Without Fail (11 page)

"Is this the only way in?" Reacher asked.

"There are fire stairs way in back," Froelich said. "But don't get ahead of yourself. See the cameras?"

She pointed to the ceiling. There were miniature surveillance cameras everywhere there needed to be to cover every corridor. "Take them into account," she said.

She led them deeper into the complex, turning left and right until they ended up at what must have been the back of the floor. There was a long narrow corridor that opened out into a windowless square space. Against the side wall of the square was a secretarial station with room for one person, with a desk and filing cabinets and shelves loaded with three-ring binders and piles of loose memos. There was a portrait of the current President on the wall and a furled Stars and Stripes in a corner. A coat rack next to the flag. Nothing else. Everything was tidy. Nothing was out of place. Behind the secretary's desk was the fire exit. It was a stout door with an acetate plaque showing a green man running. Above the exit was a surveillance camera. It stared forward like an unblinking glass eye. Opposite the secretarial station was a single blank door. It was closed. "Stuyvesant's office," Froelich said.

She opened the door and led them inside. Flicked a switch and bright halogen light filled the room. It was a reasonably small office. Smaller than the square anteroom outside it. There was a window, with white fabric blinds closed against the night. "Does the window open?" Neagley asked.

"No," Froelich said. "And it faces Pennsylvania Avenue, anyway. Some burglar climbs up three floors on a rope, somebody's going to notice, believe me."

The office was dominated by a huge desk with a grey composite top. It was completely empty. There was a leather chair pushed exactly square against it.

"Doesn't he use a phone?" Reacher asked.

"Keeps it in the drawer," Froelich said. "He likes the desktop clear."

There were tall cabinets against the wall, faced with the same grey laminate as the desk. There were two visitor chairs made of leather. Apart from that, nothing. It was a serene space. It spoke of a tidy mind.

"OK," Froelich said. "he mail threat came on the Monday in the week after the election. Then, on the Wednesday evening, Stuyvesant went home about seven thirty. Left his desk clear. His secretary left a half-hour later. Popped her head in the door just before she went, like she always does. She confirms that the desk was clear. And she'd notice, right? If there was a sheet of paper on the desk, it would stand out."

Reacher nodded. The desktop looked like the foredeck of a battleship made ready for inspection by an admiral. A speck of dust would have stood out.

"Eight o'clock Thursday morning, the Secretary comes in again," Froelich said. "She walks straight to her own desk and starts work. Doesn't open Stuyvesant's door at all. Ten after eight, Stuyvesant himself shows up. He's carrying a briefcase and wearing a raincoat. He takes off the raincoat and hangs it up on the coat rack. His secretary speaks to him and he sets his briefcase upright on her desk and confers with her about something. Then he opens his door and walks into his office. He's not carrying anything. He's left his briefcase on the secretary's desk. About four or five seconds later he comes back out. Calls his secretary in. They both confirm that at that point, the sheet of paper was there on the desk."

Neagley glanced around the office, at the door, at the desk, at the distance between the door and the desk.

"Is this just their testimony?" she asked. "Or do the surveillance cameras record to videotape?"

"Both," Froelich said. "All the cameras record to separate tapes. I've looked at this one, and everything happens exactly as they describe it, coming and going."

"So unless they're in it together, neither of them put the paper there."

Froelich nodded. "That's the way I see it."

"So who did?" Reacher asked. "What else does the tape show?"

"The cleaning crew," Froelich said.

She led them back to her own office and took three video cassettes out of her desk drawer. Stepped over to a bank of shelves, where a small Sorry television with a built-in video nestled between a printer and a fax machine.

"These are copies," she said. The originals are locked away. The recorders work on timers, six hours on each tape. Six in the morning until noon, noon until six, six until midnight, midnight until six, and start again."

She found the remote in a drawer and switched the television on. Put the first tape in the mechanism. It clicked and whirred and a dim picture settled on the screen.

