“The convoy was a decoy,” Froelich said. “We do it that way, time to time.”
“Fooled me,” Reacher said.
“Don’t tell him this isn’t a rehearsal,” Froelich said. “Remember he’s not aware of anything yet.”
Reacher sat up straight and moved over to make room. Armstrong opened the door and climbed in beside him.
“Morning, M. E.,” he said.
“Morning, sir,” she replied. “These are associates of mine, Jack Reacher and Frances Neagley.”
Neagley half-turned and Armstrong threaded a long arm over the seat to shake her hand.
“I know you,” he said. “I met you at the party on Thursday evening. You’re a contributor, aren’t you?”
“She’s a security person, actually,” Froelich said. “We had a little cloak-and-dagger stuff going there. An efficiency analysis.”
“I was impressed,” Neagley said.
“Excellent,” Armstrong said to her. “Believe me, ma’am, I’m very grateful for the care everybody takes of me. Way more than I deserve. Really.”
He was magnificent, Reacher thought. His voice and his face and his eyes spoke of nothing but boundless fascination with Neagley alone. Like he would rather talk to her than do anything else in the whole world. And he had one hell of a visual memory, to place one face in a thousand from four days ago. That was clear. A born politician. He turned and shook Reacher’s hand and lit up the car with a smile of genuine pleasure.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Reacher,” he said.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” Reacher said. Then he found himself smiling back. He liked the guy, immediately. He had charm to burn. There was charisma coming off him like heat. And even if you discounted ninety-nine percent of it as political bullshit you could still like the fragment that was left. You could like it a lot.
“You in security too?” Armstrong asked him.
“Adviser,” Reacher said.
“Well, you guys do a hell of a great job. Glad to have you aboard.”
There was a tiny sound from Froelich’s earpiece and she took off down the street and made her way toward Wisconsin Avenue. Merged into the traffic stream and headed south and east for the center of town. The sun had disappeared again and the city looked gray through the deep tint in the windows. Armstrong made a little sound like a happy sigh and looked out at it, like he was still thrilled with it. Under the raincoat he was immaculate in a suit and a broadcloth shirt and a silk tie. He looked larger than life. Reacher had five years and three inches and fifty pounds on him but felt small and dull and shabby in comparison. But the guy also looked real. Very genuine. You could forget the suit and the tie and picture him in a torn old plaid jacket, out there splitting logs in his yard. He looked like a very serious politician, but a fun guy, too. He was tall and wired with energy. Blue eyes, plain features, unruly hair flecked with gold. He looked fit. Not with the kind of polish a gym gives you, but like he was just born strong. He had good hands. A slim gold wedding ring and no others. Cracked, untidy nails.
“Ex-military, am I right?” he asked.
“Me?” Neagley said.
“Both of you, I should think. You’re both a little wary. He’s checking me out and you’re checking the windows, especially at the lights. I recognize the signs. My dad was military.”
“Career guy?”
Armstrong smiled. “You didn’t read my campaign bios? He planned on a career, but he was invalided out before I was born and started a lumber business. Never lost the look, though. He always walked the walk, that’s for sure.”
Froelich came off M Street and headed parallel with Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Executive Office Building, past the front of the White House. Armstrong craned to look out at it. Smiled, with the laugh lines deepening around his eyes.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” he said. “Out of everybody who’s surprised I’m going to be a part of that, I’m the most surprised of all, believe me.”
Froelich drove straight past her own office in the Treasury Building and headed for the Capitol dome in the distance.
“Wasn’t there a Reacher at Treasury?” Armstrong asked.
Hell of a memory for names, too, Reacher thought.
“My elder brother,” he said.
“Small world,” Armstrong said.
