Without Fail
Chapter 16

The files were biographical. There were twelve in total. Eleven were bundles of raw data like newspaper cuttings and interviews and depositions and other first-generation paperwork. The twelfth was a comprehensive summary of the first eleven. It was as thick as a medieval Bible and it read like a book. It narrated the whole story of Brook Armstrong's life, and every substantive fact had a number following it in parentheses. The number indicated on a scale of one to ten how solidly the fact had been authenticated. Most of the numbers were tens.
The story started on page one with his parents. His mother had grown up in Oregon, moved to Washington State for college, returned to Oregon to start work as a pharmacist. Her own parents and siblings were sketched in, and the whole of her education was listed from kindergarten to postgraduate school. Her early employers were listed in sequence, and the start-up of her own pharmacy business had three pages all to itself. She still owned it and still took income from it, but she was now retired and sick with something that was feared to be terminal.
His father's education was listed. His military service had a start date and a medical discharge date, but there were no details beyond that. He was an Oregon native who married the pharmacist on his return to civilian life. They moved to an isolated village in the southwest corner of the state and he used family money to buy himself a lumber business. The newlyweds had a daughter soon afterward and Brook Armstrong himself was born two years later. The family business prospered and grew to a decent size. Its progress and development had several pages all to itself. It provided a pleasant provincial lifestyle.
The sister's biography was a half inch thick itself so Reacher skipped over it and started in on Brook's education. It began like everybody else's in kindergarten. There were endless details. Too many to pay close attention to, so he leafed ahead and skimmed. Armstrong went all the way through the local school system. He was good at sports. He got excellent grades. The father had a stroke and died just after Armstrong left home for college. The lumber business was sold. The pharmacy continued to prosper. Armstrong himself spent seven years in two different universities, first Cornell in upstate New York and then Stanford in California. He had long hair but no proven drug use. He met a Bismarck girl at Stanford. They were both political science postgraduates. They got married. They made their home in North Dakota and he started his political career with a campaign for a seat in the State legislature.
"I need to get home," Swain said. "It's Thanksgiving and I've got kids and my wife is going to kill me."
Reacher looked ahead at the rest of the file. Armstrong was just starting in on his first minor election and there were six more inches of paperwork to go. He fanned through it with his thumb.
"Nothing here to worry us?" he asked.
"Nothing anywhere," Swain said.
"Does this level of detail continue throughout?"
"It gets worse."
"Am I going to find anything if I read all night?"
"No."
"Was all of it used in this summer's campaign?"
Swain nodded. "Sure. It's a great bio. That's why he was picked in the first place. Actually we got a lot of the detail from the campaign."
"And you're sure nobody in particular was upset by the campaign?"
"I'm sure."
"So where exactly does your feeling come from? Who hates Armstrong that bad and why?"
"I don't know exactly," Swain said. "It's just a feeling."
Reacher nodded.
"OK," he said. "Go home."
Swain picked up his coat and left in a hurry and Reacher sampled his way through the remaining years. Neagley leafed through the endless source material. They both gave it up after an hour.
"Conclusions?" Neagley asked.
"Swain has got a very boring job," Reacher said.
She smiled.
"Agreed," she said.
"But something kind of jumps out at me. Something that's not here, rather than something that is here. Campaigns are cynical, right? These people will use any old thing that puts them in a good light. So for instance, we've got his mother. We've got endless detail about her college degrees and her pharmacy thing. Why?"
"To appeal to independent women and small-business people."
"OK, and then we've got stuff about her getting sick. Why?"
"So Armstrong looks like a caring son. Very dutiful and full of family values. It humanizes him. And it authenticates his issues about health care."
"And we've got plenty of stuff about his dad's lumber company."
"For the business lobby again. And it touches on environmental concerns. You know, trees and logging and all that kind of thing. Armstrong can say he's got practical knowledge. He's walked the walk, at one remove."
"Exactly," Reacher said. "Whatever the issue, whatever the constituency, they find a bone to throw."
"So?"
"They took a pass on military service. And usually they love all that stuff, in a campaign. Normally if your dad was in the Army, you'd shout it from the rooftops to wrap up another whole bunch of issues. But there's no detail at all. He joined, he got discharged. That's all we know. See what I mean? We're drowning in detail everywhere else, but not there. It stands out."
"The father died ages ago."
"Doesn't matter. They'd have been all over it if there was something to be gained. And what was the medical discharge for? If it had been a wound they'd have made something out of it, for sure. Even a training accident. The guy would have been a big hero. And you know what? I don't like to see unexplained medical discharges. You know how it was. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
"I guess it does. But it can't be connected. It happened before Armstrong was even born. Then the guy died nearly thirty years ago. And you said it yourself, this all was triggered by something Armstrong did in the campaign."
Reacher nodded. "But I'd still like to know more about it. We could ask Armstrong direct, I guess."
"Don't need to," Neagley said. "I can find out, if you really need me to. I can make some calls. We've got plenty of contacts. People who figure on getting a job with us when they quit are generally interested in making a good impression beforehand."
Reacher yawned. "OK, do it. First thing tomorrow."
"I'll do it tonight. The military is still twenty-four/seven. Hasn't changed any since we quit."
"You should sleep. It can wait."
"I never sleep anymore."
Reacher yawned again. "Well, I'm going to."
"Bad day," Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. "As bad as they get. So make the calls if you want to, but don't wake me up to tell me about them. Tell me about them tomorrow."
