by Lee Child
“But you didn’t find them.”
Bannon shook his head again.
“No,” he said. “We didn’t find them. We’re still looking, of course, but being realistic we would have to say they’re out of the District by now.”
“Outstanding,” Stuyvesant said.
Bannon made a face. “We’re not turning cartwheels. But there’s nothing to be gained by yelling at us. Because we could yell right back. Somebody got through the screen you deployed. Somebody decoyed your guy off the roof.”
He looked directly at Stuyvesant as he said it.
“We paid for it,” Stuyvesant said. “Big time.”
“How did it happen?” Neagley asked. “How did they get up there at all?”
“Not through the front,” Bannon said. “There was a shit-load of cops watching the front. They saw nothing, and they can’t all have fallen asleep at the critical time. Not down the back alley either. There was a cop on foot and a cop in a car watching, both ends. Those four all say they saw nobody either, and we believe all four of them. So we think the bad guys got into a building a block over. Walked through the building and out a rear door into the alley halfway down. Then they skipped ten feet across the alley and got in the back of the warehouse and walked up the stairs. No doubt they exited the same way. But they were probably running, on the way out.”
“How did they decoy Crosetti?” Stuyvesant said. “He was a good agent.”
“Yes, he was,” Reacher said. “I liked him.”
Bannon shrugged again. “There’s always a way, isn’t there?”
Then he looked around the room, the way he did when he wanted people to understand more than he was saying. Nobody responded.
“Did you check the trains?” Reacher asked.
Bannon nodded. “Very carefully. It was fairly busy. People heading out for family dinners. But we were thorough.”
“Did you find the rifle?”
Bannon just shook his head. Reacher stared at him.
“They got away carrying a rifle?” he said.
Nobody spoke. Bannon looked back at Reacher.
“You saw the shooter,” he said.
Reacher nodded. “Just a glimpse, for a quarter-second, maybe. In silhouette, as he moved away.”
“And you figure you’ve seen him before.”
“But I don’t know where.”
“Outstanding,” Bannon said.
“There was something about the way he moved, that’s all. The shape of his body. His clothing, maybe. It’s just out of reach. Like the next line of an old song.”
“Was he the guy from the garage video?”
“No,” Reacher said.
Bannon nodded. “Whatever, it doesn’t mean much. Stands to reason you’ve seen him before. You’ve been in the same place at the same time, in Bismarck for sure, and maybe elsewhere. We already know they’ve seen you. Because of the phone call. But it would be nice to have a name and face, I guess.”
“I’ll let you know,” Reacher said.
“Your theory still standing?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Yes,” Bannon said. “We’re still looking at your ex-employees. Now more than ever. Because we think that’s why Crosetti left his post. We think he saw somebody he knew and trusted.”
They drove the half mile west on Pennsylvania Avenue and parked in the garage and rode up to the Secret Service’s own conference room. Every inch of the short journey was bitter without Froelich.
“Hell of a thing,” Stuyvesant said. “I never lost an agent before. Twenty-five years. And now I’ve lost two in a day. I want these guys, so bad.”
“They’re dead men walking,” Reacher said.
“All the evidence is against us,” Stuyvesant said.
“So what are you saying? You don’t want them if they’re yours?”
“I don’t want them to be ours.”
“I don’t think they are yours,” Reacher said. “But either way, they’re going down. Let’s be real straight about that. They’ve crossed so many lines I’ve given up counting.”
“I don’t want them to be ours,” Stuyvesant said again. “But I’m afraid Bannon might be right.”
“It’s either-or,” Reacher said. “That’s all. Either he’s right or he’s wrong. If he’s right, we’ll know soon enough because he’ll bust his balls to show us. Thing is, he’ll never look at the possibility that he’s wrong. He wants to be right too much.”
“Tell me he’s wrong.”
“I think he is wrong. And the upside is, if I’m wrong that he’s wrong, it doesn’t matter worth a damn. Because he’s going to leave no stone unturned. We can absolutely rely on him. He doesn’t need our input. Our responsibility is to look at what he’s not looking at. Which I think is the right place to look anyway.”
“Just tell me he’s wrong.”
“His thing is like a big pyramid balancing on its point. Very impressive, until it falls over. He’s betting everything on the fact that Armstrong hasn’t been told. But there’s no logic in that. Maybe these guys are targeting Armstrong personally. Maybe they just didn’t know you wouldn’t tell him.”
Stuyvesant nodded.
“I might buy that,” he said. “God knows I want to. But there’s the NCIC thing. Bannon was right about that. If they were outside our community, they’d have pointed us toward Minnesota and Colorado personally. We have to face that.”
