The room went quiet. Neagley stared at Reacher.
“What for?” she said.
“So we could find another Nendick,” he said. “The thumbprint was on every message, and the guy it came from was a message, just like Swain says Nendick was. We were supposed to trace the print and find the guy and find an exact replica of the Nendick situation. Some terrified victim, too scared to open his mouth and tell us anything. A message in himself. But by pure accident our guys hit on somebody who had never been printed, so we couldn’t find him.”
“But there were six paper messages,” Swain said. “Probably twenty days between the first one going in the mail and the last one being delivered to Froelich’s house. So what does that mean? All the messages were prepared in advance? That’s way too much planning ahead, surely.”
“It’s possible,” Neagley said. “They could have printed dozens of variations, one for every eventuality.”
“No,” Reacher said. “I think they printed them up as they went along. I think they kept the thumbprint available to them at all times.”
“How?” Swain asked. “They abducted some guy and took him hostage? They’ve stashed him somewhere? They’re taking him everywhere with them?”
“Couldn’t work,” Neagley said. “Can’t expect us to find him if he’s not home.”
“He’s home,” Reacher said. “But his thumb isn’t.”
Nobody spoke.
“Fire up a computer,” Reacher said. “Search NCIC for the word thumb.”
“We’ve got a big field office in Sacramento,” Bannon said. “Three agents are already mobile. A doctor, too. We’ll know in an hour.”
This time Bannon had come to them. They were in the Secret Service conference room, Stuyvesant at the head of the table, Reacher and Neagley and Swain together on one side, Bannon alone on the other.
“It’s a bizarre idea,” Bannon said. “What would they do? Keep it in the freezer?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “Thaw it a bit, rub it down their nose, print it on the paper. Just like Stuyvesant’s secretary with her rubber stamp. It’s probably drying out a bit with age, which is why the squalene percentage keeps getting higher.”
“What are the implications?” Stuyvesant said. “Assuming you’re right?”
Reacher made a face. “We can change one major assumption. Now I would guess they’ve both got prints on file, and they’ve both been wearing the latex gloves.”
“Two renegades,” Bannon said.
“Not necessarily ours,” Stuyvesant said.
“So explain the other factors,” Bannon said.
Nobody spoke. Bannon shrugged.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got an hour. And I don’t want to be looking in the wrong place. So convince me. Show me these are private citizens gunning for Armstrong personally.”
Stuyvesant glanced at Swain, but Swain said nothing.
“Time is ticking by,” Bannon said.
“This isn’t an ideal context,” Swain said.
Bannon smiled. “What, you only preach to the choir?”
Nobody spoke.
“You’ve got no case,” Bannon said. “I mean, who cares about a Vice President? They’re nobodies. What was it, a bucket of warm spit?”
“It was a pitcher,” Swain said. “John Nance Garner said the Vice Presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. He also called it a spare tire on the automobile of government. He was FDR’s first running mate. John Adams called it the most insignificant office man had ever invented, and he was the first Vice President of all.”
“So who cares enough to shoot a spare tire or an insignificant pitcher of spit?”
“Let me start from the beginning,” Swain said. “What does a Vice President do?”
“He sits around,” Bannon says. “Hopes the big guy dies.”
Swain nodded. “Somebody else said the Vice President’s job is merely about waiting. In case the President dies, sure, but more often for the nomination in his own right eight years down the track. But in the short term, what is the Vice President for?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Bannon said.
“He’s there to be a candidate,” Swain said. “That’s the bottom line. His design life lasts from when he’s tapped in the summer until election day. He’s useful for four or five months, tops. He starts out as a pick-me-up for the campaign. Everybody’s bored to death with the presidential nominees by midsummer, so the VP picks put a jolt into the campaigns. Suddenly we’ve all got something else to talk about. Somebody else to analyze. We look at their qualities and their records. We figure out how well they balance the tickets. That’s their initial function. Balance and contrast. Whatever the presidential nominee isn’t, the VP nominee is, and vice versa. Young, old, racy, dull, northern, southern, dumb, smart, hard, soft, rich, poor.”
“We get the picture,” Bannon said.
“So he’s there for what he is,” Swain said. “Initially he’s just a photograph and a biography. He’s a concept. Then his duties start. He’s got to have campaigning skills, obviously. Because he’s there to be the attack dog. He’s got to be able to say the stuff the presidential candidate isn’t allowed to say himself. If the campaign scripts an attack or a put-down, it’s the VP candidate they get to deliver it. Meanwhile the presidential candidate stands around somewhere else looking all statesmanlike. Then the election happens and the presidential candidate goes to the White House and the VP gets put away in a closet. His usefulness is over, first Tuesday in November.”