"This is the Wednesday evening," she said. "Six p.m. onward." The picture was grey and milky and the detail definition was soft, but the clarity was completely adequate. The camera showed the whole square area from behind the secretary's head. She was at her desk, on the phone. She looked old. She had white hair. Stuyvesant's door was on the right of the picture. It was closed. There was a date and time burned into the picture at the bottom left. Froelich hit fast wind and the motion sped up. The secretary's white head moved with comical jerkiness. Her hand batted up and down as she finished calls and fielded new ones. Some person bustled into shot and delivered a stack of internal mail and turned and bustled away. The secretary sorted the mail with the speed of a machine. She opened every envelope and piled the contents neatly and took out a stamp and ink pad and stamped every new letter at the top.

"What's she doing?" Reacher asked.

"Date of receipt," Froelich said. "This Whole operation runs on accurate paperwork. Always has."

The secretary was using her left hand to curl each sheet back and her right to stamp the date. The tape's fast motion made her look frantic. In the bottom corner of the picture the date held steady and the time unspooled just about fast enough to read. Reacher turned away from the screen and looked around Froelich's office. It was a typical government space, pretty much the civilian equivalent of the offices he'd spent his time in, aggressively plain and expensively shoehorned into a fine old building. Tough grey nylon carpet, laminate furniture, IT wiring routed carefully in white plastic conduit. Foot-high piles of paper everywhere, reports and memoranda tacked to the walls. There was a glass-fronted cabinet with a yard of procedure manuals inside. There was no window in the room. But she still had a plant. It was in a plastic pot on the desk, pale and dry and struggling to survive. There were no photographs. No mementoes. Nothing personal at all except a faint trace of her perfume in the air and the fabric of her chair.

"OK, this is where Stuyvesant goes home," she said.

Reacher looked back at the screen and saw the time counter race through seven thirty, and then seven thirty-one. Stuyvesant stepped out of his office at triple speed. He was a tall man, wide across the shoulders, slightly stooped, greying at the temples. He was carrying a slim briefcase. The video made him move with absurd energy. He raced across to the coat rack and took down a black raincoat. Hurled it onto his shoulders and raced back to the secretary's desk. Bent abruptly and said something and raced away again out of sight. Froelich pressed the fast wind button harder and the speed redoubled again. The secretary jerked and swayed in her seat. The time counter blurred. As the seven turned to an eight the secretary jumped up and Froelich slowed the tape back to triple speed in time to catch her opening Stuyvesant's door for a second. She held on to the handle and leaned inside with one foot off the ground and turned immediately and closed the door. Rushed around the square space and collected her purse and an umbrella and a coat and disappeared into the gloom at the far end of the corridor. Froelich doubled the playback speed once again and the time counter unspooled faster but the picture remained entirely static. The stillness of a deserted office descended and held steady as time rushed by.

"When do the cleaners come in?" Reacher asked.

"Just before midnight," Froelich said.

"That late?"

"They're night workers. This is a round-the-clock operation."

"And there's nothing else visible before then?"

"Nothing at all."

"So spool ahead. We get the picture." Froelich operated the buttons and shuttled between fast forward with snow on the screen and regular-speed playback with a picture to check the timecode. At eleven.fifty p.m. she let the tape run. The counter clicked ahead, a second at a time. At eleven fifty-two there was motion at the far end of the corridor. A team of three people emerged from the gloom. There were two women and a man, all of them wearing dark overalls. They looked Hispanic. They were all short and compact, dark-haired, stoic. The man was pushing a cart. It had a black garbage bag locked into a hoop at the front, and trays stacked with cloths and spray bottles on shelves at the rear.

One of the women was carrying a vacuum cleaner. It rode on her back like a pack. It had a long hose with a broad nozzle. The other woman was carrying a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other. The mop had a square foam pad on the head and a complicated hinge halfway up the handle, for squeezing excess water away. All three of them were wearing rubber gloves. The gloves looked pale on their hands. Maybe clear plastic, maybe light yellow. All three of them looked tired. Like night workers. But they looked neat and clean and professional. They had tidy haircuts and their expressions said: we know this ain't the world's most exciting job, but we're going to do it properly. Froelich paused the tape and froze them as they approached Stuyvesant's door.

"Who are they?" Reacher asked.

"Direct government employees," Froelich said. "Most office cleaners in this city are contract people, minimum wage, no benefits, high turnover nobodies. Same in any city-. But we hire our own. The FBI, too. We need a high degree of reliability, obviously. We keep two crews at all times. They're properly interviewed, they're background-checked, and they don't get in the door unless they're good people. Then we pay them real well, and give them full health plans, and dental, and paid vacations, the whole nine yards. They're department members, same as anybody else."

