Without Fail (9 page)

"I thought about cancelling the event."

"You should have."

"Then I thought about asking him to wear a vest."

"Wouldn't have mattered. I would have aimed at his head. It was a beautiful day, Froelich. Clear sky, sunny, no wind at all. Cool, dense air. True air. I was a couple hundred feet away. I could have shot his eyes out."

She went quiet.

"John Malkovich or Edward Fox?" she asked.

"I'd have hit Armstrong and then as many other people as I could, three or four seconds. Cops mostly, I guess, but women and children too. I'd have aimed to wound them, not kill them. In the stomach, probably. More effective that way. People flopping around and bleeding all over the place, it would have created mass panic. Enough to get away, probably. I'd have busted out of the church within ten seconds and gotten away into the surrounding subdivision fast enough. Neagley was standing by in a car. She'd have been rolling soon as she heard the shots. So I'd probably have been Edward Fox."

Froelich stood up and walked to the window. Put her hands palms down on the sill and stared out at the weather. "This is a disaster," she said. Reacher said nothing.

"I guess I didn't anticipate your level of focus," she said. "I didn't know it was going to be all-out guerrilla warfare."

Reacher shrugged. "Assassins aren't necessarily going to be the gentlest people you'll ever meet. And they're the ones who make the rules here."

Froelich nodded. "And I didn't know you were going to get help, especially not from a woman."

"I kind of warned you," Reacher said. "I told you it couldn't work if you were watching for me coming. You can't expect assassins to call ahead with their plans."

"I know," she said. "But I was imagining a lone man, is all."

"It's always going to be a team," Reacher said. "There are no lone men."

He saw an ironic half-smile reflected in the glass.

"So you don't believe the Warren Report?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Neither do you," he said. "No professional ever will."

"I don't feel like much of a professional today," she said.

Neagley stood up and stepped over and perched on the sill, next to Froelich, her back against the glass.

"Context," she said. "That's what you've got to think about. It's not so bad. Reacher and I were United States Army Criminal Investigation Division specialists. We were trained in all kinds of ways. Trained to think, mostly. Trained to be inventive. And to be ruthless, for sure, and self-confident. And tougher than the people we were responsible for, and some of them were plenty tough. So we're very unusual. People as specialized as us, there's not more than maybe ten thousand in the whole country."

"Ten thousand is a lot," Froelich said. "

"Out of two hundred and eighty-one million? And how many of them are currently the right age and available and motivated? It's a statistically irrelevant fraction. So don't sweat it. Because you've got an impossible job, anyway. You're required to leave him vulnerable. Because he's a politician. He's got to do all this visible stuff. We would never have dreamed of letting anybody do what Armstrong does. Never in a million years. It would have been completely out of the question."

Froelich turned round and faced the room. Swallowed once and nodded vaguely into the middle distance.

"Thanks," she said. "For trying to make me feel better. But I've got some thinking to do, haven't I?"

"Perimeters," Reacher said. "Keep the perimeters to a half-mile all round, keep the public away from him, and keep at least four agents literally within touching distance at all times. That's all you can do."

Froelich shook her head. "Can't do it," she said. "It would be considered unreasonable. Undemocratic, even. And there are going to be hundreds of weeks like this one over the next three years. After three years it'll start to get worse because they'll be in their final year and they'll be trying to get re-elected and everything will have to be looser still. And about seven years from now Armstrong will start looking for the nomination in his own right. Seen how they do that? Crowd scenes all over the place from New Hampshire onward? Town meetings in shirtsleeves? Fund-raisers? It's a complete nightmare."

The room went quiet. Neagley peeled off the window sill and walked across the room to the credenza. Took two thin files out of the drawer the photographs had been in. She held up the first.

"A written report," she said. "Salient points and recommendations, from a professional perspective."

"OK," Froelich said.

Neagley held up the second file.

"And our expenses," she said. "They're all accounted for. Receipts and all. You should make the cheque payable to Reacher. It was his money."

"OK," Froelich said again. She took the files and clasped them to her chest, as if they offered her protection from something.

"And there's Elizabeth Wright from New Jersey," Reacher said. "Don't forget her. She needs to be taken care of. I told her to make up for missing the reception you'd probably invite her to the Inauguration Ball."

"OK," Froelich said for the third time. "The Ball, whatever. I'll speak to somebody about it."

