by Lee Child
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying all four factors point in one single direction.”
“What direction?”
“What’s the purpose behind the messages?”
“They’re threats,” Froelich said.
“Who are they threatening?”
“Armstrong, of course.”
“Are they? Some were addressed to you, and some were addressed to him. But has he seen any of them? Even the ones addressed directly to him? Does he even know anything about them?”
“We never tell our protectees. That’s policy, always has been.”
“So Armstrong’s not sweating, is he? Who’s sweating?”
“We are.”
“So are the messages really aimed at Armstrong, or are they really aimed at the United States Secret Service? In a real-world sense?”
Froelich said nothing.
“OK,” Bannon said. “Now think about Minnesota and Colorado. Hell of a demonstration. Not easy to stage. Whoever you are, shooting people down takes nerve and skill and care and thought and preparation. Not easy. Not something you undertake lightly. But they undertook it, because they had some kind of point to make. Then what did they do? How did they tip you off? How did they tell you where to look?”
“They didn’t.”
“Exactly,” Bannon said. “They went to all that trouble, took all that risk, and then they sat back and did nothing at all. They just waited. And sure enough, the NCIC reports were filed by the local police departments, and the FBI computers scanned through NCIC like they’re programmed to do, and they spotted the word Armstrong like they’re programmed to do, and we called you with the good news.”
“So?”
“So tell me, how many Joe Publics would know all that would happen? How many Joe Publics would sit back and take the risk that their little drama would go unconnected for a day or two until you read about it in the newspapers?”
“So what are you saying? Who are they?”
“What weapons did they use?”
“An H&K MP5SD6 and a Vaime Mk2,” Reacher said.
“Fairly esoteric weapons,” Bannon said. “And not legally available for sale to the public, because they’re silenced. Only government agencies can buy them. And only one government agency buys both of them.”
“Us,” Stuyvesant said, quietly.
“Yes, you,” Bannon said. “And finally, I looked for Ms. Froelich’s name in the phone book. And you know what? She’s not there. She’s unlisted. Certainly there was no boxed ad saying, ‘I’m a Secret Service crew chief and this is where I live.’ So how did these guys know where to deliver the last message?”
There was a long silence.
“They know me,” Froelich said, quietly.
Bannon nodded. “I’m sorry, folks, but as of now the FBI is looking for Secret Service people. Not current employees, because current employees would have been aware of the early arrival of the demonstration threat and would have acted a day sooner. So we’re focusing on recent ex-employees who still know the ropes. People who knew you wouldn’t tell Armstrong himself. People who knew Ms. Froelich. People who knew Nendick, too, and where to find him. Maybe people who left under a cloud and are carrying some kind of grudge. Against the Secret Service, not against Brook Armstrong. Because our theory is that Armstrong is a means, not an end. They’ll waste a Vice Presi dent-elect just to get at you, exactly like they wasted the other two Armstrongs.”
The room was silent.
“What would be the motive?” Froelich asked.
Bannon made a face. “Embittered ex-employees are walking, talking, living, breathing motives. We all know that. We’ve all suffered from it.”
“What about the thumbprint?” Stuyvesant said. “All our people are printed. Always have been.”
“Our assumption is that we’re talking about two guys. Our assessment is that the thumbprint guy is an unknown associate of somebody who used to work here, who is the latex gloves guy. So we’re saying they and them purely as a convenience. We’re not saying they both worked here. We’re not suggesting you’ve got two renegades.”
“Just one renegade.”
“That’s our theory,” Bannon said. “But saying they and them is useful and instructive, too, because they’re a team. We need to look at them as a single unit. Because they share information. Therefore what I’m saying is, only one of them worked here, but they both know your secrets.”
“This is a very big department,” Stuyvesant said. “Big turnover of people. Some quit. Some are fired. Some retire. Some get asked to.”
“We’re checking now,” Bannon said. “We’re getting personnel lists direct from Treasury. We’re going back five years.”
“You’ll get a long list.”
“We’ve got the manpower.”
Nobody spoke.
“I’m real sorry, people,” Bannon said. “Nobody likes to hear their problem is close to home. But it’s the only conclusion there is. And it’s not good news for days like today. These people are here in town right now and they know exactly what you’re thinking and exactly what you’re doing. So my advice is to cancel. And if you’re not going to cancel, then my advice is to take a great deal of care.”
Stuyvesant nodded in the silence.
“We will,” he said. “You can count on that.”
“My people will be in place two hours in advance,” Bannon said.
“Ours will be in place an hour before that,” Froelich replied.
Bannon smiled a tight little smile and pushed back his chair and stood up.
“See you there,” he said.
He left the room and closed the door behind him, firmly, but quietly.
Stuyvesant checked his watch. “Well?”
They had sat quiet for a moment, and then strolled out to the reception area and got coffee. Then they regrouped in the conference room, in the same seats, each of them looking at the place Bannon had vacated like he was still there.
“Well?” Stuyvesant said again.
Nobody spoke.
“Inevitable, I guess,” Stuyvesant said. “They can’t pin the thumbprint guy on us, but the other one is definitely one of ours. It’ll be all smiles over at the Hoover Building. They’ll be grinning from ear to ear. Laughing up their sleeves at us.”