“The weapons are persuasive too,” Neagley said. “And Froelich’s address.”
Reacher nodded. “So is the thumbprint, actually. If we really want to depress ourselves we should consider if maybe they knew the print wouldn’t come back. Maybe they ran a test from this end.”
“Great,” Stuyvesant said.
“But I still don’t believe it,” Reacher said.
“Why not?”
“Get the messages and take a real close look.”
Stuyvesant waited a beat and then stood up slowly and left the room. Came back three minutes later with a file folder. He opened it up and laid the six official FBI photographs in a neat line down the center of the table. He was still wearing his pink sweater. The bright color was reflected in the glossy surfaces of the eight-by-tens as he leaned over them. Neagley moved around the table and all three of them sat side by side so they could read the messages the right way up.
“OK,” Reacher said. “Examine them. Everything about them. And remember why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for Froelich.”
The line of photographs was four feet long, and they had to stand up and shuffle left to right along the table to inspect them all.
You are going to die.
Vice-President-elect Armstrong is going to die.
The day upon which Armstrong will die is fast approaching.
A demonstration of your vulnerability will be staged today.
Did you like the demonstration?
It’s going to happen soon.
“So?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Look at the fourth message,” Reacher said. “Vulnerability is correctly spelled.”
“So?”
“That’s a big word. And look at the last message. The apostrophe in it’s is correct. Lots of people get that wrong, you know, it’s and its. There are periods at the ends, except for the question mark.”
“So?”
“The messages are reasonably literate.”
“OK.”
“Now look at the third message.”
“What about it?”
“Neagley?” Reacher asked.
“It’s a little fancy,” she said. “A little awkward and old-fashioned. The upon which thing. And the fast approaching thing.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “A little archaic.”
“But what does all this prove?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Nothing, really,” Reacher said. “But it suggests something. Have you ever read the Constitution?”
“Of what? The United States?”
“Sure.”
&n
bsp; “I guess I’ve read it,” Stuyvesant said. “A long time ago, probably.”
“Me too,” Reacher said. “Some school I was at gave us a copy each. It was a thin little book, thick cardboard covers. Very narrow when it was shut. The edges were hard. We used to karate-chop each other with it. Hurt like hell.”
“So?”
“It’s a legal document, basically. Historical, too, of course, but it’s fundamentally legal. So when somebody prints it up as a book, they can’t mess with it. They have to reproduce it exactly word for word, otherwise it wouldn’t be valid. They can’t modernize the language, they can’t clean it up.”
“Obviously not.”
“The early parts are from 1787. The last amendment in my copy was the twenty-sixth, from 1971, lowering the voting age to eighteen. A span of a hundred and eighty-four years. With everything reproduced exactly like it was written down at the particular time.”
“So?”
“One thing I remember is that in the first part, Vice President is written without a hyphen between the two words. Same in the latest part. No hyphen. But in the stuff that was written in the middle period, there is a hyphen. It’s Vice-President with a hyphen between the words. So clearly from about the 1860s up to maybe the 1930s it was considered correct usage to use a hyphen there.”
“These guys use a hyphen,” Stuyvesant said.
“They sure do,” Reacher said. “Right there in the second message.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Two things,” Reacher said. “We know they paid attention in class, because they’re reasonably literate. So the first thing it means is that they went to school someplace where they used old textbooks and old style manuals that were way out of date. Which explains the third message’s archaic feel, maybe. And which is why I figured they might be from a poor rural area with low school taxes. Second thing it means is they never worked for the Secret Service. Because you guys are buried in paperwork. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Army. Anybody who worked here would have written Vice President a million times over in their career. All with the modern usage without the hyphen. They would have gotten totally used to it that way.”
There was quiet for a moment.
“Maybe the other guy wrote it,” Stuyvesant said. “The one who didn’t work here. The one with the thumbprint.”
“Makes no difference,” Reacher said. “Like Bannon figured, they’re a unit. They’re collaborators. And perfectionists. If one guy had written it wrong, the other guy would have corrected it. But it wasn’t corrected, therefore neither of them knew it was wrong. Therefore neither of them worked here.”
Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.
“I want to believe it,” he said. “But you’re basing everything on a hyphen.”
“Don’t dismiss it,” Reacher said.
“I’m not dismissing it,” Stuyvesant said. “I’m thinking.”
“About whether I’m crazy?”
“About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the alternative scenario.”
“It could be deliberate,” Neagley said. “They might be misleading us. Trying to disguise their background or their education level. Throwing us off.”
