by Lee Child
Chapter 2
"Good line," Reacher said. "Interesting proposition. "
"What's your answer?" Froelich asked.
"No," he said. "Right now I think that's probably the safest all-around response. "
She smiled the tentative smile again and picked up her purse.
"Let me show you some ID," she said.
He shook his head.
"Don't need it," he said. "You're United States Secret Service. "
She looked at him. "You're pretty quick. "
"It's pretty clear," he said.
"Is it?"
He nodded. Touched his right elbow. It was bruised.
"Joe worked for them," he said. "And knowing the way he was, he probably worked pretty hard, and he was a little shy, so anybody he dated was probably in the office, otherwise he would never have met them. Plus, who else except the government keeps two-year-old Suburbans this shiny? And parks next to hydrants? And who else but the Secret Service could track me this efficiently through my banking arrangements?"
"You're pretty quick," she said again.
"Thank you," he said back. "But Joe didn't have anything to do with Vice Presidents. He was in Financial Crimes, not the White House protection detail. "
She nodded. "We all start out in Financial Crimes. We pay our dues as anticounterfeiting grunts. And he ran anticounterfeiting. And you're right, we met in the office. But he wouldn't date me then. He said it wasn't appropriate. But I was planning on transferring across to the protection detail as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I did, we started going out. "
Then she went a little quiet again. Looked down at her purse.
"And?" Reacher said.
She looked up. "Something he said one night. I was kind of keen and ambitious back then, you know, starting a new job and all, and I was always trying to figure out if we were doing the best we could, and Joe and I were goofing around, and he said the only real way for us to test ourselves would be to hire some outsider to try to get to the target. To see if it was possible, you know. A security audit, he called it. I asked him, like who? And he said, my little brother would be the one. If anybody could do it, he could. He made you sound pretty scary. "
Reacher smiled. "That sounds like Joe. A typical harebrained scheme. "
"You think?"
"For a smart guy, Joe could be very dumb sometimes. "
"Why is it dumb?"
"Because if you hire some outsider, all you need to do is watch for him coming. Makes it way too easy. "
"No, his idea was the person would come in anonymously and unannounced. Like now, absolutely nobody knows about you except me. "
Reacher nodded. "OK, maybe he wasn't so dumb. "
"He felt it was the only way. You know, however hard we work, we're always thinking inside the box. He felt we should be prepared to test ourselves against some random challenge from the outside. "
"And he nominated me?"
"He said you'd be ideal. "
"So why wait so long to try it? Whenever this conversation was, it had to be at least six years ago. Didn't take you six years to find me. "
"It was eight years ago," Froelich said. "Right at the start of our relationship, just after I got the transfer. And it only took me one day to find you. "
"So you're pretty quick, too," Reacher said. "But why wait eight years?"
"Because now I'm in charge. I was promoted head of the Vice President's detail four months ago. And I'm still keen and ambitious, and I still want to know that we're doing it right. So I decided to follow Joe's advice, now that it's my call. I decided to try a security audit. And you were recommended, so to speak. All those years ago, by somebody I trusted very much. So I'm here to ask you if you'll do it. "
"You want to get a cup of coffee?"
She looked surprised, like coffee wasn't on the agenda.
"This is urgent business," she said.
"Nothing's too urgent for coffee," he said. "That's been my experience. Drive me back to my motel and I'll take you to the downstairs lounge. Coffee's OK, and it's a very dark room. Just right for a conversation like this. "
The government Suburban had a DVD-based navigation system built into the dash, and Reacher watched her fire it up and pick the motel's street address off a long list of potential Atlantic City destinations.
"I could have told you where it is," he said.
"I'm used to this thing," she said. "It talks to me. "
"I wasn't going to use hand signals," he said.
