by Lee Child
“You still look good,” he said.
“So do you, in black.”
“Feels like a uniform,” he said. “Five years since I last wore one.”
Neagley finished stretching. Smoothed her hair and pulled the hem of her shirt back down into place.
“Are we done here?” she asked.
“Tired?”
“Exhausted. We worked our butts off, ruining that poor woman’s day.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I liked her. And like I told her, I think she’s got an impossible job. And all in all, I think she’s pretty good at it. I doubt if anybody else could do it better. And I think she kind of knows that too, but it’s burning her up that she’s forced to settle for ninety-five percent instead of a hundred.”
“I agree.”
“Who’s this guy Joe she was talking about?”
“An old boyfriend.”
“You knew him?”
“My brother. She dated him.”
“When?”
“They broke up six years ago.”
“What’s he like?”
Reacher glanced at the floor. Didn’t correct the is to a was.
“Like a civilized version of me,” he said.
“So maybe she’ll want to date you, too. Civilized can be an overrated virtue. And collecting the complete set is always fun for a girl.”
Reacher said nothing. The room went quiet.
“I guess I’ll head home,” Neagley said. “Back to Chicago. Back to the real world. But I got to say, it was a pleasure working with you again.”
“Liar.”
“No, really, I mean it.”
“So stick around. A buck gets ten she’ll be back inside an hour.”
Neagley smiled. “What, to ask you out?”
Reacher shook his head. “No, to tell us what her real problem is.”
4
Froelich walked across the sidewalk to her Suburban. Spilled the files onto the passenger seat. Started the engine and kept her foot hard on the brake. Pulled her phone from her bag and flipped it open. Entered Stuyvesant’s home number digit by digit and then paused with her finger resting on the call button. The phone waited patiently with the number displayed on the tiny green screen. She looked ahead through the windshield, fighting with herself. She looked down at the phone. Back out at the street. Her finger rested on the button. Then she flipped the phone shut and dropped it on top of the files. Pulled the transmission lever into drive and took off from the curb with a loud chirp from all four tires. Hung a left and a right and headed for her office.
The room-service guy came back to collect the coffee tray and left with it. Reacher took his jacket off and hung it in the closet. Pulled the T-shirt out of the waistband of his jeans.
“Did you vote in the election?” Neagley asked him.
He shook his head. “I’m not registered anywhere. Did you?”
“Sure,” she said. “I always vote.”
“Did you vote for Armstrong?”
“Nobody votes for Vice President. Except his family, maybe.”
“But did you vote for that ticket?”
She nodded. “Yes, I did. Would you have?”
“I guess so,” he said. “You ever hear anything about Armstrong before?”
“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I’m interested in politics, but I’m not one of those people who can name all hundred senators.”
“Would you run for office?”
“Not in a million years. I like a low profile, Reacher. I was a sergeant, and I always will be, inside. Never wanted to be an officer.”
“You had the potential.”
She shrugged and smiled, all at the same time. “Maybe I did. But what I didn’t have was the desire. And you know what? Sergeants have plenty of power. More than you guys ever realized.”
“Hey, I realized,” he said. “Believe me, I realized.”
“She’s not coming back, you know. We’re sitting here talking and wasting time and I’m missing all kinds of flights home, and she’s not coming back.”
“She’s coming back.”
Froelich parked in the garage and headed upstairs. Presidential protection was a 24/7 operation, but Sundays still felt different. People dressed different, the air was quieter, phone traffic was down. Some people spent the day at home. Like Stuyvesant, for instance. She closed her office door and sat at her desk and opened a drawer. Took out the things she needed and slipped them into a large brown envelope. Then she opened Reacher’s expenses file and copied the figure on the bottom line onto the top sheet of her yellow pad and switched her shredder on. Fed the whole file into it, sheet by sheet, and then followed it with the file of recommendations and all the six-by-four photographs, one by one. She fed the file folders themselves in and stirred the long curling shreds around in the output bin until they were hopelessly tangled. Then she switched the machine off again and picked up the envelope and headed back down to the garage.
Reacher saw her car from the hotel room window. It came around the corner and slowed. There was no traffic on the street. Late in the afternoon, on a November Sunday in D.C. The tourists were in their hotels, showering, getting ready for dinner. The natives were home, reading their newspapers, watching the NFL on television, paying bills, doing chores. The air was fogging with evening. Streetlights were sputtering to life. The black Suburban had its headlights on. It pulled a wide U across both lanes and slid into an area reserved for waiting taxis.
“She’s back,” Reacher said.
Neagley joined him at the window. “We can’t help her.”
“Maybe she isn’t looking for help.”
“Then why would she come back?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A second opinion? Validation? Maybe she just wants to talk. You know, a problem shared is a problem halved.”
“Why talk to us?”
“Because we didn’t hire her and we can’t fire her. And we weren’t rivals for her position. You know how these organizations work.”
“Is she allowed to talk to us?”
“Didn’t you ever talk to somebody you shouldn’t have?”
