by Lee Child
The Armstrongs made it a rule never to eat at public events. It was too easy to look like idiots, greasy fingers, trying to talk while chewing. So they had an early lunch at home and drove up in convoy and got right to the business at hand. It was easy enough. Even relaxing, in a way. Local politics was not Armstrong’s problem anymore. Wouldn’t be much of a problem for his successor either, to be truthful. He had a handsome newly minted plurality and was basking in a lot of reflected glow. So the afternoon turned out to be not much more than a pleasant stroll around a pleasant piece of real estate. His wife was beautiful, his successor stayed at his side throughout, there were no awkward questions from the press, all four network affiliates and CNN were there, all the local papers had sent photographers, and stringers from The Washington Post and The New York Times showed up, too. All in all it went so well he began to wish they hadn’t bothered to schedule the follow-up event. It really wasn’t necessary.
Froelich watched the faces. She watched the perimeters. She watched the crowd, straining to sense any alteration in the herd behavior that might indicate tension or uneasiness or sudden panic. She saw nothing. Saw no sign of Reacher, either.
Armstrong stayed thirty minutes longer than anticipated, because the weak fall sun bathed the field in gold, and there was no breeze, and he was having a good time, and there was nothing scheduled for the evening except a quiet dinner with key members of the state legislature. So his wife was escorted home and his personal detail herded him back toward the cars and drove him north into the city of Bismarck itself. There was a hotel adjacent to the restaurant and Froelich had arranged rooms for the dead time before the meal. Armstrong napped for an hour and then showered and dressed. The meal was going well when his chief of staff fielded a call. The outgoing President and Vice President were formally summoning the President-elect and the Vice President-elect to a one-day transition conference at the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont, starting early the next morning. It was a conventional invitation, because inevitably there was business to discuss. And it was delivered in the traditional way, last-minute and pompous, because the lame ducks wanted to push the world around one last time. But Froelich was delighted, because the unofficial name for the Naval Support Facility in Thurmont is Camp David, and there is no safer place in the world than that particular wooded clearing in the Maryland mountains. She decided they should all fly back to Andrews immediately and take Marine helicopters straight out to the compound. If they spent all night and all day there she would be able to relax completely for twenty-four hours.
But late on the Sunday morning a Navy steward found her at breakfast in the mess hall and plugged a telephone into a baseboard socket near her chair. Nobody uses cordless or cellular phones at Camp David. Too vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping.
“Call transferred from your main office, ma’am,” the steward said.
There was empty silence for a second, and then a voice.
“We should get together,” Reacher said.
“Why?”
“Can’t tell you on the phone.”
“Where have you been?”
“Here and there.”
“Where are you now?”
“In a room at the hotel you used for the reception Thursday.”
“You got something urgent for me?”
“A conclusion.”
“Already? It’s only been five days. You said ten.”
“Five was enough.”
Froelich cupped the phone. “What’s the conclusion?”
Then she found herself holding her breath.
“It’s impossible,” Reacher said.
She breathed out and smiled. “Told you so.”
“No, your job is impossible. You should get over here, right now.”
3
She drove back to D.C. in her Suburban and argued with herself the whole way. If the news is really bad, when do I involve Stuyvesant? Now? Later? In the end she pulled over on Dupont Circle and called him at home and asked him the question direct.
“I’ll get involved when I need to,” he said. “Who did you use?”
“Joe Reacher’s brother.”
“Our Joe Reacher? I didn’t know he had a brother.”
“Well, he did.”
“What’s he like?”
“Just like Joe, maybe a little rougher.”
“Older or younger?”
“Both,” Froelich said. “He started out younger, and now he’s older.”
Stuyvesant went quiet for a moment.
“Is he as smart as Joe?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Froelich said.
Stuyvesant went quiet again. “So call me when you need to. But sooner rather than later, OK? And don’t say anything to anybody else.”
She ended the call and threaded back into the Sunday traffic and drove the last mile and parked outside the hotel. The desk was expecting her and sent her straight up to 1201, twelfth floor. She followed a waiter through the door. He was carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two upside-down cups on saucers. No milk, no sugar, no spoons, and a single pink rose in a narrow china vase. The room was standard-issue city hotel. Two queen beds, flowery prints at the window, bland lithographs on the walls, a table, two chairs, a desk with a complicated phone, a credenza with a television, a connecting door to the next room. Reacher was sitting on the nearer bed. He was wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket with a black T-shirt and black jeans and black shoes. He had an earpiece in his ear and a pretty good fake Secret Service pin in the collar of the jacket. He was clean shaven and his hair had been cut very short and was neatly combed.
“What have you got for me?” she asked.
“Later,” he said.
The waiter put the tray on the table and backed silently out of the room. Froelich watched the door click shut behind him and turned back to Reacher. Paused a beat.
“You look just like one of us,” she said.