She smiled again and pulled out into the traffic. There wasn't much. Evening gloom was falling. The wind was still blowing. The casinos might do OK, but the boardwalk and the piers and the beaches weren't going to see much business for the next six months. He sat still next to her in the warmth from the heater and thought about her with his dead brother for a moment. Then he just watched her drive. She was pretty good at it. She parked outside the motel door and he led her inside and down a half-flight of stairs to the lounge. It smelled stale and sticky, but it was warm and there was a flask of coffee on the machine behind the bar. He pointed at it, and then at himself and Froelich, and the barman got busy. Then he walked to a corner booth and slid in across the vinyl with his back to the wall and the whole room in sight. Old habits. Froelich clearly had the same habits because she did the same thing, so they ended up close together and side by side. Their shoulders were almost touching.
"You're very similar to him," she said.
"In some ways," he said. "Not in others. Like, I'm still alive. "
"You weren't at his funeral. "
"It came at an inopportune time. "
"You sound just the same. "
"Brothers often do. "
The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.
"People liked him," Froelich said.
"He was OK, I guess. "
"Is that all?"
"That's a compliment, one brother to another. "
He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.
"You drink it black," Froelich said. "Just like Joe. "
Reacher nodded. "Thing I can't get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I'm three years older than he ever got to be. "
Froelich looked away. "I know. He just stopped being there, but the world carried on anyway. It should have changed, just a little bit. "
She sipped her coffee. Black, no sugar. Just like Joe.
"Nobody ever think of doing it, apart from him?" Reacher asked. "Using an outsider for a security audit?"
"Nobody. "
"Secret Service is a relatively old organization. "
"So?"
"So I'm going to ask you an obvious question. "
She nodded. "President Lincoln signed us into existence just after lunch on April fourteenth, 1865. Then he went to the theater that same night and got assassinated. "
"Ironic. "
"From our perspective, now. But back then we were only supposed to protect the currency. Then McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they figured they should have somebody looking out for the President full-time, and we got the job. "
"Because there was no FBI until the 1930s. "
She shook her head. "Actually there was an early incarnation called the Office of the Chief Examiner, founded in 1908. It became the FBI in 1935. "
"That sounds like the sort of pedantic stuff Joe would know. "
"I think it was him who told me. "
"He would. He loved all that historical stuff. "
He saw her make an effort not to go quiet again.
"So what was your obvious question?" she said.
"You use an outsider for the very first time in a hundred and one years, got to be because of something more
than you're a perfectionist. "
She started to answer, and then she stopped. She paused a beat. He saw her decide to lie. He could sense it, in the angle of her shoulder.
"I'm under big pressure," she said. "You know, professionally. There are a lot of people waiting for me to screw up. I need to be sure. "
He said nothing. Waited for the embellishments. Liars always embellish.
"I wasn't an easy choice," she said. "It's still rare for a woman to head up a team. There's a gender thing going on, same as anywhere else, I guess, same as always. Some of my colleagues are a little Neanderthal. "
He nodded. Said nothing.
"It's always on my mind," she said. "I've got to slam-dunk the whole thing. "
"Which Vice President?" he asked. "The new one or the old one?"
"The new one," she said. "Brook Armstrong. The Vice President-elect, strictly speaking. I was assigned to lead his team back when he joined the ticket, and we want continuity, so it's a little bit like an election for us, too. If our guy wins, we stay on the job. If our guy loses, we're back to being footsoldiers. "
Reacher smiled. "So did you vote for him?"
She didn't answer.
"What did Joe say about me?" he asked.
"He said you'd relish the challenge. You'd beat your brains out to find a way of getting it done. He said you had a lot of ingenuity and you'd find three or four ways of doing it and we'd learn a lot from you. "
"And you said?"
"This was eight years ago, don't forget. I was kind of full of myself, I guess. I said no way would you even get close. "
"And he said?"
"He said plenty of people had made that same mistake. "
Reacher shrugged. "I was in the Army eight years ago. I was probably ten thousand miles away, up to my eyes in bullshit. "
She nodded. "Joe knew that. It was kind of theoretical. "
He looked at her. "But now it's not theoretical, apparently. Eight years later you're going ahead with it. And I'm still wondering why. "
"Like I said, now it's my call. And I'm under big-time pressure to perform well. "
He said nothing.
