by Lee Child
“Emmy?” he said. “Like the television thing?”
“M. E.,” she said. “I go by my initials.”
“What are they for?”
“I won’t tell you that.”
He paused a beat. “What did Joe call you?”
“He called me Froelich,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, he would.”
“I still miss him,” she said.
“Me too, I guess,” Reacher said. “So is this about Joe, or is it about something else?”
She was still again, for another beat. Then she shook herself, a tiny subliminal quiver, and came back all business.
“Both,” she said. “Well, mainly something else, really.”
“Want to tell me what?”
“I want to hire you for something,” she said. “On a kind of posthumous recommendation from Joe. Because of what he used to say about you. He talked about you, time to time.”
Reacher nodded. “Hire me for what?”
Froelich paused again and came up with a tentative smile.
“I’ve rehearsed this line,” she said. “Couple of times.”
“So let me hear it.”
“I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States.”
2
“Good line,” Reacher said. “Interesting proposition.”
“What’s your answer?” Froelich asked.
“No,” he said. “Right now I think that’s probably the safest all-around response.”
She smiled the tentative smile again and picked up her purse.
“Let me show you some ID,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Don’t need it,” he said. “You’re United States Secret Service.”
She looked at him. “You’re pretty quick.”
“It’s pretty clear,” he said.
“Is it?”
He nodded. Touched his right elbow. It was bruised.
“Joe worked for them,” he said. “And knowing the way he was, he probably worked pretty hard, and he was a little shy, so anybody he dated was probably in the office, otherwise he would never have met them. Plus, who else except the government keeps two-year-old Suburbans this shiny? And parks next to hydrants? And who else but the Secret Service could track me this efficiently through my banking arrangements?”
“You’re pretty quick,” she said again.
“Thank you,” he said back. “But Joe didn’t have anything to do with Vice Presidents. He was in Financial Crimes, not the White House protection detail.”
She nodded. “We all start out in Financial Crimes. We pay our dues as anticounterfeiting grunts. And he ran anticounterfeiting. And you’re right, we met in the office. But he wouldn’t date me then. He said it wasn’t appropriate. But I was planning on transferring across to the protection detail as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I did, we started going out.”
Then she went a little quiet again. Looked down at her purse.
“And?” Reacher said.
She looked up. “Something he said one night. I was kind of keen and ambitious back then, you know, starting a new job and all, and I was always trying to figure out if we were doing the best we could, and Joe and I were goofing around, and he said the only real way for us to test ourselves would be to hire some outsider to try to get to the target. To see if it was possible, you know. A security audit, he called it. I asked him, like who? And he said, my little brother would be the one. If anybody could do it, he could. He made you sound pretty scary.”
Reacher smiled. “That sounds like Joe. A typical hare-brained scheme.”
“You think?”
“For a smart guy, Joe could be very dumb sometimes.”
“Why is it dumb?”
“Because if you hire some outsider, all you need to do is watch for him coming. Makes it way too easy.”
“No, his idea was the person would come in anonymously and unannounced. Like now, absolutely nobody knows about you except me.”
Reacher nodded. “OK, maybe he wasn’t so dumb.”
“He felt it was the only way. You know, however hard we work, we’re always thinking inside the box. He felt we should be prepared to test ourselves against some random challenge from the outside.”
“And he nominated me?”
“He said you’d be ideal.”
“So why wait so long to try it? Whenever this conversation was, it had to be at least six years ago. Didn’t take you six years to find me.”
“It was eight years ago,” Froelich said. “Right at the start of our relationship, just after I got the transfer. And it only took me one day to find you.”
“So you’re pretty quick, too,” Reacher said. “But why wait eight years?”
“Because now I’m in charge. I was promoted head of the Vice President’s detail four months ago. And I’m still keen and ambitious, and I still want to know that we’re doing it right. So I decided to follow Joe’s advice, now that it’s my call. I decided to try a security audit. And you were recommended, so to speak. All those years ago, by somebody I trusted very much. So I’m here to ask you if you’ll do it.”
“You want to get a cup of coffee?”
She looked surprised, like coffee wasn’t on the agenda.
“This is urgent business,” she said.
“Nothing’s too urgent for coffee,” he said. “That’s been my experience. Drive me back to my motel and I’ll take you to the downstairs lounge. Coffee’s OK, and it’s a very dark room. Just right for a conversation like this.”
The government Suburban had a DVD-based navigation system built into the dash, and Reacher watched her fire it up and pick the motel’s street address off a long list of potential Atlantic City destinations.
“I could have told you where it is,” he said.
“I’m used to this thing,” she said. “It talks to me.”
