Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “There’s a researcher in the office called Swain who made an important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting. He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we added the guy in California who’d had his thumb removed and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration against you.”

  “Oh no,” Armstrong said.

  “So, ten messages,” Reacher said. “All of them designed to torment you, except you hadn’t been told about any of them. But then I started wondering whether we’re still miscounting. And you know what? I’m pretty sure we are. I think there were at least eleven messages.”

  Silence in the small room.

  “What would be the eleventh?” Armstrong asked.

  “Something that slipped through,” Reacher said. “Something that came in the mail, addressed to you, something that the Secret Service didn’t see as a threat. Something that meant nothing at all to them, but something that meant a lot to you.”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “I think it came first,” Reacher said. “Right at the very beginning, maybe, before the Secret Service even caught on. I think it was like an announcement, that only you would understand. So I think you’ve known about all this all along. I think you know who’s doing it, and I think you know why.”

  “People have died,” Armstrong said. “That’s a hell of an accusation.”

  “Do you deny it?”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  Reacher leaned forward.

  “Some crucial words were never spoken,” he said. “Thing is, if I was standing there serving turkey and then somebody started shooting and somebody else was suddenly bleeding to death on top of me, sooner or later I’d be asking, who the hell were they? What the hell did they want? Why the hell were they doing that? Those are fairly basic questions. I’d be asking them loud and clear, believe me. But you didn’t ask them. We saw you twice, afterward. In the White House basement, and then later at the office. You said all kinds of things. You asked, had they been captured yet? That was your big concern. You never asked who they might be or what their possible motive was. And why didn’t you ask? Only one possible explanation. You already knew.”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “I think your wife knows, too,” Reacher said. “You conveyed her anger at you for putting people at risk. I don’t think she was generalizing. I think she knows you know, and she thinks you should have told somebody.”

  Armstrong was silent.

  “So I think you’re feeling a little guilty now,” Reacher said. “I think that’s why you agreed to make the television statement for me and that’s why you suddenly want to go to the service itself. Some kind of a conscience thing. Because you knew, and you didn’t tell anybody.”

  “I’m a politician,” Armstrong said. “We have hundreds of enemies. There was no point in speculating.”

  “Bullshit,” Reacher said. “This isn’t political. This is personal. Your kind of political enemy is some North Dakota soybean grower you made ten cents a week poorer by altering a subsidy. Or some pompous old senator you declined to vote with. The soybean grower might make a halfhearted effort against you at election time and the senator might bide his time and screw you on some big floor issue but neither one of them is going to do what these guys are doing.”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “I’m not a fool,” Reacher said. “I’m an angry man who watched a woman I was fond of bleed to death.”

  “I’m not a fool either,” Armstrong said.

  “I think you are. Something’s coming back at you from the past and you think you can just ignore it and hope for the best? Didn’t you realize it would happen? You people have no perspective. You thought you were world famous already just because you were in the House and the Senate? Well, you weren’t. Real people never heard of you until the campaign this summer. You thought all your little secrets were already out? Well, they weren’t, either.”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “Who are they?” Reacher asked.

  Armstrong shrugged. “Your guess?”

  Reacher paused a beat.

  “I think you’ve got a temper problem,” he said. “Same as your dad. I think way back before you learned to control it you made people suffer, and some of them forgot about it, but some of them didn’t. I think it’s a part of some particular person’s life that somebody once did something bad to them. Maybe hurt them, or hurt their self-esteem, or screwed them up in some other kind of a big way. I think that particular person repressed it deep down inside until they turned on the TV one day and saw your face for the first time in thirty years.”

  Armstrong sat still for a long moment.

  “How far along is the FBI with this?” he asked.

  “They’re nowhere. They’re out beating the bushes for people that don’t exist. We’re way ahead of them.”

  “And what are your intentions?”

  “I’m going to help you,” Reacher said. “Not that you deserve it in any way at all. It’ll be a purely accidental by-product of me standing up for Nendick and his wife, and an old guy called Andretti, and two people called Armstrong, and Crosetti, and especially for Froelich, who was my brother’s friend.”

  There was silence.

  “Will this stay confidential?” Armstrong asked.

  Reacher nodded. “It’ll have to. Purely for my sake.”

  “Sounds like you’re contemplating a very serious course of action.”

  “People play with fire, they get burned.”

  “That’s the law of the jungle.”

  “Where the hell else do you think you live?”

  Armstrong was quiet, another long moment.

  “So then you’ll know my secret and I’ll know yours,” he said.

  Reacher nodded. “And we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  There was another long silence. It lasted a whole minute. Reacher saw Armstrong the politician fade away, and Armstrong the man replace him.

  “You’re wrong in most ways,” he said. “But not all of them.”

  He leaned down and opened a drawer. Took out a padded mailer and tossed it on the desk. It skidded on the shiny wood and came to rest an inch from the edge.

