by Lee Child
“Did you know their names?” Reacher asked.
Armstrong shook his head. “I didn’t know much about them, except I guess they lived in some nearby town. What are you going to do?”
“I know what I’d like to do.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to break both your arms and never see you again as long as I live. Because if you’d spoken up on Election Day, Froelich would still be alive.”
“Why the hell didn’t you?” Neagley asked.
Armstrong shook his head. There were tears in his eyes.
“Because I had no idea it was serious,” he said. “I really didn’t, I promise you, on my daughter’s life. Don’t you see? I just thought it was supposed to remind me or unsettle me. I wondered whether maybe in their minds they still thought I was in the wrong back then, and it was supposed to be a threat of political embarrassment or exposure or something. Obviously I wasn’t worried about that because I wasn’t in the wrong back then. Everybody would understand that. And I couldn’t see any other logical reason for sending it. I was thirty years older, so were they. I’m a rational adult, I assumed they were. So I thought it was maybe just an unpleasant joke. I didn’t conceive of any danger in it. I absolutely promise you that. I mean, why would I? So it unsettled me for an hour, and then I dropped it. Maybe I half-expected some kind of lame follow-up, but I figured I’d deal with that when it happened. But there was no follow-up. It didn’t happen. Not as far as I knew. Because nobody told me. Until now. Until you told me. And according to Stuyvesant you shouldn’t be telling me even now. And people have suffered and died. Christ, why did he keep me out of the loop? I could have given him the whole story if he’d just asked.”
Nobody spoke.
“So you’re right and you’re wrong,” he said. “I knew who and why, but I didn’t know all along. I didn’t know the middle. I knew the beginning, and I knew the end. I knew as soon as the shooting started, believe me. I mean, I just knew. It was an unbelievable shock, out of the blue. Like, this is the follow-up? It was an insane development. It was like half-expecting a rotten tomato to be thrown at me one day and getting a nuclear missile instead. I thought the world had gone mad. You want to blame me for not speaking out, OK, go ahead and blame me, but how could I have known? How could I have predicted this kind of insanity?”
Silence for a beat.
“So that’s my guilty secret,” Armstrong said. “Not that I did anything wrong thirty years ago. But that I didn’t have the right kind of imagination to see the implications of the package three weeks ago.”
Nobody spoke.
“Should I tell Stuyvesant now?” Armstrong asked.
“Your choice,” Reacher said.
There was a long pause. Armstrong the man faded away again, and Armstrong the politician came back to replace him.
“I don’t want to tell him,” he said. “Bad for him, bad for me. People have suffered and died. It’ll be seen as a serious misjudgment on both our parts. He should have asked, I should have told.”
Reacher nodded. “So leave it to us. You’ll know our secret and we’ll know yours.”
“And we’ll all live happily ever after.”
“Well, we’ll all live,” Reacher said.
“Descriptions?” Neagley asked.
“Just kids,” Armstrong said. “Maybe my age. I only remember their eyes.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
“Underwood, Oregon,” Armstrong said. “Where my mother still lives. Where I’m going in an hour.”
“And these kids were from the area?”
Armstrong glanced at Reacher. “And you predicted they’ll go home to wait.”
“Yes,” Reacher said. “I did.”
“And I’m heading right there.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Reacher said. “That theory is way out of date now. I assume they expected you’d remember them, and I assume they didn’t anticipate the communication breakdown between yourself and the Secret Service. And they wouldn’t want you to be able to lead them right to their door. Therefore their door has changed. They don’t live in Oregon anymore. That’s one thing we can be absolutely sure of.”
“So how are you going to find them?”
Reacher shook his head. “We can’t find them. Not now. Not in time. They’ll have to find us. In Wyoming. At the memorial service.”
“I’m going there too. With minimal cover.”
“So just hope it’s all over before you arrive.”
“Should I tell Stuyvesant?” Armstrong asked again.
“Your choice,” Reacher said again.
“I can’t cancel the appearance. That wouldn’t be right.”
“No,” Reacher said. “I guess it wouldn’t.”
“I can’t tell Stuyvesant now.”
“No,” Reacher said. “I guess you can’t.”
Armstrong said nothing. Reacher stood up to leave, and Neagley did the same.
“One last thing,” Reacher said. “We think these guys grew up to be cops.”
Armstrong sat still. He started to shake his head, but then he stopped and looked down at the desk. His face clouded, like he was hearing a faint thirty-year-old echo.
