by Lee Child
“Defense is OK,” she said. “But attack is defense, isn’t it? In a situation like this? But we always let things come to us. Then we just run away from them. We’re too operational. We’re not investigative enough.”
“You have investigators,” he said. “Like the guy who watches the movies.”
She nodded against his shoulder. “The Office of Protection Research. It’s a strange role. Kind of academic, rather than specific. Strategic, rather than tactical.”
“So do it yourself. Try a few things.”
“Like what?”
“We’re back to the original evidence, with Nendick crapping out. So we have to start over. You should concentrate on the thumbprint.”
“It’s not on file.”
“Files have glitches. Files get updated. Prints get added. You should try again, every few days. And you should widen the search. Try other countries. Try Interpol.”
“I doubt if these guys are foreign.”
“But maybe they’re Americans who traveled. Maybe they got in trouble in Canada or Europe. Or Mexico or South America.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“And you should check the thumbprint thing as an MO. You know, search the databases to see if anybody ever signed threatening letters with their thumb before. How far back do the archives go?”
“To the dawn of time.”
“So put a twenty-year limit on it. I guess way back at the dawn of time plenty of people signed things with their thumbs.”
She smiled, sleepily. He could feel it against his shoulder.
“Before they learned to write,” he said.
She didn’t reply. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, snuggled against his shoulder. He eased his position and felt a shallow dip on his side of the mattress. He wondered if Joe had made it. He lay quiet for a spell and then craned his arm up and switched out the light.
Seemed like about a minute and a half later they were up again and showered and back in the Secret Service conference room eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with an FBI liaison agent named Bannon. Reacher was in his Atlantic City coat and the third of Joe’s abandoned Italian suits and the third Somebody & Somebody shirt and a plain blue tie. Froelich was in another black pant suit. Neagley was in the same suit she had worn on Sunday evening. It was the one that showed off her figure. The one that Nendick had ignored. She was cycling through her wardrobe as fast as the hotel laundry would let her. Stuyvesant was immaculate in his usual Brooks Brothers. Maybe it was fresh on, maybe it wasn’t. There was no way to tell. All his suits were the same. He looked very tired. Actually they all looked very tired, and Reacher was a little worried about that. In his experience tiredness impaired operational efficiency as badly as a drink too many.
“We’ll sleep on the plane,” Froelich said. “We’ll tell the pilot to fly slow.”
Bannon was a guy of about forty. He was in a tweed sport coat and gray flannels and looked bluff and Irish and was tall and heavy. He had a red complexion that the winter morning hadn’t helped. But he was polite and cheerful and he had supplied the doughnuts and the coffee himself. Two different stores, each chosen for its respective quality. He had been well received. Twenty bucks’ worth of food and drink had broken a lot of interagency ice.
“No secrets either way,” he said. “That’s what we’re proposing. And no blame anywhere. But no bullshit, either. I think we got to face the fact that the Nendick woman is dead. We’ll look for her like she wasn’t, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. So we’ve got three down already. Some evidence, but not a lot. We’re guessing Nendick has met with these guys, and we’re assuming they’ve certainly been to his house, if only to grab up his wife. So that’s a crime scene, and we’re going over it today, and we’ll share what we get. Nendick will help us if he ever wakes up. But assuming he won’t anytime soon, we’ll go at it from three different directions. First, the message stuff that went down here in D.C. Second, the scene in Minnesota. Third, the scene in Colorado.”
“Are your people in charge out there?” Froelich asked.
“Both places,” Bannon said. “Our ballistics people figure the Colorado weapon for a Heckler and Koch submachine gun called the MP5.”
“We already concluded that,” Neagley said. “And it was probably silenced, which makes it the MP5SD6.”
Bannon nodded. “You’re one of the ex-military, right? In which case you’ve seen MP5s before. As I have. They’re military and paramilitary weapons. Police and federal SWAT teams use them.”
Then he went quiet and looked around the assembled faces, like there was more to his point than he had actually articulated.
