Ли Чайлд - Without Fail

They turned a corner. Walked on. Stuyvesant stopped and shepherded them into the conference room and came in after them and hit the lights and closed the door. Reacher and Neagley sat together on one side of the long table and Stuyvesant sat next to Froelich on the other, like he foresaw an adversarial element to the conversation.

“Explain,” he said.

Silence for a second.

“This is definitely not an inside job,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “Although we were fooling ourselves by ever thinking it was entirely one thing or the other. It was always both. But it was useful shorthand. The real question was where the balance lay. Was it fundamentally an inside job with trivial help from the outside? Or was it basically an outside job with trivial help from the inside?”

“The trivial help being what?” Stuyvesant asked.

“A potential insider needed a thumbprint that wasn’t his. A potential outsider needed a way to get the second message inside this building.”

“And you’ve concluded that it’s the outsider?”

Reacher nodded again. “Which is absolutely the worst news we could have gotten. Because whereas an insider messing around is merely a pain in the ass, an outsider is truly dangerous.”

Stuyvesant looked away. “Who?”

“No idea,” Reacher said. “Just some outsider with a loose one-time connection to an insider, sufficient to get the message in and nothing more.”

“The insider being one of the cleaners.”

“Or all of them,” Froelich said.

“I assume so, yes,” Reacher said.

“You sure about this?”

“Completely.”

“How?” Stuyvesant asked.

Reacher shrugged.

“Lots of reasons,” he said. “Some of them small, one of them big.”

“Explain,” Stuyvesant said again.

“I look for simplicity,” Reacher said.

Stuyvesant nodded. “So do I. I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not zebras. But the simple explanation here is an insider trying to get under Froelich’s skin.”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “The chosen method is way too complex for that. They’d be doing all the usual stuff instead. The easy stuff. I’m sure we’ve all seen it before. Mysterious communications failures, computer crashes, bogus alarm calls to nonexistent addresses in the bad part of town, she arrives, calls in for backup, nobody shows, she gets scared, she panics on the radio, a recording gets made and starts to circulate. Any law enforcement department has got a stack of examples a yard high.”

“Including the military police?”

“Sure. Especially with women officers.”

Stuyvesant shook his head.

“No,” he said. “That’s conjecture. I’m asking how you know .”

“I know because nothing happened today.”

“Explain,” Stuyvesant said for the third time.

“This is a smart opponent,” Reacher said. “He’s bright and he’s confident. He’s in command . But he threatened something and he didn’t deliver.”

“So? He failed, is all.”

“No,” Reacher said. “He didn’t even try . Because he didn’t know he had to. Because he didn’t know his letter arrived today.”

Silence in the room.

“He expected it to arrive tomorrow,” Reacher said. “It was mailed on Friday. Friday to Monday is pretty fast for the U.S. mail. It was a fluke. He banked on Friday to Tuesday.”

Nobody spoke.

“He’s an outsider,” Reacher said. “He’s got no direct connection to the department and therefore he’s unaware his threat showed up a day early, or he’d have delivered today for sure . Because he’s an arrogant son of a bitch, and he wouldn’t have wanted to let himself down. Count on it. So he’s out there somewhere, waiting to deliver on his threat tomorrow, which is exactly when he expected he’d have to all along.”

“Great,” Froelich said. “There’ll be another contributor reception tomorrow.”

Stuyvesant was quiet for a beat.

“So what do you suggest?” he asked.

“We have to cancel,” Froelich said.

“No, I meant long-term strategy,” Stuyvesant said. “And we can’t cancel anything . We can’t just give up and say we can’t protect our principal.”

“You have to tough it out,” Reacher said. “It’ll only be a demonstration. Designed to torment you. My guess is it’ll specifically avoid Armstrong altogether. It’ll penetrate somewhere he has been or will be some other time.”

“Like where?” Froelich asked.

“His house, maybe,” Reacher said. “Either here or in Bismarck. His office. Somewhere. It’ll be theatrical, like these damn messages. It’ll be some spectacular thing in a place Armstrong just was or is heading for next. Because right now this whole thing is a contest , and the guy promised a demonstration, and I think he’ll keep his word, but I’m betting the next move will be parallel somehow. Otherwise why phrase the message the way he did? Why talk about a demonstration? Why not just go ahead and say, Armstrong, you’re going to die today?”

Froelich made no reply.

“We have to identify this guy,” Stuyvesant said. “What do we know about him?”

Silence in the room.

“Well, we know we’re fooling ourselves again,” Reacher said. “Or else still speaking in shorthand. Because it’s not a him . It’s them . It’s a team. It always is. It’s two people.”

“That’s a guess,” Stuyvesant said.

“You wish,” Reacher said back. “It’s provable.”

“How?”

“It bothered me way back that there was the thumbprint on the letter along with clear evidence of latex gloves. Why would he swing both ways? Either his prints are on file or they aren’t. But it’s two people. The thumbprint guy has never been printed. The gloves guy has been. It’s two people, working together.”

Stuyvesant looked very tired. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

“You don’t really need us anymore,” Neagley said. “This isn’t an internal investigation now. This is out there in the world.”

“No,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s still internal as long as there’s something to get from the cleaners. They must have met with these people. They must know who they are.”

Neagley shrugged. “You gave them lawyers. You made it very difficult.”

“They had to have counsel, for God’s sake,” Stuyvesant said. “They were arrested. That’s the law. It’s their Sixth Amendment right.”

“I guess it is,” Neagley said. “So tell me, is there a law for when the Vice President gets killed before his inauguration?”

“Yes, there is,” Froelich said quietly. “The Twentieth Amendment. Congress chooses another one.”

Neagley nodded. “Well, I sure hope they’ve got their short list ready.”

Silence in the room.

“You should bring in the FBI,” Reacher said.

“I will,” Stuyvesant replied. “When we’ve got names. Not before.”

“They’ve already seen the letters.”

“Only in the labs. Their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing.”

“You need their help.”

“And I’ll ask for it. Soon as we’ve gotten names, I’m going to give them to the Bureau on a silver platter. But I’m not going to tell them where they came from. I’m not going to tell them we were internally compromised. And I’m sure as hell not bringing them in while we still are internally compromised.”

“Is it that big of a deal?”

“Are you kidding? CIA had a problem with that Ames guy, remember? The Bureau got hold of it and they laughed up their sleeves for years. Then they had their own problems with that Hanssen guy, and they didn’t look so smart after all. This is the big leagues, Reacher. Right now the Secret Service is number one, by a very healthy margin. We’ve only recorded one defeat in our entire history, and that was almost forty years ago. So we’re not about to take a dive down the league table just for the fun of it.”