Neagley made a face. “Occasionally. Like, I talked to you.”
“And I talked to you, which was worse, because you weren’t an officer.”
“But I had the potential.”
“That’s for damn sure,” he said, looking down. “Now she’s just sitting there.”
“She’s on the phone. She’s calling somebody.”
The room phone rang.
“Us, evidently,” Reacher said.
He picked up the phone.
“We’re still here,” he said.
Then he listened for a moment.
“OK,” he said, and put the phone down.
“She coming up?” Neagley asked. He nodded and went back to the window in time to see Froelich climbing out of the car. She was holding an envelope. She skipped across the sidewalk and disappeared from sight. Two minutes later they heard the distant chime of the elevator arriving on their floor. Twenty seconds after that, a knock on the door. Reacher stepped over and opened up and Froelich walked in and stopped in the middle of the room. Glanced first at Neagley, and then at Reacher.
“Can we have a minute in private?” she asked him.
“Don’t need one,” he said. “The answer is yes.”
“You don’t know the question yet.”
“You trust me, because you trusted Joe and Joe trusted me, therefore that loop is closed. Now you want to know if I trust Neagley, so you can close that loop also, and the answer is yes, I trust her absolutely, therefore you can too.”
“OK,” Froelich said. “I guess that was the question.”
“So take your jacket off and make yourself at home. You want more coffee?”
Froelich slipped out of her jacket and dumped it on the bed. Stepped over to the table and laid the envelope down.
“More coffee would be fine,”
she said.
Reacher dialed room service and asked for a large pot and three cups, three saucers, and absolutely nothing else.
“I only told you half the truth before,” Froelich said.
“I guessed,” Reacher said.
Froelich nodded apologetically and picked up the envelope. Opened the flap and pulled out a clear vinyl page protector. There was something in it.
“This is a copy of something that came in the mail,” she said.
She dropped it on the table and Reacher and Neagley inched their chairs closer to take a look. The page protector was a standard office product. The thing inside it was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a single sheet of white paper. It was shown lying on a wooden surface and had a wooden office ruler laid alongside it to indicate scale. It looked like a normal letter-sized sheet. Centered left to right on it, an inch or so above the middle, were five words: You are going to die. The words were crisp and bold, obviously printed from a computer.
The room stayed quiet.
“When did it come?” Reacher asked.
“The Monday after the election,” Froelich said. “First-class mail.”
“Addressed to Armstrong?”
Froelich nodded. “At the Senate. But he hasn’t seen it yet. We open all public mail addressed to protectees. We pass on whatever is appropriate. We didn’t think this was appropriate. What do you think of it?”
“Two things, I guess. First, it’s true.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“You discovered the secret of immortality? Everybody’s going to die, Froelich. I am, you are. Maybe when we’re a hundred, but we aren’t going to live forever. So technically it’s a statement of fact. An accurate prediction, as much as a threat.”
“Which raises a question,” Neagley said. “Is the sender smart enough to have phrased it that way on purpose?”
“What would be the purpose?”
“To avoid prosecution if you find him? Or her? To be able to say, hey, it wasn’t a threat, it was a statement of fact? Anything we can infer from the forensics about the sender’s intelligence?”
Froelich looked at her in surprise. And with a measure of respect.
“We’ll get to that,” she said. “And we’re pretty sure it’s a him, not a her.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that,” Froelich said again.
“But why are you worrying about it?” Reacher asked. “That’s my second reaction. Surely those guys get sackloads of threats in the mail.”
Froelich nodded. “Several thousand a year, typically. But most of them are sent to the President. It’s fairly unusual to get one directed specifically at the Vice President. And most of them are on old scraps of paper, written in crayon, bad spelling, crossings out. Defective, in some way. And this one isn’t defective. This one stood out from the start. So we looked at it pretty hard.”
“Where was it mailed?”
“Las Vegas,” Froelich said. “Which doesn’t really help us. In terms of Americans traveling inside America, Vegas has the biggest transient population there is.”
“You’re sure an American sent it?”
“It’s a percentage game. We’ve never had a written threat from a foreigner.”
“And you don’t think he’s a Vegas resident?”
“Very unlikely. We think he traveled there to mail it.”
“Because?” Neagley asked.
“Because of the forensics,” Froelich said. “They’re spectacular. They indicate a very careful and cautious guy.”
“Details?”
“Were you a specialist? In the military police?”
“She was a specialist in breaking people’s necks,” Reacher said. “But I guess she took an intelligent interest in the other stuff.”
“Ignore him,” Neagley said. “I spent six months training in the FBI labs.”
Froelich nodded. “We sent this to the FBI. Their facilities are better than ours.”
There was a knock at the door. Reacher stood up and walked over and put his eye to the peephole. The room-service guy, with the coffee. Reacher opened the door and took the tray from him. A large pot, three upside-down cups, three saucers, no milk or sugar or spoons, and a single pink rose in a thin china vase. He carried the tray back to the table and Froelich moved the photograph to give him room to put it down. Neagley righted the cups and started to pour.