  “I guess this counts as the first message,” he said. “It arrived on Election Day. I suppose the Secret Service must have been a little puzzled, but they didn’t see anything really wrong with it. So they passed it right along.”

  The mailer was a standard commercial stationery product. It was addressed to Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. The address was printed on a familiar self-adhesive label in the familiar computer font, Times New Roman, fourteen point, bold. It had been mailed somewhere in the state of Utah on October 28. The flap had been opened a couple of times and resealed. Reacher eased it back and looked inside. Held it so Neagley could see.

  There was nothing in the envelope except a miniature baseball bat. It was the kind of thing sold as a souvenir or given away as a token. It was plain lacquered softwood the color of honey. It was about an inch wide around the barrel and would have been about fifteen inches long except that it was broken near the end of the handle. It had been broken deliberately. It had been partially sawn through and then snapped where it was weak. The raw end had been scratched and scraped to make it look accidental.

  “I don’t have a temper problem,” Armstrong said. “But you’re right, my father did. We lived in a small town in Oregon, kind of lonely and isolated. It was a lumber town, basically. It was a mixed sort of place. The mill owners had big houses, the crew chiefs had smaller houses, the crews lived in shanties or rooming houses. There was a school. My mother owned the pharmacy. Down the road was the rest of the state, up the road was virgin forest. It felt like the frontier. It was a litt
le lawless, but it wasn’t too bad. There were occasional whores and a lot of drinking, but overall it was just trying to be an American town.”

  He went quiet for a moment. Placed his hands palms down on the desk and stared at them.

  “I was eighteen,” he said. “Finished with high school, ready for college, spending my last few weeks at home. My sister was away traveling somewhere. We had a mailbox at the gate. My father had made it himself, in the shape of a miniature lumber mill. It was a nice thing, made out of tiny strips of cedar. At Halloween in the previous year it had been smashed up, you know, the traditional Halloween thing where the tough kids go out cruising with a baseball bat, bashing mailboxes. My father heard it happening and he chased them, but he didn’t really see them. We were a little upset, because it was a nice mailbox and destroying it seemed kind of senseless. But he rebuilt it stronger and became kind of obsessed about protecting it. Some nights he hid out and guarded it.”

  “And the kids came back,” Neagley said.

  Armstrong nodded.

  “Late that summer,” he said. “Two kids, in a truck, with a bat. They were big guys. I didn’t really know them, but I’d seen them around before, here and there. They were brothers, I think. Real hard kids, you know, delinquents, bullies from out of town, the sort of kids you always stayed well away from. They took a swing at the box and my dad jumped out at them and there was an argument. They were sneering at him, threatening him, saying bad things about my mother. They said, bring her on out and we’ll show her a good time with this bat, better than you can show her. You can imagine the gestures that went with it. So then there was a fight, and my dad got lucky. It was just one of those things, two lucky punches and he won. Or maybe it was his military training. The bat had bust in half, maybe against the box. I thought that would be the end of it, but he dragged the kids into the yard and got some logging chain and some padlocks and got them chained up to a tree. They were kneeling down, facing each other around the trunk. My dad’s mind was gone. His temper had kicked in. He was hitting them with the broken bat. I was trying to stop him, but it was impossible. Then he said he was going to show them a good time with the bat, with the broken end, unless they begged him not to. So they begged. They begged long and loud.”

  He went quiet again.

  “I was there all the time,” he said. “I was trying to calm my father down, that’s all. But these guys were looking at me like I was participating. There was this thing in their eyes, like I was a witness to their worst moment. Like I was seeing them being totally humiliated, which I guess is the worst thing you can do to a bully. There was absolute hatred in their eyes. Against me. Like they were saying, you’ve seen this, so now you have to die. It was literally as bad as that.”

  “What happened?” Neagley asked.

  “My father kept them there. He said he was going to leave them there all night and start up again in the morning. We went inside and he went to bed and I snuck out again an hour later. I was going to let them go. But they were already gone. They’d gotten out of the chains somehow. Escaped. They never came back. I never saw them again. I went off to college, never really came home again except for visits.”

  “And your father died.”

  Armstrong nodded. “He had blood pressure problems, which was understandable, I guess, given his personality. I kind of forgot about the two kids. It was just an episode that had happened in the past. But I didn’t really forget about them. I always remembered the look in their eyes. I can see it right now. It was stone-cold hatred. It was like two cocky thugs who couldn’t stand to be seen any other way than how they chose to be seen. Like I was committing a mortal sin just for happening to see them losing. Like I was doing something to them. Like I was their enemy. They stared at me. I gave up trying to understand it. I’m no kind of a psychologist. But I never forgot that look. When that package came I wasn’t puzzled for a second who had sent it, even though it’s been nearly thirty years.”

  “Did you know their names?” Reacher asked.

  Armstrong shook his head. “I didn’t know much about them, except I guess they lived in some nearby town. What are you going to do?”