The night duty officer fixed them a ride back to the Georgetown motel and Reacher went straight to his room. It was quiet and still and empty. It had been cleaned and tidied. The bed was made. Joe's box had gone. He sat in the chair for a moment and wondered if Stuyvesant had thought to cancel Froelich's booking. Then the nighttime silence pressed in on him and he was overcome by a sense of something not there. A sense of absence. Things that should be there and weren't. What exactly? Froelich, of course. He had an ache for her. She should be there, and she wasn't. She had been there the last time he was in the room. Early that morning. Today's the day we win or lose, she had said. Losing is not an option, he had replied.
Something not there. Maybe Joe himself. Maybe lots of things. There were lots of things missing from his life. Things not done, things not said. What exactly? Maybe it was just Armstrong's father's service career on his mind. But maybe it was more than that. Was something else missing? He closed his eyes and chased it hard but all he saw was the pink spray of Froelich's blood arcing backward into the sunlight. So he opened his eyes again and stripped off his clothes and showered for the third time that day. He found himself staring down at the tray like he was still expecting to see it run red. But it stayed clear and white.
The bed was cold and hard and the new sheets were stiff with starch. He slipped in alone and stared at the ceiling for an hour and thought hard. Then he switched off abruptly and made himself sleep. He dreamed of his brother strolling hand in hand with Froelich all the way around the Tidal Basin in summer. The light was soft and golden and the blood streaming from her neck hung in the still warm air like a shimmering red ribbon five feet above the ground. It hung there undisturbed by the passing crowds and it made a full mile-wide circle when she and Joe arrived back where they had started. Then she changed into Swain and Joe changed into the Bismarck cop. The cop's coat flapped open as he walked and Swain said I think we miscounted to everybody he met. Then Swain changed into Armstrong. Armstrong smiled his brilliant politician's smile and said I'm so sorry and the cop turned and threaded a long gun out from under his flapping coat and slowly racked the bolt and shot Armstrong in the head. There was no sound, because the gun was silenced. No sound, even as Armstrong hit the water and floated away.
There was an alarm call from the desk at six o'clock and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Reacher rolled out of bed and wrapped a towel around his waist and checked the spy hole. It was Neagley, with coffee for him. She was all dressed and ready to go. He let her in and sat on the bed and started the coffee and she paced the narrow alley that led to the window. She was wired. Looked like she'd been drinking coffee all night.
"OK, Armstrong's father?" she said, like she was asking the question for him. "He was drafted right at the end of Korea. Never saw active service. But he went through officer training and came out a second lieutenant and was assigned to an infantry company. They were stationed in Alabama, some place that's long gone. They were ordered to achieve battle readiness for a fight everybody knew was already over. And you know how that stuff went, right?"
Reacher nodded sleepily. Sipped his coffee.
"Some idiot captain running endless competitions," he said. "Points for this, points for that, deductions all over the place, at the end of the month Company B gets to keep a flag in its barracks for kicking Company A's ass."
"And Armstrong senior usually won," Neagley said. "He ran a tight unit. But he had a temper problem. It was unpredictable. If somebody screwed up and lost points he could fly into a rage. Happened a couple of times. Not just the usual officer bullshit. It's described in the records as serious uncontrolled temper tantrums. He went way too far, like he couldn't stop himself."
"And?"
"They let him get away with it twice. It wasn't constant. It was purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote it up as generic battle stress, even though he'd never been a combat officer."
Reacher made a face. "He must have had friends. And so must you, to get that deep into the records."
"I've been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant's going to have a coronary when he sees the motel bill."
"How many individual victims?"
"My first thought, but we can forget them. There were three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died ten years ago in Palm Springs, and the third is more than seventy years old, lives in Florida."
"Dry hole," Reacher said.
"But it explains why they left it out of the campaign."
Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. "Any chance Armstrong himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she'd seen him angry."
"That was my second thought," Neagley said. "It's conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was insisting on going to her service, wasn't there? But I assume the broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The guy's been running for office at one level or another his whole life. And this all started with the campaign this summer. We already agreed on that."
Reacher nodded, vaguely.
"The campaign," he repeated. He sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at the wall, one full minute, then two.
"What?" Neagley asked.
He didn't reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C. under the gray dawn sky.
"What did Armstrong do in the campaign?" he asked.
"Lots of things."
"How many Representatives does New Mexico have?"
"I don't know," Neagley said.
"I think it's three. Can you name them?"
"No."
"Would you recognize any of them on the street?"
"No."
"Oklahoma?"
"Don't know. Five?"
"Six, I think. Can you name them?"
"One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can't remember his name."
"Senators from Tennessee?"
"What's your point?"
Reacher stared out of the window.
"We've got Beltway disease," he said. "We're all caught up in it. We're not looking at this thing like real people. To almost everybody else out there in the country all these politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said you're interested in politics but you couldn't name all hundred senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested than you. Most people wouldn't recognize another state's junior senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard of Armstrong before."
"So?"
"So Armstrong did one absolutely basic, fundamental, elemental thing in the campaign. He put himself in the public eye, nationally. For the very first time in his life ordinary people outside of his home state and outside of his circle of friends saw his face. Heard his name. For the first time ever. I think this all could be as basic as that."
"In what way?"
"Suppose his face came back at somebody from way in the past. Completely out of the blue. Like a sudden shock."
"Like who?"
"Like you're some guy somewhere and long ago some young man lost his temper and smacked you around. Some situation like that. Maybe in a bar, maybe over a girl. Maybe he humiliated you by doing so. You never see the guy again, but the incident festers in your mind. Years pass, and suddenly there's the guy all over the papers and the TV. He's a politician, running for Vice President. You never heard of him in the years before, because you don't watch C-SPAN or CNN. But now, there he is, everywhere, in your face. So what do you do? If you're politically aware you might call the opposing campaign and dish the dirt. But you're not politically aware, because this is the first time you've ever seen him since the fight in the bar a lifetime ago. So what do you do? The sight of him brings it all back. It's been festering."