"And they respond?"

She nodded. "They're terrific, generally."

"But you think this crew smuggled the letter in."

"No other conclusion to come to."

Reacher pointed at the screen. "So where is it now?"

"Could be in the garbage bag, in a stiff envelope. Could be in a page protector, taped underneath one of the trays or the shelves. Could be taped to the guy's back, under his overalls."

She hit play and the cleaners continued onward into Stuyve sant's office. The door swung shut behind them. The camera stared forward blankly. The time counter ticked on, five minutes, seven, eight. Then the tape ran out.

"Midnight," Froelich said.

She ejected the cassette and put the second tape in. Pressed play and the date changed to Thursday and the timer restarted at midnight exactly. It crawled onward, two minutes, four, six.

"They certainly do a thorough job," Neagley said. "Our office cleaners would have done the whole building by now. A lick and a promise."

"Stuyvesant likes a clean working environment," Froelich said.

At seven minutes past midnight the door opened and the crew filed out.

"So now you figure the letter is there on the desk," Reacher said.

Froelich nodded. The video showed the cleaners starting work around the secretarial station. They missed nothing. Everything was energetically dusted and wiped and polished. Every inch of carpet was vacuumed. Garbage was emptied into the black bag. It had bellied out to twice its size. The man looked a little dishevelled by his efforts. He pushed the cart backward foot by foot and the women retreated with him. Sixteen minutes past midnight, they backed away into the gloom and left the picture still and quiet, as it had been before they came.

"That's it," Froelich said. "Nothing more for the next five hours and forty-four minutes. Then we change tapes again and find nothing at all from six a.m. until eight, when the secretary comes in, and then it goes down exactly as she and Stuyvesant claimed it did."

"As one might expect," said a voice from the door. "I think our word can be trusted. After all, I've been in government service for twenty-five years, and my secretary even longer than that, I believe."

FIVE

The guy at the door was Stuyvesant, no doubt about that. Reacher recognized him from his appearance on the tape. He was tall, broad-shouldered, over fifty, still in reasonable shape. A handsome face, tired eyes. He was wearing a suit and a tie, on a Sunday. Froelich was looking at him, worried. But he in turn was staring straight at Neagley.

"You're the woman on the video," he said. "In the ballroom, Thursday night."

He was clearly thinking hard. Running conclusions through his head and then nodding imperceptibly to himself whenever they made sense. After a moment he moved his gaze from Neagley to Reacher and stepped right into the room.

"And you're Joe Reacher's brother," he said. "You look just like him."

Reacher nodded. "Jack Reacher," he said, and offered his hand.

Stuyvesant took it. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said. "Five years late, I know, but the Treasury Department still remembers your brother with affection."

Reacher nodded again, "This is Frances Neagley," he said. "Reacher brought her in to help with the audit," Froelich said.

Stuyvesant smiled a brief smile. "I gathered that," he said. "Smart move. What were the results?"

The office went quiet.

"I apologize if I offended you, sir," Froelich said. "You know, before. Talking about the tape like that. I was just explaining the situation."

"What were the audit results?" Stuyvesant asked again. She said nothing back. "That bad?" Stuyvesant said to her. "Well, I certainly hope so. I knew Joe Reacher, too. Not as well as you did, but we came into contact, time to time. He was impressive. I'm assuming his brother is at least half as smart. Ms Neagley, probably smarter still. In which case they must have found ways through. Am I right?"

"Three definites," Froelich said.

Stuyvesant nodded. "The ballroom, obviously," he said. "Probably the family house and that damn outdoors event in Bismarck, too. Am I right?"

"Yes," Froelich said.

"Extreme levels of performance," Neagley said. "Unlikely to be duplicated."

Stuyvesant held up his hand and cut her off. "Let's go to the conference room," he said. "I want to talk about baseball."