"Would you consider doing it?" Froelich asked.
"I don't know much about Armstrong. Never heard much about him before. "
She nodded. "Nobody has. He was a surprise choice. Junior senator from North Dakota, standard-issue family man, wife, grown-up daughter, cares long-distance for his sick old mother, never made any kind of national impact. But he's an OK guy, for a politician. Better than most. I like him a lot, so far. "
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
"We would pay you, obviously," Froelich said. "That's not a problem. You know, a professional fee, as long as it's reasonable. "
"I'm not very interested in money," Reacher said. "I don't need a job. "
"You could volunteer. "
"I was a soldier. Soldiers never volunteer for anything. "
"That's not what Joe said about you. He said you did all kinds of stuff. "
"I don't like to be employed. "
"Well, if you want to do it for free we certainly wouldn't object. "
He was quiet for a beat. "There would be expenses, probably, if a person did this sort of a thing properly. "
"We'd reimburse them, naturally. Whatever the person needed. All official and aboveboard, afterward. "
He looked down at the table. "Exactly what would you want the person to do?"
"I want you, not a person. Just to act the part of an assassin. To scrutinize things from an outside perspective. Find the holes. Prove to me if he's vulnerable, with times, dates, places. I could start you off with some schedule information, if you want. "
"You offer that to all assassins? If you're going to do this you should do it for real, don't you think?"
"OK," she said.
"You still think nobody could get close?"
She considered her answer carefully, maybe ten seconds. "On balance, yes, I do. We work very hard. I think we've got everything covered. "
"So you think Joe was wrong back then?"
She didn't answer.
"Why did you break up?" he asked.
She glanced away for a second and shook her head. "That's private. "
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-five. "
"So eight years ago you were twenty-seven. "
She smiled. "Joe was nearly thirty-six. An older man. I celebrated his birthday with him. And his thirty-seventh. "
Reacher moved sideways a little and looked at her again. Joe had good taste, he thought. Close up, she looked good. Smelled good. Perfect skin, great eyes, long lashes. Good cheekbones, a small straight nose. She looked lithe and strong. She was attractive, no doubt about it. He wondered what it would be like to hold her, kiss her. Go to bed with her. He pictured Joe wondering the same thing, the first time she walked into the office he ran. And he eventually found out. Way to go, Joe.
"I guess I forgot to send a birthday card," he said. "Either time. "
"I don't think he minded. "
"We weren't very close," he said. "I don't really understand why not. "
"He liked you," she said. "He made that clear. Talked about you, time to time. I think he was quite proud of you, in his own way. "
Reacher said nothing.
"So will you help me out?" she asked.
"What was he like? As a boss?"
"He was terrific. He was a superstar, professionally. "
"What about as a boyfriend?"
"He was pretty good at that, too. "
Reacher said nothing. There was a long silence.
"Where have you been since you left the service?" Froelich asked. "You haven't left much of a paper trail. "
"That was the plan," Reacher said. "I keep myself to myself. "
Questions in her eyes.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'm not radioactive. "
"I know," she said. "Because I checked. But I'm kind of curious, now that I've met you. You were just a name before. "
He glanced down at the table, trying to look at himself as a third party, described secondhand in occasional bits and pieces by a brother. It was an interesting perspective.
"Will you help me out?" she asked again.
She unbuttoned her coat, because of the warmth of the room. She was wearing a pure white blouse under the coat. She moved a little closer, and half-turned to face him. They were as close as lovers on a lazy afternoon.
"I don't know," he said.
"It'll be dangerous," she said. "I have to warn you that nobody will know you're out there except me. That's a big problem if you're spotted anywhere. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn't be asking. "
"I wouldn't be spotted anywhere," Reacher said.
