Without Fail (25 page)

"We can get her back for you," he said.

Nendick said nothing.

"Just tell us who, and we'll go get her right now."

No reply.

"Sooner the better," Reacher said. "Thing like this, we don't want to have her wait any longer than she has to, do we?" Nendick stared at the far wall with total oncentration.

"When did they come for her?" Reacher asked. "Couple of weeks ago?"

Nendick said nothing. Made no sound at all. Neagley came in from the hallway. Drifted away into the half of the kitchen that was set up as a family room. There was a matching set of heavy furniture grouped along one wall, bookcase, credenza, bookcase.

"We can help you," Reacher said. "But we need to know where to start."

Nendick said nothing in reply. Nothing at all. Just stared and shook and rocked and hugged himself tight. "Reacher," Neagley called. Soft voice, with some kind of strain in it. He stepped away from Nendick and joined her at the credenza. She handed him something. It was an envelope. There was a Polaroid photograph in it. The photograph showed a woman sitting on a chair. Her, face was white and panicked. Her eyes were wide. Her hair was dirty. It was Nendick's wife, looking about a hundred years older than the pictures in the living room. She was holding up a copy of USA Today. The masthead was right under her chin. Neagley passed him another envelope. Another Polaroid in it. Same woman. Same pose. Same paper, but a different day.

"Proofs of life," Reacher said.

Neagley nodded. "But look at this. What's this proof of?"

She passed him another envelope. A padded brown mailer. Something soft and white in it. Underwear. One pair. Discoloured. Slightly grimy.

"Great," he said. Then she passed him a fourth envelope. Another padded brown mailer. Smaller. There was a box in it. It was a tiny neat cardboard thing such as a jeweller might put a pair of earrings in. There was a pad of cotton wool in it. The cotton wool was browned with old blood, because lying on top of it was a fingertip. It had been clipped off at the first knuckle by something hard and sharp. Garden shears, maybe. It was probably from the little finger of the left hand, judging by the size and the curve. There was still paint on the nail. Reacher looked at it for a long moment. Nodded and handed it back to Neagley. Walked round and faced Nendick head on across the breakfast bar. Looked straight into his eyes. Gambled.

"Stuyvesant," he called. "And Froelich. Go wait in the hallway."

They stood still for a second, surprised. He glared hard at them. They shuffled obediently out of the room.

"Neagley," he called. "Come over here with me."

She walked round and stood quiet at his side. He leaned down and put his elbows on the counter. Put his face level with Nendick's. Spoke softly.

"OK, they're gone," he said. "It's just us now. And we're not Secret Service. You know that, right? You never saw us before the other day. So you can trust us. We won't screw up like they will. We come from a place where you're not allowed to screw up. And we come from a place where they don't have rules. So we can get her back. We know how to do this. We'll get the bad guys and we'll bring her back. Safe. Without fail, OK? That's a promise. Me to you."

Nendick leaned his head back and opened his mouth. His lips were dry. They were flecked with sticky foam. Then he closed his mouth. Tight. Clamped his jaw hard. So hard his lips were compressed into a bloodless thin line. He brought one shaking hand out from under his arm and put the thumb and forefinger together like he was holding something small. He drew the small imaginary thing sideways across his lips, slowly, like he was closing a zipper. He put his hand back under his arm. Shook. Stared at the wall. There was crazy fear in his eyes. Some kind of absolute, uncontrolled terror. He started rocking again. Started coughing. He was coughing and choking in his throat. He wouldn't open his mouth. It was clamped tight. He was bucking and shaking on the stool. Clutching his sides. Gulping desperately inside his clamped mouth. His eyes were wild and staring. They were pools of horror. Then they rolled up inside his head and the whites showed and he pitched backward off the stool.

TEN

They did what they could at the scene, but it was useless. Nendick just lay on the kitchen floor, not moving, not really conscious, but not really unconscious either. He was in some kind of fugue state. Like suspended animation. He was pale and damp with perspiration. His breathing was shallow. His pulse was weak. He was responsive to touch and light but nothing else. An hour later he was in a guarded room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center with a tentative diagnosis of psychosis-induced catatonia.

"Paralysed with fear, in layman's language," the doctor said. "It's a genuine medical condition. We see it most often in superstitious populations, like Haiti, or parts of Louisiana. Voodoo country, in other words. The victims get cold sweats, pallor, loss of blood pressure, near-unconsciousness. Not the same thing as adrenalin-induced panic. It's a neurogenic process. The heart slows, the large blood vessels in the abdomen take blood away from the brain, most voluntary function shuts down."

"What kind of threat could do that to a person?" Froelich asked, quietly.

"One that the person sincerely believes," the doctor answered. "That's the key. The victim has to be convinced. My guess is his wife's kidnappers described to him what they would do to her if he talked. Then your arrival triggered a crisis, because he was afraid he would talk. Maybe he even wanted to talk, but he knew he couldn't afford to. I wouldn't want to speculate about the exact nature of the threat against his wife."