He led them through narrow winding corridors to a relatively spacious room in the heart of the, complex. It had a long table in it with ten chairs, five to a side. No windows. The same grey synthetic carpet underfoot and the same white acoustic tile overhead. The same bright halogen light. There was a low cabinet against one wall. It had closed doors and three telephones on it. Two were white and one was red. Stuyvesant sat down and waved to the chairs on the other side of the table. Reacher glanced at a huge notice board full of memos labelled confidential.

"I'm going to be uncharacteristically frank," Stuyvesant said. "Just temporarily, you understand, because I think we owe you an explanation, and because Froelich involved you with my initial approval, and because Joe Reacher's brother is family, so to speak, and therefore his colleague is too."

"We worked together in the military," Neagley said. Stuyvesant nodded, like that was an inference he had drawn long ago. "Let's talk about baseball," he said. "You follow the game?"

They all waited. "The Washington Senators had already gone when I hit town," he said. "So I've had to make do with the Baltimore Orioles, which has been a mixed bag in terms of fun. But do you understand what's unique about the game?"

"The length of the season," Reacher said. "The win percentages."

Stuyvesant smiled, like he was conferring praise.

"Maybe you're better than half as smart," he said. "The thing about baseball is that the regular season is one hundred and sixty-two games long. Way, way longer than any other sport. Any other sport has fifteen or twenty or thirty-some games. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer, anything.

"Any other sport, the players can start out thinking they can win every single game all season long. It's just about a realistic motivational goal. It's even been achieved, here and there, now and then. But it's impossible in baseball. The very best teams, the greatest champions, they all lose around a third of their games. They lose fifty or sixty times a year, at least. Imagine what that feels like, from a psychological perspective. You're a superb athlete, you're fanatically competitive, but you know for sure you're going to lose repeatedly. You have to make mental adjustments, or you couldn't cope with it. And presidential protection is exactly the same thing. That's my point. We can't win every day. So we get used to it."

"You only lost once," Neagley said. "Back in 1963."

"No," Stuyvesant said. "We lose repeatedly. But not every loss is significant. Just like baseball. Not every hit they get produces a run against you, not every defeat they inflict loses you the World Series. And with us, not every mistake kills our guy."

"So what are you saying?" Neagley asked.

Stuyvesant sat forward. "I'm saying that despite what your audit might have revealed you should still have considerable faith in us. Not every error costs us a run. Now, I completely understand that kind of so-what self-confidence must seem very offhand to an outsider. But you must understand we're forced to think that way. Your audit showed up a few holes, and what we have to do now is judge whether it's possible to fill them. Whether it's reasonable.

"I'm going to leave that to Froelich's own judgement. It's her show. But what I'm suggesting is that you get rid of any sense of doubt you're feeling about us. As private citizens. Any sense of our failure. Because we're not failing. There are always going to be holes. Part of the job. This is a democracy. Get used to it."

Then he sat back, like he was finished.

"What about this specific threat?" Reacher asked him.

He paused, and then he shook his head. His face had changed. The mood in the whole room had changed.

"That's precisely where I stop being frank," he said. "I told you it was a temporary indulgence. And it was a very serious lapse on Froelich's part to reveal the existence of any threat at all. All I'm prepared to say is we intercept a lot of threats. Then we deal with them. How we deal with them is entirely confidential. Therefore I would ask you to understand you are now under an absolute obligation never to mention this situation to anybody after you leave here tonight. Or any aspect of our procedures. That obligation is rooted in federal statute. There are sanctions available to me."

There was silence. Reacher said nothing. Neagley sat quiet. Froelich looked upset. Stuyvesant ignored her completely and gazed at Reacher and Neagley, at first hostile, and then suddenly pensive. He started thinking hard again. He stood up and walked over to the low cabinet with the telephones on it. Squatted down in front of it. Opened the doors and took out two yellow legal pads and two ballpoint pens. Walked back and dropped one of each in front of Reacher and one of each in front of Neagley. Circled round the head of the table again and sat back down in his chair.

"Write your full names," he said. "All and any aliases, dates of birth, social security numbers, military ID numbers, and current addresses."

"What for?" Reacher asked.

"Just do it," Stuyvesant said.

Reacher paused and picked up his pen. Froelich looked at him, anxiously. Neagley glanced at him and shrugged and started writing on her pad. Reacher waited a second and then followed her example. He was finished well before her. He had no middle name and no current address. Stuyvesant walked around behind them and scooped the pads off the table. Said nothing and carried on walking straight out of the room with the pads held tight under his arm. The door slammed loudly behind him.

