Ли Чайлд - Without Fail

Then he sat back, like he was finished.

“What about this specific threat?” Reacher asked him.

Stuyvesant paused, and then he shook his head. His face had changed. The mood in the whole room had changed.

“That’s precisely where I stop being frank,” he said. “I told you it was a temporary indulgence. And it was a very serious lapse on Froelich’s part to reveal the existence of any threat at all. All I’m prepared to say is we intercept a lot of threats. Then we deal with them. How we deal with them is entirely confidential. Therefore I would ask you to understand you are now under an absolute obligation never to mention this situation to anybody after you leave here tonight. Or any aspect of our procedures. That obligation is rooted in federal statute. There are sanctions available to me.”

There was silence. Reacher said nothing. Neagley sat quiet. Froelich looked upset. Stuyvesant ignored her completely and gazed hard at Reacher and Neagley, at first hostile, and then suddenly pensive. He started thinking hard again. He stood up and walked over to the low cabinet with the telephones on it. Squatted down in front of it. Opened the doors and took out two yellow legal pads and two ballpoint pens. Walked back and dropped one of each in front of Reacher and one of each in front of Neagley. Circled around the head of the table again and sat back down in his chair.

“Write your full names,” he said. “All and any aliases, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, military ID numbers, and current addresses.”

“What for?” Reacher asked.

“Just do it,” Stuyvesant said.

Reacher paused and picked up his pen. Froelich looked at him, anxiously. Neagley glanced at him and shrugged and started writing on her pad. Reacher waited a beat and then followed her example. He was finished well before her. He had no middle name and no current address. Stuyvesant walked around behind them and scooped the pads off the table. Said nothing and walked straight out of the room with the pads held tight under his arm. The door slammed loudly behind him.

“I’m in trouble,” Froelich said. “And I’ve made trouble for you guys, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Reacher said. “He’s going to make us sign some kind of confidentiality agreement, is all. He’s gone to get them typed up, I guess.”

“But what’s he going to do to me?”

“Nothing, probably.”

“Demote me? Fire me?”

“He authorized the audit. The audit was necessary because of the threats. The two things were connected. We’ll tell him we pushed you with questions.”

“He’ll demote me,” Froelich said. “He wasn’t happy about me running the audit in the first place. Told me it indicated a lack of self-confidence.”

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. “We did stuff like that all the time.”

“Audits build self-confidence,” Neagley said. “That was our experience. Better to know something for sure than just hope for the best.”

Froelich looked away. Didn’t reply. The room went quiet. They all waited, five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Reacher stood up and stretched. Stepped over to the low cabinet and looked at the red phone. He picked it up and held it to his ear. There was no dial tone. He put it back and scanned the confidential memos on the notice board. The ceiling was low and he could feel heat on his head from the halogen lights. He sat down again and turned his chair and tilted it back and put his feet on the next one in line. Glanced at his watch. Stuyvesant had been gone twenty minutes.

“Hell is he doing?” he said. “Typing them himself?”

“Maybe he’s calling his agents,” Neagley said. “Maybe we’re all going to jail, to guarantee our everlasting silence forever.”

Reacher yawned and smiled. “We’ll give him ten more minutes. Then we’re leaving. We’ll all go out and get some dinner.”

Stuyvesant came back after five more. He walked into the room and closed the door. He was carrying no papers. He stepped over and sat down in his original seat and placed his hands flat on the table. Drummed a staccato little rhythm with his fingertips.

“OK,” he said. “Where were we? Reacher had a question, I think.”

Reacher took his feet off the chair and turned to face front.

“Did I?” he said.

Stuyvesant nodded. “You asked about this specific threat. Well, it’s either an inside job or it’s an outside job. It’s got to be one or the other, obviously.”

“We’re discussing this now?”

“Yes, we are,” Stuyvesant said.

“Why? What changed?”

Stuyvesant ignored the question. “If it’s an outside job, should we necessarily worry? Perhaps not, because that’s like baseball, too. If the Yankees come to town saying they’re going to beat the Orioles, does that mean it’s true? Boasting about it is not the same thing as actually doing it.”

Nobody spoke.

“I’m asking for your input here,” Stuyvesant said.

Reacher shrugged.

“OK,” he said. “You think it is an outside threat?”

“No, I think it’s inside intimidation intended to damage Froelich’s career. Now ask me what I’m going to do about it.”

Reacher glanced at him. Glanced at his watch. Glanced at the wall. Twenty-five minutes, a Sunday evening, deep inside the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia triangle .

“I know what you’re going to do about it,” he said.

“Do you?”

“You’re going to hire me and Neagley for an internal investigation.”

“Am I?”

Reacher nodded. “If you’re worried about inside intimidation then you need an internal investigation. That’s clear. And you can’t use one of your own people, because you might hit on the bad guy by chance. And you don’t want to bring the FBI in, because that’s not how Washington works. Nobody washes their dirty linen in public. So you need some other outsider. And you’ve got two of them sitting right in front of you. They’re already involved, because Froelich just involved them. So either you terminate that involvement, or you choose to expand on it. You’d prefer to expand on it, because that way you don’t have to find fault with an excellent agent you just promoted. So can you use us? Of course you can. Who better than Joe Reacher’s little brother? Inside Treasury, Joe Reacher is practically a saint. So your ass is covered. And mine is too. Because of Joe I’ll get automatic credibility from the start. And I was a good investigator in the military. So was Neagley. You know that, because you just checked. My guess is you just spent twenty-five minutes talking to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. That’s why you wanted those details. They ran us through their computers and we came out clean. More than clean, probably, because I’m sure our security clearances are still on file, and I’m sure they’re still way higher than you actually need them to be.”

Stuyvesant nodded. He looked satisfied.

“An excellent analysis,” he said. “You get the job, just as soon as I get hard copies of those clearances. They should be here in an hour or two.”

“You can do this?” Neagley said.

“I can do what I want,” Stuyvesant said. “Presidents tend to give a lot of authority to the people they hope will keep them alive.”

Silence in the room.

“Will I be a suspect?” Stuyvesant asked.

“No,” Reacher said.

“Maybe I should be. Maybe I should be your number-one suspect. Perhaps I felt forced to promote a woman because of contemporary pressures to do so, but I secretly resent it, so I’m working behind her back to panic her and thereby discredit her.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I could have found a friend or a relative who had never been fingerprinted. I could have placed the paper on my desk at seven-thirty Wednesday evening and instructed my secretary not to notice it. She’d have followed my orders. Or I could have instructed the cleaners to smuggle it in that night. They’d have followed my orders, too. But they’d have followed Froelich’s orders equally. She should be your number-two suspect, probably. Maybe she has a friend or a relative with no prints on file either, and maybe she’s setting this whole thing up in order to deal with it spectacularly and earn some enhanced credibility.”