"You think about some kind of revenge."
Reacher nodded. "Which would explain Swain's thing about wanting him to suffer. But maybe Swain's been looking in the wrong place. Maybe we all have. Because maybe this isn't personal to Armstrong the politician. Maybe it's personal to Armstrong the man. Maybe it's really personal."
Neagley stopped pacing and sat down in the chair.
"It's very tenuous," she said. "People get over things, don't they?"
"Do they?"
"Mostly."
Reacher glanced down at her. "You haven't gotten over whatever makes it that you don't like people to touch you."
The room went quiet.
"OK," she said. "Normal people get over things."
"Normal people don't kidnap women and cut thumbs off and kill innocent bystanders."
She nodded.
"OK," she said again. "It's a theory. But where can we go with it?"
"Armstrong himself, maybe," Reacher said. "But that would be a difficult conversation to have with a Vice President-elect. And would he even remember? If he inherited the kind of temper that gets a guy thrown out of the Army he could have had dozens of fights long ago. He's a big guy. Could have spread mayhem far and wide before he got a handle on it."
"His wife? They've been together a long time."
Reacher said nothing.
"Time to get going," Neagley said. "We meet with Bannon at seven. Are we going to tell him?"
"No," Reacher said. "He wouldn't listen."
"Go shower," Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. "Something else first. It kept me awake last night for an hour. It nagged at me. Something that's not here, or something that hasn't been done."
Neagley shrugged.
"OK," she said. "I'll think about it. Now get your ass in gear."
He dressed in the last of Joe's suits. It was charcoal gray and as fine as silk. He used the last of the clean shirts. It was stiff with starch and as white as new snow. The last tie was dark blue with a tiny repeated pattern. When you looked very closely you saw that each element of the pattern was a diagram of a pitcher's hand, gripping a baseball, preparing to throw a knuckleball.
He met Neagley out in the lobby and ate a muffin from the buffet and took a cup of coffee with him in the Secret Service Town Car. They were late into the conference room. Bannon and Stuyvesant were already there. Bannon was still dressed like a city cop. Stuyvesant was back in a Brooks Brothers suit. Reacher and Neagley left one seat unoccupied between themselves and Stuyvesant. Bannon stared at the empty place, like maybe it was supposed to symbolize Froelich's absence.
"The FBI is not going to have agents in Grace, Wyoming," he said. "Special request from Armstrong, via the director. He doesn't want a circus out there."
"Suits me," Reacher said.
"You're wasting your time," Bannon said. "We're complying only because we're happy to. The bad guys know how this stuff works. They were in the business. They'll have understood his statement was a trap. So they won't show up."
Reacher nodded. "Won't be the first trip I ever wasted."
"I'm warning you against independent action."
"There won't be any action, according to you."
Bannon nodded.
"Ballistics tests are in," he said. "The rifle we found in the warehouse is definitely the same gun that fired the Minnesota bullet."
"So how did it get here?" Stuyvesant asked.
"We burned more than a hundred man-hours last night," Bannon said. "All I can tell you for sure is how it didn't get here. It didn't fly in. We checked all commercial arrivals into eight airports and there were no firearms manifests at all. Then we traced all private planes into the same eight airports. Nothing even remotely suspicious."
"So they drove it in?" Reacher said.
Bannon nodded. "But Bismarck to D.C. is more than thirteen hundred miles. That's more than twenty hours absolute minimum, even driving like a lunatic. Impossible, in the time frame. So the rifle was never in Bismarck. It came in direct from Minnesota, which was a little more than eleven hundred miles in forty-eight hours. Your grandmother could do that."
"My grandmother couldn't drive," Reacher said. "Still figuring on three guys?"
Bannon shook his head. "No, on reflection we're sticking at two. The whole thing profiles better that way. We figure the team was split one and one between Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday and it stayed split afterward. The guy pretending to be the Bismarck cop was acting solo at the church. We figure he had the submachine gun only. Which makes sense, because he knew Armstrong was going to be buried in agents as soon as the decoy rifle was discovered. And a submachine gun is better than a rifle against a cluster of people. Especially an H amp;K MP5. Our people say it's as accurate as a rifle at a hundred yards and a lot more powerful. Thirty-round magazines, he would have chewed through six agents and gotten to Armstrong easy enough."
"So why was the other guy bothering to drive here at the time?" Stuyvesant asked.
"Because these are your people," Bannon said. "They're realistic professionals. They knew the odds. They knew they couldn't guarantee a hit in any one particular place. So they went through Armstrong's schedule and planned to leapfrog ahead of each other to cover all the bases."
Stuyvesant said nothing.
"But they were together yesterday," Reacher said. "You're saying the first guy drove the Vaime here and I saw the guy from Bismarck on the warehouse roof."
Bannon nodded. "No more leapfrogging, because yesterday was the last good opportunity for a spell. The Bismarck guy must have flown in, commercial, not long after the Air Force brought you back."
"So where's the H amp;K? He must have abandoned it in Bismarck somewhere between the church and the airport. You find it?"
"No," Bannon said. "But we're still looking."
"And who was the guy the state trooper saw in the subdivision?"
"We're discounting him. Almost certainly just a civilian."
Reacher shook his head. "So this solo guy hid the decoy rifle and legged it back to the church with the H amp;K all by himself?"