“I wasn’t going to use hand signals,” he said.
She smiled again and pulled out into the traffic. There wasn’t much. Evening gloom was falling. The wind was still blowing. The casinos might do OK, but the boardwalk and the piers and the beaches weren’t going to see much business for the next six months. He sat still next to her in the warmth from the heater and thought about her with his dead brother for a moment. Then he just watched her drive. She was pretty good at it. She parked outside the motel door and he led her inside and down a half-flight of stairs to the lounge. It smelled stale and sticky, but it was warm and there was a flask of coffee on the machine behind the bar. He pointed at it, and then at himself and Froelich, and the barman got busy. Then he walked to a corner booth and slid in across the vinyl with his back to the wall and the whole room in sight. Old habits. Froelich clearly had the same habits because she did the same thing, so they ended up close together and side by side. Their shoulders were almost touching.
“You’re very similar to him,” she said.
“In some ways,” he said. “Not in others. Like, I’m still alive.”
“You weren’t at his funeral.”
“It came at an inopportune time.”
“You sound just the same.”
“Brothers often do.”
The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.
“People liked him,” Froelich said.
“He was OK, I guess.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s a compliment, one brother to another.”
He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.
“You drink it black,” Froelich said. “Just like Joe.”
Reacher nodded. “Thing I can’t get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I’m three years older than he ever got to be.”
Froelich looked away. “I know. He just stopped being there, but the world carried on anyway. It should h
ave changed, just a little bit.”
She sipped her coffee. Black, no sugar. Just like Joe.
“Nobody ever think of doing it, apart from him?” Reacher asked. “Using an outsider for a security audit?”
“Nobody.”
“Secret Service is a relatively old organization.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to ask you an obvious question.”
She nodded. “President Lincoln signed us into existence just after lunch on April fourteenth, 1865. Then he went to the theater that same night and got assassinated.”
“Ironic.”
“From our perspective, now. But back then we were only supposed to protect the currency. Then McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they figured they should have somebody looking out for the President full-time, and we got the job.”
“Because there was no FBI until the 1930s.”
She shook her head. “Actually there was an early incarnation called the Office of the Chief Examiner, founded in 1908. It became the FBI in 1935.”
“That sounds like the sort of pedantic stuff Joe would know.”
“I think it was him who told me.”
“He would. He loved all that historical stuff.”
He saw her make an effort not to go quiet again.
“So what was your obvious question?” she said.
“You use an outsider for the very first time in a hundred and one years, got to be because of something more than you’re a perfectionist.”
She started to answer, and then she stopped. She paused a beat. He saw her decide to lie. He could sense it, in the angle of her shoulder.
“I’m under big pressure,” she said. “You know, professionally. There are a lot of people waiting for me to screw up. I need to be sure.”
He said nothing. Waited for the embellishments. Liars always embellish.
“I wasn’t an easy choice,” she said. “It’s still rare for a woman to head up a team. There’s a gender thing going on, same as anywhere else, I guess, same as always. Some of my colleagues are a little Neanderthal.”
He nodded. Said nothing.
“It’s always on my mind,” she said. “I’ve got to slam-dunk the whole thing.”
“Which Vice President?” he asked. “The new one or the old one?”
“The new one,” she said. “Brook Armstrong. The Vice Pres ident-elect, strictly speaking. I was assigned to lead his team back when he joined the ticket, and we want continuity, so it’s a little bit like an election for us, too. If our guy wins, we stay on the job. If our guy loses, we’re back to being footsoldiers.”
Reacher smiled. “So did you vote for him?”
She didn’t answer.
“What did Joe say about me?” he asked.
“He said you’d relish the challenge. You’d beat your brains out to find a way of getting it done. He said you had a lot of ingenuity and you’d find three or four ways of doing it and we’d learn a lot from you.”
“And you said?”
“This was eight years ago, don’t forget. I was kind of full of myself, I guess. I said no way would you even get close.”
“And he said?”
“He said plenty of people had made that same mistake.”
Reacher shrugged. “I was in the Army eight years ago. I was probably ten thousand miles away, up to my eyes in bullshit.”
She nodded. “Joe knew that. It was kind of theoretical.”
He looked at her. “But now it’s not theoretical, apparently. Eight years later you’re going ahead with it. And I’m still wondering why.”
“Like I said, now it’s my call. And I’m under big-time pressure to perform well.”
He said nothing.
“Would you consider doing it?” Froelich asked.
“I don’t know much about Armstrong. Never heard much about him before.”
She nodded. “Nobody has. He was a surprise choice. Junior senator from North Dakota, standard-issue family man, wife, grown-up daughter, cares long-distance for his sick old mother, never made any kind of national impact. But he’s an OK guy, for a politician. Better than most. I like him a lot, so far.”