Froelich made it onto Constitution Avenue and drove past the side of the Capitol. Made a left onto First Street and headed for a white tent leading to a side door in the Senate Offices. There were two Secret Service Town Cars flanking the tent. Four agents out on the sidewalks, looking cautious and cold. Froelich drove straight for the tent and eased to a stop tight against the curb. Checked her position and rolled forward a foot to put Armstrong’s door right inside the canvas shelter. Reacher saw a group of three agents waiting inside the tunnel. One of them stepped forward and opened the Suburban’s door. Armstrong raised his eyebrows, like he was bemused by all the attention.
“Good meeting you both,” he said. “And thanks, M.E.”
Then he stepped out into the canvas gloom and shut the door and the agents surrounded him and walked him down the length of the tent toward the building. Reacher glimpsed uniformed Capitol security people waiting inside. Armstrong stepped through the door and it closed solidly behind him. Froelich pulled away from the curb and eased around the parked cars and headed north in the direction of Union Station.
“OK,” she said, like she was very relieved. “So far so good.”
“You took a chance there,” Reacher said.
“Two in two hundred eighty-one million,” Neagley said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Could have been one of us who sent the letters.”
Froelich smiled. “My guess is it wasn’t. What did you think of him?”
“I liked him,” Reacher said. “I really did.”
“Me too,” Neagley said. “I’ve liked him since Thursday. So now what?”
“He’s in there all day for meetings. Lunch in the dining room. We’ll take him home around seven o’clock. His wife is home. So we’ll rent them a video or something. Keep them locked up tight all evening.”
“We need intelligence,” Reacher said. “We don’t know what exact form this demonstration might take. Or where it will be. Could be anything from graffiti upward. We don’t want to let it pass us by without noticing. If it happens at all.”
Froelich nodded. “We’ll check at midnight. Assuming we get to midnight.”
“And I want Neagley to interview the cleaners again. We get what we need from them, we can put our minds at rest.”
“I’d like to do that,” Froelich said.
They dropped Neagley at the Federal lockup and then drove back to Froelich’s office. Written FBI forensic reports were in on the latest two messages. They were identical to the first two in every respect. But there was a supplementary report from a Bureau chemist. He had detected something unusual about the thumbprints.
“Squalene,” Froelich said. “You ever heard of that?”
Reacher shook his head.
“It’s an acyclic hydrocarbon. A type of oil. There are traces of it present in the thumbprints. Slightly more on the third and fourth than the first and second.”
“Prints always have oils. That’s how they get made.”
“But usually it’s regular human finger oil. This stuff is different. C-thirty-H-fifty. It’s a fish oil. Shark-liver oil, basically.”
She passed the paper across her desk. It was covered in complicated stuff about organic chemistry. Squalene was a natural oil used as an old-fashioned lubricant for delicate machinery, like clockwork watches. There was an addendum at the bottom which said that when hydrogenated, squalene with an e becomes squalane with an a.
“What’s hydrogenated?” Reacher asked.
“You add water?” Froelich said. “Like hydroelectric power?”
He shrugged and she pulled a dictionary off the shelf and flicked through to H.
&nb
sp; “No,” she said. “It means you add extra hydrogen atoms to the molecule.”
“Well, that makes everything clear as mud. I scored pretty low in chemistry.”
“It means this guy could be a shark fisherman.”
“Or he guts fish for a living,” Reacher said. “Or he works in a fish store. Or he’s an antique watchmaker with his hands dirty from lubricating something.”
Froelich opened a drawer and flipped through a file and pulled a single sheet. Passed it across. It was a life-size fluoroscope photograph of a thumbprint.
“This our guy?” Reacher asked.
Froelich nodded. It was a very clear print. Maybe the clearest print Reacher had ever seen. All the ridges and whorls were exactly delineated. It was bold and astonishingly provocative. And it was big. Very big. The pad of the thumb measured nearly an inch and a half across. Reacher pressed his own thumb alongside it. His thumb was smaller, and he didn’t have the most delicate hands in the world.
“That’s not a watchmaker’s thumb,” Froelich said.
Reacher nodded slowly. The guy must have hands like bunches of bananas. And rough skin, to print with that degree of clarity.
“Manual worker,” he said.