"I don't see why not."
"Have you ever hidden out and lined up to shoot a man?"
"No," Bannon said.
"I have," Reacher said. "And it's not a lot of fun. You need to be comfortable, and relaxed, and alert. It's a muscle thing. You get there well ahead of time, you settle in, you adjust your position, you figure out your range, you check the wind, you assess the angle of elevation or depression, you calculate the bullet drop. Then you lie there, staring through the sight. You get your breathing slow, you let your heart rate drop. And you know what you want at that point, more than anything else in the whole world?"
"What?"
"You want somebody you trust watching your back. All of your concentration is out there in front of you, and you start to feel an itch in your spine. If these guys are realistic professionals like you say they are, then no way would one of them work that church tower alone."
Bannon was silent.
"He's right," Neagley said. "Best guess is the guy in the subdivision was the back-watcher, on his way from hiding the decoy. He was looping around, well away from the fence. The shooter was hiding out in the church, waiting for him to get back."
"Which begs a question," Reacher said. "Like, who was it on the road from Minnesota at the time?"
Bannon shrugged.
"OK," he said. "So there are three of them."
"All ours?" Stuyvesant asked, neutrally.
"I don't see why not," Bannon said.
Reacher shook his head. "You're obsessed. Why don't you just arrest everybody who ever worked for the Secret Service? There are probably some hundred-year-olds left over from FDR's first term."
"We're sticking with our theory," Bannon said.
"Fine," Reacher said. "Keeps you out of my hair."
"I warned you against vigilantism, twice."
"And I heard you twice."
The room went silent. Then Bannon's face softened. He glanced across at Froelich's empty chair.
"Even though I would completely understand your motive," he said.
Reacher stared down at the table.
"It's two guys, not three," he said. "I agree with you, it profiles better. A thing like this, the best choice would be one guy on his own, but that's never practical, so it's got to be two. But not three. A third guy multiplies the risk by a hundred."
"So what happened with the rifle?"
"They messengered it, obviously," Reacher said. "FedEx or UPS or somebody. Maybe the USPS itself. They probably packaged it up with a bunch of saws and hammers and called it a delivery of tool samples. Some bullshit story like that. Addressed to a motel here, awaiting their arrival. That's what I would have done, anyway."
Bannon looked embarrassed. Said nothing. Just stood up and left. The door clicked shut behind him. The room went quiet. Stuyvesant stayed in his seat, a little awkward.
"We need to talk," he said.
"You're firing us," Neagley said.
He nodded. Put his hand in his inside jacket pocket and came out with two slim white envelopes.
"This isn't internal anymore," he said. "You know that. It's gotten way too big."
"But you know Bannon is looking in the wrong place."
"I hope he'll come to realize that," Stuyvesant said. "Then maybe he'll start looking in the right place. Meanwhile we'll defend Armstrong. Starting with this craziness in Wyoming. That's what we do. That's all we can do. We're reactive. We're defensive. We've got no legal basis to employ outsiders in a proactive role."
He slid the first envelope along the shiny tabletop. Gave it enough force that it carried exactly six feet and spun to a stop in front of Reacher. Then the second, with a gentler motion, so it stopped in front of Neagley.
"Later," Reacher said. "Fire us later. Give us the rest of the day."
"Why?"
"We need to talk to Armstrong. Just me and Neagley."
"About what?"
"About something important," Reacher said. Then he went quiet again.
"The thing we talked about this morning?" Neagley asked him.
"No, the thing that was on my mind last night."
"Something not there, something not done?"
He shook his head. "It was something not said."
"What wasn't said?"
He didn't answer. Just gathered up both envelopes and slid them back along the tabletop. Stuyvesant stopped them dead with the flat of his hand. Picked them up and held them, uncertain.
"I can't let you talk to Armstrong without me," he said.
"You'll have to," Reacher said. "It's the only way he'll talk at all."
Stuyvesant said nothing. Reacher glanced at him. "Tell me about the mail system. How long have you been checking Armstrong's mail?"
"From the start," Stuyvesant said. "Since he was picked as the candidate. That's absolutely standard procedure."
"How does it work?"
Stuyvesant shrugged. "It's easy enough. At first the agents at his house opened everything delivered there and we had a guy at the Senate Offices opening the stuff that went there and a guy in Bismarck looking after the local items. But after the first couple of messages we centralized everything right here for convenience."
"But everything always got passed on to him except for the threats?"
"Obviously."
"You know Swain?"
"The researcher? I know him a little."
"You should promote him. Or give him a bonus. Or a big kiss on the forehead. Because he's the only person around here with an original idea in his head. Us included."
"What's his idea?"
"We need to see Armstrong. As soon as possible. Me and Neagley, alone. Then we'll consider ourselves fired and you'll never see us again. And you'll never see Bannon again, either. Because your problem will be over a couple of days later."
Stuyvesant put both envelopes back in his jacket.
It was the day after Thanksgiving and Armstrong was in self-imposed exile from public affairs, but arranging a meeting with him was intensely problematic. Straight after the morning meeting Stuyvesant promoted one of Froelich's original six male rivals to replace her, and the guy was full of all kinds of macho "Now we can do this properly" bullshit. He kept it firmly under control in front of Stuyvesant because of sensitivity issues, but he threw up every kind of obstacle he could find. The main stumbling block was a decades-old rule that no protectee can be alone with visitors without at least one protection agent present. Reacher saw the logic in that. Even if they were strip-searched for weapons, he and Neagley could have completely dismembered Armstrong in about a second and a half. But they had to meet alone. That was vital. Stuyvesant was reluctant to overrule the new team leader on his first day, but eventually he quoted the Pentagon security clearances and decreed that the presence of two agents immediately outside the door would be sufficient. Then he called Armstrong at home to clear it with him personally. He got off the phone and said that Armstrong sounded a little concerned about something and would call right back.
