by Lee Child
“So what’s your conclusion?”
“I just think the early phase was extraordinary. The messages? Think about the risks. Think about the energy required to minimize those risks. They put unbelievable resources into the early phase. So I have to assume they felt it was worthwhile.”
“But it wasn’t,” Neagley said. “Armstrong has never even seen any of the messages. They were wasting their time.”
“Simple ignorance,” Swain said. “Were you aware we absolutely won’t discuss threats with a protectee?”
“No,” Neagley said. “I was surprised.”
“Nobody’s aware,” Swain said. “Everybody’s surprised. These guys thought they were getting right to him. So I’m convinced it’s personal. Aimed at him, not us.”
“So are we,” Reacher said. “You got a specific reason?”
“You’ll think I’m naive,” Swain said. “But I don’t believe anybody who works or has worked for us would have killed the other two Armstrongs. Not just like that.”
Reacher shrugged. “Maybe you’re naive. Maybe you aren’t. But it doesn’t matter. We’re convinced anyway.”
“What’s your reason?”
“The hyphen in the second message.”
“The hyphen?” Swain said. Then he paused. “Yes, I see. Plausible, but a little circumstantial, wouldn’t you say?”
“Whatever, we’re working with the assumption it was personal.”
“OK, but why? Only possible answer is they absolutely hate him. They wanted to taunt him, scare him, make him suffer first. Just shooting him isn’t enough for them.”
“So who are they? Who hates him that bad?”
Swain made a gesture with his hand, like he was pushing that question aside.
“Something else,” he said. “This is a little off the wall, but I think we’re miscounting. How many messages have there been?”
“Six,” Reacher said.
“No,” Swain said. “I think there have been seven.”
“Where’s the seventh?”
“Nendick,” Swain said. “I think Nendick delivered the second message, and was the third message. You see, you got here and forty-eight hours later you got to Nendick, which was pretty quick. But with respect, we’d have gotten there anyway, sooner or later. It was inevitable. If it wasn’t the cleaners, it had to be the tapes. So we’d have gotten there. And what was waiting for us? Nendick wasn’t just a delivery system. He was a message in himself. He showed what these people are capable of. Assuming Armstrong was in the loop, he’d have been getting pretty shaky by that point.”
“Then there are nine messages,” Neagley said. “On that basis, we should add in the Minnesota and the Colorado situations.”
“Absolutely,” Swain said. “You see what I mean? Everything has fear as its purpose. Every single thing. Suppose Armstrong was in the loop all along. He gets the first message, he’s worried. We get the second message, he’s more worried. We trace its source, and he starts to feel better, but no, it gets even worse, because we find Nendick paralyzed with fear. Then we get the demonstration threat, he’s worried some more. Then the demonstration happens, and he’s devastated by how ruthless it was.”
Reacher said nothing. Just stared at the floor.
“You think I’m overanalytical,” Swain said.
Reacher shook his head, still looking at the floor. “No, I think I’m underanalytical. Maybe. Possibly. Because what are the thumbprints about?”
“They’re a taunt of a different sort,” Swain said. “They’re a boast. A puzzle. A tease. Can’t catch me sort of thing.”
“How long did you work with my brother?”
“Five years. I worked for him, really. I say with him as a vain attempt at status.”
“Was he a good boss?”
“He was a great boss,” Swain said. “Great guy all around.”
“And he ran random-observation sessions?”
Swain nodded. “They were fun. Anybody could say anything.”
“Did he join in?”
“He was very lateral.”
Reacher looked up. “You just said everything has fear as its purpose, every single thing. Then you said the thumbprints are a taunt of a different sort. So not everything is the same, right? Something’s different.”
Swain shrugged. “I could stretch it. The thumbprints induce the fear that these guys are too clever to be caught. Different sort of fear, but it’s still fear.”
Reacher looked away. Went quiet. Thirty seconds, a whole minute.
“I’m going to cave in,” he said. “Finally. I’m going to be like Joe. I’m wearing his suit. I was sleeping with his girl-friend. I keep meeting his old colleagues. So now I’m going to make a lateral random off-the-wall observation, just like he did, apparently.”
“What is it?” Neagley said.
“I think we missed something,” Reacher said. “Just skated right on by it.”
“What?”