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“We would pay you, obviously,” Froelich said. “That’s not a problem. You know, a professional fee, as long as it’s reasonable.”
“I’m not very interested in money,” Reacher said. “I don’t need a job.”
“You could volunteer.”
“I was a soldier. Soldiers never volunteer for anything.”
“That’s not what Joe said about you. He said you did all kinds of stuff.”
“I don’t like to be employed.”
“Well, if you want to do it for free we certainly wouldn’t object.”
He was quiet for a beat. “There would be expenses, probably, if a person did this sort of a thing properly.”
“We’d reimburse them, naturally. Whatever the person needed. All official and aboveboard, afterward.”
He looked down at the table. “Exactly what would you want the person to do?”
“I want you, not a person. Just to act the part of an assassin.
To scrutinize things from an outside perspective. Find the holes. Prove to me if he’s vulnerable, with times, dates, places. I could start you off with some schedule information, if you want.”
“You offer that to all assassins? If you’re going to do this you should do it for real, don’t you think?”
“OK,” she said.
“You still think nobody could get close?”
She considered her answer carefully, maybe ten seconds. “On balance, yes, I do. We work very hard. I think we’ve got everything covered.”
“So you think Joe was wrong back then?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why did you break up?” he asked.
She glanced away for a second and shook her head. “That’s private.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“So eight years ago you were twenty-seven.”
She smiled. “Joe was nearly thirty-six. An older man. I celebrated his birthday with him. And his thirty-seventh.”
Reacher moved sideways a little and looked at her again. Joe had good taste, he thought. Close up, she looked good. Smelled good. Perfect skin, great eyes, long lashes. Good cheekbones, a small straight nose. She looked lithe and strong. She was attractive, no doubt about it. He wondered what it would be like to hold her, kiss her. Go to bed with her. He pictured Joe wondering the same thing, the first time she walked into the office he ran. And he eventually found out. Way to go, Joe.
“I guess I forgot to send a birthday card,” he said. “Either time.”
“I don’t think he minded.”
“We weren’t very close,” he said. “I don’t really understand why not.”
“He liked you,” she said. “He made that clear. Talked about you, time to time. I think he was quite proud of you, in his own way.”
Reacher said nothing.
“So will you help me out?” she asked.
“What was he like? As a boss?”
“He was terrific. He was a superstar, professionally.”
“What about as a boyfriend?”
“He was pretty good at that, too.”
Reacher said nothing. There was a long silence.
“Where have you been since you left the service?” Froelich asked. “You haven’t left much of a paper trail.”
“That was the plan,” Reacher said. “I keep myself to myself.”
Questions in her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not radioactive.”
“I know,” she said. “Because I checked. But I’m kind of curious, now that I’ve met you. You were just a name before.”
He glanced down at the table, trying to look at himself as a third party, described secondhand in occasional bits and pieces by a brother. It was an interesting perspective.
�
��Will you help me out?” she asked again.
She unbuttoned her coat, because of the warmth of the room. She was wearing a pure white blouse under the coat. She moved a little closer, and half-turned to face him. They were as close as lovers on a lazy afternoon.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’ll be dangerous,” she said. “I have to warn you that nobody will know you’re out there except me. That’s a big problem if you’re spotted anywhere. Maybe it’s a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking.”
“I wouldn’t be spotted anywhere,” Reacher said.
She smiled. “That’s exactly what Joe told me you’d say, eight years ago.”
He said nothing.
“It’s very important,” she said. “And urgent.”
“You want to tell me why it’s important?”
“I’ve already told you why.”
“Want to tell me why it’s urgent?”
She said nothing.
“I don’t think this is theoretical at all,” he said.
She said nothing.
“I think you’ve got a situation,” he said.
She said nothing.
“I think you know somebody is out there,” he said. “An active threat.”
She looked away. “I can’t comment on that.”
“I was in the Army,” he said. “I’ve heard answers like that before.”
“It’s just a security audit,” she said. “Will you do it for me?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“There would be two conditions,” he said.
She turned back and looked at him. “Which are?”
“One, I get to work somewhere cold.”
“Why?”
“Because I just spent a hundred and eighty-nine dollars on warm clothes.”
She smiled, briefly. “Everywhere he’s going should be cold enough for you in the middle of November.”
“OK,” he said. He dug in his pocket and slid her a match-book and pointed to the name and address printed on it. “And there’s an old couple working a week in this particular club and they’re worried about getting ripped off for their wages. Musicians. They should be OK, but I need to be sure. I want you to talk to the cops here.”