"Will he be OK?" Stuyvesant asked.

"Depends on the condition of his heart. If he tends towards heart disease he could be in serious trouble. The cardiac stress is truly enormous."

"When can we talk to him?"

"No time soon. Depends on him, basically. He needs to come round."

"It's very important. He's got critical information."

The doctor shook his head. "Could be days," he said. "Could be never."

They waited a long fruitless hour during which nothing changed. Nendick just lay there inert, surrounded by beeping machines. He breathed in and out, but that was all. So they gave it up and left him there and drove back to the office in the dark and the silence. Regrouped in the windowless conference room and faced the next big decision.

"Armstrong's got to be told," Neagley said. "They've staged their demonstration. No place to go now except stage the real thing."

Stuyvesant shook his head. "We never tell them. It's a rigid policy. Has been for a hundred and one years. We're not going to change it now."

"Then we should limit his exposure," Froelich said.

"No," Stuyvesant said. "That's an admission of defeat in itself, and it's a slippery slope. We pull out once, we'll be pulling out for ever, every single threat we get. And that must not happen. What must happen is that we defend him to the best of our ability. So we start planning, now. What are we defending against? What do we know?"

"That two men are already dead," Froelich replied.

"Two men and one woman," Reacher said. "Look at the statistics. Kidnapped is the same thing as dead, ninety-nine times in a hundred."

"The photographs were proof of life," Stuyvesant said.

"Until the poor guy delivered. Which he did almost two weeks ago."

"He's still delivering. He's not talking. So I'm going to keep on hoping."

Reacher said nothing.

"Know anything about her?" Neagley asked.

Stuyvesant shook his head. "Never met her. Don't even know her name. I hardly know Nendick, either. He's just some technical guy I sometimes see around."

The room went quiet.

"FBI has got to be told as well," Neagley said. This isn't just about Armstrong now. There's a kidnap victim dead or in serious danger. That's the Bureau's jurisdiction, no question. Plus the interstate homicide. That's their bag too."

The room stayed very quiet. Stuyvesant sighed and looked round at each of the others, slowly and carefully, one at a time.

"Yes," he said. "I agree. It's gone too far. They need to know. God knows I don't want to, but I'll tell them. I'll let us take the hit. I'll hand everything over to them."

There was silence. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. It was exactly the right thing to do, in the circumstances. Approval would have seemed sarcastic, and commiseration wasn't appropriate. For the Nendick couple and two unrelated families called Armstrong, maybe, but not for Stuyvesant.

"Meanwhile we'll focus on Armstrong," he said. "That's all we can do."

"Tomorrow is North Dakota again," Froelich said. "More open air fun and games. Same place as before. Not very secure. We leave at ten."

"And Thursday?"

"Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. He's serving turkey dinners in a homeless shelter here in D.C. He'll be very exposed."

There was a long moment of silence. Stuyvesant sighed again, heavily, and placed his hands palms down on the long wooden table.

"OK," he said. "Be back in here at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. "I'm sure the Bureau will be delighted to send over a liaison guy." Then he levered himself upright and left the room to head back to his office, where he would make the calls that would put a permanent asterisk next to his career. "I feel helpless," Froelich said. "I want to be more proactive."

"Don't like playing defence?" he asked.

They were in her bed, in her room. It was larger than the guest room. Prettier. And quieter, because it was at the back of the house. The ceiling was smoother. Although it would take angled sunlight to really test it. Which would happen at sunset instead of in the morning, because the window faced the other way. The bed was warm. The house was warm. It was like a cocoon of warmth in the cold grey city night.

"Defence is OK," she said. "But attack is defence, isn't it? In a situation like this? But we always let things come to us. Then we just run away from them. We're too operational. We're not investigative enough."

"You have investigators," he said. "Like the guy who watches the movies."

She nodded against his shoulder. "The Office of Protection Research. It's a strange role. Kind of academic, rather than specific. Strategic, rather than tactical."

"So do it yourself. Try a few things."

"Like what?"

"We're back to the original evidence, with Nendick crapping out. So we have to start over. You should concentrate on the thumbprint."

"It's not on file."

"Files have glitches. Files get updated. Prints get added. You should try again, every few days. And you should widen the search. Try other countries. Try Interpol."

"I doubt if these guys are foreign."

"But maybe they're Americans who travelled. Maybe they got in trouble in Canada or Europe. Or Mexico or South America."

"Maybe," she said.

"And you should check the thumbprint thing as an MO. You know, search the databases to see if anybody ever signed threatening letters with their thumb before. How far back do the archives go?"

"To the dawn of time."

"So put a twenty-year limit on it. I guess way back at the dawn of time plenty of people signed things with their thumbs."