They waited and Armstrong called back after twenty minutes and told Stuyvesant three things: first, his mother's health had taken a sudden turn for the worse, therefore second, he wanted to be flown out to Oregon that afternoon, therefore third, the meeting with Reacher and Neagley would have to be short and it would have to be delayed two hours while he packed.
So Reacher and Neagley went to Froelich's office to wait some more, but it had already been taken over by the new guy. The little plant was gone. Furniture had been moved. Things had been changed around. All that remained of Froelich was a faint trace of her perfume in the air. So they went back to the reception area and sprawled in the leather chairs. Watched the muted television. It was tuned to a news channel, and they saw Froelich die all over again, silently and in slow motion. They saw part of Armstrong's subsequent statement. They saw Bannon interviewed outside the Hoover Building. They didn't ask for the sound to be turned up. They knew what he would be saying. They watched football highlights from the Thanksgiving Day games. Then Stuyvesant called them back to his office.
His secretary wasn't there. She was clearly enjoying a long weekend at home. They walked through the empty area and sat down in front of Stuyvesant's immaculate desk while he ran through the rules of engagement.
"No physical contact," he said.
Reacher smiled. "Not even a handshake?"
"I guess a handshake is OK," Stuyvesant said. "But nothing else. And you are not to reveal anything about the current situation. He doesn't know, and I don't want him to find out from you. Is that understood?"
Reacher nodded.
"Understood," Neagley said.
"Don't upset him and don't harass him. Remember who he is. And remember he's preoccupied with his mother."
"OK," Reacher said.
Stuyvesant looked away. "I've decided I don't want to know why you want to see him. And I don't want to know what happens afterward, if anything. But I do want to say thanks for everything you've already done. Your audit will help us, and I think you probably saved us in Bismarck, and your hearts have been in the right place throughout, and I'm very grateful for all of that."
Nobody spoke.
"I'm going to retire," Stuyvesant said. "I'd have to fight to save my career now, and the truth is I don't like my career enough to fight for it."
"These guys were never your agents," Reacher said.
"I know that," Stuyvesant said. "But I lost two people. Therefore my career is over. But that's my decision and my problem. All I mean to say to you is I'm glad I got the chance to meet Joe's brother, and it was a real pleasure working with you both."
Nobody spoke.
"And I'm glad you were there at the end for M.E."
Reacher looked away. Stuyvesant took the envelopes out of his pocket again.
"I don't know whether to hope you're right or wrong," he said. "About Wyoming, I mean. We'll have three agents and some local cops. That's not a lot of cover, if things turn out bad."
He passed the envelopes across the desk.
"There's a car waiting downstairs," he said. "You get a one-way ride to Georgetown, and then you're on your own."
They went down in the elevator and Reacher detoured into the main hall. It was vast and dark and gray and deserted, and the cold marble echoed with his footsteps. He stopped underneath the carved panel and glanced up at his brother's name. Glanced at the empty space where Froelich's would soon be added. Then he glanced away and walked back and joined Neagley. They pushed through the small door with the wired glass porthole and found their car.
The white tent was still in place across the sidewalk in front of Armstrong's house. The driver pulled up with the rear door tight against the contour and spoke into his wrist microphone. A second later Armstrong's front door opened and three agents stepped out. One walked forward through the canvas tunnel and opened the car door. Reacher got out and Neagley slid out beside him. The agent closed the door again and stood impassive on the curb and the car drove away. The second agent held his arms out in a brief mime that they should stand still and be searched. They waited in the whitened canvas gloom. Neagley tensed while strange hands patted her down. But it was superficial. They barely touched her. And they missed Reacher's ceramic knife. It was hidden in his sock.
The agents led them inside to Armstrong's hallway and closed the door. The house was larger than it appeared from the outside. It was a big substantial place that looked like it had been standing for a hundred years and was good for maybe a hundred more. The hallway had dark antiques and striped paper on the walls and a clutter of framed pictures everywhere. There were rugs on the floors laid over thick wall-to-wall carpeting. There was a battered garment bag resting in a corner, presumably ready for the emergency trip to Oregon.
"This way," one of the agents said.
He led them deep into the house and through a dogleg in the hallway to a huge eat-in kitchen that would have looked at home in a log cabin. It was all pine, with a big table at one end and all the cooking equipment at the other. There was a strong smell of coffee. Armstrong and his wife were sitting at the table with heavy china mugs and four different newspapers. Mrs. Armstrong was wearing a jogging suit and a sheen of sweat, like there might be a home gym in the basement. It looked like she wasn't going to Oregon with her husband. She had no makeup on. She looked a little tired and dispirited, like the events of Thanksgiving Day had altered her feelings in a fundamental way. Armstrong himself looked composed. He was wearing a clean shirt under a jacket with the sleeves pulled up over his forearms. No tie. He was reading the editorials from The New York Times and The Washington Post side by side.
"Coffee?" Mrs. Armstrong asked.
Reacher nodded and she stood up and walked into the kitchen area and pulled two more mugs off hooks and filled them. Walked back with one in each hand. Reacher couldn't decide if she was short or tall. She was one of those women who look short in flat shoes and tall in heels. She handed the mugs over without much expression. Armstrong looked up from his papers.
"I'm sorry to hear about your mother," Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded.
"Mr. Stuyvesant told me you want a private conversation," he said.