Then she just stood still.

"This is a disaster," she said again.

"You've got an impossible job," Reacher said. "Don't beat up on yourself."

She nodded. "Joe used to tell me the same thing. He said, in the circumstances, we should consider a ninety-five per cent success rate a triumph."

"Ninety-four per cent," Reacher said "You've lost one president out of eighteen since you guys took over. Six per cent failure rate. That's not too bad."

"Ninety-four, ninety-five," she said. "Whatever, I guess he was right."

"Joe was right about a lot of things, the way I recall it."

"But we've never lost a vice president," she said. "Not yet." She put the files under one arm and stacked the photographs on the credenza and butted them around with her fingertips until they were neatly piled. Picked them up and put them in her bag. Then she glanced at each of the four walls in turn, as if she was memorizing their exact details. A distracted little gesture. She nodded at nothing in particular and headed for the door.

"Got to go," she said.

She walked out of the room and the door sucked shut behind her. There was silence for a spell. Then Neagley stood up straight at the end of one of the beds and clamped the cuffs of her sweatshirt in her palms and stretched her arms high above her head. She tilted her head back and yawned. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders. The hem of her shirt rode up and Reacher saw hard muscle above the waistband of her jeans. It was ridged like a turtle's back.

"You still look good," he said.

"So do you, in black."

"Feels like a uniform," he said. "Five years since I last wore one."

Neagley finished stretching. Smoothed her hair and pulled the hem of her shirt back down into place.

"Are we done here?" she asked. "Tired?"

"Exhausted. We worked our butts off, ruining that poor woman's day."

"What did you think of her?"

"I liked her. And like I told her, I think she's got an impossible job. And all in all, I think she's pretty good at it. I doubt if anybody else could do it better. And I think she kind of knows that too, but it's burning her up that she's forced to settle for ninety-five per cent instead of a hundred."

"I agree."

"Who's this guy Joe she was talking about?"

"An old boyfriend."

"You knew him?"

"My brother. She dated him."

"When?"

"They broke up six years ago."

"what's he like?"

Reacher glanced at the floor. Didn't correct the is to a was. "Like a civilized version of me," he said.

"So maybe she'll want to date you, too. Civilized can be an overrated virtue. And collecting the complete set is always fun for a girl."

Reacher said nothing. The room went quiet.

"I guess I'll head home," Neagley said. "Back to Chicago. Back to the real world. But I got to say, it was a pleasure working with you again."

"Liar."

"No, really, I mean it."

"So stick around. A buck gets ten she'll be back inside an hour."

Neagley smiled. "what, to ask you out?"

Reacher shook his head. "No, to tell us what her real problem is."

FOUR

Froelich walked across the sidewalk to her Suburban. Spilled the files onto the passenger seat. Started the engine and kept her foot hard on the brake. Pulled her phone from her bag and flipped it open. Entered Stuyvesant's home number digit by digit and then paused with her finger resting on the call button.

The phone waited patiently with the number displayed on the tiny green screen. She looked ahead through the windshield, fighting, with herself. She looked down at the phone. Back out at the street. Her finger rested on the button. Then she flipped the phone shut and dropped it on top of the files. Pulled the transmission lever into drive and took off from the kerb with a loud chirp from all four tyres. Hung a left and a right and headed for her office. The room service guy came back to collect the coffee tray. Reacher took his jacket off and hung it in the closet. Pulled the T-shirt out of the waistband of his jeans.

"Did you vote in the election?" Neagley asked him.

He shook his head. "I'm not registered anywhere: Did you?"

"Sure," she said. "I always vote."

"Did you vote for Armstrong?"

"Nobody votes for vice president. Except his family, maybe."

"But did you vote for that ticket?"

She nodded. "Yes, I did. Would you have?"

"I guess so," he said. "You ever hear anything about Armstrong before?"

"Not really," she said. "I mean, I'm interested in politics, but "I'm not one of those people who can name all hundred senators."

"Would you run for office?"

"Not in a million years. I like a low profile, Reacher. I was a sergeant, and I always will be, inside. Never wanted to be an officer."

"You had the potential."

She shrugged and smiled, all at the same time. "Maybe I did. But what I didn't have was the desire. And you know what? Sergeants have plenty of power. More than you guys ever realized."

"Hey, I realized," he said. "Believe me, I realized."