“But does that make them wrong?” Neagley asked.
“No,” Froelich said. “These guys know where I live. So I think Bannon’s right.”
Stuyvesant flinched, like the umpire had called strike one.
“And you?” he said to Neagley.
“Worrying about DNA on envelopes sounds like insiders,” Neagley said. “But one thing bothers me. If they’re familiar with your procedures, then they didn’t interpret the Bismarck situation very well. They expected the cops would move toward the decoy rifle and Armstrong would move toward the cars, thereby traversing their field of fire. But that didn’t happen. Armstrong waited in the blind spot and the cars came to him.”
Froelich shook her head.
“No, I’m afraid their interpretation was correct,” she said. “Normally Armstrong would have been well out in the middle of the field, letting people get a good look at him. Right there in the center of things. We don’t usually make them skulk around the edges. It was a last-minute change to keep him near the church. Based on Reacher’s input. And normally there’s absolutely no way I would allow a rear-wheel-drive limo on the grass. Too easy to bog down and get stuck. That’s an article of faith. But I knew the ground was dry and hard. It was practically frozen. So I improvised. That maneuver would have struck an insider as completely off the wall. It would have been the very last thing they were expecting. They would have been totally surprised by it.”
Silence for a beat.
“Then Bannon’s theory is perfectly plausible,” Neagley said. “I’m very sorry.”
Stuyvesant nodded, slowly. Strike two.
“Reacher?” he said.
“Ca
n’t argue with a word of it.”
Strike three. Stuyvesant’s head dropped, like his last hope was gone.
“But I don’t believe it,” Reacher said.
Stuyvesant’s head came up again.
“I’m glad they’re pursuing it,” Reacher said. “Because it needs to be pursued, I guess. We need to eliminate all possibilities. And they’ll go at it like crazy. If they’re right, they’ll take care of it for us, that’s for sure. So it’s one less thing for us to worry about. But I’m pretty sure they’re wasting their time.”
“Why?” Froelich asked.
“Because I’m pretty sure neither of these guys ever worked here.”
“So who are they?”
“I think they’re both outsiders. I think they’re between two and ten years older than Armstrong himself, both of them brought up and educated in remote rural areas where the schools were decent but the taxes were low.”
“What?”
“Think of everything we know. Think of everything we’ve seen. Then think of the very smallest part of it. The very tini est component.”
“Tell us,” Froelich said.
Stuyvesant checked his watch again. Shook his head.
“Not now,” he said. “We need to move. You can tell us later. But you’re sure?”
“They’re both outsiders,” Reacher said. “Guaranteed. It’s in the Constitution.”
13
Every city has a cusp, where the good part of town turns bad. Washington D.C. was no different. The border between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim inroads of its own. It was pierced in some places by gentrified corridors. Elsewhere it worked gradually, shading imperceptibly over hundreds of yards down streets where you could buy thirty different blends of tea at one end and cash checks at the other for thirty percent of the proceeds.
The shelter selected for Armstrong’s appearance was halfway into the no-man’s-land north of Union Station. To the east were train tracks and switching yards. To the west was a highway running underground in a tunnel. All around were decayed buildings. Some of them were warehouses and some of them were apartments. Some of them were abandoned, some of them were not. The shelter itself was exactly what Froelich had described. It was a long low one-story building made of brick. It had large metal-framed windows evenly spaced in the walls. It had a yard next to it twice its own size. The yard was closed in on three sides by high brick walls. It was impossible to decipher the building’s original purpose. Maybe it had been a stable, back when Union Station’s freight had been hauled away by horses. Maybe later it was updated with new windows and used as a trucking depot after the horses faded away. Maybe it had served time as an office. It was impossible to tell.
It housed fifty homeless people every night. They were woken early every morning and given breakfast and turned out on the streets. Then the fifty cots were stacked and stored and the floor was washed and the air was misted with disinfectant. Metal tables and chairs were carried in and placed where the beds had been. Lunch was available every day, and dinner, and then the reverse conversion to a dormitory took place at nine every evening.
But this day was different. Thanksgiving Day was always different, and this year it was more different than usual. Wake-up call happened a little earlier and breakfast was served a little faster. The overnighters were shown the door a full half hour before normal, which was a double blow to them because cities are notoriously quiet on Thanksgiving Day and panhandling receipts are dismal. The floor was washed more thoroughly than usual and more disinfectant was sprayed into the air. The tables were positioned more exactly, the chairs were lined up more precisely, more volunteers were on hand, and all of them were wearing fresh white sweatshirts with the benefactor’s name brightly printed in red.
The first Secret Service agents to arrive were the line-of-sight team. They had a large-scale city surveyor’s map and a telescopic sight removed from a sniper rifle. One agent walked through every step that Armstrong was scheduled to take. Every separate pace he would stop and turn around and squint through the scope and call out every window and every rooftop he could see. Because if he could see a rooftop or a window, a potential marksman on that rooftop or in that window could see him. The agent with the map would identify the building concerned and check the scale and calculate the range. Anything under seven hundred feet he marked in black.