She smiled. "That's exactly what Joe told me you'd say, eight years ago. "
He said nothing.
"It's very important," she said. "And urgent. "
"You want to tell me why it's important?"
"I've already told you why. "
"Want to tell me why it's urgent?"
She said nothing.
"I don't think this is theoretical at all," he said.
She said nothing.
"I think you've got a situation," he said.
She said nothing.
"I think you know somebody is out there," he said. "An active threat. "
She looked away. "I can't comment on that. "
"I was in the Army," he said. "I've heard answers like that before. "
"It's just a security audit," she said. "Will you do it for me?"
He was quiet for a long time.
"There would be two conditions," he said.
She turned back and looked at him. "Which are?"
"One, I get to work somewhere cold. "
"Why?"
"Because I just spent a hundred and eighty-n
ine dollars on warm clothes. "
She smiled, briefly. "Everywhere he's going should be cold enough for you in the middle of November. "
"OK," he said. He dug in his pocket and slid her a matchbook and pointed to the name and address printed on it. "And there's an old couple working a week in this particular club and they're worried about getting ripped off for their wages. Musicians. They should be OK, but I need to be sure. I want you to talk to the cops here. "
"Friends of yours?"
"Recent. "
"When's payday supposed to be?"
"Friday night, after the last set. Midnight, maybe. They need to pick up their money and get their stuff to their car. They'll be heading to New York. "
"I'll ask one of our agents to check in with them every day. Better than the cops, I think. We've got a field office here. Big-time money laundering in Atlantic City. It's the casinos. So you'll do it?"
Reacher went quiet again and thought about his brother. He's back to haunt me, he thought. I knew he would be, one day. His coffee cup was empty but still warm. He lifted it off the saucer and tilted it and watched the sludge in the bottom flow toward him, slow and brown, like river silt.
"When does it need to be done?" he asked.
At that exact moment less than a hundred and thirty miles away in a warehouse behind Baltimore's Inner Harbor cash was finally exchanged for two weapons and matching ammunition. A lot of cash. Good weapons. Special ammunition. The planning for the second attempt had started with an objective analysis of the first attempt's failure. As realistic professionals they were reluctant to blame the whole debacle on inadequate hardware, but they agreed that better firepower couldn't hurt. So they had researched their needs and located a supplier. He had what they wanted. The price was right. They negotiated a guarantee. It was their usual type of arrangement. They told the guy that if there was a problem with the merchandise they would come back and shoot him through the spinal cord, low down, put him in a wheelchair.
Getting their hands on the guns was the last preparatory step. Now they were ready to go fully operational.
Vice President-elect Brook Armstrong had six main tasks in the ten weeks between election and inauguration. Sixth and least important was the continuation of his duties as junior senator from North Dakota until his term officially ended. There were nearly six hundred and fifty thousand people in the state and any one of them might want attention at any time, but Armstrong assumed they all understood they were in limbo until his successor took over. Equally, Congress wasn't doing much of anything until January. So his senatorial duties didn't occupy much of his attention.
Fifth task was to ease his successor into place back home. He had scheduled two rallies in the state so he could hand the new guy on to his own tame media contacts. It had to be a visual thing, shoulder to shoulder, plenty of grip-and-grin for the cameras, Armstrong taking a metaphoric step backward, the new guy taking a metaphoric step forward. The first rally was planned for the twentieth of November, the other four days later. Both would be irksome, but party loyalty demanded it.
Fourth task was to learn some things. He would be a member of the National Security Council, for instance. He would be exposed to stuff a junior senator from North Dakota couldn't be expected to know. A CIA staffer had been assigned as his personal tutor, and there were Pentagon people coming in, and Foreign Service people. It was all kept as fluid as possible, but there was a lot of work to be fitted around everything else.
