Ли Чайлд - Without Fail

“But it showed me arriving in the morning. My secretary, too.”

“That was the third tape. There was another change at six A.M., back to the real thing. Only the middle tape was swapped.”

Silence in the room.

“He probably described the garage cameras for them too,” Reacher said. “For the Sunday night delivery.”

“How did you spot it?” Stuyvesant asked. “The hair?”

“Partly. It was Neagley’s ass, really. Nendick was so nervous around the tapes he didn’t pay attention to Neagley’s ass. She noticed. She told me that’s very unusual.”

Stuyvesant blushed again, like maybe he was able to vouch for that fact personally.

“So we should let the cleaners go,” Reacher said. “Then we should talk with Nendick. He’s the one who met with these guys.”

Stuyvesant nodded. “And been threatened by them, presumably.”

“I hope so,” Reacher said. “I hope he’s not involved of his own free will.”

Stuyvesant used his master key and entered the video recording room with the duty officer as a witness. They found that ten consecutive midnight-to-six tapes were missing prior to the Thursday in question. Nendick had entered them in a technical log as faulty recordings. Then they picked a dozen random tapes from the last three months and watched parts of them. They confirmed that the cleaners never spent more than nine minutes in his office. So Stuyvesant made a call and secured their immediate release.

Then there were three options: either call Nendick in on a pretext, or send agents out to arrest him, or drive themselves over to his house and get some questioning started before the Sixth Amendment kicked in and began to complicate things.

“We should go right now,” Reacher said. “Exploit the element of surprise.”

He was expecting resistance, but Stuyvesant just nodded blankly. He looked pale and tired. He looked like a man with problems. Like a man juggling a sense of betrayal and righteous anger against the standard Beltway instinct for concealment. And the instinct for concealment was going to be much stronger with a guy like Nendick than with the cleaners. Cleaners would be regarded as mere ciphers. Sooner or later somebody could spin it hey, cleaners, what can you do ? But a guy like Nendick was different. A guy like that was a main component in an organization that should know better. So Stuyvesant booted up his secretary’s computer and found Nendick’s home address. It was in a suburb ten miles out in Virginia. It took twenty minutes to get there. He lived on a quiet winding street in a subdivision. The subdivision was old enough that the trees and the foundation plantings were mature but new enough that the whole place still looked smart and well kept. It was a medium-priced area. There were foreign cars on most of the driveways, but they weren’t this year’s models. They were clean, but a little tired. Nendick’s house was a long low ranch with a khaki roof and a brick chimney. It was dark except for the blue flicker of a television set in one of the windows.

Froelich swung straight onto the driveway and parked in front of the garage. They climbed out into the cold and walked to the front door. Stuyvesant put his thumb on the bell and left it there. Thirty seconds later a light came on in the hallway. It blazed orange in a fan-shaped window above the door. A yellow porch light came on over their heads. The door opened and Nendick just stood in his hallway and said nothing. He was wearing a suit, like he was just home from work. He looked slack with fear, like a new ordeal was about to be piled on top of an old one. Stuyvesant looked at him and paused and then stepped inside. Froelich followed him. Then Reacher. Then Neagley. She closed the door behind her and took up station in front of it like a sentry, feet apart, hands clasped easy in the small of her back.

Nendick still said nothing. Just stood there, slack and staring. Stuyvesant put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around. Pushed him toward the kitchen. He didn’t resist. Just stumbled limply toward the back of his house. Stuyvesant followed him and hit a switch and fluorescent tubes sputtered to life above the countertops.

“Sit,” he said, like he was talking to a dog.

Nendick stepped over and sat on a stool at his breakfast bar. Said nothing. Just wrapped his arms around himself like a man chilled by fever.

“Names,” Stuyvesant said.

Nendick said nothing. He worked at saying nothing. He stared forward at the far wall. One of the fluorescent lights was faulty. It was struggling to kick in. Its capacitor put an angry buzz into the silence. Nendick’s hands started shaking, so he tucked them up under his arms to keep them still and began to rock back and forth on the stool. It creaked gently under his weight. Reacher glanced away and looked around the kitchen. It was a pretty room. There were yellow check drapes at the window. The ceiling was painted to match. There were flowers in vases. They were all dead. There were dishes in the sink. A couple of weeks’ worth. Some of them were crusted.

Reacher stepped back to the hallway. Into the living room. The television was a huge thing a couple of years old. It was tuned to a commercial network. The program seemed to be made up of clips from police traffic surveillance videos several years out of date. The sound was low. Just a constant murmur suggesting extreme and sustained excitement. There was a remote control balanced carefully on the arm of a chair opposite the screen. There was a low mantel above the fireplace with a row of six photographs in brass frames. Nendick and a woman featured in all six of them. She was about his age, maybe just lively enough and attractive enough not to be called plain. The photographs followed the couple from their wedding day through a couple of vacations and some other unspecified events. There were no pictures of children. And this wasn’t a house where children lived. There were no toys anywhere. No mess. Everything was frilly and considered and matched and adult.

The remote on the arm of the chair was labeled Video , not TV . Reacher glanced at the screen and pressed play. The cop radio sound died instantly and the video machine clicked and whirred and a second later the picture went black and was replaced by an amateur video of a wedding. Nendick and his wife smiled into the camera from several years in the past. Their heads were close together. They looked happy. She was all in white. He was wearing a suit. They were on a lawn. A blustery day. Her hair was blowing and the sound track was dominated by wind noise. She had a nice smile. Bright eyes. She was saying something for posterity, but Reacher couldn’t hear the words.

He pressed stop and a nighttime car chase resumed. He stepped back into the kitchen. Nendick was still shaking and rocking. He still had his hands trapped up under his arms. He still wasn’t saying anything. Reacher glanced again at the dirty dishes and the dead flowers.

“We can get her back for you,” he said.

Nendick said nothing.

“Just tell us who, and we’ll go get her right now.”

No reply.

“Sooner the better,” Reacher said. “Thing like this, we don’t want to have her wait any longer than she has to, do we?”

Nendick stared at the far wall with total concentration.

“When did they come for her?” Reacher asked. “Couple of weeks ago?”

Nendick said nothing. Made no sound at all. Neagley came in from the hallway. Drifted away into the half of the kitchen that was set up as a family room. There was a matching set of heavy furniture grouped along one wall, bookcase, credenza, bookcase.

“We can help you,” Reacher said. “But we need to know where to start.”

Nendick said nothing in reply. Nothing at all. Just stared and shook and rocked and hugged himself tight.