But it was a good location. The only available sniper nests were on the roofs of the abandoned five-story warehouses opposite. The guy with the map finished up with a straight line of just five black crosses, nothing more. He wrote checked with scope, clear daylight, 0845 hrs, all suspect locations recorded across the bottom of the map and signed his name and added the date. The agent with the scope countersigned and the map was rolled and stored in the back of a department Suburban, awaiting Froelich’s arrival.
Next on scene was a convoy of police vans with five separate canine units in them. One unit cleared the shelter. Two more entered the warehouses. The last two were explosives hunters who checked the surrounding streets in all directions on a four-hundred-yard radius. Beyond four hundred yards, the maze of streets meant there were too many potential access routes to check, and therefore too many to bomb with any realistic chance of success. As soon as a building or a street was pronounced safe a D.C. patrolman took up station on foot. The sky was still clear and the sun was still out. It gave an illusion of warmth. It kept grousing to a minimum.
By nine thirty the shelter was the epicenter of a quarter of a square mile of secure territory. D.C. cops held the perimeter on foot and in cars and there were better than fifty more loose in the interior. They made up the majority of the local population. The city was still quiet. Some of the shelter inhabitants were hanging around. There was nowhere productive to go, and they knew from experience that to be early in the lunch line was better than late. Politicians didn’t understand portion control, and pickings could be getting slim after the first thirty minutes.
Froelich arrived at ten o’clock exactly, driving her Suburban, Reacher and Neagley riding with her. Stuyvesant was right behind in a second Suburban. Behind him were four more trucks carrying five department sharpshooters and fifteen general-duty agents. Froelich parked on the sidewalk tight against the base of the warehouse wall. Normally she might have just blocked the street beyond the shelter entrance, but she didn’t want to reveal the direction of Armstrong’s intended approach to onlookers. He was actually scheduled to come in from the south, but that information and ten minutes with a map could predict his route all the way from Georgetown.
She assembled her people in the shelter’s yard and sent the sharpshooters to secure the warehouse roofs. They would be up there three hours before the event started, but that was normal. Generally they were the first to arrive and the last to leave. Stuyvesant pulled Reacher aside and asked him to go up there with them.
“Then come find me,” he said. “I want a firsthand report about how bad it is.”
So Reacher walked across the street with an agent called Crosetti and they ducked past a cop into a damp hallway full of trash and rat droppings. There were stairs winding up through a central shaft. Crosetti was in a Kevlar vest and was carrying a rifle in a hard case. But he was a fit guy. He was half a flight ahead of Reacher at the top.
The stairs came out inside a rooftop hutch. There was a wooden door that opened outward into the sunlight. The roof was flat. It was made of asphalt. There were pigeon corpses here and there. There were dirty skylights made of wired glass and small metal turrets on top of ventilation pipes. The roof was lipped with a low wall, set on top with eroded coping stones. Crosetti walked to the left edge, and then the right. Made visual contact with his colleagues on either side. Then he walked to the front to check the view. Reacher was already there.
The view was good and bad. Good in the conventional sense because the sun was s
hining and they were five floors up in a low-built part of town. Bad because the shelter’s yard was right there underneath them. It was like looking down into a shoe box from a distance of three feet up and three feet away. The back wall where Armstrong would be standing was dead ahead. It was made out of old brick and looked like the execution wall in some foreign prison. Hitting him would be easier than shooting a fish in a barrel.
“What’s the range?” Reacher asked.
“Your guess?” Crosetti said.
Reacher put his knees against the lip of the roof and glanced out and down.
“Ninety yards?” he said.
Crosetti unsnapped a pocket in his vest and took out a range finder.
“Laser,” he said. He switched it on and lined it up.
“Ninety-two to the wall,” he said. “Ninety-one to his head. That was a pretty good guess.”
“Windage?”
“Slight thermal coming up off the concrete down there,” Crosetti said. “Nothing else, probably. No big deal.”
“Practically like standing right next to him,” Reacher said.
“Don’t worry,” Crosetti said. “As long as I’m up here nobody else can be. That’s the job today. We’re sentries, not shooters.”
“Where are you going to be?” Reacher asked.
Crosetti glanced all around his little piece of real estate and pointed.
“Over there, I guess,” he said. “Tight in the far corner. I’ll face parallel with the front wall. Slight turn to my left and I’m covering the yard. Slight turn to my right, I’m covering the head of the stairwell.”
“Good plan,” Reacher said. “You need anything?”
Crosetti shook his head.
“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll leave you to it. Try to stay awake.”
Crosetti smiled. “I usually do.”
“Good,” Reacher said. “I like that in a sentry.”
He went back down five flights through the darkness and stepped out into the sun. Walked across the street and glanced up. Saw Crosetti nestled comfortably in the angle of the corner. His head and his knees were visible. So was his rifle barrel. It was jutting upward against the bright sky at a relaxed forty-five degrees. He waved. Crosetti waved back. He walked on and found Stuyvesant in the yard. He was hard to miss, given the color of his sweater and the brightness of the daylight.