“Was Armstrong good at that kind of stuff?”
“He was excellent. The truth is he was a very negative campaigner, but the polls didn’t really show it because he kept that nice smile on his face the whole time. Truth is he was deadly.”
“And you think he trod on enough toes to get himself assassinated for it?”
Swain nodded. “That’s what I’m working on now. I’m analyzing every speech and comment, matching up his attacks against the profile of the people he was attacking.”
“The timing is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “Nobody can argue with that. He was in the House for six years and the Senate for another six and barely got a nasty letter. This whole thing was triggered by something recent.”
“And his recent history is the campaign,” Swain said.
“Nothing way in his background?” Bannon asked.
Swain shook his head.
“We’re covered four ways,” he said. “First and most recent was your own FBI check when he was nominated. We’ve got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we’ve got opposition research from the other campaign from this time around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys dig up way more stuff than you do. And he’s clean.”
“North Dakota sources?”
“Nothing,” Swain said. “We talked to all the papers up there, matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there’s nothing wrong with the guy.”
“So it was the campaign,” Stuyvesant said. “He pissed somebody off.”
“Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons,” Bannon said. “Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can’t mail something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?”
Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked his watch. Took his cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. It sat there, silent.
“I’m sticking with the theory,” he said. “Except now I’m listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is.”
The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief?
because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.
“Sacramento?” Stuyvesant asked.
“No,” Bannon said. “Local. They found the rifle.”
They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.
“Was it a Vaime Mk2?” Bannon asked.
“Without a doubt,” one of the techs said.
“Serial number on it?”
The guy shook his head. “Removed with acid.”
“Anything you can do?”
The guy shook his head again.
“No,” he said. “If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.”
“So where is it now?”
“We’re fuming it for prints,” the guy said. “But it’s hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s been wiped.”
“Where was it found?”
“In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms.”
“I guess they waited in there,” Bannon said. “Maybe five minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads.”
“Shell cases?” Neagley asked.
“None,” the tech said. “They must have collected their brass. But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is intact. The mud preserved it.”
He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich’s case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti’s. The Minnesota bullet looked new. Its passage through the farmyard mud had scoured it clean.
“Get the rifle,” Bannon said.
It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot super-glue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.
“That’s the wrong scope,” Reacher said. “That’s a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes.”
“Yeah, it’s been modified,” one of the techs said. “We already logged that.”
“By the factory?”
The guy shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “High standard, but it’s not factory workmanship.”
“So what does that mean?” Bannon asked.
“I’m not sure,” Reacher said.
“Is a Hensoldt better than a Bushnell?”
“Not really. They’re both fine scopes. Like BMW and Mercedes. Like Canon and Nikon.”
“So a person might have a preference?”
“Not a government person,” Reacher said. “Like, what would you say if one of your crime scene photographers came to you and said, I want a Canon instead of this Nikon you gave me?”
“I’d probably tell him to get lost.”
“Exactly. He works with what he’s got. So I don’t see somebody going to their department armorer and asking him to junk a thousand-dollar Bushnell just because he prefers the feel of a thousand-dollar Hensoldt.”
“So why the switch?”
“I’m not sure,” Reacher said again. “Damage, maybe. If you drop a rifle you can damage a sniper scope pretty easily. But a government repairer would use another Bushnell. They don’t just buy the rifles. They buy crateloads of spare parts along with them.”
“Suppose they were short? Suppose the scopes got damaged a lot?”
“Then they might use a Hensoldt, I guess. Hensoldts usually come with SIG rifles. You need to look at your lists again. Find out if there’s anybody who buys Vaimes and SIGs for their snipers.”
“Is the SIG silenced too?”
“No,” Reacher said.
“So there you go,” Bannon said. “Some agency needs two types of sniper rifles, it buys Vaimes as the silenced option and SIGs as the unsilenced option. Two types of scope in the spare-parts bins. They run out of Bushnells, they start in on the Hensoldts.”
“Possible,” Reacher said. “You should make the inquiries. You should ask specifically if anybody has fitted a Hensoldt scope to a Vaime rifle. And if they haven’t, you should start asking commercial gunsmiths. Start with the expensive ones. These are rare pieces. This could be important.”