"Private would be good," Reacher said.
"Should my wife join us?"
"That depends on your definition of privacy."
Mrs. Armstrong glanced at her husband.
"You can tell me afterward," she said. "Before you leave. If you need to."
Armstrong nodded again and made a show of folding his newspapers. Then he stood up and detoured to the coffee machine and refilled his mug.
"Let's go," he said.
He led them back to the doglegged hallway and into a side room. Two agents followed and stood on each side of the door on the outside. Armstrong glanced out at them as if in apology and shut the door on them. Walked around and stood behind a desk. The room was set up like a study, but it was more recreational than for real. There was no computer. The desk was a big old item made from dark wood. There were leather chairs and books chosen for the look of their spines. There was paneling and an old Persian rug. There was an air freshener somewhere putting fragrance into the hush. There was a framed photograph on the wall. It showed a person of indeterminate gender standing on an ice floe. He or she was wearing an enormous padded down coat with a hood and thick mittens that reached the elbow. The hood had a big fur ruff that framed the face tight. The face itself was entirely hidden by a ski mask and smoked yellow snow goggles. One of the elbow-high mittens was raised in greeting.
"Our daughter," Armstrong said. "We asked her for a photo, because we miss her. That's what she sent. She has a sense of humor."
He sat down behind the desk. Reacher and Neagley took a chair each.
"This all feels very confidential," Armstrong said.
Reacher nodded. "And in the end I think we'll all agree it should be kept confidential."
"What's on your mind?"
"Mr. Stuyvesant gave us some ground rules," Reacher said. "I'm going to start breaking them right now. The Secret Service intercepted six threatening messages against you. The first came in the mail eighteen days ago. Two more came in the mail subsequently and three were hand-delivered."
Armstrong said nothing.
"You don't seem surprised," Reacher said.
Armstrong shrugged.
"Politics is a surprising business," he said.
"I guess it is," Reacher said. "All six messages were signed with a thumbprint. We traced the print to an old guy in California. His thumb had been amputated and stolen and used like a rubber stamp."
Armstrong said nothing.
"The second message showed up in Stuyvesant's own office. Eventually it was proved that a surveillance technician named Nendick had placed it there. Nendick's wife had been kidnapped in order to coerce his actions. He was so frightened of the danger to her posed by his inevitable interrogation that he went into some kind of a coma. But we're guessing she was already dead by then anyway."
Armstrong was silent.
"There's a researcher in the office called Swain who made an important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting. He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we added the guy in California who'd had his thumb removed and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration against you."
"Oh no," Armstrong said.
"So, ten messages," Reacher said. "All of them designed to torment you, except you hadn't been told about any of them. But then I started wondering whether we're still miscounting. And you know what? I'm pretty sure we are. I think there were at least eleven messages."
Silence in the small room.
"What would be the eleventh?" Armstrong asked.
"Something that slipped through," Reacher said. "Something that came in the mail, addressed to you, something that the Secret Service didn't see as a threat. Something that meant nothing at all to them, but something that meant a lot to you."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think it came first," Reacher said. "Right at the very beginning, maybe, before the Secret Service even caught on. I think it was like an announcement, that only you would understand. So I think you've known about all this all along. I think you know who's doing it, and I think you know why."
"People have died," Armstrong said. "That's a hell of an accusation."
"Do you deny it?"
Armstrong said nothing.
Reacher leaned forward.
"Some crucial words were never spoken," he said. "Thing is, if I was standing there serving turkey and then somebody started shooting and somebody else was suddenly bleeding to death on top of me, sooner or later I'd be asking, who the hell were they? What the hell did they want? Why the hell were they doing that? Those are fairly basic questions. I'd be asking them loud and clear, believe me. But you didn't ask them. We saw you twice, afterward. In the White House basement, and then later at the office. You said all kinds of things. You asked, had they been captured yet? That was your big concern. You never asked who they might be or what their possible motive was. And why didn't you ask? Only one possible explanation. You already knew."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think your wife knows, too," Reacher said. "You conveyed her anger at you for putting people at risk. I don't think she was generalizing. I think she knows you know, and she thinks you should have told somebody."
Armstrong was silent.
"So I think you're feeling a little guilty now," Reacher said. "I think that's why you agreed to make the television statement for me and that's why you suddenly want to go to the service itself. Some kind of a conscience thing. Because you knew, and you didn't tell anybody."
"I'm a politician," Armstrong said. "We have hundreds of enemies. There was no point in speculating."
"Bullshit," Reacher said. "This isn't political. This is personal. Your kind of political enemy is some North Dakota soybean grower you made ten cents a week poorer by altering a subsidy. Or some pompous old senator you declined to vote with. The soybean grower might make a halfhearted effort against you at election time and the senator might bide his time and screw you on some big floor issue but neither one of them is going to do what these guys are doing."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I'm not a fool," Reacher said. "I'm an angry man who watched a woman I was fond of bleed to death."
"I'm not a fool either," Armstrong said.
"I think you are. Something's coming back at you from the past and you think you can just ignore it and hope for the best? Didn't you realize it would happen? You people have no perspective. You thought you were world famous already just because you were in the House and the Senate? Well, you weren't. Real people never heard of you until the campaign this summer. You thought all your little secrets were already out? Well, they weren't, either."
Armstrong said nothing.
"Who are they?" Reacher asked.
Armstrong shrugged. "Your guess?"
Reacher paused a beat.