"I'm in trouble," Froelich said. "And I've made trouble for you guys, too."

"Don't worry about it," Reacher said. "He's going to make us sign some kind of confidentiality agreement, is all. He's gone to get them typed up, I guess."

"But what's he going to do to me?"

"Nothing, probably."

"Demote me? Fire me?"

"He authorized the audit. The audit was necessary because of the threats. The two things were connected. We'll tell him we pushed you with questions."

"He'll demote me," Froelich said. "He wasn't happy about me running the audit in the first place. Told me it indicated a lack of self-confidence."

"Bullshit," Reacher said. "We did stuff like that all the time."

"Audits build self-confidence," Neagley said. "That was our experience. Better to know something for sure than just hope for the best."

Froelich looked away. Didn't reply. The room went quiet. They all waited, five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Reacher stood up and stretched. Stepped over to the low cabinet and looked at the red phone. He picked it up and held it to his ear. There was no dial tone. He put it back and scanned the confidential memos on the notice board. The ceiling was low and he could feel heat on his head from the halogen lights. He sat down again and turned his chair and tilted it back and put his feet on the next one in line. Glanced at his watch. Stuyvesant had been gone twenty minutes.

"Hell is he doing?" he said. "Typing them himself?"

"Maybe he's calling his agents," Neagley said. "Maybe we're all going to jail, to guarantee our everlasting silence for ever."

Reacher yawned and smiled. "We'll give him ten more minutes. Then we're leaving. We'll all go out and get some dinner."

Stuyvesant came back after five more. He walked into the room and closed the door. He was carrying no papers. He stepped over and sat down in his original seat and placed his hands flat on the table. Drummed a staccato little rhythm with his fingertips.

"OK," he said. "Where were we? Reacher had a question, I think."

Reacher took his feet off the chair and turned to face front. "Did I?" he said.

Stuyvesant nodded. "You asked about this specific threat. Well, it's either an inside job or it's an outside job. It's got to be one or the other, obviously."

"We're discussing this now?"

"Yes, we are," Stuyvesant said.

"Why? What changed?"

Stuyvesant ignored the question. "If it's an outside job, should we necessarily worry? Perhaps not, because that's like baseball, too. If the Yankees come to town saying they're going to beat the Orioles, does that mean it's true? Boasting about it is not the same thing as actually doing it."

Nobody spoke.

"I'm asking for your input here," Stuyvesant said.

Reacher shrugged. "OK," he said. "You think it is an outside threat?"

"No, I think it's inside intimidation intended to damage Froelich's career. Now ask me what I'm going to do about it."

Reacher glanced at him. Glanced at his watch. Glanced at the wall. Twenty-five minutes, a Sunday evening, deep inside the D. C.-Maryland-Virginia triangle.

"I know what you're going to do about it," he said.

"Do you?"

"You're going to hire me and Neagley for an internal investigation."

"Am I?"

Reacher nodded. "If you're worried about inside intimidation then you need an internal investigation. That's clear. And you can't use one of your own people, because you might hit on the bad guy by chance. And you don't want to bring the FBI in, because that's not how Washington works. Nobody washes their dirty linen in public. So you need some other outsider. And you've got two of them sitting right in front of you. They're already involved, because Froelich just involved them. So either you terminate that involvement, or you choose to expand on it.

"You'd prefer to expand on it, because that way you don't have to find fault with an excellent agent you just promoted. So can you use us? Of course you can. Who better than Joe Reacher's little brother? Inside Treasury, Joe Reacher is practically a saint. So your ass is covered. And mine is too. Because of Joe I'll get automatic credibility from the start. And I was a good investigator in the military. So was Neagley. You know that, because you just checked. My guess is you just spent twenty five minutes talking to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. That's why you wanted those details. They ran us through their computers and we came out clean. More than clean, probably, because I'm sure our security clearances are still on file, and I'm sure they're still way higher than you actually need them to be."

Stuyvesant nodded. He looked satisfied. "An excellent analysis," he said. "You get the job, just as soon as I get hard copies of those clearances. They should be here in an hour or two."