattered and the inquiry box disappeared. The phone rang and Froelich picked it up. Listened for a moment and put it down.
“Stuyvesant’s back,” she said. “He’s got the preliminary FBI report on the rifle. He wants us in the conference room.”
“We came close to losing today,” Stuyvesant said.
He was at the head of the table with sheets of faxed paper spread out in front of him. They were covered in dense type, a little blurred from transmission. Reacher could see the cover sheet’s heading, upside down. There was a small seal on the left, and U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation on the right.
“First factor is the unlocked door,” Stuyvesant said. “The FBI’s guess is the lock was picked early this morning. They say a child could have done it with a bent knitting needle. We should have secured it with a temporary lock of our own.”
“Couldn’t do it,” Froelich said. “It’s a landmark building. Can’t be touched.”
“Then we should have changed the venue.”
“I looked for alternatives first time around. Every other place was worse.”
“You should have had an agent on the roof,” Neagley said.
“No budget,” Stuyvesant said. “Until after the inauguration.”
“If you get that far,” Neagley said.
“What was the rifle?” Reacher asked, in the silence.
Stuyvesant squared the paper in front of him. “Your guess?”
“Something disposable,” Reacher said. “Something they weren’t actually planning on using. In my experience something that gets found that easily is supposed to get found that easily.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “It was barely a rifle at all. It was an ancient .22 varmint gun. Badly maintained, rusty, probably hadn’t been used in a generation. It was not loaded and there was no ammunition with it.”
“Identifying marks?”
“None.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Of course not.”
Reacher nodded.
“Decoy,” he said.
“The unlocked door is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “What did you do when you
went in, for instance?”
“I locked it again behind me.”
“Why?”
“I like it that way, for surveillance.”
“But if you were going to be shooting?”
“Then I would have left it open, especially if I didn’t have the key.”
“Why?”
“So I could get out fast, afterward.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “The unlocked door means they were in there to shoot. My take is they were waiting in there with the MP5 or the Vaime Mk2. Maybe both weapons. They imagined the junk gun would be spotted far away at the fence, the bulk of the police presence would move somewhat toward it, we would move Armstrong toward the motorcade, whereupon they would have a clear shot at him.”
“Sounds right to me,” Reacher said. “But I didn’t actually see anybody in there.”
“Plenty of places to hide in a country church,” Stuyvesant said. “Did you check the crypt?”
“No.”
“The loft?”
“No.”
“Plenty of places,” Stuyvesant said again.
“I sensed somebody.”
“Yes,” Stuyvesant said. “They were in there. That’s for sure.”
There was silence for a beat.
“Any unexplained attendees?” Froelich asked.
Stuyvesant shook his head. “It was pure chaos. Cops running everywhere, the crowd scattering. By the time order was restored at least twenty people had left. It’s understandable. You’re in a crowd on an open field, somebody finds a gun, you run like hell. Why wouldn’t you?”
“What about the man on foot in the subdivision?”
“Just a guy in a coat,” Stuyvesant said. “State cop couldn’t really come up with anything more than that. Probably just a civilian out walking. Probably nobody. My guess is our guys were already in the church by that time.”
“Something must have aroused the trooper’s suspicions,” Neagley said.
Stuyvesant shrugged. “You know how it is. How does a North Dakota State Trooper react around the Secret Service? He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Somebody looks suspicious, he’s got to call it in even if he can’t articulate exactly why afterward. And we can’t moan at him for it. I’d rather he erred on the side of caution. Don’t want to make him afraid to be vigilant.”
“So we’ve still got nothing,” Froelich said.
“We’ve still got Armstrong,” Stuyvesant said. “And Armstrong’s still got a pulse. So go eat dinner and be back here at ten for the FBI meeting.”
First they went back to Froelich’s office to check on Neagley’s NCIC search. It was done. In fact it had been done before they even stepped away from the desk. The rubric at the top of the screen said the search had lasted nine-hundredths of a second and come up with zero matches. Froelich called up the inquiry box again and typed thumbprint on letter. Clicked on search and watched the screen. It redrew immediately and came up with no matches in eight-hundredths of a second.
“Getting nowhere even faster now,” she said.
She tried thumbprint on message. Same result, no matches in eight-hundredths of a second. She tried thumbprint on threat. Identical result, identical eight-hundredths of a second. She sighed with frustration.
“Let me have a go,” Reacher said. She got up and he sat down in her chair and typed a short letter signed with a big thumbprint.
“Idiot,” Neagley said.
He clicked the mouse. The screen redrew instantly and reported that within the seven-hundredths of a second it had spent looking the software had detected no matches.
“But it was a new speed record,” Reacher said, and smiled.
Neagley laughed, and the mood of frustration eased a little. He typed thumbprint and squalene and hit search again. A tenth of a second later the search came back blank.
“Slowing down,” he said.
He tried squalene on its own. No match, eight-hundredths of a second.
He typed squalane with an a. No match, eight-hundredths of a second.
“Forget it,” he said. “Let’s go eat.”