“What about Minnesota?” Neagley asked.
“We found the bullet,” Bannon said. “We swept the farmyard with a metal detector. It was buried about nine inches deep in the mud. Consistent with a shot from a small wooded hillside about a hundred and twenty yards away to the north. Maybe eighty feet of elevation.”
“What was the bullet?” Reacher asked.
“NATO 7.62 millimeter,” Bannon said.
Reacher nodded. “You test it?”
“For what?”
“Burn.”
Bannon nodded. “Low power, weak charge.”
“Subsonic ammunition,” Reacher said. “In that caliber it has to be a Vaime Mk2 silenced sniper rifle.”
“Which is also a police and paramilitary weapon,” Bannon said. “Often supplied to antiterrorist units.”
He looked around the room again, like he was inviting a comment. Nobody made one. So he pitched it himself.
“You know what?” he said.
“What?”
“Put a list of who buys Heckler & Koch MP5s in America side to side with a list of who buys Vaime Mk2s, and you see only one official purchaser on both lists.”
“Who?”
“The United States Secret Service.”
The room went quiet. Nobody spoke. There was a knock at the door. The duty officer. He stood there, framed in the doorway.
“Mail just arrived,” he said. “Something you need to see.”
They laid it on the conference room table. It was a familiar brown envelope, gummed flap, metal closure. A computer-printed self-adhesive address label. Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. Clear black-on-white Times New Roman lettering. Bannon opened his briefcase and took out a pair of white cotton gloves. Pulled them on, right hand, left hand. Tightened them over his fingers.
“Got these from the lab,” he said. “Special circumstances. We don’t want to use latex. Don’t want to confuse the talcum traces.”
The gloves were clumsy. He had to slide the envelope to the edge of the table to pick it up. He held it with one hand and looked for something to open it with. Reacher took his ceramic knife out of his pocket and snapped it open. Offered it handle-first. Bannon took it and eased the tip of the blade under the corner of the flap. Moved the envelope backward and the knife forward. The blade cut the paper like it was cutting air. He handed the knife back to Reacher and pressed on the sides of the envelope so it made a mouth. Glanced inside. Turned the envelope over and tipped something out.
It was a single sheet of letter-size paper. Heavyweight white stock. It landed and skidded an inch on the polished wood and settled flat. It had a question printed over two lines, centered between the margins, a little higher than halfway up the sheet. Five words, in the familiar severe typeface: Did you like the demonstration? The last word was the only word on the second line. That isolation gave it some kind of extra emphasis.
Bannon turned the envelope over and checked the postmark.
“Vegas again,” he said. “Saturday. They’re real confident, aren’t they? They’re asking if he liked the demonstration three days before they staged it.”
“We have to move out now,” Froelich said. “Lift-off at ten. I want Reacher and Neagley with me. They’ve been there before. They know the ground.”
Stuyvesant raised his hand. A vague gesture
. Either OK or whatever or don’t bother me, Reacher couldn’t tell.
“I want twice-daily meetings,” Bannon said. “In here, seven every morning and maybe ten at night?”
“If we’re in town,” Froelich said. She headed for the door. Reacher and Neagley followed her out of the room. Reacher caught her and nudged her elbow and steered her left instead of right, down the corridor toward her office.
“Do the database search,” he whispered.
She glanced at her watch. “It’s way too slow.”
“So start it now and let it compile all day.”
“Won’t Bannon do it?”
“Probably. But double-checking never hurt anybody.”
She paused. Then she turned and headed for the interior of the floor. Lit up her office and turned on her computer. The NCIC database had a complex search protocol. She entered her password and clicked the cursor into the box and typed thumbprint.
“Be more specific,” Reacher said. “That’s going to give you ten zillion plain-vanilla fingerprint cases.”
She tabbed backward and typed thumbprint+document+ letter+signature.
“OK?” she said.
He shrugged. “I was born before these things were invented.”