“Shark fisherman,” Froelich said. “Where do they catch a lot of sharks?”
“Florida, maybe.”
“Orlando’s in Florida.”
Her phone rang. She picked it up and her face fell. She looked up at the ceiling and pressed the phone into her shoulder.
“Armstrong needs to go over to the Department of Labor,” she said. “And he wants to walk.”
7
It was exactly two miles from the Treasury Building to the Senate Offices and Froelich drove the whole way one-handed while she talked on her phone. The weather was gray and the traffic was heavy and the trip was slow. She parked at the mouth of the white tent on First Street and killed the motor and snapped her phone closed all at the same time.
“Can’t the Labor guys come over here?” Reacher asked.
She shook her head. “It’s a political thing. There are going to be changes over there and it’s more polite if Armstrong makes the effort himself.”
“Why does he want to walk?”
“Because he’s an outdoors type. He likes fresh air. And he’s stubborn.”
“Where does he have to go, exactly?”
She pointed due west. “Less than half a mile that way. Call it six or seven hundred yards across Capitol Plaza.”
“Did he call them or did they call him?”
“He called them. It’s going to leak so he’s trying to preempt the bad news.”
“Can you stop him going?”
“Theoretically,” she said. “But I really don’t want to. That’s not the sort of argument I want to have right now.”
Reacher turned and looked down the street behind them. Nothing there except gray weather and speeding cars on Constitution Avenue.
“So let him do it,” he said. “He called them. Nobody’s luring him out into the open. It’s not a trick.”
She glanced ahead through the windshield. Then she turned and stared past him, through his side window, down the length of the tent. Flipped her phone open and spoke to people in her office again. She used abbreviations and a torrent of jargon he couldn’t follow. Finished the call and closed her phone.
“We’ll bring a Metro traffic chopper in,” she said. “Keep it low enough to be obvious. He’ll have to pass the Armenian Embassy, so we’ll put some extra cops there. They’ll blend in. I’ll follow him in the car on D Street fifty yards behind. I want you out ahead of him with your eyes wide open.”
“When are we doing this?”
“Within ten minutes. Go up the street and left.”
“OK,” he said. She restarted the car and rolled forward so he could step onto the sidewalk clear of the tent. He got out and zipped his jacket and walked away into the cold. Up First Street and left onto C Street. There was traffic on Delaware Avenue ahead of him and beyond it he could see Capitol Plaza. There were low bare trees and open brown lawns. Paths made from crushed sandstone. A fountain in the center. A pool to the right. To the left and farther on, some kind of an obelisk memorial to somebody.
He dodged cars and ran across Delaware. Walked on into the plaza. Grit crunched under his shoes. It was very cold. His soles were thin. It felt like there were ice crystals mixed in with the crushed stone underfoot. He stopped just short of the fountain. Looked around. Perimeters were good. To the north was open ground and then a semicircle of state flags and some other monument and the bulk of Union Station. To the south was nothing except for the Capitol Building itself far away across Constitution Avenue. Ahead to the west was a building he assumed was the Department of Labor. He looped around the fountain with his eyes focused on the middle distance and saw nothing that worried him. Poor cover, no close windows. There were people in the park, but no assassin hangs around all day just in case somebody’s schedule changes unexpectedly.
He walked on. C Street restarted on the far side of the plaza, just about opposite the obelisk. It was more of an upright slab, really. There was a sign pointing toward it: Taft Memorial. C Street crossed New Jersey Avenue and then Louisiana Avenue. There were crosswalks. Fast traffic. Armstrong was going to spend some time standing still waiting for lights. The Armenian Embassy was ahead on the left. A police cruiser was pulling up in front of it. It parked on the curb and four cops got out. He heard a distant helicopter. Turned around and saw it low in the north and west, skirting the prohibited airspace around the White House. The Department of Labor was dead ahead. There were plenty of convenient side doors.