And everything else was increasingly urgent. The third task was where it started to get important. There were some tens of thousands of contributors who had supported the campaign nationally. The really big donors would be taken care of in other ways, but the individual thousand-dollar-and-up supporters needed to share the success, too. So the party had scheduled a number of big receptions in D. C. where they could all mill around and feel important and at the center of things. Their local committees would invite them to fly in and dress up and rub shoulders. They would be told it wasn't officially certain yet whether it would be the new President or the new Vice President hosting them. In practice three-quarters of the duty was already scheduled to fall to Armstrong.
The second task was where it started to get really important. Second task was to stroke Wall Street. A change of administration was a sensitive thing, financially. No real reason why there should be anything but smooth continuity, but temporary nerves and jitters could snowball fast, and market instability could cripple a new presidency from the get-go. So a lot of effort went into investor reassurance. The President-elect handled most of it himself, with the crucial players getting extensive personal face time in D. C. , but Armstrong was slated to handle the second-division people up in New York. There were five separate trips planned during the ten-week period.
But Armstrong's first and most important task of all was to run the transition team. A new administration needs a roster of nearly eight thousand people, and about eight hundred of them need confirmation by the Senate, of which about eighty are really key players. Armstrong's job was to participate in their selection, and then use his Senate connections to grease their way through the upcoming confirmation process. The transition operation was based in the official space on G Street, but it made sense for Armstrong to lead it from his old Senate office. All in all, it wasn't fun. It was grunt work, but that's the difference between being first and second on the ticket.
So the third week after the election went like this: Armstrong spent the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday inside the Beltway, working with the transition team. His wife was taking a well-earned post-election break at home in North Dakota, so he was temporarily living alone in his Georgetown row house. Froelich packed his protection detail with her best agents and kept them all on high alert.
He had four agents camping out with him in the house and four Metro cops permanently stationed outside in cars, two in front and two in the alley behind. A Secret Service limo picked him up every morning and drove him to the Senate offices, with a second car following. The gun car, it was called. There was the usual efficient transfer across the sidewalks at both ends. Then three agents stayed with him throughout the day. His personal detail, three tall men, dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties, sunglasses even in November. They kept him inside a tight unobtrusive triangle of protection, always unsmiling, eyes always roving, physical placement always subtly adjusting. Sometimes he could hear faint sounds from their radio earpieces. They wore microphones on their wrists and carried automatic weapons under their jackets. He thought the whole experience was impressive, but he knew he was in no real danger inside the office building. There were D. C. cops outside, the Hill's own security inside, permanent metal detectors on all the street doors, and all the people he saw were either elected members or their staffers, who had been security-cleared many times over.
But Froelich wasn't as sanguine as Armstrong was. She watched for Reacher in Georgetown and on the Hill, and saw no sign of him. He wasn't there. Neither was anybody else worth worrying about. It should have relaxed her, but it didn't.
The first scheduled reception for mid-level donors was held on the Thursday evening, in the ballroom of a big chain hotel. The whole building was swept by dogs during the afternoon, and key interior positions were occupied by Metro cops who would stay put until Armstrong finally left many hours later. Froelich put two Secret Service agents on the door, six in the lobby, and eight in the ballroom itself. Another four secured the loading dock, which is where Armstrong would enter. Discreet video cameras covered the whole of the lobby and the whole of the ballroom and each was connected to its own recorder. The recorders were all slaved to a master timecode generator, so there would be a permanent real-time record of the whole event.
The guest list was a thousand people long. November weather meant they couldn't line up on the sidewalk and the tenor of the event meant security had to be pleasantly unobtrusive, so the standard winter protocol applied, whic
h was to get the guests in off the street and into the lobby immediately through a temporary metal detector placed inside the frame of the entrance door. Then they milled around inside the lobby and eventually made their way to the ballroom door. Once there, their printed invitations were checked and they were asked for photo ID. The invitations were laid facedown on a glass sheet for a moment, and then handed back as souvenirs. Under the glass sheet was a video camera working to the same timecode as the others, so names and faces were permanently tied together in the visual record. Finally, they passed through a second metal detector and onward into the ballroom. Froelich's crew were serious but good-humored, and made it seem more like they were protecting the guests themselves from some thrilling unspecified danger, rather than protecting Armstrong from them.