  “I know what I’d like to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d like to break both your arms and never see you again as long as I live. Because if you’d spoken up on Election Day, Froelich would still be alive.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you?” Neagley asked.

  Armstrong shook his head. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Because I had no idea it was serious,” he said. “I really didn’t, I promise you, on my daughter’s life. Don’t you see? I just thought it was supposed to remind me or unsettle me. I wondered whether maybe in their minds they still thought I was in the wrong back then, and it was supposed to be a threat of political embarrassment or exposure or something. Obviously I wasn’t worried about that because I wasn’t in the wrong back then. Everybody would understand that. And I couldn’t see any other logical reason for sending it. I was thirty years older, so were they. I’m a rational adult, I assumed they were. So I thought it was maybe just an unpleasant joke. I didn’t conceive of any danger in it. I absolutely promise you that. I mean, why would I? So it unsettled me for an hour, and then I dropped it. Maybe I half-expected some kind of lame follow-up, but I figured I’d deal with that when it happened. But there was no follow-up. It didn’t happen. Not as far as I knew. Because nobody told me. Until now. Until you told me. And according to Stuyvesant you shouldn’t be telling me even now. And people have suffered and died. Christ, why did he keep me out of the loop? I could have given him the whole story if he’d just asked.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “So you’re right and you’re wrong,” he said. “I knew who and why, but I didn’t know all along. I didn’t know the middle. I knew the beginning, and I knew the end. I knew as soon as the shooting started, believe me. I mean, I just knew. It was an unbelievable shock, out of the blue. Like, this is the follow-up? It was an insane development. It was like half-expecting a rotten tomato to be thrown at me one day and getting a nuclear missile instead. I thought the world had gone mad. You want to blame me for not speaking out, OK, go ahead and blame me, but how could I have known? How could I have predicted this kind of insanity?”

  Silence for a beat.

  “So that’s my guilty secret,” Armstrong said. “Not that I did anything wrong thirty years ago. But that I didn’t have the right kind of imagination to see the implications of the package three weeks ago.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Should I tell Stuyvesant now?” Armstrong asked.

  “Your choice,” Reacher said.

  There was a long pause. Armstrong the man faded away again, and Armstrong the politician came back to replace him.

  “I don’t want to tell him,” he said. “Bad for him, bad for me. People have suffered and died. It’ll be seen as a serious misjudgment on both our parts. He should have asked, I should have told.”

  Reacher nodded. “So leave it to us. You’ll know our secret and we’ll know yours.”

  “And we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  “Well, we’ll all live,” Reacher said.

  “Descriptions?” Neagley asked.

  “Just kids,” Armstrong said. “Maybe my age. I only remember their eyes.”

  “What’s the name of the town?”

  “Underwood, Oregon,” Armstrong said. “Where my mother still lives. Where I’m going in an hour.”

  “And these kids were from the area?”

  Armstrong glanced at Reacher. “And you predicted they’ll go home to wait.”

  “Yes,” Reacher said. “I did.”

  “And I’m heading right there.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Reacher said. “That theory is way out of date now. I assume they expected you’d remember them, and I assume they didn’t anticipate the communication breakdown between yourself and the Secret Service. And they wouldn
’t want you to be able to lead them right to their door. Therefore their door has changed. They don’t live in Oregon anymore. That’s one thing we can be absolutely sure of.”

  “So how are you going to find them?”

  Reacher shook his head. “We can’t find them. Not now. Not in time. They’ll have to find us. In Wyoming. At the memorial service.”

  “I’m going there too. With minimal cover.”

  “So just hope it’s all over before you arrive.”

  “Should I tell Stuyvesant?” Armstrong asked again.

  “Your choice,” Reacher said again.

  “I can’t cancel the appearance. That wouldn’t be right.”

  “No,” Reacher said. “I guess it wouldn’t.”

  “I can’t tell Stuyvesant now.”

  “No,” Reacher said. “I guess you can’t.”

  Armstrong said nothing. Reacher stood up to leave, and Neagley did the same.

  “One last thing,” Reacher said. “We think these guys grew up to be cops.”

  Armstrong sat still. He started to shake his head, but then he stopped and looked down at the desk. His face clouded, like he was hearing a faint thirty-year-old echo.

  “Something during the beating,” he said. “I only half-heard it, and I’m sure I discounted it at the time. But I think at one point they claimed their dad was a cop. They said he could get us in big trouble.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  The protection agents showed them out. They walked the length of the canvas tent and stepped off the curb into the street. Turned east and got back on the sidewalk and settled in for the trek to the subway. It was late morning and the air was clear and cold. The neighborhood was deserted. Nobody was out walking. Neagley opened the envelope Stuyvesant had given her. It contained a check for five thousand dollars. The memo line was written up as professional consultation. Reacher’s envelope contained two checks. One was for the same five-grand fee and the other was for his audit expenses, repaid to the exact penny.

  “We should go shopping,” Neagley said. “We can’t go hunting in Wyoming dressed like this.”