"I think you've got a temper problem," he said. "Same as your dad. I think way back before you learned to control it you made people suffer, and some of them forgot about it, but some of them didn't. I think it's a part of some particular person's life that somebody once did something bad to them. Maybe hurt them, or hurt their self-esteem, or screwed them up in some other kind of a big way. I think that particular person repressed it deep down inside until they turned on the TV one day and saw your face for the first time in thirty years."
Armstrong sat still for a long moment.
"How far along is the FBI with this?" he asked.
"They're nowhere. They're out beating the bushes for people that don't exist. We're way ahead of them."
"And what are your intentions?"
"I'm going to help you," Reacher said. "Not that you deserve it in any way at all. It'll be a purely accidental by-product of me standing up for Nendick and his wife, and an old guy called Andretti, and two people called Armstrong, and Crosetti, and especially for Froelich, who was my brother's friend."
There was silence.
"Will this stay confidential?" Armstrong asked.
Reacher nodded. "It'll have to. Purely for my sake."
"Sounds like you're contemplating a very serious course of action."
"People play with fire, they get burned."
"That's the law of the jungle."
"Where the hell else do you think you live?"
Armstrong was quiet, another long moment.
"So then you'll know my secret and I'll know yours," he said.
Reacher nodded. "And we'll all live happily ever after."
There was another long silence. It lasted a whole minute. Reacher saw Armstrong the politician fade away, and Armstrong the man replace him.
"You're wrong in most ways," he said. "But not all of them."
He leaned down and opened a drawer. Took out a padded mailer and tossed it on the desk. It skidded on the shiny wood and came to rest an inch from the edge.
"I guess this counts as the first message," he said. "It arrived on Election Day. I suppose the Secret Service must have been a little puzzled, but they didn't see anything really wrong with it. So they passed it right along."
The mailer was a standard commercial stationery product. It was addressed to Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. The address was printed on a familiar self-adhesive label in the familiar computer font, Times New Roman, fourteen point, bold. It had been mailed somewhere in the state of Utah on October 28. The flap had been opened a couple of times and resealed. Reacher eased it back and looked inside. Held it so Neagley could see.
There was nothing in the envelope except a miniature baseball bat. It was the kind of thing sold as a souvenir or given away as a token. It was plain lacquered softwood the color of honey. It was about an inch wide around the barrel and would have been about fifteen inches long except that it was broken near the end of the handle. It had been broken deliberately. It had been partially sawn through and then snapped where it was weak. The raw end had been scratched and scraped to make it look accidental.
"I don't have a temper problem," Armstrong said. "But you're right, my father did. We lived in a small town in Oregon, kind of lonely and isolated. It was a lumber town, basically. It was a mixed sort of place. The mill owners had big houses, the crew chiefs had smaller houses, the crews lived in shanties or rooming houses. There was a school. My mother owned the pharmacy. Down the road was the rest of the state, up the road was virgin forest. It felt like the frontier. It was a little lawless, but it wasn't too bad. There were occasional whores and a lot of drinking, but overall it was just trying to be an American town."
He went quiet for a moment. Placed his hands palms down on the desk and stared at them.
"I was eighteen," he said. "Finished with high school, ready for college, spending my last few weeks at home. My sister was away traveling somewhere. We had a mailbox at the gate. My father had made it himself, in the shape of a miniature lumber mill. It was a nice thing, made out of tiny strips of cedar. At Halloween in the previous year it had been smashed up, you know, the traditional Halloween thing where the tough kids go out cruising with a baseball bat, bashing mailboxes. My father heard it happening and he chased them, but he didn't really see them. We were a little upset, because it was a nice mailbox and destroying it seemed kind of senseless. But he rebuilt it stronger and became kind of obsessed about protecting it. Some nights he hid out and guarded it."
"And the kids came back," Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded.
"Late that summer," he said. "Two kids, in a truck, with a bat. They were big guys. I didn't really know them, but I'd seen them around before, here and there. They were brothers, I think. Real hard kids, you know, delinquents, bullies from out of town, the sort of kids you always stayed well away from. They took a swing at the box and my dad jumped out at them and there was an argument. They were sneering at him, threatening him, saying bad things about my mother. They said, bring her on out and we'll show her a good time with this bat, better than you can show her. You can imagine the gestures that went with it. So then there was a fight, and my dad got lucky. It was just one of those things, two lucky punches and he won. Or maybe it was his military training. The bat had bust in half, maybe against the box. I thought that would be the end of it, but he dragged the kids into the yard and got some logging chain and some padlocks and got them chained up to a tree. They were kneeling down, facing each other around the trunk. My dad's mind was gone. His temper had kicked in. He was hitting them with the broken bat. I was trying to stop him, but it was impossible. Then he said he was going to show them a good time with the bat, with the broken end, unless they begged him not to. So they begged. They begged long and loud."
He went quiet again.
"I was there all the time," he said. "I was trying to calm my father down, that's all. But these guys were looking at me like I was participating. There was this thing in their eyes, like I was a witness to their worst moment. Like I was seeing them being totally humiliated, which I guess is the worst thing you can do to a bully. There was absolute hatred in their eyes. Against me. Like they were saying, you've seen this, so now you have to die. It was literally as bad as that."
"What happened?" Neagley asked.
"My father kept them there. He said he was going to leave them there all night and start up again in the morning. We went inside and he went to bed and I snuck out again an hour later. I was going to let them go. But they were already gone. They'd gotten out of the chains somehow. Escaped. They never came back. I never saw them again. I went off to college, never really came home again except for visits."
"And your father died."