Froelich spent her time staring at the video monitors, looking for faces that didn't fit. She saw none, but she kept on worrying anyway. She saw no sign of Reacher. She wasn't sure whether to be relieved or annoyed about that. Was he doing it or not? She thought about cheating and issuing his description to her team. Then she thought better of it. Win or lose, I need to know, she thought.
Armstrong's two-car convoy entered the loading dock a half hour later, by which time the guests had drunk a couple of glasses of cheap sparkling wine and eaten as many soggy canapes as they wanted. His personal three-man detail brought him in through a rear passageway and kept to a ten-foot radius for the duration. His appearance was timed to last two hours, which gave him an average of a little over seven seconds per guest. On a rope line seven seconds would be an eternity, but this situation was different, primarily in the handshaking method. A campaigning politician learns very quickly to fumble a handshake and grip the back of the recipient's hand, not the palm. It creates a breathless so-much-support-here-I've-got-to-be-quick type of drama, and better still it means it's strictly the pol's choice when he lets go, not the supporter's. But in an event of this nature, Armstrong couldn't use that tactic. So he had to shake properly and work fast to keep to seven seconds each. Some guests were content with brevity and others hung on a little longer, gushing their congratulations like maybe he hadn't experienced any before. There were some men who went for the two-handed forearm grip. Some put their arms around his shoulders for private photographs. Some were disappointed that his wife wasn't there. Some weren't. There was one woman in particular who took his hand in a firm grip and held on for ten or twelve seconds, even pulling him nice and close and whispering something in his ear. She was surprisingly strong and nearly pulled him off balance. He didn't really hear what she whispered. Maybe her room number. But she was slim and pretty, with dark hair and a great smile, so he wasn't too upset about it. He just smiled back gratefully and moved on. His Secret Service detail didn't bat an eye.
He worked a complete circle around the room, eating nothing, drinking nothing, and made it back out of the rear door after two hours and eleven minutes. His personal detail put him back in his car and drove him home. The sidewalk crossing was completely uneventful and another eight minutes later his house was locked down for the night and secure. Back at the hotel the rest of the security detail withdrew unnoticed and the thousand guests left over the next hour or so.
Froelich drove straight back to her office and called Stuyvesant at home just before midnight. He answered right away and sounded like he had been holding his breath and waiting for the phone to ring.
"Secure," she said.
"OK," he replied. "Any problems?"
"None that I saw. "
"You should review the video anyway. Look for faces. "
"I plan to. "
"Happy about tomorrow?"
"I'm not happy about anything. "
"Your outsider working yet?"
"Waste of time. Three full days and he's nowhere to be seen. "
"What did I tell you? It wasn't necessary. "
There was nothing to accomplish in D. C. on the Friday morning so Armstrong stayed home and had his CIA guy come in for two hours' teaching. Then his detail rehearsed the full motorcade exfiltration. They used an armored Cadillac with two escort Suburbans flanked by two cop cars and a motorcycle escort. They drove him to Andrews Air Force Base for a midday flight to New York City. As a courtesy the defeated incumbents had allowed him the use of Air Force Two, although technically it couldn't use that call sign until it had a real inaugurated Vice President in it, so for the moment it was just a comfortable private airplane. It flew into La Guardia and three cars from the Secret Service's New York Field Office picked the party up and drove them south to Wall Street, with an NYPD motorcycle escort riding ahead of them.