“Wait,” Neagley said. “Let me try again. This is like an Olympic event.”
She nudged him out of the chair. Typed single unexplained thumbprint. Hit search. No match, six-hundredths of a second. She smiled.
“Six hundredths,” she said. “Folks, we have a new world record.”
“Way to go,” Reacher said.
She typed solo unexplained thumbprint. Hit search.
“This is kind of fun,” she said.
No match, six-hundredths of a second.
“Tied for first place,” Froelich said. “My turn again.”
She took Neagley’s place at the keyboard and thought for a long moment.
“OK, here we go,” she said. “This one either wins me the gold medal, or it’ll keep us here all night long.”
She typed a single word: thumb. Hit search. The inquiry box disappeared and the screen paused for a whole second and came back with a single entry. A single short paragraph. It was a police report from Sacramento in California. An emergency room doctor from a city hospital had notified the local police department five weeks ago that he had treated a man who had severed his thumb in a carpentry accident. But the doctor was convinced by the nature of the wound that it had been deliberate albeit amateur surgery. The cops had followed up and the victim had assured them it had indeed been an accident with a power saw. Case closed, report filed.
“Weird stuff in this system,” Froelich said.
“Let’s go eat,” Reacher said again.
“Maybe we should try vegetarian,” Neagley said.
They drove out to Dupont Circle and ate at an Armenian restaurant. Reacher had lamb and Froelich and Neagley stuck to various chickpea concoctions. They had baklava for dessert and three small cups each of strong muddy coffee. They talked a lot, but about nothing. Nobody wanted to talk about Armstrong, or Nendick, or his wife, or men capable of frightening a person to the point of death and then shooting down two innocent civilians who happened to share a name. Froelich didn’t want to talk about Joe in front of Reacher, Neagley didn’t want to talk about Reacher in front of Froelich. So they talked about politics, like everybody else in the restaurant and probably everybody else in the city. But talking about politics in late November was pretty much impossible without mentioning the new administration, which led back toward Armstrong, so they generalized it away again toward personal views and beliefs. That needed background information, and before long Froelich was asking Neagley about her life and career.
Reacher tuned it out. He knew she wouldn’t answer questions about her life. She never did. Never had. He had known her many years, and had discovered absolutely nothing about her background. He assumed there was some unhappiness there. It was pretty common among Army people. Some join because they need a job or want to learn a trade, some join because they want to shoot heavy weapons and blow things up. Some like Reacher himself join because it’s preordained. But most join because they’re looking for cohesion and trust and loyalty and camaraderie. They’re looking for the brothers and the sisters and the parents they haven’t got anyplace else.
So Neagley skipped her early life and ran through her service career for Froelich and Reacher ignored it and looked around the restaurant. It was busy. Lots of couples and families. He guessed people who were cooking big Thanksgiving meals tomorrow didn’t want to cook tonight. There were a couple of faces he almost recognized. Maybe they were politicians or television reporters. He tuned the conversation back in again when Neagley started talking about her new career in Chicago. It sounded pretty good. She was partnered with a bunch of people from law enforcement and the military. It was a big firm. They offered a whole range of services from computer security to kidnap protection for traveling executives overseas. If you had to live in one place and go to work every day, that was probably the way to do it. She sounded satisfied with her life.
They wer
e about to order a fourth cup of coffee when Froelich’s cell phone rang. It was just after nine o’clock. The restaurant had gotten noisy and they missed it at first. Then they became aware of the low insistent trilling inside her purse. Froelich got the phone out and answered the call. Reacher watched her face. Saw puzzlement, and then a little concern.
“OK,” she said, and closed the phone. Looked across at Reacher. “Stuyvesant wants you back in the office, right now, immediately.”
“Me?” Reacher said. “Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
Stuyvesant was waiting for them behind one end of the reception counter just inside the main door. The duty officer was busy at the other end. Everything looked completely normal except for a telephone directly in front of Stuyvesant. It had been dragged up out of position and was sitting on the front part of the counter, facing outward, trailing its wire behind it. Stuyvesant was staring at it.
“We got a call,” he said.
“Who from?” Froelich asked.
“Didn’t get a name. Or a number. Caller ID was blocked. Male voice, no particular accent. He called the switchboard and asked to speak with the big guy. Something in the voice made the duty officer take it seriously, so he patched it through, thinking perhaps the big guy was me, you know, the boss. But it wasn’t. The caller didn’t want to speak with me. He wanted the big guy he’s been seeing around recently.”
“Me?” Reacher said.
“You’re the only big guy new on the scene.”
“Why would he want to speak with me?”
“We’re about to find out. He’s calling back at nine-thirty.”
Reacher glanced at his watch. Twenty-two minutes past.
“It’s them,” Froelich said. “They saw you in the church.”
“That’s my guess,” Stuyvesant said. “This is our first real contact. We’ve got a recorder set up. We’ll get a voice print. And we’ve got a trace on the line. You need to talk for as long as you can.”
Reacher glanced at Neagley. She looked at her watch. Shook her head.