Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “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 dialed 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 color 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. Centered 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. First, 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 forever. 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 traveling 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 traveled 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 inasmuch 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 toward 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.”

  “No prints, I guess,” Neagley said.

  “Well, this is where it gets weird,” Froelich answered. She moved the coffee tray an inch and laid the photograph flat. Pointed to the top edge. “Right here on the actual edge we’ve got microscopic traces of talcum dust.” Then she pointed to a spot an inch below the top edge. “And here we’ve got two definite smudges of talcum dust, one on the back, one on the front.”

  “Latex gloves,” Neagley said.

  “Exactly,” Froelich said. “Disposable latex gloves, like a doctor’s or a dentist’s. They come in boxes of fifty or a hundred pairs. Talcum powder inside the gl
oves, to help them slip on. But there’s always some loose talcum in the box, so it transfers from the outside of the glove, too. The dust on the top edge is baked, but the smudges aren’t.”

  “OK,” Neagley said. “So the guy puts on his gloves, breaks open a new ream of paper, fans it out so it won’t jam, which puts talcum dust on the top edge where he flips it, then he loads the printer, prints out his message, whereby he bakes the dust.”

  “Because a laser printer uses heat,” Froelich said. “The toner powder is attracted to the paper by an electrostatic charge in the shape of the required letters, and then a heater bakes it into place permanently. Somewhere around two hundred degrees, I think, momentarily.”

  Neagley leaned close. “Then he lifts the paper out of the output tray by clamping it between his finger and thumb, which accounts for the smudges front and back near the top, which aren’t baked because it’s after the heat treatment. And you know what? This is a home office, not a work office.”

  “Why?”

  “The front and back finger-clamping thing means the paper is coming out of the printer vertically. Popping up, like a toaster. If it was feeding out flat the marks would be different. There would be a smear on the front where he slides it. Less of a mark on the back. And the only Hewlett-Packard lasers that feed the paper vertically are the little ones. Home-office things. I’ve got one myself. It’s too slow to use high-volume. And the toner cartridge only lasts twenty-five hundred pages. Strictly amateur. So this guy did this in his den at home.”

  Froelich nodded. “Stands to reason, I guess. He’s going to look a little strange using latex gloves in front of other people in an office.”

  Neagley smiled, like she was making progress. “OK, he’s in his den, he lifts the message out of his printer and slides it straight into the envelope and seals it with faucet water while he’s still got his gloves on. Hence none of his prints.”

  Froelich’s face changed. “No, this is where it gets very weird.” She pointed to the photograph. Laid her fingernail on a spot an inch below the printed message, and a little ways to the right of center. “What might we expect to find here, if this were a regular letter, for instance?”

  “A signature,” Reacher said.

  “Exactly,” Froelich said. She kept her fingernail on the spot. “And what we’ve got here is a thumbprint. A big, clear, definite thumbprint. Obviously deliberate. Bold as anything, exactly vertical, clear as a bell. Way too big to be a woman’s. He’s signed the message with his thumb.”

  Reacher pulled the photograph out from under Froelich’s finger and studied it.

  “You’re tracing the print, obviously,” Neagley said.

  “They won’t find anything,” Reacher said. “The guy must be completely confident his prints aren’t on file anywhere.”

  “We’ve come up blank so far,” Froelich said.

  “Which is very weird,” Reacher said. “He signs the note with his thumbprint, which he’s happy to do because his prints aren’t on file anywhere, but he goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure his prints don’t appear anywhere else on the letter or the envelope. Why?”

  “Effect?” Neagley said. “Drama? Neatness?”

  “But it explains the expensive paper,” Reacher said. “The smooth coating holds the print. Cheap paper would be too porous.”

  “What did they use at the lab?” Neagley asked. “Iodine fuming? Ninhydrin?”

  Froelich shook her head. “It came right up on the fluoroscope.”

  Reacher was quiet for a spell, just looking at the photograph. Full dark had fallen outside the window. Shiny, damp, city dark.

  “What else?” he said to Froelich. “Why are you so uptight?”

  “Should she need something else?” Neagley asked him.

  He nodded. You know how these organizations work, he had told her.

  “There has to be something else,” he said. “I mean, OK, this is scary and challenging and intriguing, I guess, but she’s really panicking here.”

  Froelich sighed and picked up her envelope and slid out a second item. It was identical to the first in almost every respect. A plastic page protector, with an eight-by-ten color photograph inside it. The photograph showed a sheet of white paper. There were eight words printed on it: Vice-President–elect Armstrong is going to die. The paper was lying on a different surface, and it had a different ruler next to it. The surface was gray laminate, and the ruler was clear plastic.

