Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “We worked together in the military,” Neagley said.

  Stuyvesant nodded, like that was an inference he had drawn long ago.

  “Let’s talk about baseball,” he said. “You follow the game?”

  They all waited.

  “The Washington Senators had already gone when I hit town,” he said. “So I’ve had to make do with the Baltimore Orioles, which has been a mixed bag in terms of fun. But do you understand what’s unique about the game?”

  “The length of the season,” Reacher said. “The win percentages.”

  Stuyvesant smiled, like he was conferring praise.

  “Maybe you’re better than half as smart,” he said. “The thing about baseball is that the regular season is one hundred sixty-two games long. Way, way longer than any other sport. Any other sport has about half as many games as baseball. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer, anything. Any other sport, the players can start out thinking they can win every single game all season long. It’s just about a realistic motivational goal. It’s even been achieved, here and there, now and then. But it’s impossible in baseball. The very best teams, the greatest champions, they all lose around a third of their games. They lose fifty or sixty times a year, at least. Imagine what that feels like, from a psychological perspective. You’re a superb athlete, you’re fanatically competitive, but you know for sure you’re going to lose repeatedly. You have to make mental adjustments, or you couldn’t cope with it. And presidential protection is exactly the same thing. That’s my point. We can’t win every day. So we get used to it.”

  “You only lost once,” Neagley said. “Back in 1963.”

  “No,” Stuyvesant said. “We lose repeatedly. But not every loss is significant. Just like baseball. Not every hit they get produces a run against you, not every defeat they inflict loses you the World Series. And with us, not every mistake kills our guy.”

  “So what are you saying?” Neagley asked.

  Stuyvesant sat forward. “I’m saying despite what your audit might have revealed you should still have considerable faith in us. Not every error costs us a run. Now, I completely understand that kind of so-what self-confidence must seem very offhand to an outsider. But you must understand we’re forced to think that way. Your audit showed up a few holes, and what we have to do now is judge whether it’s possible to fill them. Whether it’s reasonable. I’m going to leave that to Froelich’s own judgment. It’s her show. But what I’m suggesting is that you get rid of any sense of doubt you’re feeling about us. As private citizens. Any sense of our failure. Because we’re not failing. There are always going to be holes. Part of the job. This is a democracy. Get used to it.”

  Then he sat back, like he was finished.

  “What about this specific threat?” Reacher asked him.

  Stuyvesant paused, and then he shook his head. His face had changed. The mood in the whole room had changed.

  “That’s precisely where I stop being frank,” he said. “I told you it was a temporary indulgence. And it was a very serious lapse on Froelich’s part to reveal the existence of any threat at all. All I’m prepared to say is we intercept a lot of threats. Then we deal with them. How we deal with them is entirely confidential. Therefore I would ask you to understand you are now under an absolute obligation never to mention this situation to anybody after you leave here tonight. Or any aspect of our procedures. That obligation is rooted in federal statute. There are sanctions available to me.”

  There was silence. Reacher said nothing. Neagley sat quiet. Froelich looked upset. Stuyvesant ignored her completely and gazed hard at Reacher and Neagley, at first hostile, and then suddenly pensive. He started thinking hard again. He stood up and walked over to the low cabinet with the telephones on it. Squatted down in front of it. Opened the doors and took out two yellow legal pads and two ballpoint pens. Walked back and dropped one of each in front of Reacher and one of each in front of Neagley. Circled around the head of the table again and sat back down in his chair.

  “Write your full names,” he said. “All and any aliases, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, military ID numbers, and current addresses.”

  “What for?” Reacher asked.

  “Just do it,” Stuyvesant said.

  Reacher paused and picked up his pen. Froelich looked at him, anxiously. Neagley glanced at him and shrugged and started writing on her pad. Reacher waited a beat and then followed her example. He was finished well before her. He had no middle name and no current address. Stuyvesant walked around behind them and scooped the pads off the table. Said nothing and walked straight out of the room with the pads held tight under his arm. The door slammed loudly behind him.

  “I’m in trouble,” Froelich said. “And I’ve made trouble for you guys, too.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Reacher said. “He’s going to make us sign some kind of confidentiality agreement, is all. He’s gone to get them typed up, I guess.”

  “But what’s he going to do to me?”

  “Nothing, probably.”

  “Demote me? Fire me?”

  “He authorized the audit. The audit was necessary because of the threats. The two things were connected. We’ll tell him we pushed you with questions.”

  “He’ll demote me,” Froelich said. “He wasn’t happy about me running the audit in the first place. Told me it indicated a lack of self-confidence.”

  “Bullshit,” Reacher said. “We did stuff like that all the time.”

  “Audits build self-confidence,” Neagley said. “That was our experience. Better to know something for sure than just hope for the best.”