Reacher shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is too subtle. They’d do all the usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen between Vice and President is something you don’t know from right or wrong. It’s something you just do.”
“What are the exact implications?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Age is critical,” Reacher said. “They can’t be older than early fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders, down stairs. They can’t be younger than mid-forties, because you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970 every school in America had new books. I think they were in junior high at or toward the end of the period when isolated rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date maps on the wall, you’re sitting there with all your cousins listening to some gray-haired old lady.”
“It’s very speculative,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s a pyramid too, balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over.”
Silence in the room.
“Well, I’m going to pursue it,” Reacher said. “With Armstrong, or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if necessary. For Froelich’s sake. She deserves it.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “If neither of them worked for us, how would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said.
“How did they decoy Crosetti?”
“I don’t know.”
“How would they get our weapons?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did they know where M. E. lived?”
“Nendick told them.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “OK. But what would be their motive?”
“Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician must make plenty of enemies.”
Silence again.
“Maybe it’s half and half,” Neagley said. “Maybe they’re outsiders with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work here. Maybe they’re some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs. They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons you buy.”
“That’s possible,” Stuyvesant said. “We turn down a lot of people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be right.”
“No,” Reacher said. “She’s wrong. Why would they wait? I’m sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?”
“That’s a good point too,” Stuyvesant said.
“This is about Armstrong personally,” Reacher said. “It has to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and effect. Armstrong became the running mate during the summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich told me that herself. Now we’re getting threats against him. Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign, that’s why.”
Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned over and butted the first message under the second. Then both of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and closed it.
“OK, this is what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to give Neagley’s theory to Bannon. Somebody we refused to hire is more or less in the same category as somebody we eventually fired. The bitterness component would be about the same. The FBI can deal with all of that as a whole. We’ve got the paperwork. They’ve got the manpower. And the balance of probability is that they’re correct. But we’d be derelict if we didn’t also consider the alternative. That they might not be correct. So we’re going to spend our time looking at Reacher’s theory. Because we’ve got to do something, for Froelich’s sake, apart from anything else. So where do we start?”
“With Armstrong,” Reacher said. “We figure out who hates him and why.”
Stuyvesant called a guy from the Office of Protection Research and ordered him into the office immediately. The guy pleaded he was eating Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Stuyvesant relented and gave him two hours to finish up. Then he headed back to the Hoover Building to meet with Bannon again. Reacher and Neagley waited in reception. There was a television in there and Reacher wanted to see if Armstrong delivered on the early news. It was a half hour away.
“You OK?” Neagley asked.
“I feel weird,” Reacher said. “Like I’m two people. She thought I wa
s Joe with her at the end.”
“What would Joe have done about it?”
“Same as I’m going to do about it, probably.”
“So go ahead and do it,” Neagley said. “You always were Joe as far as she was concerned. You may as well square the circle for her.”
He said nothing.
“Close your eyes,” Neagley said. “Clear your mind. You need to concentrate on the shooter.”
Reacher shook his head. “I won’t get it if I concentrate.”
“So think about something else. Use peripheral vision. Pretend you’re looking somewhere else. The next roof along, maybe.”
He closed his eyes. Saw the edge of the roof, harsh against the sun. Saw the sky, bright and pale all at the same time. A winter sky. Just a trace of uniform misty haze all over it. He gazed at the sky. Recalled the sounds he had been hearing. Nothing much from the crowd. Just the clatter of serving spoons, and Froelich saying thanks for stopping by. Mrs. Armstrong saying enjoy, nervously, like she wasn’t quite sure what she had gotten herself into. Then he heard the soft chunk of the first silenced bullet hitting the wall. It had been a poor shot. It had missed Armstrong by four feet. Probably a rushed shot. The guy comes up the stairs, stands in the rooftop doorway, calls softly to Crosetti. And Crosetti responds. The guy waits for Crosetti to come to him. Maybe backs away into the stairwell. Crosetti comes on. Crosetti gets shot. The rooftop hutch muffles the sound from the silencer. The guy steps over the body and runs crouched straight to the lip of the roof. Kneels and fires hastily, too soon, before he’s really settled, and he misses by four feet. The miss craters the brick and a small chip flies off and hits Reacher in the cheek. The guy racks the bolt and aims more carefully for the second shot.
He opened his eyes.
“I want you to work on how,” he said.
“How what, exactly?” Neagley said.
“How they lured Crosetti away from his post. I want to know how they did that.”
Neagley was quiet for a moment.
“I’m afraid Bannon’s theory fits best,” she said. “Crosetti looked up and saw somebody he recognized.”
