Without Fail (38 page)

"Second thing it means is they never worked for the Secret Service. Because you guys are buried in paperwork. I've never seen anything like it, even in the army. Anybody who worked here would have written Vice President a million times over in their career. All with the modern usage without the hyphen. They would have gotten totally used to it that way."

There was quiet for a moment.

"Maybe the other guy wrote it," Stuyvesant said. "The one who didn't work here. The one with the thumbprint."

"Makes no difference," Reacher said. "Like Bannon figured, they're a unit. They're collaborators. And perfectionists. If one guy had written it wrong, the other guy would have corrected it. But it wasn't corrected, therefore neither of them knew it was wrong. Therefore neither of them worked here." Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.

"I want to believe it," he said. "But you're basing everything on a hyphen."

"Don't dismiss it," Reacher said.

"I'm not dismissing it," Stuyvesant said. "I'm thinking."

"About whether I'm crazy?"

"About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch."

"That's the beauty of it," Reacher said. "It doesn't matter if I'm completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the alternative scenario."

"It could be deliberate," Neagley said. "They might be misleading us. Trying to disguise their background or their education level. Throwing us off."

Reacher shook his head.

"I don't think so," he said. "This is too subtle. They'd do all the usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen between Vice and President is something you don't know from right or wrong. It's something you just do."

"What are the exact implications?" Stuyvesant asked.

"Age is critical," Reacher said. "They can't be older than early fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders, down stairs. They can't be younger than mid-forties, because you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970 every school in America had new books. I think they were in junior high at or towards the end of the period when isolated rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date maps on the wall, you're sitting there with all your cousins listening to some grey-haired old lady."

"It's very speculative," Stuyvesant said. "It's a pyramid too, balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over."

Silence in the room.

"Well, I'm going to pursue it," Reacher said. "With Armstrong, or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if necessary. For Froelich's sake. She deserves it."

Stuyvesant nodded. "If neither of them worked for us, how would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?"

"I don't know," Reacher said. "How did they decoy Crosetti?"

"I don't know."

"How would they get our weapons?"

"I don't know."

"How did they know where M. E. lived?"

"Nendick told them."

Stuyvesant nodded. "OK. But what would be their motive?"

"Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician must make plenty of enemies."

Silence again.

"Maybe it's half and half," Neagley said. "Maybe they're outsiders with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work here. Maybe they're some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs. They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons you buy."

"That's possible," Stuyvesant said. "We turn down a lot of people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be right."

"No," Reacher said. "She's wrong. Why would they wait? I'm sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?"

"That's a good point too," Stuyvesant said.

"This is about Armstrong personally," Reacher said. "It has to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and effect. Armstrong became the running mate during the summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich told me that herself. Now we're getting threats against him. Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign, that's why."

Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned over and butted the first message under the second. Then both of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and closed it.

"OK, this is what we're going to do," he said. "We're going to give Neagley's theory to Bannon. Somebody we refused to hire is more or less in the same category as somebody we eventually fired. The bitterness component would be about the same. The FBI can deal with all of that as a whole. We've got the paperwork. They've got the manpower. And the balance of probability is that they're correct. But we'd be derelict if we didn't also consider the alternative. That they might not be correct. So we're going to spend our time looking at Reacher's theory. Because we've got to do something, for Froelich's sake, apart from anything else. So where do we start?"

"With Armstrong," Reacher said. "We figure out who hates him and why." Stuyvesant called a guy from the Office of Protection Research and ordered him into the office immediately. The guy pleaded he was eating Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Stuyvesant relented and gave him two hours to finish up. Then he headed back to the Hoover Building to meet with Bannon again. Reacher and Neagley waited in reception. There was a television in there and Reacher wanted to see if Armstrong delivered on the early news. It was a half-hour away.

"You OK?" Neagley asked.

"I feel weird," Reacher said. "Like I'm two people. She thought it was Joe with her at the end."

"What would Joe have done about it?"

"Same as "I'm going to do about it, probably."

"So go ahead and do it," Neagley said. "You always were Joe as far as she was concerned. You may as well square the circle for her."

He said nothing.

"Close your eyes," Neagley said. "Clear your mind. You need to concentrate on the shooter."

Reacher shook his head. "I won't get it if I concentrate."

"So think about something else. Use peripheral vision. Pretend you're looking somewhere else. The next roof along, maybe."