  Froelich looked away. Didn’t reply. The room went quiet. They all waited, five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Reacher stood up and stretched. Stepped over to the low cabinet and looked at the red phone. He picked it up and held it to his ear. There was no dial tone. He put it back and scanned the confidential memos on the notice board. The ceiling was low and he could feel heat on his head from the halogen lights. He sat down again and turned his chair and tilted it back and put his feet on the next one in line. Glanced at his watch. Stuyvesant had been gone twenty minutes.

  “Hell is he doing?” he said. “Typing them himself?”

  “Maybe he’s calling his agents,” Neagley said. “Maybe we’re all going to jail, to guarantee our everlasting silence forever.”

  Reacher yawned and smiled. “We’ll give him ten more minutes. Then we’re leaving. We’ll all go out and get some dinner.”

  Stuyvesant came back after five more. He walked into the room and closed the door. He was carrying no papers. He stepped over and sat down in his original seat and placed his hands flat on the table. Drummed a staccato little rhythm with his fingertips.

  “OK,” he said. “Where were we? Reacher had a question, I think.”

  Reacher took his feet off the chair and turned to face front.

  “Did I?” he said.

  Stuyvesant nodded. “You asked about this specific threat. Well, it’s either an inside job or it’s an outside job. It’s got to be one or the other, obviously.”

  “We’re discussing this now?”

  “Yes, we are,” Stuyvesant said.

  “Why? What changed?”

  Stuyvesant ignored the question. “If it’s an outside job, should we necessarily worry? Perhaps not, because that’s like baseball, too. If the Yankees come to town saying they’re going to beat the Orioles, does that mean it’s true? Boasting about it is not the same thing as actually doing it.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “I’m asking for your input here,” Stuyvesant said.

  Reacher shrugged.

  “OK,” he said. “You think it is an outside threat?”

  “No, I think it’s inside intimidation intended to damage Froelich’s career. Now ask me what I’m going to do about it.”

  Reacher glanced at him. Glanced at his watch. Glanced at the wall. Twenty-five minutes, a Sunday evening, deep inside the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia t
riangle.

  “I know what you’re going to do about it,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “You’re going to hire me and Neagley for an internal investigation.”

  “Am I?”

  Reacher nodded. “If you’re worried about inside intimidation then you need an internal investigation. That’s clear. And you can’t use one of your own people, because you might hit on the bad guy by chance. And you don’t want to bring the FBI in, because that’s not how Washington works. Nobody washes their dirty linen in public. So you need some other outsider. And you’ve got two of them sitting right in front of you. They’re already involved, because Froelich just involved them. So either you terminate that involvement, or you choose to expand on it. You’d prefer to expand on it, because that way you don’t have to find fault with an excellent agent you just promoted. So can you use us? Of course you can. Who better than Joe Reacher’s little brother? Inside Treasury, Joe Reacher is practically a saint. So your ass is covered. And mine is too. Because of Joe I’ll get automatic credibility from the start. And I was a good investigator in the military. So was Neagley. You know that, because you just checked. My guess is you just spent twenty-five minutes talking to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. That’s why you wanted those details. They ran us through their computers and we came out clean. More than clean, probably, because I’m sure our security clearances are still on file, and I’m sure they’re still way higher than you actually need them to be.”

  Stuyvesant nodded. He looked satisfied.

  “An excellent analysis,” he said. “You get the job, just as soon as I get hard copies of those clearances. They should be here in an hour or two.”

  “You can do this?” Neagley said.

  “I can do what I want,” Stuyvesant said. “Presidents tend to give a lot of authority to the people they hope will keep them alive.”

  Silence in the room.

  “Will I be a suspect?” Stuyvesant asked.

  “No,” Reacher said.

  “Maybe I should be. Maybe I should be your number-one suspect. Perhaps I felt forced to promote a woman because of contemporary pressures to do so, but I secretly resent it, so I’m working behind her back to panic her and thereby discredit her.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I could have found a friend or a relative who had never been fingerprinted. I could have placed the paper on my desk at seven-thirty Wednesday evening and instructed my secretary not to notice it. She’d have followed my orders. Or I could have instructed the cleaners to smuggle it in that night. They’d have followed my orders, too. But they’d have followed Froelich’s orders equally. She should be your number-two suspect, probably. Maybe she has a friend or a relative with no prints on file either, and maybe she’s setting this whole thing up in order to deal with it spectacularly and earn some enhanced credibility.”

  “Except I’m not setting it up,” Froelich said.

  “Neither of you is a suspect,” Reacher said.

  “Why not?” Stuyvesant asked.

  “Because Froelich came to me voluntarily, and she knew something about me from my brother. You hired us directly after seeing our military records. Neither of you would have done those things if you had something to hide. Too much risk.”

  “Maybe we think we’re smarter than you are. An internal investigation that missed us would be the best cover there is.”

  Reacher shook his head. “Neither of you is that dumb.”

  “Good,” Stuyvesant replied. He looked satisfied. “So let’s agree it’s a jealous rival elsewhere in the department. Let’s assume he conspired with the cleaners.”

  “Or she,” Froelich said.