“I’ve got all these weird images going around in my head. Like for instance, Stuyvesant’s secretary doing things at her desk.”
“What things?”
“I think we’ve got the thumbprint exactly ass-backward. All along we’ve assumed they knew it was untraceable. But I think we’re completely wrong. I think it’s just the opposite. I think they expected it would be traceable.”
“Why?”
“Because I think the thumbprint thing is exactly the same as the Nendick thing. I met a watchmaker today. He told me where squalene comes from.”
“Sharks’ livers,” Neagley said.
“And people’s noses,” Reacher said. “Same stuff. That gunk you wake up with in the morning is squalene. Same chemical exactly.”
“So?”
“So I think our guys gambled and got unlucky. Suppose you picked a random male person aged about sixty or seventy. What are the chances he’d have been fingerprinted at least once in his lifetime?”
“Pretty good, I guess,” Neagley said. “All immigrants are printed. American born, he’d have been drafted for Korea or Vietnam and printed even if he didn’t go. He’d have been printed if he’d ever been arrested or worked for the government.”
“Or for some private corporations,” Swain said. “Plenty of them require prints. Banks, retailers, people like that.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “So here’s the thing. I don’t think the thumbprint comes from one of the guys themselves. I think it comes from somebody else entirely. From some innocent bystander. From somebody they picked out at random. And it was supposed to lead us directly to that somebody.”
The room went quiet. Neagley stared at Reacher.
“What for?” she said.
“So we could find another Nendick,” he said. “The thumbprint was on every message, and the guy it came from was a message, just like Swain says Nendick was. We were supposed to trace the print and find the guy and find an exact replica of the Nendick situation. Some terrified victim, too scared to open his mouth and tell us anything. A message in himself. But by pure accident our guys hit on somebody who had never been printed, so we couldn’t find him.”
“But there were six paper messages,” Swain said. “Probably twenty days between the first one going in the mail and the last one being delivered to Froelich’s house. So what does that mean? All the messages were prepared in advance? That’s way too much planning ahead, surely.”
“It’s possible,” Neagley said. “They could have printed dozens of variations, one for every eventuality.”
“No,” Reacher said. “I think they printed them up as they went along. I think they kept the thumbprint available to them at all times.”
“How?” Swain asked. “They abducted some guy and took him hostage? They’ve stashed him somewhere? They’re taking him everywhere with them?”
“Couldn’t work,” Neagley said. “Can’t expect us to find him if he’s not home.”
“He’s home,” Reacher said. “But his thumb isn’t.”
“Fire up a computer,” Reacher said. “Search NCIC for the word thumb.”
“We’ve got a big field office in Sacramento,” Bannon said. “Three agents are already mobile. A doctor, too. We’ll know in an hour.”
This time Bannon had come to them. They were in the Secret Service conference room, Stuyvesant at the head of the table, Reacher and Neagley and Swain together on one side, Bannon alone on the other.
“It’s a bizarre idea,” Bannon said. “What would they do? Keep it in the freezer?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “Thaw it a bit, rub it down their nose, print it on the paper. Just like Stuyvesant’s secretary with her rubber stamp. It’s probably drying out a bit with age, which is why the squalene percentage keeps getting higher.”
“What are the implications?” Stuyvesant said. “Assuming you’re right?”
Reacher made a face. “We can change one major assumption. Now I would guess they’ve both got prints on file, and they’ve both been wearing the latex gloves.”
“Two renegades,” Bannon said.
“Not necessarily ours,” Stuyvesant said.
“So explain the other factors,” Bannon said.
Nobody spoke. Bannon shrugged.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got an hour. And I don’t want to be looking in the wrong place. So convince me. Show me these are private citizens gunning for Armstrong personally.”
Stuyvesant glanced at Swain, but Swain said nothing.
“Time is ticking by,” Bannon said.
“This isn’t an ideal context,” Swain said.
Bannon smiled. “What, you only preach to the choir?”
Nobody spoke.
“You’ve got no case,” Bannon said. “I mean, who cares about a Vice President? They’re nobodies. What was it, a bucket of warm spit?”
“It was a pitcher,” Swain said. “John Nance Garner said the Vice Presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. He also called it a spare tire on the automobile of government. He was FDR’s first running mate. John Adams called it the most insignificant office man had ever invented, and he was the first Vice President of all.”