He closed his eyes. Saw the edge of the roof, harsh against the sun. Saw the sky, bright and pale all at the same time. A winter sky. Just a trace of uniform misty haze all over it. He gazed at the sky. Recalled the sounds he had been hearing. Nothing much from the crowd. Just the clatter of serving spoons, and Froelich saying thanks for stopping by. Mrs Armstrong saying enjoy, nervously, like she wasn't quite sure what she had gotten herself into. Then he heard the soft chunk of the first silenced bullet hitting the wall. It had been a poor shot. It had missed Armstrong by four feet. Probably a rushed shot. The guy comes up the stairs, stands in the rooftop doorway, calls softly to Crosetti. And Crosetti responds. The guy waits for Crosetti to come to him. Maybe backs away into the stairwell. Crosetti comes on. Crosetti gets shot. The rooftop hutch muffles the sound from the silencer. The guy steps over the body and runs crouched straight to the lip of the roof. Kneels and fires hastily, too soon, before he's really settled, and he misses by four feet. The miss craters the brick and a small chip flies off and hits Reacher in the cheek. The guy racks the bolt and aims more carefully for the second shot.

He opened his eyes.

"I want you to work on how," he said.

"How what, exactly?" Neagley said.

"How they lured Crosetti away from his post. I want to know how they did that."

Neagley was quiet for a moment.

"I'm afraid Bannon's theory fits best," she said. "Crosetti looked up and saw somebody he recognized."

"Assume he didn't," Reacher said. "How else?"

"I'll work on it. You work on the shooter."

He closed his eyes again and looked at the next roof along. Back down at the serving tables. Froelich, in the last minute of her life. He recalled the spray of blood and his immediate instinctive reaction. Incoming lethal fire. Point of origin? He had glanced up and seen… what? The curve of a back or a shoulder. It was moving. The shape and the movement were somehow one and the same thing.

"His coat," he said. "The shape of his coat over his body, and the way it draped when he moved."

"Seen the coat before?"

"Yes."

"Colour?"

"I don't know. Not sure it really had a colour."

"Texture?"

"Texture is important. Not thick, not thin."

"Herringbone?"

Reacher shook his head. "Not the coat we saw on the garage video. Not the guy, either. This guy was taller and leaner. Some length in his upper body. It gave the coat its drape. I think it was a long coat."

"You only saw his shoulder."

"It flowed like a long coat."

"How did it flow?"

"Energetically. Like the guy was moving fast."

"He would be. Far as he knew he'd just shot Armstrong."

"No, like he was always energetic. A rangy guy, decisive in his movements."

"Age?"

"Older than us."

"Build?"

"Moderate."

"Hair?"

"Don't remember."

He kept his eyes closed and searched his memory for coats. A long coat, not thick, not thin. He let his mind drift, but it always came back to the Atlantic City coat store. Standing there in front of a rainbow of choice, five whole minutes after taking a stupid random decision that had led him away from the peace and quiet of a lonely motel room in La Jolla, California. He gave up on it twenty minutes later and gestured for the duty officer to turn the television sound up for the news. The story led the bulletin, obviously. The coverage opened with a studio portrait of Armstrong in a box behind the anchorman's shoulder. Then it cut to video of Armstrong handing his wife out of the limo. They stood up together and smiled. Started to walk past the camera. Then the tape cut to Armstrong holding up his ladle and his spoon. A smile on his face. The voice-over paused long enough for the live sound to come up: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Then there were seven or eight seconds taken from a little later on when the food line was really moving. Then it happened.

Because of the silencer there was no gunshot, and because there was no gunshot the cameraman didn't duck or startle in the usual way. The picture held steady. And because there was no gunshot it seemed completely inexplicable why Froelich was suddenly jumping at Armstrong. It looked a little different, seen from the front. She just took off from her left foot and twisted up and sideways. She looked desperate, but graceful. They ran it once at normal speed, and then again in slow motion. She got her right hand on his left Shoulder and pushed him down and herself up. Her momentum carried her all the way round and she drew her knees up and simply knocked him over with them. He fell and she followed him down. She was a foot below her maximum height when the second bullet came in and hit her.

"Shit," Reacher said.

Neagley nodded, slowly. "She was too quick. A quarter second slower she'd still have been high enough in the air to take it in the vest."

"She was too good."

They ran it again, normal speed. It was all over in a second. Then they let the tape run on. The cameraman seemed rooted to the spot. Reacher saw himself barging through the tables. Saw the other agents firing. Froelich was out of sight, on the floor. The camera ducked because of the firing, but then came up level again and started moving in. The picture wobbled as the guy stumbled over something. There were long moments of total confusion. Then the cameraman started forward again, hungry for a shot of the downed agent. Neagley's face appeared, and the picture went black. Coverage switched back to the anchorman. The anchorman looked straight at the camera and announced that Armstrong's reaction had been immediate and emphatic.