Froelich was already in position inside the Stock Exchange. The New York Field Office had plenty of experience working with the NYPD and she was comfortable that the building was adequately secure. Armstrong's reassurance meetings were held in a back office and lasted two hours, so she relaxed until the photo call. The transition team's media handlers wanted news pictures on the sidewalk in front of the building's pillars, sometime after the closing bell. She had no chance whatsoever of persuading them otherwise, because they desperately needed the positive exposure. But she was profoundly unhappy about her guy standing still in the open air for any period of time. She had agents video the photographers for the record and check their press credentials twice and search every camera bag and every pocket of every vest. She checked in by radio with the local NYPD lieutenant and confirmed that the perimeter was definitively secured to a thousand feet on the ground and five hundred vertically. Then she allowed Armstrong out with the assorted brokers and bankers and they posed for five whole agonizing minutes. The photographers crouched on the sidewalk right at Armstrong's feet so they could get group head-and-shoulders shots with the New York Stock Exchange lintel inscription floating overhead. Too much proximity, Froelich thought. Armstrong and the financial guys stared optimistically and resolutely into the middle distance, endlessly. Then, mercifully, it was over. Armstrong gave his patented "I'd love to stay" wave and backed away into the building. The financiers followed him and the photographers dispersed. Froelich relaxed again. Next up was a routine road trip back to Air Force Two and a flight to North Dakota for the first of Armstrong's handover rallies the next day, which meant she had maybe fourteen hours without major pressure.
Her cell phone rang in the car as they got close to La Guardia. It was her senior colleague from the Treasury side of the organization, at his desk in D. C.
"That bank account we're tracking?" he said. "The customer just called in again. He's wiring twenty grand to Western Union in Chicago. "
"In cash?"
"No, cashier's check. "
"A Western Union cashier's check? For twenty grand? He's paying somebody for something. Goods or services. Got to be. "
Her colleague made no reply, and she clicked her phone off and just held it in her hand for a second. Chicago? Armstrong wasn't going anywhere near Chicago.
Air Force Two landed in Bismarck and Armstrong went home to join his wife and spend the night in his own bed in the family house in the lake country south of the city. It was a big old place with an apartment above the garage block that the Secret Service took over as its own. Froelich withdrew Mrs. Armstrong's personal detail to give the couple some privacy. She gave all the personal agents the rest of the night off and tasked four more to stake out the house, two in front, two behind. State troopers made up the numbers, parked in cars on a three-hundred-yard radius. She walked the whole area herself as a final check, and her cell phone rang as she came back into the driveway.
"Froelich?" Reacher said.
"How did you get this number?"
"I was a military cop. I can get numbers. "
"Where are you?"
"Don't forget those musicians, OK? In Atlantic City? Tonight's the night. "
Then the phone went dead. She walked up to the apartment above the garage and idled some time away. She called the Atlantic Ci
ty office at one in the morning and was told that the old couple had been paid the right money at the right time and escorted to their car and all the way out to I-95, where they had turned north. She clicked off her phone and sat for a spell in a window seat, just thinking. It was a quiet night, very dark. Very lonely. Cold. Distant dogs barked occasionally. No moon, no stars. She hated nights like this. The family-house situations were always the trickiest. Eventually anybody got thoroughly sick of being guarded, and even though Armstrong was still amused by the novelty she could tell he was ready for some down time. And certainly his wife was. So she had nobody at all in the interior and was relying exclusively on perimeter defense. She knew she should be doing more, but she had no real option, at least not until they explained the extent of the present danger to Armstrong himself, which they hadn't yet done, because the Secret Service never does.
Saturday dawned bright and cold in North Dakota, and preparations began immediately after breakfast. The rally was scheduled for one o'clock on the grounds of a church community center on the south side of the city. Froelich had been surprised that it was an outdoors event, but Armstrong had told her that it would be heavy overcoat weather, nothing more. He told her that North Dakotans usually didn't retreat indoors until well after Thanksgiving. At which point she was almost overcome by an irrational desire to cancel the whole event. But she knew the transition team would oppose her, and she didn't want to fight losing battles this early. So she said nothing. Then she almost proposed Armstrong wear a Kevlar vest under his heavy overcoat, but eventually she decided against it. Poor guy's got four years of this, maybe eight, she thought. He's not even inaugurated yet. Too early. Later, she wished she'd gone with her first instinct.