"She's not coming back, you know. We're sitting here talking and wasting time and "I'm missing all kinds of flights home, and she's not coming back."

"She's coming back." Froelich parked in the garage and headed upstairs. Presidential protection was a non-stop operation, but Sundays still felt different. People dressed differently, the air was quieter, phone traffic was down. Some people spent the day at home. Like Stuyvesant, for instance. She closed her office door and sat at her desk and opened a drawer. Took out the things she needed and slipped them into a large brown envelope. Then she opened Reacher's expenses file and copied the figure on the bottom line onto the top sheet of her yellow pad and switched her shredder on. Fed the whole file into it, sheet by sheet, and then followed it with the file of recommendations and all the six-by-four photographs, one by one. She fed the file folders themselves in and stirred the long curling shreds around in the output bin until they were hopelessly tangled. Then she switched the machine off again and picked up the envelope and headed back down to the garage.

Reacher saw her car from the hotel room window. It came round the corner and slowed. There was no traffic on the street. Late in the afternoon, on a November Sunday in D.C. The tourists were in their hotels, showering, getting ready for dinner. The natives were home, reading their newspapers, watching the NFL on television, paying bills, doing chores. The air was fogging with evening. Streetlights were sputtering to life. The black Suburban had its headlights on. It pulled a wide U across both lanes and slid into an area reserved for waiting taxis.

"She's back," Reacher said.

Neagley joined him at the window. "We can't help her."

"Maybe she isn't looking for help."

"Then why would she come back?"

"I don't know," he said. "A second opinion? Validation? Maybe she just wants to talk. You know, a problem shared is a problem halved."

"Why talk to us?"

"Because we didn't hire her and we can't fire her. And we weren't rivals for her position. You know how these organizations work."

"Is she allowed to talk to us?"

"Didn't you ever talk to somebody you shouldn't have?"

Neagley made a face. "Occasionally. Like, I talked to you."

"And I talked to you, which was worse, because you weren't an officer."

"But I had the potential."

"That's for damn sure," he said, looking down. "Now she's just sitting there."

"She's on the phone. She's calling somebody."

The room phone rang.

"Us, evidently," Reacher said. He picked up the phone. "We're still here," he said. Then he listened for a moment.

"OK," he said, and put the phone down.

"She coming up?" Neagley asked. He nodded and went back to the window in time to see Froelich climbing out of the car. She was holding an envelope. She skipped across the sidewalk and disappeared from sight. Two minutes later they heard the distant chime of the elevator arriving on their floor. Twenty seconds after that, a knock on the door. Reacher stepped over and opened up and Froelich walked in and stopped in the middle of the room. Glanced first at Neagley, and then at Reacher.

"Can we have a minute in private?" she asked him.

"Don't need one," he said. "The answer is yes."

"You don't know the question yet."

"You trust me, because you trusted Joe and Joe trusted me, therefore that loop is closed. Now you want to know if I trust Neagley, so you can close that loop also, and the answer is yes, I trust her absolutely, therefore you can too."

"OK," Froelich said. "I guess that was the question."

"So take your jacket off and make yourself at home. You want more coffee?"

Froelich slipped out-of her jacket and dumped it on the bed. Stepped over to the table and laid the envelope down.

"More coffee would be fine," she said.

Reacher dialled room service and asked for a large pot and three cups, three saucers, and absolutely nothing else. "I only told you half the truth before," Froelich said.

"I guessed," Reacher said.

Froelich nodded apologetically and picked up the envelope. Opened the flap and pulled out a clear vinyl page protector. There was something in it.

"This is a copy of something that came in the mail," she said. She dropped it on the table and Reacher and Neagley inched their chairs closer to take a look. The page protector was a standard office product. The thing inside it was an eight-by-ten colour photograph of a single sheet of white paper. It was shown lying on a wooden surface and had a wooden office ruler laid alongside it to indicate scale. It looked like a normal letter sized sheet. Centred left-to-right on it, an inch or so above the middle, were five words: You are going to die. The words were crisp and bold, obviously printed from a computer.

The room stayed quiet.

"When did it come?" Reacher asked.

"The Monday after the election," Froelich said. "First class mail."

"Addressed to Armstrong?"

Froelich nodded. "At the Senate. But he hasn't seen it yet. We open all public mail addressed to protectees. We pass on whatever is appropriate. We didn't think this was appropriate. What do you think of it?"