“It’s a start,” Neagley said. “We can refine it later if we need to.”
So Froelich clicked on search and the hard disk chattered and the inquiry box disappeared from the screen.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Moving a threatened Vice President-elect from the District of Columbia to the great state of North Dakota was a complicated undertaking. It required eight separate Secret Service vehicles, four police cars, a total of twenty agents, and an airplane. Staging the local political rally itself required twelve agents, forty local police officers, four State Police vehicles, and two local canine units. Froelich spent a total of four hours on the radio in order to coordinate the whole operation.
She left her own Suburban in the garage and used a stretched Town Car with a driver so she could be free to concentrate on giving orders. Reacher and Neagley sat with her in the back and they drove out to Georgetown and parked near Armstrong’s house. Thirty minutes later they were joined by the gun car and two Suburbans. Fifteen minutes after that, an armored Cadillac stretch showed up and parked with its passenger door tight against the tent. Then two Metro cruisers sealed the street, top and bottom. Their light bars were flashing. All vehicles were using full headlights. The sky was dark gray and a light rain was falling. Everybody kept their engines idling to power their heaters and exhaust fumes were drifting and pooling near the curbs.
They waited. Froelich talked to the personal detail in the house and the Air Force ground crew at Andrews. She talked to the cops in their cars. She listened to traffic reports from a radio news helicopter. The city was jammed because of the weather. The Metro traffic division was recommending a long loop right around the Beltway. Andrews reported that the mechanics had signed off on the plane and the pilots were aboard. The personal detail reported that Armstrong had finished his morning coffee.
“Move him,” she said.
The transfer inside the tent was invisible, but she heard it happen in her earpiece. The limo moved away from the curb and a Suburban jumped ahead of it and formed up behind the lead cop. The gun car came next, then Froelich’s stretch, then the second Suburban, then the trail cop. The convoy moved out and straight up Wisconsin Avenue, through Bethesda, traveling directly away from Andrews. But then it turned right and swung onto the Beltway and settled in for a fast clockwise loop. By then Froelich was patched through to Bismarck and was checking the arrival arrangements. Local ETA was one o’clock and she wanted plans in place so she could sleep on the flight.
The convoy used the north gate into Andrews and swept right onto the tarmac. Armstrong’s limo stopped with its passenger door twenty feet from the bottom of the steps up to the plane. The plane was a Gulfstream twinjet painted in the Air Force’s ceremonial blue United States of America livery. Its engines were whining loudly and blowing rain across the ground in thin waves. The Suburbans spilled agents and Armstrong slid out of his limo and ran the twenty feet through the drizzle. His personal detail followed, and then Froelich and Neagley and Reacher. A waiting press van contributed two reporters. A second three-man team of agents brought up the rear. Ground crew wheeled the stairs away and a steward closed the airplane door.
Inside it was nothing like the Air Force One Reacher had seen in the movies. It was more like the kind of bus a small-time rock band would ride in, a plain little vehicle customized with twelve better-than-stock seats. Eight of them were arranged in two groups of four with tables between each facing pair, and there were four facing ahead in a row straight across the front. The seats were leather and the tables were wood, but they looked out of place in the utilitarian fuselage. There was clearly a pecking order about who sat where. People crowded the aisle until Armstrong chose his place. He went for a backward-facing window seat in the port-side foursome. The two reporters sat down opposite. Maybe they had arranged an interview to kill the downtime. Froelich and the personal detail took the other foursome. The backup agents and Neagley took the front row. Reacher was left with no choice. The one seat that remained put him directly across the aisle from Froelich, but it also put him right next to Armstrong.
He stuffed his coat into the overhead bin and slid into the seat. Armstrong glanced at him like he was already an old friend. The reporters checked him out. He could feel their inquiring gaze. They were looking at his suit. He could see them thinking: too upmarket for an agent. So who is this guy? An aide? An appointee? He buckled his seat belt like sitting next to Vice Presidents-elect was something he did every four years, regular as clockwork. Armstrong did nothing to disabuse his audience. Just sat there, poised, waiting for the first question.