  “It’s virtually identical,” Froelich said. “The forensics are the same, and it’s got the same thumbprint for a signature.”

  “And?”

  “It showed up on my boss’s desk,” Froelich said. “One morning, it was just there. No envelope, no nothing. And absolutely no way of telling how it got there.”

  Reacher stood up and moved to the window. Found the track cord and pulled the drapes closed. No real reason. It just felt like the appropriate thing to do.

  “When did it show up?” he asked.

  “Three days after the first one came in the mail,” Froelich said.

  “Aimed at you,” Neagley said. “Rather than Armstrong himself. Why? To make sure you take the first one seriously?”

  “We were already taking it seriously,” Froelich said.

  “When does Armstrong leave Camp David?” Reacher asked.

  “They’ll have dinner there tonight,” Froelich said. “Probably shoot the breeze for a spell. They’ll fly back after midnight, I guess.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “Guy called Stuyvesant,” Froelich said. “Like the cigarette.”

  “You tell him about the last five days?”

  Froelich shook her head. “I decided not to.”

  “Wise,” Reacher said. “Exactly what do you want us to do?”

  Froelich was quiet for a spell.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “I’ve asked myself that for six days, ever since I decided to find you. I asked myself, in a situation like this, what do I really want? And you know what? I really want to talk to somebody. Specifically, I really want to talk to Joe. Because there are complexities here, aren’t there? You can see that, right? And Joe would find a way through them. He was smart like that.”

  “You want me to be Joe?” Reacher said.

  “No, I want Joe to be still alive.”

  Reacher nodded. “You and me both. But he ain’t.”

  “So maybe you could be the next best thing.”

  Then she was quiet again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That didn’t come out very well.”

  “Tell me about the Neanderthals,” Reacher said. “In your office.”

  She nodded. “That was my first thought, too.”

  “It’s a definite possibility,” he said. “Some guy gets all jealous and resentful, lays all this stuff on you and hopes you’ll crack up and look stupid.”

  “My first thought,” she said again.

  “Any likely candidates in particular?”

  She shrugged. “On the surface, none of them. Below the surface, any of them. There are six guys on my old pay grade who got passed over when I got the promotion. Each one of them has got friends and allies and supporters in the grades below. Like networks inside networks. Could be anybody.”

  “Gut feeling?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t come up with a favorite. And all their prints are on file. Condition of employment for us too. And this period between the election and the inauguration is very busy. We’re stretched. Nobody’s had time for a weekend in Vegas.”

  “Didn’t have to be a weekend. Could have been in and out in a single day.”

  Froelich said nothing.

  “What about discipline problems?” Reacher asked. “Anybody resent the way you’re leading the team? You had to yell at anybody yet? Anybody underperforming?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve changed a few things. Spoken to a couple of people. But I’ve been tactful. And the thumbprint doesn’t match anybod
y anyway, whether I’ve spoken to them or not. So I think it’s a genuine threat from out there in the world.”

  “Me too,” Neagley said. “But there’s some insider involvement, right? Like, who else could wander around your building and leave something on your boss’s desk?”

  Froelich nodded.

  “I need you to come see the office,” she said.

  They rode the short distance in the government Suburban. Reacher sprawled in the back and Neagley rode with Froelich in the front. The night air was damp, suspended somewhere between drizzle and evening mist. The roads were glossy with water and orange light. The tires hissed and the windshield wipers thumped back and forth. Reacher glimpsed the White House railings and the front of the Treasury Building before Froelich turned a corner and drove into a narrow alley and headed for a garage entrance straight ahead. There was a steep ramp and a guard in a glass booth and a bright wash of white light. There were low ceilings and thick concrete pillars. She parked the Suburban on the end of a row of six identical models. There were Lincoln Town Cars here and there, and Cadillacs of various vintages and sizes with awkward rebuilt frames around the windows where bulletproof glass had been installed. Every vehicle was black and shiny and the whole garage was painted glossy white, walls and ceiling and floor alike. The place looked like a monochrome photograph. There was a door with a small porthole of wired glass. Froelich led them through it and up a narrow mahogany staircase into a small first-floor lobby. There were marble pilasters and a single elevator door.

  “You two shouldn’t really be here,” Froelich said. “So say nothing, stick close to me and walk fast, OK?”

  Then she paused a beat. “But come look at something first.”

  She led them through another inconspicuous door and around a corner into a vast dark hall that felt the size of a football field.

  “The building’s main lobby,” she said. Her voice echoed in the marble emptiness. The light was dim. White stone looked gray in the gloom.