“You owe me lots of money,” he said.
“Twenty grand?”
He smiled. “Most of that. They told you about it?”
She nodded. “But why a cashier’s check? That puzzled me.” “It won’t, soon.”
He stood up and stepped across to the table. Righted the cups and picked up the pot and poured the coffee.
“You timed the room service well,” she said.
He smiled again. “I knew where you were, I knew you’d be driving back. It’s Sunday, no traffic. Easy enough to derive an ETA.”
“So what have you got to tell me?”
“That you’re good,” he said. “That you’re really, really good. That I don’t think anybody else could do this better than you.”
She went quiet. “But?”
“But you’re not good enough. You need to face that whoever it is out there could walk right in and get the job done.”
“I never said there’s anybody out there.”
He said nothing.
“Just give me the information, Reacher.”
“Three and a half,” he said.
“Three and a half what? Out of ten?”
“No, Armstrong’s dead, three and a half times over.”
She stared at him. “Already?”
“That’s how I score it,” he said.
“What do you mean, a half?”
“Three definites and one possible.”
She stopped halfway to the table and just stood there, bewildered.
“In five days?” she said. “How? What aren’t we doing?”
“Have some coffee,” he said.
She moved toward the table like an automaton. He handed her a cup. She took it and backed away to the bed. The cup rattled in the saucer.
“Two main approaches,” Reacher said. “Like in the movies, John Malkovich or Edward Fox. You’ve seen those movies?”
She nodded blankly. “We have a guy monitoring the movies. In the Office of Protection Research. He analyzes all the assassination movies. John Malkovich made
In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood.”
“And Rene Russo,” Reacher said. “She was pretty good.”
“Edward Fox was in The Day of the Jackal, way back.”
Reacher nodded. “John Malkovich was looking to take out the President of the United States, and Edward Fox was looking to take out the President of France. Two competent assassins, working solo. But there was a fundamental difference between them. John Malkovich knew all along he wasn’t going to survive the mission. He knew he’d die a second after the President. But Edward Fox aimed to get away with it.”
“He didn’t, though.”
“It was a movie, Froelich. Had to end that way. He could have gotten away with it, easy as anything.”
“So?”
“It gives us two strategies to consider. A close-up suicide mission, or a clean long-distance job.”
“We know all that. I told you, we have a person working on it. We get transcripts, analyses, memos, position papers. We talk to the screenwriters sometimes, if there’s new stuff. We want to know where they get their ideas from.”
“Learn anything?”
She shrugged and sipped her coffee and he saw her trawl back through her memory, like she had all the transcripts and all the memos and all the position papers stashed away in a mental filing cabinet.
“The Day of the Jackal impressed us, I think,” she said. “Edward Fox played a pro shooter who had a rifle built so it could be disguised as a crutch for a handicapped veteran. He used the disguise to get into a nearby building some hours before a public appearance and planned a long-range head shot from a high-floor window. He was using a silencer, so he could get away afterward. Could have worked, in theory. But the story was set a long time ago. Before I was born. Early sixties, I think. General de Gaulle, after the Algerian crisis, wasn’t it? We enforce far wider perimeters now. The movie was a factor in that, I guess. Plus our own problems in the early sixties, of course.”
“And In the Line of Fire?” Reacher asked.
“John Malkovich played a renegade CIA operative,” she said. “He manufactured a plastic pistol in his basement so he could beat the metal detectors and conned his way into a campaign rally and intended to shoot the President from very close range. Whereupon, as you say, we would have taken him down immediately.”
“But old Clint jumped into the path of the bullet,” Reacher said. “Good movie, I thought.”
“Implausible, we thought,” Froelich answered. “Two main faults. First, the idea that you can build a working pistol from hobbyist material is absurd. We look at stuff like that all the time. His gun would have exploded, blown his hand off at the wrist. The bullet would have just fallen out of the wreckage onto the floor. And second, he spent about a hundred thousand dollars along the way. Lots and lots of travel, phony offices for mail drops, plus a fifty-thousand-dollar donation to the party that got him into the campaign rally in the first place. Our assessment was a maniac personality like that wouldn’t have big bucks to spend. We dismissed it.”
“It was only a movie,” Reacher said. “But it was illustrative.”
“Of what?”
“Of the idea of getting into a rally and attacking the target from close quarters, as opposed to the old idea of going for long-distance safety.”
Froelich paused. Then she smiled, a little warily at first, like a grave danger might be receding into the distance.
“Is this all you’ve got?” she said. “Ideas? You had me worried.”
“Like the rally here on Thursday night,” Reacher said. “A thousand guests. Time and place announced in advance. Advertised, even.”
“You found the transition’s website?”
Reacher nodded. “It was very useful. Lots of information.”
“We vet it all.”