Stuyvesant was staring into the distance. Worry in the slope of his shoulders.
“What?” Reacher asked.
Stuyvesant focused, and shook his head. A defeated little gesture.
“I’m afraid we bought SIGs,” he said, quietly. “We had a batch of SG550s about five years ago. Unsilenced semiautomatics, as an alternative option. But we don’t use them much because the automatic mechanism makes them a little inaccurate for close crowd situations. They’re mostly stored. We use the Vaimes everywhere now. So I’m sure the SIG parts bins are still full.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Bannon’s phone rang again. The insane little overture trilled into the silence. He clicked it on and put it to his ear and said yeah and listened.
“I see,” he said. Listened some more.
“The doctor agree?” he asked. Listened some more.
“I see,” he said, and listened.
“I guess,” he said, and listened.
“Two?” he asked, and listened.
“OK,” he said, and clicked the phone off.
“Upstairs,” he said. He was pale.
Stuyvesant and Reacher and Neagley followed him out to the elevator and rode with him up to the conference room. He sat at the head of the table and the others stayed together toward the other end, like they didn’t want to get too close to the news. The sky was full dark outside the windows. Thanksgiving Day was grinding to a close.
“His name is Andretti,” Bannon said. “Age seventy-three, retired carpenter, retired volunteer firefighter. He’s got granddaughters. That’s where the pressure came from.”
“Is he talking?” Neagley asked.
“Some,” Bannon said. “Sounds like he’s made of slightly sterner stuff than Nendick.”
“So how did it go down?”
“He frequents a cop bar outside of Sacramento, from his firefighting days. He met two guys in there.”
“Were they cops?” Reacher asked.
“Cop-like,” Bannon said. “That was his description. They got to talking, they got to showing each other pictures of the family. They got to talking about what a rotten world it is, and what they would do to protect their families from it. It was gradual, he said.”
“And?”
“He clammed up on us for a spell, but then our doctor took a look at his hand. The left thumb has been surgically removed. Well, not really surgically. Somewhere between severed and hacked off, our guy said. But there was an attempt at neatness. Andretti stuck to his carpentry story. Our doctor said, no way was that a saw. Like, no way. Andretti seemed pleased to be contradicted, and he talked some more
.”
“And?”
“He lives alone. Widower. The two cop-like guys had wormed an invitation home with him. They were asking him, what would you do to protect your family? Like, what would you do? How far would you go? It was all rhetorical at first, and then it got practical fast. They told him he would have to give up his thumb or his granddaughters. His choice. They held him down and did it. They took his photographs and his address book. Told him now they knew what his granddaughters looked like and where they lived. Told him they’d take out their ovaries the same way they’d taken off his thumb. And he was ready to believe them, obviously. He would be, right? They’d just done it to him. They stole a cooler from the kitchen and some ice from the refrigerator to transport the thumb. They left and he made it to the hospital.”
Silence in the room.
“Descriptions?” Stuyvesant asked.
Bannon shook his head.
“Too scared,” he said. “My guys talked about Witness Protection for the whole family, but he’s not going to bite. My guess is we’ve got all we’re going to get.”
“Forensics in the house?”
“Andretti cleaned it thoroughly. They made him. They watched him do it.”
“What about the bar? Anybody see them talking?”
“We’ll ask. But this was nearly six weeks ago. Don’t hold your breath.”
Nobody spoke for a long time.
“Reacher?” Neagley said.
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
He shrugged.
“I’m thinking about Dostoyevsky,” he said. “I just found a copy of Crime and Punishment that I sent Joe for a birthday present. I remember I almost sent him The Brothers Karamazov instead, but I decided against it. You ever read that book?”
Neagley shook her head.
“Part of it is about what the Turks did in Bulgaria,” he said. “There was all kinds of rape and pillage going on. They hanged prisoners in the mornings after making them spend their last night nailed to a fence by their ears. They threw babies in the air and caught them on bayonets. They said the best part was doing it in front of the mothers. Ivan Karamazov was seriously disillusioned by it all. He said no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. Then I was thinking about these guys making Andretti clean his house while they watched. I guess he had to do it one-handed. He probably struggled with it. Dostoyevsky put his feelings in a book. I don’t have his talent. So now I’m thinking I’m going to find these guys and impress on them the error of their ways in whatever manner my own talent allows.”
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