Armstrong nodded. "He had blood pressure problems, which was understandable, I guess, given his personality. I kind of forgot about the two kids. It was just an episode that had happened in the past. But I didn't really forget about them. I always remembered the look in their eyes. I can see it right now. It was stone-cold hatred. It was like two cocky thugs who couldn't stand to be seen any other way than how they chose to be seen. Like I was committing a mortal sin just for happening to see them losing. Like I was doing something to them. Like I was their enemy. They stared at me. I gave up trying to understand it. I'm no kind of a psychologist. But I never forgot that look. When that package came I wasn't puzzled for a second who had sent it, even though it's been nearly thirty years."
"Did you know their names?" Reacher asked.
Armstrong shook his head. "I didn't know much about them, except I guess they lived in some nearby town. What are you going to do?"
"I know what I'd like to do."
"What's that?"
"I'd like to break both your arms and never see you again as long as I live. Because if you'd spoken up on Election Day, Froelich would still be alive."
"Why the hell didn't you?" Neagley asked.
Armstrong shook his head. There were tears in his eyes.
"Because I had no idea it was serious," he said. "I really didn't, I promise you, on my daughter's life. Don't you see? I just thought it was supposed to remind me or unsettle me. I wondered whether maybe in their minds they still thought I was in the wrong back then, and it was supposed to be a threat of political embarrassment or exposure or something. Obviously I wasn't worried about that because I wasn't in the wrong back then. Everybody would understand that. And I couldn't see any other logical reason for sending it. I was thirty years older, so were they. I'm a rational adult, I assumed they were. So I thought it was maybe just an unpleasant joke. I didn't conceive of any danger in it. I absolutely promise you that. I mean, why would I? So it unsettled me for an hour, and then I dropped it. Maybe I half-expected some kind of lame follow-up, but I figured I'd deal with that when it happened. But there was no follow-up. It didn't happen. Not as far as I knew. Because nobody told me. Until now. Until you told me. And according to Stuyvesant you shouldn't be telling me even now. And people have suffered and died. Christ, why did he keep me out of the loop? I could have given him the whole story if he'd just asked."
Nobody spoke.
"So you're right and you're wrong," he said. "I knew who and why, but I didn't know all along. I didn't know the middle. I knew the beginning, and I knew the end. I knew as soon as the shooting started, believe me. I mean, I just knew. It was an unbelievable shock, out of the blue. Like, this is the follow-up? It was an insane development. It was like half-expecting a rotten tomato to be thrown at me one day and getting a nuclear missile instead. I thought the world had gone mad. You want to blame me for not speaking out, OK, go ahead and blame me, but how could I have known? How could I have predicted this kind of insanity?"
Silence for a beat.
"So that's my guilty secret," Armstrong said. "Not that I did anything wrong thirty years ago. But that I didn't have the right kind of imagination to see the implications of the package three weeks ago."
Nobody spoke.
"Should I tell Stuyvesant now?" Armstrong asked.
"Your choice," Reacher said.
There was a long pause. Armstrong the man faded away again, and Armstrong the politician came back to replace him.
"I don't want to tell him," he said. "Bad for him, bad for me. People have suffered and died. It'll be seen as a serious misjudgment on both our parts. He should have asked, I should have told."
Reacher nodded. "So leave it to us. You'll know our secret and we'll know yours."
"And we'll all live happily ever after."
"Well, we'll all live," Reacher said.
"Descriptions?" Neagley asked.
"Just kids," Armstrong said. "Maybe my age. I only remember their eyes."
"What's the name of the town?"
"Underwood, Oregon," Armstrong said. "Where my mother still lives. Where I'm going in an hour."
"And these kids were from the area?"
Armstrong glanced at Reacher. "And you predicted they'll go home to wait."
"Yes," Reacher said. "I did."
"And I'm heading right there."
"Don't worry about it," Reacher said. "That theory is way out of date now. I assume they expected you'd remember them, and I assume they didn't anticipate the communication breakdown between yourself and the Secret Service. And they wouldn't want you to be able to lead them right to their door. Therefore their door has changed. They don't live in Oregon anymore. That's one thing we can be absolutely sure of."
"So how are you going to find them?"
Reacher shook his head. "We can't find them. Not now. Not in time. They'll have to find us. In Wyoming. At the memorial service."
"I'm going there too. With minimal cover."
"So just hope it's all over before you arrive."
"Should I tell Stuyvesant?" Armstrong asked again.
"Your choice," Reacher said again.
"I can't cancel the appearance. That wouldn't be right."
"No," Reacher said. "I guess it wouldn't."
"I can't tell Stuyvesant now."
"No," Reacher said. "I guess you can't."
Armstrong said nothing. Reacher stood up to leave, and Neagley did the same.
"One last thing," Reacher said. "We think these guys grew up to be cops."
Armstrong sat still. He started to shake his head, but then he stopped and looked down at the desk. His face clouded, like he was hearing a faint thirty-year-old echo.
"Something during the beating," he said. "I only half-heard it, and I'm sure I discounted it at the time. But I think at one point they claimed their dad was a cop. They said he could get us in big trouble."
Reacher said nothing.
The protection agents showed them out. They walked the length of the canvas tent and stepped off the curb into the street. Turned east and got back on the sidewalk and settled in for the trek to the subway. It was late morning and the air was clear and cold. The neighborhood was deserted. Nobody was out walking. Neagley opened the envelope Stuyvesant had given her. It contained a check for five thousand dollars. The memo line was written up as professional consultation. Reacher's envelope contained two checks. One was for the same five-grand fee and the other was for his audit expenses, repaid to the exact penny.
"We should go shopping," Neagley said. "We can't go hunting in Wyoming dressed like this."
"I don't want you to come with me," Reacher said.