“But it still told me every place Armstrong’s going to be,” Reacher said. “And when. And in what kind of a context. Like the rally right here, Thursday night. With the thousand guests.”
“What about them?”
“One of them was a dark-haired woman who got hold of Armstrong’s hand and pulled him a little off-balance.”
She stared at him. “You were there?”
He shook his head. “No, but I heard about it.”
“How?”
He ignored the question. “Did you see it?”
“Only on video,” she said. “Afterward.”
“That woman could have killed Armstrong. That was the first opportunity. Up to that point you were doing real well. You were scoring A-plus during the government stuff around the Capitol.”
She smiled again, a little dismissively. “Could have? You’re wasting my time, Reacher. I wanted better than could have. I mean, anything could happen. A bolt of lightning could hit the building. A meteorite, even. The universe could stop expanding and time could reverse. That woman was an invited guest. She was a party contributor. She passed through two metal detectors and she was ID-checked at the door.”
“Like John Malkovich.”
“We’ve been through that.”
“Suppose she was a martial-arts expert. Maybe military-trained in black ops. She could have broken Armstrong’s neck like you could break a pencil.”
“Suppose, suppose.”
“Suppose she was armed.”
“She wasn’t. She passed through two metal detectors.” Reacher put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and came out with a slim brown object.
“Ever seen one of these?” he asked.
It looked like a penknife, maybe three and a half inches long. A curved handle. He clicked a button and a speckled brown blade snapped outward.
“This is entirely ceramic,” he said. “Same basic stuff as a bathroom tile. Harder than anything except a diamond. Certainly harder than steel, and sharper than steel. And it doesn’t trigger a metal detector. That woman could have been carrying this thing. She could have slit Armstrong open from his belly button to his chin with it. Or cut his throat. Or stuck it in his eye.”
He passed the weapon over. Froelich took it and studied it.
“Made by a firm called Böker,” Reacher said. “In Solingen, Germany. They’re expensive, but they’re relatively available.”
Froelich shrugged. “OK, so you bought a knife. Doesn’t prove anything.”
“That knife was in the ballroom Thursday night. It was clutched in that woman’s left hand, in her pocket, with the blade open, all the time she was shaking Armstrong’s hand and pulling him close. She got his belly within three inches of it.”
Froelich stared at him. “Are you serious? Who was she?”
“She was a party supporter called Elizabeth Wright, from Elizabeth, New Jersey, as it happens. She gave the campaign four thousand bucks, a grand each in her name, her husband’s, and her two kids’. She stuffed envelopes for a month, put a big sign in her front yard, and operated a phone tree on Election Day.”
“So why would she carry a knife?”
“Well, actually, she didn’t.”
He stood up and walked to the connecting door. Pulled his half open and knocked hard on the inner half.
“OK, Neagley,” he called.
The inner door opened and a woman walked in from the next room. She was somewhere in her late thirties, medium height and slim, dressed in blue jeans and a soft gray sweatshirt. She had dark hair. Dark eyes. A great smile. The way she moved and the tendons in her wrists spoke of serious gym time.
“You’re the woman on the video,” Froelich said.
Reacher smiled. “Frances Neagley, meet M. E. Froelich. M. E. Froelich, meet Frances Neagley.”
“Emmy?” Frances Neagley said. “Like the television thing?”
“Initials,” Reacher said.
Froelich stared at him. “Who is she?”
“The best Master Sergeant I ever worked with. Beyond expert-qualified on every kind of close-quarters combat you can think of. Scares the hell out of me, certainly. She got cut loose around the same time I did. Works as a
security consultant in Chicago.”
“Chicago,” Froelich repeated. “That’s why the check went there.”
Reacher nodded. “She funded everything, because I don’t have a credit card or a checkbook. As you already know, probably.”
“So what happened to Elizabeth Wright from New Jersey?”
“I bought these clothes,” Reacher said. “Or rather, you bought them for me. And the shoes. Sunglasses, too. My version of Secret Service fatigues. I went to the barber. Shaved every day. I wanted to look plausible. Then I wanted a lone woman from New Jersey, so I met a couple of Newark flights at the airport here on Thursday. Watched the crowd and latched onto Ms. Wright and told her I was a Secret Service agent and there was a big security snafu going on and she should come with me.”
“How did you know she was headed to the rally?”
“I didn’t. I just looked at all the women coming out of baggage claim and tried to judge by how they looked and what they were carrying. Wasn’t easy. Elizabeth Wright was the sixth woman I approached.”
“And she believed you?”
“I had impressive ID. I bought this radio earpiece from Radio Shack, two bucks. Little electrical cord disappearing down the back of my neck, see? I had a rented Town Car, black. I looked the part, believe me. She believed me. She was quite excited about the whole thing, really. I brought her back to this room and guarded her all evening while Neagley took over. I kept listening to my earpiece and talking into my watch.”
Froelich switched her gaze across to Neagley.
