Without Fail (29 page)

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 anywhere 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 travelling 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 were about to order a fourth round 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."

The?" 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.

"Not enough time now," she said.

Reacher nodded. "Can we get a weather report for Chicago?"

"I could call Andrews," Froelich said. "But why?"

"Just do it, OK?"

She stepped away to use another line. The air force meteorological people took four minutes to tell her Chicago was cold but clear and expected to stay that way. Reacher glanced at his watch again. Nine twenty-seven.

"OK," he said.

"Remember, talk as long as you can," Stuyvesant said. "They can't explain you. They don't know who you are. They're worried about that."

"Is the Thanksgiving thing on the web site?" Reacher asked.

"Yes," Froelich said.

"Specific location?"

"Yes," she said again. Nine twenty-eight.

"What else is upcoming?" Reacher asked.

"Wall Street again in ten days," Froelich said. "That's all."

"What about this weekend?"

"Back to North Dakota with his wife. Late tomorrow afternoon."

"Is that on the web site?"

Froelich shook her head. "No, that's completely private," she said. "We haven't announced it anywhere."

Nine twenty-nine.

"OK," Reacher said again.

Then the phone rang, very loud in the silence.

"A little early," Reacher said. "Somebody's anxious."

"Talk as long as you can," Stuyvesant said. "Use their curiosity against them. Keep it going."

Reacher picked up the phone. "Hello," he said.

"You won't get that lucky again," a voice said.

Reacher ignored it and listened hard to the background sounds.

"Hey," the voice said. "I want to talk to you."

"But I don't want to talk to you, asshole," Reacher said, and put the phone down.

Stuyvesant and Froelich just stared at him.

"Hell are you doing?" Stuyvesant asked.

"I wasn't feeling very talkative," Reacher said.

"I told you to talk as long as you could."

Reacher shrugged. "You wanted it done different, you should have done it yourself. You could have pretended to be me. Talked to your heart's content."

"That was deliberate sabotage."

"No, it wasn't. It was a move in a game."

"This isn't a damn game."

"That's exactly what it is."

"We needed information."

"Get real," Reacher said. "You were never going to get information."

Stuyvesant was silent.

"I want a cup of coffee," Reacher said. "You dragged us out of the restaurant before we were finished."

"We're staying here," Stuyvesant said. "They might call back."

"They won't," Reacher said. They waited five minutes at the reception counter and then gave it up and took plastic cups of coffee with them to the conference room. Neagley was keeping herself to herself.

Froelich was very quiet. Stuyvesant was very angry.

"Explain," he said.

Reacher sat down alone at one end of the table. Neagley occupied neutral territory halfway down one side. Froelich and Stuyvesant sat together at the far end.

"These guys use faucet water to seal their envelopes," Reacher said.

"So?" Stuyvesant said.

"So there's not one chance in a million they're going to make a traceable call to the main office of the United States Secret Service, for God's sake. They would have cut the call short. I didn't want to let them have the satisfaction. They need to know if they're tangling with me, then I take the upper hand, not them."

"You blew it because you think you're in a pissing contest?"

"I didn't blow anything," Reacher said. "We got all the information we were ever going to get."

"We got absolutely nothing."

"No, you got a voice print. The guy said thirteen words. All the vowel sounds, most of the consonants. You got the sibilant characteristics, and some of the fricatives."

"We needed to know where they were, you idiot."

"They were at a pay phone with caller ID blocked. Somewhere in the Midwest. Think about it, Stuyvesant. They were in Bismarck today with heavy weapons. Therefore they're driving. They're on a four-hundred-mile radius by now. They're somewhere in one of about six huge states, in a bar or a country store, using the pay phone. And anybody smart enough to use faucet water to seal an envelope knows exactly how short to keep a phone call to make it untraceable."

"You don't know they're driving."

"No," Reacher said. "You're quite right. I don't know for sure. There is a slight possibility that they were frustrated about today's outcome. Annoyed, even. And they know from the web site that there's another chance tomorrow, right here. And then nothing much for a spell. So it's possible they ditched their weapons and aimed to fly in tonight. In which case they might be at O'Hare right now, waiting for a connection. It might have been worthwhile putting some cops in place to see who's using the pay phones. But I only had eight minutes. If you had thought about it earlier it might have been practical. You had a whole half-hour.

"They gave you notice, for God's sake. You could have arranged something easily. In which case I would have talked their damn ears off, to let the cops get a good look around. But you didn't think about it. You didn't arrange it. You didn't arrange anything. So don't talk to me about sabotage. Don't be telling me I'm the one who blew something here." Stuyvesant looked down. Said nothing.

"Now ask him why he wanted the weather report," Neagley said.

Stuyvesant said nothing.

"Why did you want the weather report?" Froelich asked.

"Because there might still have been time to get something together. If the weather was bad the night before Thanksgiving in Chicago the airport would be so backed up they'd be sitting around there for hours. In which case I would have provoked some kind of a call-back later, for after we got some cops in place. But the weather was OK. Therefore no delays, therefore no time."

Stuyvesant said nothing.

"Accent?" Froelich asked, quietly. "Did the thirteen words you granted them give you a chance to pick anything out?"

"You made a recording," Reacher said. "But nothing jumped out at me. Not foreign. Not Southern, not East Coast. Probably one of those other places where they don't have much of an accent."

The room was quiet for a long moment.

"I apologize," Stuyvesant said. "You probably did the right thing."

Reacher shook his head. Breathed out. "Don't worry about it," he said. "We're clutching at straws here. Million to one we were ever goingto get a location. It was a snap decision, really. Just a gut thing. If they're puzzled about me, I want to keep them puzzled. Keep them guessing. And I wanted to make them mad at me. I wanted to take some focus off Armstrong. Better that they focus on me for a spell."

"You want these people coming after you personally?"

"Better than have them coming after Armstrong personally."

"Are you nuts? He's got the Secret Service around him. You haven't."

Reacher smiled. "I'm not too worried about them."

Froelich moved in her chair.

"So this is a pissing contest," she said. "God, you're just like Joe, you know that?"

"Except I'm still alive," Reacher said.

There was a knock at the door. The duty officer put his head into the room.

"Special Agent Bannon is here," he said. "Ready for the evening meeting." Stuyvesant briefed Bannon privately in his office about the telephone communications. They came back into the conference room together at ten past ten. Bannon still looked more like a city cop than a federal agent. Donegal tweed, grey flannel, stout shoes, red face. Like a wise old high-mileage detective from Chicago or Boston or New York. He was carrying a thin file folder, and he was acting sombre.

"Nendick is still unresponsive," he said.

Nobody spoke. "He's no better and no worse," Bannon said. "They're still worried about him."

He sat heavily in the chair opposite Neagley's. Opened his file folder and took out a thin stack of colour photographs. Dealt them like cards around the table. Two each.

"Bruce Armstrong and Brian Armstrong," he said. "Late of Minnesota and Colorado, respectively."

The photographs were large inkjet prints done on glossy paper. Not faxes. The originals must have been borrowed from the families and then scanned and e-mailed. They were snapshots, basically, each blown up and then cropped down to a useful head-and-shoulders format in the local FBI lab, presumably. The results looked artificial. Two bluff open faces, two innocent smiles, two fond gazes directed towards something that should have been there in the shot with them.