“What did the FBI find?” she asked.
“The envelope was clean,” Froelich said. “Standard brown letter size, gummed flap, metal butterfly closure. The address was printed on a self-adhesive label, presumably by the same computer that printed the message. The message was inserted unfolded. The flap gum was wetted with faucet water. No saliva, no DNA. No fingerprints on the metal closure. There were five sets of prints on the envelope itself. Three of them were postal workers. Their prints are on file as government workers. It’s a condition of their employment. The fourth was the Senate mail handler who passed it on to us. And the fifth was our agent who opened it.”
Neagley nodded. “So forget the envelope. Except inasmuch as the faucet water was pretty thoughtful. This guy’s a reader, keeps up with the times.”
“What about the letter itself?” Reacher asked.
Froelich picked up the photograph and tilted it toward the room light.
“Very weird,” she said. “The FBI lab says the paper was made by the Georgia-Pacific company, their high-bright, twenty-four-pound heavyweight, smooth finish, acid-free laser stock, standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch letter size. Georgia-Pacific is the third-largest supplier into the office market. They sell hundreds of tons a week. So a single sheet is completely untraceable. But it’s a buck or two more expensive per ream than basic paper, so that might mean something. Or it might not.”
“What about the printing?”
“It’s a Hewlett-Packard laser. They can tell by the toner chemistry. Can’t tell which model, because all their black-and-white lasers use the same basic toner powder. The typeface is Times New Roman, from Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95, fourteen point, printed bold.”
“They can narrow it down to a single computer program?”
Froelich nodded. “They’ve got a guy who specializes in that. Typefaces tend to change very subtly between different word processors. The software writers fiddle with the kerning, which is the spacing between individual letters, as opposed to the spacing between words. If you look long enough, you can kind of sense it. Then you can measure it and identify the program. But it doesn’t help us much. There must be a million zillion PCs out there with Works 4.5 bundled in.”
“No prints, I guess,” Neagley said.
“Well, this is where it gets weird,” Froelich answered. She moved the coffee tray an inch and laid the photograph flat. Pointed to the top edge. “Right here on the actual edge we’ve got microscopic traces of talcum dust.” Then she pointed to a spot an inch below the top edge. “And here we’ve got two definite smudges of talcum dust, one on the back, one on the front.”
“Latex gloves,” Neagley said.
“Exactly,” Froelich said. “Disposable latex gloves, like a doctor’s or a dentist’s. They come in boxes of fifty or a hundred pairs. Talcum powder inside the gloves, to help them slip on. But there’s always some loose talcum in the box, so it transfers from the outside of the glove, too. The dust on the top edge is baked, but the smudges aren’t.”
“OK,” Neagley said. “So the guy puts on his gloves, breaks open a new ream of paper, fans it out so it won’t jam, which puts talcum dust on the top edge where he flips it, then he loads the printer, prints out his message, whereby he bakes the dust.”
“Because a laser printer uses heat,” Froelich said. “The toner powder is attracted to the paper by an electrostatic charge in the shape of the required letters, and then a heater bakes it into place permanently. Somewhere around two hundred degrees, I think, momentarily.”
Neagley leaned close. “Then he lifts
the paper out of the output tray by clamping it between his finger and thumb, which accounts for the smudges front and back near the top, which aren’t baked because it’s after the heat treatment. And you know what? This is a home office, not a work office.”
“Why?”
“The front and back finger-clamping thing means the paper is coming out of the printer vertically. Popping up, like a toaster. If it was feeding out flat the marks would be different. There would be a smear on the front where he slides it. Less of a mark on the back. And the only Hewlett-Packard lasers that feed the paper vertically are the little ones. Home-office things. I’ve got one myself. It’s too slow to use high-volume. And the toner cartridge only lasts twenty-five hundred pages. Strictly amateur. So this guy did this in his den at home.”
Froelich nodded. “Stands to reason, I guess. He’s going to look a little strange using latex gloves in front of other people in an office.”
Neagley smiled, like she was making progress. “OK, he’s in his den, he lifts the message out of his printer and slides it straight into the envelope and seals it with faucet water while he’s still got his gloves on. Hence none of his prints.”
Froelich’s face changed. “No, this is where it gets very weird.” She pointed to the photograph. Laid her fingernail on a spot an inch below the printed message, and a little ways to the right of center. “What might we expect to find here, if this were a regular letter, for instance?”
“A signature,” Reacher said.
“Exactly,” Froelich said. She kept her fingernail on the spot. “And what we’ve got here is a thumbprint. A big, clear, definite thumbprint. Obviously deliberate. Bold as anything, exactly vertical, clear as a bell. Way too big to be a woman’s. He’s signed the message with his thumb.”
Reacher pulled the photograph out from under Froelich’s finger and studied it.
“You’re tracing the print, obviously,” Neagley said.
“They won’t find anything,” Reacher said. “The guy must be completely confident his prints aren’t on file anywhere.”
“We’ve come up blank so far,” Froelich said.