“Something during the beating,” he said. “I only half-heard it, and I’m sure I discounted it at the time. But I think at one point they claimed their dad was a cop. They said he could get us in big trouble.”
Reacher said nothing.
The protection agents showed them out. They walked the length of the canvas tent and stepped off the curb into the street. Turned east and got back on the sidewalk and settled in for the trek to the subway. It was late morning and the air was clear and cold. The neighborhood was deserted. Nobody was out walking. Neagley opened the envelope Stuyvesant had given her. It contained a check for five thousand dollars. The memo line was written up as professional consultation. Reacher’s envelope contained two checks. One was for the same five-grand fee and the other was for his audit expenses, repaid to the exact penny.
“We should go shopping,” Neagley said. “We can’t go hunting in Wyoming dressed like this.”
“I don’t want you to come with me,” Reacher said.
17
They had the argument right there on the street as they walked through Georgetown.
“Worried about my safety?” Neagley asked. “Because you shouldn’t be. Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can look after myself. And I can make my own decisions.”
“I’m not worried about your safety,” Reacher said.
“What then? My performance? I’m way better than you.”
“I know you are.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“Your license. You’ve got something to lose.”
Neagley said nothing.
“You’ve got a license, right?” Reacher said. “To be in the business you’re in? And you’ve got an office and a job and a home and a fixed location. I’m going to disappear after this. You can’t do that.”
“Think we’re going to get caught?”
“I can afford to take the risk. You can’t.”
“There’s no risk if we don’t get caught.”
Now Reacher said nothing.
“It’s like you told Bannon,” she said. “I’m lying there lined up on these guys, I’m going to get an itch in my spine. I need you to watch my back.”
“This isn’t your fight.”
“Why is it yours? Because some woman your brother once dumped got herself killed doing her job? That’s tenuous.”
Reacher said nothing.
“OK, it’s your fight,” Neagley said. “I know that. But whatever thing you’ve got in your head that makes it your fight makes it my fight too. Because I’ve got the same thing in my head. And even if we didn’t think the same, if I had a problem, wouldn’t you help me out?”
“I would if you asked.”
“So we’re even.”
“Except I’m not aski
ng.”
“Not right now. But you will be. You’re two thousand miles from Wyoming and you don’t have a credit card to buy a plane ticket with, and I do. You’re armed with a folding knife with a three-inch blade and I know a guy in Denver who will give us any weapons we want, no questions asked, and you don’t. I can rent a car in Denver to get us the rest of the way, and you can’t.”
They walked on, twenty yards, thirty.
“OK,” Reacher said. “I’m asking.”
“We’ll get the clothes in Denver,” she said. “I know some good places.”
They made it to Denver before three in the afternoon Mountain Time. The high plains lay all around them, tan and dormant. The air was thin and bitter cold. There was no snow yet, but it was coming. The runway plows were lined up and ready. The snowdrift fences were prepared. The car rental companies had shipped their sedans south and brought in plenty of new four-wheel-drives. Neagley signed for a GMC Yukon at the Avis counter. They shuttled to the lot and picked it up. It was black and shiny and looked a lot like Froelich’s Suburban except it was two feet shorter.
They drove it into the city. It was a long, long way. Space seemed infinitely available even after D.C., which wasn’t the most crowded place in the East. They parked in a downtown garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They bought a bird-watcher’s spotting scope and a hiker’s large-scale map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker’s heavy-duty outfit in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing cubicle. Left Joe’s last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.
Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the city center toward the dubious part of town. There was a strong smell of dog food in the air.
“There’s a factory here,” she said.
Reacher nodded. “No kidding.”
She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.
“This is your guy?” Reacher asked.
Neagley nodded. “What do we want?”
Reacher shrugged. “No point planning it to death. Something short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition, I guess. That should do it.”
She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a personnel entrance and got halfway to the car before he saw who it was. He was tall and heavy through the neck and shoulders. He had short fair hair and an open amiable face, but he had big hands and thick wrists and wasn’t the sort of guy you’d mess with on a whim. He sketched a wave and ducked back inside and a moment later the big door started rolling up. Neagley drove in under it and it came back down behind them.
On the inside the building was about half the size it should have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers’ lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated. Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.
“This is Eddie Brown,” Neagley said.
“Not my real name,” the big guy said.
He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.
The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil. The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition. Reacher could smell the new brass and the crisp cardboard and faint traces of powder.