He crossed C Street to the north sidewalk. Strolled back fifty yards to where he could see into the plaza. Waited. The helicopter was stationary in the air, low enough to be obvious, high enough not to be deafening. He saw Froelich’s Suburban come around the corner, tiny in the distance. It pulled over and waited at the curb. He watched people. Most of them were hurrying. It was too cold for loitering. He saw a group of men way on the far side of the fountain. Six guys in dark overcoats surrounded a seventh in a khaki raincoat. They walked in the center of the sandstone path. The two agents on point were alert. The others crowded tight, like a moving huddle. They passed the fountain and headed for New Jersey Avenue. Waited at the light. Armstrong was bareheaded. The wind blew his hair. Cars streamed past. Nobody paid attention. Drivers and pedestrians occupied different worlds, based on relative time and space. Froelich kept her distance. Her Suburban idled along in the gutter fifty yards back. The light changed and Armstrong and his team walked on. So far, so good. The operation was working well.
Then it wasn’t.
First the wind pushed the police helicopter slightly off station. Then Armstrong and his team were halfway across the narrow triangular spit of land between New Jersey Avenue and Louisiana Avenue when a lone pedestrian did a perfect double take from ten yards away. He was a middle-aged guy, lean from neglect, bearded, long-haired, unkempt. He was wearing a belted raincoat greasy with age. He stood completely still for a split second and then launched himself toward Armstrong with his legs taking long bouncing strides and his arms windmilling uselessly and his mouth wide open in a snarl. The two nearest agents jumped forward to intercept him and the other four pulled back and crowded around Armstrong himself. They jostled and maneuvered until they had all six bodies between the crazy guy and Armstrong. Which left Armstrong totally vulnerable from the opposite direction.
Reacher thought decoy and spun around. Nothing there. Nothing anywhere. Just the cityscape, still and cold and indifferent. He checked windows for movement. He looked for the flash of sun on glass. Nothing. Nothing at all. He looked at cars on the avenues. All of them oblivious and moving fast. None of them slowing. He turned back and saw the crazy guy on the ground with two agents holding him down and two more with guns covering him. He saw Froelich’s Suburban speeding up and taking the corner fast. She stopped hard on the curb
and two agents bundled Armstrong straight across the sidewalk and into the backseat.
But the Suburban didn’t go anywhere. It just sat there with traffic spilling around it. The helicopter drifted back on station and lost a little altitude and came down for a closer look. Its noise beat the air. Nothing happened. Then Armstrong got back out of the car. The two agents got out with him and walked him over to the crazy guy on the ground. Armstrong squatted down. Rested his elbows on his knees. It looked like he was talking. Froelich left her motor running and joined him on the sidewalk. Raised her hand and spoke into her wrist microphone. After a long moment a Metro cruiser came around the corner and pulled up behind the Suburban. Armstrong stood up straight and watched the two agents with the guns put the guy in the back of the cop car. The cop car drove away and Froelich went back to her Suburban and Armstrong regrouped with his escort and walked on toward the Department of Labor. The helicopter drifted above them. As they finally crossed Louisiana Avenue one way Reacher crossed it the other and jogged down to Froelich in her car. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with her head turned to watch Armstrong walk away. Reacher tapped on the window and she whirled around in surprise. Saw who it was and buzzed the glass down.
“You OK?” he asked her.
She turned back again to watch Armstrong. “I must be nuts.”
“Who was the guy?”
“Just some street person. We’ll follow it up, but I can tell you right now it’s not connected. No way. If that guy had sent the messages we’d still be smelling the bourbon on the paper. Armstrong wanted to talk to him. Said he felt sorry for him. And then he insisted on sticking with the walkabout. He’s nuts. And I’m nuts for allowing it.”
“Is he going to walk back?”
“Probably. I need it to rain, Reacher. Why doesn’t it ever rain when you want it to? A real downpour an hour from now would help me out.”
He glanced up at the sky. It was gray and cold, but all the clouds were high and unthreatening. It wasn’t going to rain.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 228