She smiled, sleepily. He could feel it against his shoulder. "Before they learned to write," he said.

She didn't reply. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, snuggled against his shoulder. He eased his position and felt a shallow dip on his side of the mattress. He wondered if Joe had made it. He lay quiet for a spell and then craned his arm up and switched out the light. Seemed like about a minute and a half later they were up again and showered and back in the Secret Service conference room eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with an FBI liaison agent named Bannon. Reacher was in his Atlantic City coat and the third of Joe's abandoned Italian suits and the third Somebody & Somebody shirt and a plain blue tie. Froelich was in another black trouser suit.

Neagley was in the same outfit she had worn on Sunday evening. It was the one that showed off her figure. The one that Nendick had ignored. She was cycling through her wardrobe as fast as the hotel laundry would let her. Stuyvesant was immaculate in his usual Brooks Brothers. Maybe it was fresh on, maybe it wasn't. There was no way to tell. All his suits were the same. He looked very fired. Actually they all looked very fired, and Reacher was a little worried about that. In his experience tiredness impaired operational efficiency as badly as a drink too many.

"We'll sleep on the plane," Froelich said. "We'll tell the pilot to fly slow."

Bannon was a guy of about forty. He was in a tweed sports coat and grey flannels and looked bluff and Irish and was tall and heavy. He had a red complexion that the winter morning hadn't helped. But he was polite and cheerful and he had supplied the doughnuts and the coffee himself. Two different stores, each chosen for its respective quality. He had been well received. Twenty bucks' worth of food and drink had broken a lot of interagency ice.

"No secrets either way," he said. hat's what we're proposing. And no blame anywhere. But no bullshit, either. I think we got to face the fact that the Nendick woman is dead. We'll look for her like she wasn't, but we shouldn't fool ourselves. So we've got three down already. Some evidence, but not a lot. We're guessing Nendick has met with these guys, and we're assuming they've certainly been to his house, if only to grab up his wife. So that's a crime scene, and we're going over it today, and we'll share what we get. Nendick will help us if he ever wakes up. But assuming he won't anytime soon, we'll go at it from three different directions. First, the message stuff that went down here in D.C. Second, the scene in Minnesota. Third, the scene in Colorado."

"Are your people in charge out there?" Froelich asked.

"Both places," Bannon said. "Our ballistics people figure the Colorado weapon for a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun called the MP5."

"We already concluded that," Neagley said. "And it was probably silenced, which makes it the MP5SD6."

Bannon nodded. "You're one of the ex-military, right? In which case you've seen MP5s before. As I have. They're military and paramilitary weapons. Police and federal SWAT teams use them, people like that."

Then he went quiet and looked round the assembled faces, like there was more to his point than he had actually articulated.

"What about Minnesota?" Neagley asked.

"We found the bullet," Bannon said. "We swept the farmyard with a metal detector. It was buried about nine inches deep in the mud. Consistent with a shot from a small wooded hillside about a hundred and twenty yards away to the north. Maybe eighty feet of elevation."

"What was the bullet?" Reacher asked.

"NATO 7.62 millimetre," Bannon said.

Reacher nodded. "You test it?"

"For what?"

"Burn."

Bannon nodded. "Low power, weak charge."

"Subsonic ammunition," Reacher said. "In that calibre it has to be a Vaime Mk2 silenced sniper rifle."

"Which is also a police and paramilitary weapon," Bannon said. "Often supplied to anti-terrorist units, people like that."

He looked round the room again, like he was inviting a comment. Nobody made one. So he pitched it himself. "You know what?" he said.

"What?"

"Put a list of who buys Heckler & Koch MP5s in America side to side with a list of who buys Vaime Mk2s, and you see only one official purchaser on both lists."

"Who?" qne United States Secret Service."

The room went quiet. Nobody spoke. There was a knock at the door. The duty officer. He stood there, framed in the doorway.

"Mail just arrived," he said. "Something you need to see." They laid it on the conference room table. It was a familiar brown envelope, gummed flap, metal closure. A computer printed self-adhesive address label. Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. Clear black-on-white Times New Roman lettering. Bannon opened his briefcase and took out a pair of white cotton gloves. Pulled them on, right hand, left hand. Tightened them over his fingers.

"Got these from the lab," he said. "Special circumstances. We don't want to use latex. Don't want to confuse the talcum traces."

The gloves were clumsy. He had to slide the envelope to the edge of the table to pick it up. He held it with one hand and looked for something to open it with. Reacher took his ceramic knife out of his pocket and snapped it open. Offered it handle first. Bannon took it and eased the tip of the blade under the corner of the flap. Moved the envelope backward and the knife forward. The blade cut the paper like cutting air. He handed the knife back to Reacher and pressed on the sides of the envelope so it made a mouth. Glanced inside. Turned the envelope over and tipped something out.