"Two things, I guess. Firstly, it's true."

"Not if I can help it."

"You discovered the secret of immortality? Everybody's going to die, Froelich. I am, you are. Maybe when we're a hundred, but we aren't going to live for ever. So technically it's a statement of fact. An accurate prediction, as much as a threat."

"Which raises a question," Neagley said. "Is the sender smart enough to have phrased it that way on purpose?"

"What would be the purpose?"

"To avoid prosecution if you find him? Or her? To be able to say, hey, it wasn't a threat, it was a statement of fact? Anything we can infer from the forensics about the sender's intelligence?"

Froelich looked at her in surprise. And with a measure of respect.

"We'll get to that," she said. "And we're pretty sure it's a him, not a her."

"Why?"

"We'll get to that," Froelich said again.

"But why are you worrying about it?" Reacher asked, "That's my second reaction. Surely those guys get sackloads of threats in the mail."

Froelich nodded. "Several thousand a year, typically. But most of them are sent to the President. It's fairly unusual to get one directed specifically at the Vice President. And most of them are on old scraps of paper, written in crayon, bad spelling, crossings out. Defective, in some way. And this one isn't defective. This one stood out from the start. So we looked at it pretty hard."

"Where was it mailed?"

"Las Vegas," Froelich said. "Which doesn't really help us. In terms of Americans travelling inside America, Vegas has the biggest transient population there is."

"You're sure an American sent it?"

"It's a percentage game. We've never had a written threat from a foreigner."

"And you don't think he's a Vegas resident?"

"Very unlikely. We think he travelled there to mail it."

"Because?" Neagley asked.

"Because of the forensics," Froelich said. °They're spectacular. They indicate a very careful and cautious guy."

"Details?"

"Were you a specialist? In the military police?"

"She was a specialist in breaking people's necks," Reacher said. "But I guess she took an intelligent interest in the other stuff."

"Ignore him," Neagley said. "I spent six months training in the FBI labs."

Froelich nodded. "We sent this to the FBI. Their facilities are better than ours."

There was a knock at the door. Reacher stood up and walked over and put his eye to the peephole. The room service guy, with the coffee. Reacher opened the door and took the tray from him. A large pot, three upside-down cups, three saucers, no milk or sugar or spoons, and a single pink rose in a thin china vase. He carried the tray back to the table and Froelich moved the photograph to give him room to put it down. Neagley righted the cups and started to pour.

"What did the FBI find?" she asked. "The envelope was clean," Froelich said. "Standard brown letter-size, gummed flap, metal butterfly closure. The address was printed on a self-adhesive label, presumably by the same computer that printed the message. The message was inserted unfolded. The flap gum was wetted with faucet water. No saliva, no DNA. No fingerprints on the metal closure. There were five sets of prints on the envelope itself. Three of them were postal workers. Their prints are on file as government workers. It's a condition of their employment. The fourth was the Senate mail handler who passed it on to us. And the fifth was our agent, who opened it."

Neagley nodded. "So forget the envelope. Except in as much as the faucet water was pretty thoughtful. This guy's a reader, keeps up with the times."

"What about the letter itself?" Reacher asked.

Froelich picked up the photograph and tilted it towards the room light.

"Very weird," she said. "The FBI lab says the paper was made by the Georgia-Pacific company, their high-bright, twenty-four pound heavyweight, smooth finish, acid-free laser stock, standard eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch letter-size.

"Georgia-Pacific is the third largest supplier into the office market. They sell hundreds of tons a week. So a single sheet is completely untraceable. But it's a buck or two more expensive per ream than basic paper, so that might mean something. Or it might not."

"What about the printing?"

"It's a Hewlett-Packard laser. They can tell by the toner chemistry. Can't tell which model, because all their black-and white lasers use the same basic toner powder. The typeface is Times New Roman, from Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95, fourteen point, printed bold."

"They can narrow it down to a single computer program?" Froelich nodded, "They've got a guy who specializes in that. Typefaces tend to change very subtly between different word processors. The software writers fiddle with the kerning, which is the spacing between individual letters, as opposed to the spacing between words. If you look long enough, you can kind of sense it. Then you can measure it and identify the program. But it doesn't help us much. There must be a million zillion PCs out there with Works 4.5 bundled in."