The engine noise built and the plane moved out to the runway. By the time it took off and leveled out almost everybody except those at Reacher’s table was fast asleep. They all just shut down like professionals do when they’re faced with a window between periods of intense activity. Froelich was accustomed to sleeping on planes. That was clear. Her head was tucked down on her shoulder and her arms were folded neatly in her lap. She looked good. The three agents around her sprawled a little less decorously. They were big guys. Wide necks, broad shoulders, thick wrists. One of them had his foot shoved out in the aisle. It looked to be about size fourteen. He assumed Neagley was asleep behind him. She could sleep anywhere. He had once seen her sleep in a tree, on a long stakeout. He found the button and laid his chair back a fraction and got comfortable. But then the reporters started talking. To Armstrong, but about him.
“Can we get a name, sir, for the record?” one of them said.
Armstrong shook his head.
“I’m afraid identities need to remain confidential at this point,” he said.
“But we can assume we’re still in the national security arena here?”
Armstrong smiled. Almost winked.
“I can’t stop you assuming things,” he said.
The reporters wrote something down. Started a conversation about foreign relations, with heavy emphasis on military resources and spending. Reacher ignored it all and tried to drift off. Came around again when he heard a repeated question and felt eyes on him. One of the reporters was looking in his direction.
“But you do still support the doctrine of overwhelming force?” the other guy was asking Armstrong.
Armstrong glanced at Reacher. “Would you wish to comment on that?”
Reacher yawned. “Yes, I still support overwhelming force. That’s for sure. I support it big time. Always have, believe me.”
The reporters both wrote it down. Armstrong nodded wisely. Reacher laid his chair back a little more and went to sleep.
He woke up on the descent into Bismarck. Everybody around him was already awake. Froelich was talking quietly to her agents, giving them their standard operational instruc
tions. Neagley was listening along with the three guys in her row. He glanced out Armstrong’s window and saw brilliant blue sky and no clouds. The earth was tan and dormant, ten thousand feet below. He could see the Missouri River winding north to south through an endless sequence of bright blue lakes. He could see the narrow ribbon of I-94 running east to west. The brown urban smudge of Bismarck where they met.
“We’re leaving the perimeter to the local cops,” Froelich was saying. “We’ve got forty of them on duty, maybe more. Plus state troopers in cars. Our job is to stick close together. We’ll be in and out quick. We’re arriving after the event has started and we’re leaving before it finishes.”
“Leave them wanting more,” Armstrong said, to nobody in particular.
“Works in show business,” one of the reporters said. The plane yawed and tilted and settled into a long shallow glide path. Seat backs came upright and belts were ratcheted tight. The reporters stowed their notebooks. They were staying on the plane. No attraction in open-air local politics for important foreign-relations journalists. Froelich glanced across at Reacher and smiled. But there was worry in her eyes.
The plane put down gently and taxied over to a corner of the tarmac where a five-car motorcade waited. There was a State Police cruiser at each end and three identical stretched Town Cars sandwiched between. A small knot of ground crew standing by with a rolling staircase. Armstrong traveled with his detail in the center limo. The backup crew took the one behind it. Froelich and Reacher and Neagley took the one in front. The air was freezing, but the sky was bright. The sun was blinding.
“You’ll be freelancing,” Froelich said. “Wherever you feel you need to be.”
There was no traffic. It felt like empty country. There was a short fast trip over smooth concrete roads and suddenly Reacher saw the familiar church tower in the distance, and the low surrounding huddle of houses. There were cars parked solid along the side of the approach road all the way up to a State Police roadblock a hundred yards from the community center entrance. The motorcade eased past it and headed for the parking lot. The fences were decorated with bunting and there was a large crowd already assembled, maybe three hundred people. The church tower loomed over all of them, tall and square and solid and blinding white in the winter sun.