  “Where are the cleaners now?” Reacher asked.

  “Suspended,” Stuyvesant said. “At home, on full pay. They live together. One of the women is the man’s wife and the other woman is his sister-in-law. The other crew is working overtime to make up, and costing me a fortune.”

  “What’s their story?”

  “They know nothing about anything. They didn’t bring in any sheet of paper, they never saw it, it wasn’t there when they were there.”

  “But you don’t believe them.”

  Stuyvesant was quiet for a long moment. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs and then laid his hands flat on the table again.

  “They’re trusted employees,” he said. “They’re very nervous about being under suspicion. Very upset. Frightened, even. But they’re also calm. Like we won’t be able to prove anything, because they didn’t do anything. They’re a little puzzled. They passed a lie-detector test. All three of them.”

  “So you do believe them.”

  Stuyvesant shook his head. “I can’t believe them. How can I? You saw the tapes. Who else put the damn thing there? A ghost?”

  “So what’s your opinion?”

  “I think somebody they knew inside the building asked them to do it, and explained it away as a routine test procedure, like a war game or a secret mission, said there was no harm in it, and coached them through what would happen afterward in terms of the video and the questioning and the lie detector. I think that might give a person enough composure to pass the polygraph. If they were convinced they weren’t in the wrong and there would be no adverse consequences. If they were convinced they were really helping the department somehow.”

  “Have you pursued that with them yet?”

  Stuyvesant shook his head.

  “That’ll be your job,” he said. “I’m not good at interrogation.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  He left as suddenly as he had arrived. Just upped and walked out of the room. The door swung shut behind him and left Reacher and Neagley and Froelich sitting together at the table in the bright light and the silence.

  “You won’t be popular,” Froelich said. “Internal investigators never are.”

  “I’m not interested in being popular,” Reacher said.

  “I’ve already got a job,” Neagley said.

  “Take some vacation time,” Reacher said. “Stick around, be unpopular with me.”

  “Will I get paid?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be a fee,” Froelich said.

  Neagley shrugged. “OK, I guess my partners could see this as a prestige thing. You know, government work? I could go back to the hotel, make some calls, see if they can cope without me for a spell.”

  “You want to get that dinner first?” Froelich asked.

  Neagley shook her head. “No, I’ll eat in my room. You two get dinner.”

  They wound their way back through the corridors to Froelich’s office and she called a driver for Neagley. Then she escorted her down to the garage and came back upstairs to find Reacher sitting quiet at her desk.

  “Are you two having a relationship?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “You and Neagley.”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “She was weird about dinner.”

  He shook his head. “No, we’re not having a relationship.”

  “Did you ever? You seem awful close.”

  “Do we?”

  “She obviously likes you, and you obviously like her. And she’s cute.”

  He nodded. “I do like her. And she is cute. But we never had a relationship.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? It just never happened. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m not sure what it’s got to do with you, anyway. You’re my brother’s ex, not mine. I don’t even know your name.”

  “M. E.,” she said.

  “Martha Enid?” he said. “Mildred Eliza?”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Dinner, my place.”

  “Your place?”

  “Restaurants are impossible here on Sunday night. And I can’t afford them anyway. And I’ve still got some of Joe’s things. Maybe you should have them.”

  She lived in a small warm row house in an un
glamorous neighborhood across the Anacostia River near Bolling Air Force Base. It was one of those city homes where you close the drapes and concentrate on the inside. There was street parking and a wooden front door with a small foyer behind it that led directly into a living room. It was a comfortable space. Wood floors, a rug, old-fashioned furniture. A small television set with a big cable box wired to it. Some books on a shelf, a small music system with a yard of CDs propped against it. The heaters were turned up high so Reacher peeled off his black jacket and dumped it on the back of a chair.

  “I don’t want it to be an insider,” Froelich said.

  “Better that than a real outside threat.”

  She nodded and moved toward the back of the room where an arch opened into an eat-in kitchen. She looked around, a little vague, like she was wondering what all the machines and cabinets were for.

  “We could send out for Chinese food,” Reacher called.

  She took off her jacket and folded it in half and laid it on a stool.

  “Maybe we should,” she said.

  She had a white blouse on and without the jacket it looked softer and more feminine. The kitchen was lit with regular bulbs turned low and they were kinder to her skin than the bright office halogen had been. He looked at her and saw what Joe must have seen, eight years previously. She found a take-out menu in a drawer and dialed a number and called in an order. Hot and sour soup and General Tso’s chicken, times two.

  “That OK?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “It’s what Joe liked.”

  “I’ve still got some of his things,” she said. “You should come see them.”

  She walked ahead of him back to the foyer and up the stairs. There was a guest room at the front of the house. It had a deep closet with a single door. A light bulb came on automatically when she opened it. The closet was full of miscellaneous junk, but the hanging rail had a long line of suits and shirts still wrapped in the dry cleaner’s plastic. The plastic had turned a little yellow and brittle with age.