“I’m impressed,” he said.
“Take what you need,” Eddie said.
“Where do the serial numbers lead to?”
“The Austrian Army,” Eddie said. “They kind of fizzle out after that.”
Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Reacher’s new jacket carefully spread out in the Yukon’s load space over two nine-millimeter Steyr GBs, a Heckler & Koch MP5 unsilenced machine gun, an M16 rifle, and boxes full of two hundred rounds for each weapon.
They entered Wyoming after dark, driving north on I-25. They turned left at Cheyenne and picked up I-80. They rolled west to Laramie and then headed north. The town called Grace was still five hours away, well beyond Casper. The map showed it nestled in the middle of nowhere between towering mountains on one side and infinite grasslands on the other.
“We’ll stop in Medicine Bow,” Reacher said. “Sounds like a cool place. We’ll aim to get to Grace at dawn tomorrow.”
Medicine Bow didn’t look like much of a cool place in the dark, but it had a motel about two miles out with rooms available. Neagley paid for them. Then they found a steakhouse a mile in the other direction and ate twelve-ounce sirloins that cost less than a drink in D.C. The place closed up around them so they took the hint and headed back to their rooms. Reacher left his coat in the truck, to hide the firepower from curious eyes. They said goodnight in the lot. Reacher went straight to bed. He heard Neagley in the shower. She was singing to herself. He could hear it, through the wall.
He woke up at four in the morning, Saturday. Neagley was showering again, and still singing. He thought: When the hell does she sleep? He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Turned his shower on hot, which must have made hers run cold, because he heard a muffled scream through the wall. So he turned it off again and waited until he heard her finish. Then he showered and dressed and met her out by the car. It was still pitch dark. Still very cold. There were flakes of snow blowing in from the west. They were drifting slowly through the parking lot lights.
“Can’t find any coffee,” Neagley said.
They found some an hour north. A roadside diner was opening for breakfast. They saw its lights a mile away. It was next to the mouth of a dirt road leading down through the darkness to the Medicine Bow National Forest. The diner looked like a barn, long and low, made out of red boards. Cold outside, warm inside. They sat at a table by a curtained window and ate eggs and bacon and toast and drank strong bitter coffee.
“OK, we’ll call them one and two,” Neagley said. “One is the Bismarck guy. You’ll recognize him. Two is the guy from the garage video. We might recognize him from his build. But we don’t really know what he looks like.”
Reacher nodded. “So we’ll look for the Bismarck guy hanging out with some other guy. No point planning it to death.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“You should go home.”
“Now that I’ve gotten you here?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“You’re uptight that Froelich was killed. That’s all. Doesn’t mean anything�
�s going to happen to me.”
He said nothing.
“We’re two against two,” Neagley said. “You and me against two bozos, and you’re worried about it?”
“Not very,” he said.
“Maybe they won’t even show. Bannon figured they’d know it was a trap.”
“They’ll show,” Reacher said. “They’ve been challenged. It’s a testosterone thing. And they’ve got more than enough screws loose to jump right on it.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, if they do.”
“I’d feel bad if it did.”
“It’s not going to,” she said.
“Tell me I’m not making you do this.”
“My own free will,” she said.
He nodded. “So let’s go.”
They got back on the road. Snowflakes hung in the headlight beams. They drifted in weightlessly from the west and shone bright in the light and then whipped backward as they drove. They were big flakes, dry and powdery, not many of them. The road was narrow. It wandered left and right. The surface was lumpy. All around it in the darkness was a vastness so large it sucked the noise of the car away into nothing. They were driving in a bright tunnel of silence, leaping ahead from one lonely snowflake to the next.
“I guess Casper will have a police department,” Reacher said.
Neagley nodded at the wheel. “Could be a hundred strong. Casper is nearly as big as Cheyenne. Nearly as big as Bismarck, actually.”
“And they’ll be responsible for Grace,” Reacher said.
“Alongside the state troopers, I guess.”
“So any other cops we find there are our guys.”
“You’re still certain they’re cops?”
He nodded. “It’s the only way everything makes sense. The initial contact with Nendick and Andretti in the cop bars, the familiarity with the NCIC, the access to the government weapons. Plus the way they slip in and out everywhere. Crowds, confusion, a gold shield gets you anywhere. And if Armstrong’s right and their dad was a cop, that’s a pretty good predictor. It’s a family trade, like the military.”