“So who cares enough to shoot a spare tire or an insignificant pitcher of spit?”
“Let me start from the beginning,” Swain said. “What does a Vice President do?”
“He sits around,” Bannon says. “Hopes the big guy dies.”
Swain nodded. “Somebody else said the Vice President’s job is merely about waiting. In case the President dies, sure, but more often for the nomination in his own right eight years down the track. But in the short term, what is the Vice President for?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Bannon said.
“He’s there to be a candidate,” Swain said. “That’s the bottom line. His design life lasts from when he’s tapped in the summer until election day. He’s useful for four or five months, tops. He starts out as a pick-me-up for the campaign. Everybody’s bored to death with the presidential nominees by midsummer, so the VP picks put a jolt into the campaigns. Suddenly we’ve all got something else to talk about. Somebody else to analyze. We look at their qualities and their records. We figure out how well they balance the tickets. That’s their initial function. Balance and contrast. Whatever the presidential nominee isn’t, the VP nominee is, and vice versa. Young, old, racy, dull, northern, southern, dumb, smart, hard, soft, rich, poor.”
“We get the picture,” Bannon said.
“So he’s there for what he is,” Swain said. “Initially he’s just a photograph and a biography. He’s a concept. Then his duties start. He’s got to have campaigning skills, obviously. Because he’s there to be the attack dog. He’s got to be able to say the stuff the presidential candidate isn’t allowed to say himself. If the campaign scripts an attack or a put-down, it’s the VP candidate they get to deliver it. Meanwhile the presidential candidate stands around somewhere else looking all statesmanlike. Then the election happens and the presidential candidate goes to the White House and the VP gets put away in a closet. His usefulness is over, first Tuesday in November.”
“Was Armstrong good at that kind of stuff?”
“He was excellent. The truth is he was a very negative campaigner, but the polls didn’t really show it because he kept that nice smile on his face the whole time. Truth is he was deadly.”
“And you think he trod on enough toes to get himself assassinated for it?”
Swain nodded. “That’s what I’m working on now. I’m analyzing every speech and comment, matching up his attacks against the profile of the people he was attacking.”
“The timing is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “Nobody can argue with that. He was in the House for six years and the Senate for another six and barely got a nasty letter. This whole thing was triggered by something recent.”
“And his recent history is the campaign,” Swain said.
“Nothing way in his background?” Bannon asked.
Swain shook his head.
“We’re covered four ways,” he said. “First and most recent was your own FBI check when he was nominated. We’ve got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we’ve got opposition research from the other campaign from this time around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys dig up way more stuff than you do. And he’s clean.”
“North Dakota sources?”
“Nothing,” Swain said. “We talked to all the papers up there, matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there’s nothing wrong with the guy.”
“So it was the campaign,” Stuyvesant said. “He pissed somebody off.”
“Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons,” Bannon said. “Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can’t mail something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?”
Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked his watch. Took his cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. It sat there, silent.
“I’m sticking with the theory,” he said. “Except now I’m listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is.”
The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief? because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.
“Sacramento?” Stuyvesant asked.
“No,” Bannon said. “Local. They found the rifle.”
They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.
“Was it a Vaime Mk2?” Bannon asked.
“Without a doubt,” one of the techs said.
“Serial number on it?”
The guy shook his head. “Removed with acid.”
“Anything you can do?”
The guy shook his head again.
“No,” he said. “If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.”
“So where is it now?”
“We’re fuming it for prints,” the guy said. “But it’s hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s been wip
ed.”
“Where was it found?”
“In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms.”
“I guess they waited in there,” Bannon said. “Maybe five minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads.”
“Shell cases?” Neagley asked.
“None,” the tech said. “They must have collected their brass. But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is intact. The mud preserved it.”
He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich’s case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti’s. The Minnesota bullet looked new. Its passage through the farmyard mud had scoured it clean.
“Get the rifle,” Bannon said.
It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot superglue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.
“That’s the wrong scope,” Reacher said. “That’s a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes.”
“Yeah, it’s been modified,” one of the techs said. “We already logged that.”
“By the factory?”
The guy shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “High standard, but it’s not factory workmanship.”
“So what does that mean?” Bannon asked.