The church community center's grounds were about the size of a soccer field and were bordered to the north by the church itself, which was a handsome white clapboard structure traditional in every way. The other three sides were well fenced and two of them backed onto established housing subdivisions, with the third fronting onto the street. There was a wide gateway that opened into a small parking lot. Froelich banned parking for the day and put two agents and a local cop car on the gate, with twelve more cops on foot on the grass just inside the perimeter. She put two cop cars in each of the surrounding streets and had the church itself searched by the local police canine unit and then closed and locked. She doubled the personal detail to six agents, because Armstrong's wife was accompanying him. She told the detail to stick close to the couple at all times. Armstrong didn't argue with that. Being seen in the center of a prowling pack of six tough guys looked very high-level. His successor-designate would be happy about it, too. Some of that D. C. power-elite status might rub off on him.
The Armstrongs made it a rule never to eat at public events. It was too easy to look like idiots, greasy fingers, trying to talk while chewing. So they had an early lunch at home and drove up in convoy and got right to the business at hand. It was easy enough. Even relaxing, in a way. Local politics was not Armstrong's problem anymore. Wouldn't be much of a problem for his successor either, to be truthful. He had a handsome newly minted plurality and was basking in a lot of reflected glow. So the afternoon turned out to be not much more than a pleasant stroll around a pleasant piece of real estate. His wife was beautiful, his successor stayed at his side throughout, there were no awkward questions from the press, all four network affiliates and CNN were there, all the local papers had sent photographers, and stringers from The Washington Post and The New York Times showed up, too. All in all it went so well he began to wish they hadn't bothered to schedule the follow-up event. It really wasn't necessary.
Froelich watched the faces. She watched the perimeters. She watched the crowd, straining to sense any alteration in the herd behavior that might indicate tension or uneasiness or sudden panic. She saw nothing. Saw no sign of Reacher, either.
Armstrong stayed thirty minutes longer than anticipated, because the weak fall sun bathed the field in gold, and there was no breeze, and he was having a good time, and there was nothing scheduled for the evening except a quiet dinner with key members of the state legislature. So his wife was escorted home and his personal detail herded him back toward the cars and drove him north into the city of Bismarck itself. There was a hotel adjacent to the restaurant and Froelich had arranged rooms for the dead time before the meal. Armstrong napped for an hour and then showered and dressed. The meal was going well when his chief of staff fielded a call. The outgoing President and Vice President were formally summoning the President-elect and the Vice President-elect to a one-day transition conference at the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont, starting early the next morning. It was a conventional invitation, because inevitably there was business to discuss. And it was delivered in the traditional way, last-minute and pompous, because the lame ducks wanted to push the world around one last time. But Froelich was delighted, because the unofficial name for the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont is Camp David, and there is no safer place in the world than that particular wooded clearing in the Maryland mountains. She decided they should all fly back to Andrews immediately and take Marine helicopters straight out to the compound. If they spent all night and all day there she would be able to relax completely for twenty-four hours.
But late on the Sunday morning a Navy steward found her at breakfast in the mess hall and plugged a telephone into a baseboard socket near her chair. Nobody uses cordless or cellular phones at Camp David. Too vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping.
"Call transferred from your main office, ma'am," the steward said.
There was empty silence for a second, and then a voice.
"We should get together," Reacher said.
"Why?"
"Can't tell you on the phone. "
"Where have you been?"
"Here and there. "
"Where are you now?"
"In a room at the hotel you used for the reception Thursday. "
"You got something urgent for me?"
"A conclusion. "
"Already? It's only been five days. You said ten. "
"Five was enough. "
Froelich cupped the phone. "What's the conclusion?"
Then she found herself holding her breath.
"It's impossible," Reacher said.
She breathed out and smiled. "Told you so. "
"No, your job is impossible. You should get over here, right now. "
