Ли Чайлд - Without Fail

There was silence. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. It was exactly the right thing to do, in the circumstances. Approval would have seemed sarcastic, and commiseration wasn’t appropriate. For the Nendick couple and two unrelated families called Armstrong, maybe, but not for Stuyvesant.

“Meanwhile we’ll focus on Armstrong,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

“Tomorrow is North Dakota again,” Froelich said. “More open-air fun and games. Same place as before. Not very secure. We leave at ten.”

“And Thursday?”

“Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. He’s serving turkey dinners in a homeless shelter here in D.C. He’ll be very exposed.”

There was a long moment of silence. Stuyvesant sighed again, heavily, and placed his hands palms down on the long wooden table.

“OK,” he said. “Be back in here at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I’m sure the Bureau will be delighted to send over a liaison guy.”

Then he levered himself upright and left the room to head back to his office, where he would make the calls that would put a permanent asterisk next to his career.

“I feel helpless,” Froelich said. “I want to be more proactive.”

“Don’t like playing defense?” he asked.

They were in her bed, in her room. It was larger than the guest room. Prettier. And quieter, because it was at the back of the house. The ceiling was smoother. Although it would take angled sunlight to really test it. Which would happen at sunset instead of in the morning, because the window faced the other way. The bed was warm. The house was warm. It was like a cocoon of warmth in the cold gray city night.

“Defense is OK,” she said. “But attack is defense, isn’t it? In a situation like this? But we always let things come to us. Then we just run away from them. We’re too operational. We’re not investigative enough.”

“You have investigators,” he said. “Like the guy who watches the movies.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “The Office of Protection Research. It’s a strange role. Kind of academic, rather than specific. Strategic, rather than tactical.”

“So do it yourself. Try a few things.”

“Like what?”

“We’re back to the original evidence, with Nendick crapping out. So we have to start over. You should concentrate on the thumbprint.”

“It’s not on file.”

“Files have glitches. Files get updated. Prints get added. You should try again, every few days. And you should widen the search. Try other countries. Try Interpol.”

“I doubt if these guys are foreign.”

“But maybe they’re Americans who traveled. Maybe they got in trouble in Canada or Europe. Or Mexico or South America.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And you should check the thumbprint thing as an MO. You know, search the databases to see if anybody ever signed threatening letters with their thumb before. How far back do the archives go?”

“To the dawn of time.”

“So put a twenty-year limit on it. I guess way back at the dawn of time plenty of people signed things with their thumbs.”

She smiled, sleepily. He could feel it against his shoulder.

“Before they learned to write,” he said.

She didn’t reply. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, snuggled against his shoulder. He eased his position and felt a shallow dip on his side of the mattress. He wondered if Joe had made it. He lay quiet for a spell and then craned his arm up and switched out the light.

Seemed like about a minute and a half later they were up again and showered and back in the Secret Service conference room eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with an FBI liaison agent named Bannon. Reacher was in his Atlantic City coat and the third of Joe’s abandoned Italian suits and the third Somebody amp; Somebody shirt and a plain blue tie. Froelich was in another black pant suit. Neagley was in the same suit she had worn on Sunday evening. It was the one that showed off her figure. The one that Nendick had ignored. She was cycling through her wardrobe as fast as the hotel laundry would let her. Stuyvesant was immaculate in his usual Brooks Brothers. Maybe it was fresh on, maybe it wasn’t. There was no way to tell. All his suits were the same. He looked very tired. Actually they all looked very tired, and Reacher was a little worried about that. In his experience tiredness impaired operational efficiency as badly as a drink too many.

“We’ll sleep on the plane,” Froelich said. “We’ll tell the pilot to fly slow.”

Bannon was a guy of about forty. He was in a tweed sport coat and gray flannels and looked bluff and Irish and was tall and heavy. He had a red complexion that the winter morning hadn’t helped. But he was polite and cheerful and he had supplied the doughnuts and the coffee himself. Two different stores, each chosen for its respective quality. He had been well received. Twenty bucks’ worth of food and drink had broken a lot of interagency ice.

“No secrets either way,” he said. “That’s what we’re proposing. And no blame anywhere. But no bullshit, either. I think we got to face the fact that the Nendick woman is dead. We’ll look for her like she wasn’t, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. So we’ve got three down already. Some evidence, but not a lot. We’re guessing Nendick has met with these guys, and we’re assuming they’ve certainly been to his house, if only to grab up his wife. So that’s a crime scene, and we’re going over it today, and we’ll share what we get. Nendick will help us if he ever wakes up. But assuming he won’t anytime soon, we’ll go at it from three different directions. First, the message stuff that went down here in D.C. Second, the scene in Minnesota. Third, the scene in Colorado.”

“Are your people in charge out there?” Froelich asked.

“Both places,” Bannon said. “Our ballistics people figure the Colorado weapon for a Heckler and Koch submachine gun called the MP5.”

“We already concluded that,” Neagley said. “And it was probably silenced, which makes it the MP5SD6.”

Bannon nodded. “You’re one of the ex-military, right? In which case you’ve seen MP5s before. As I have. They’re military and paramilitary weapons. Police and federal SWAT teams use them.”

Then he went quiet and looked around the assembled faces, like there was more to his point than he had actually articulated.

“What about Minnesota?” Neagley asked.

“We found the bullet,” Bannon said. “We swept the farmyard with a metal detector. It was buried about nine inches deep in the mud. Consistent with a shot from a small wooded hillside about a hundred and twenty yards away to the north. Maybe eighty feet of elevation.”

“What was the bullet?” Reacher asked.

“NATO 7.62 millimeter,” Bannon said.

Reacher nodded. “You test it?”

“For what?”

“Burn.”

Bannon nodded. “Low power, weak charge.”

“Subsonic ammunition,” Reacher said. “In that caliber it has to be a Vaime Mk2 silenced sniper rifle.”

“Which is also a police and paramilitary weapon,” Bannon said. “Often supplied to antiterrorist units.”

He looked around the room again, like he was inviting a comment. Nobody made one. So he pitched it himself.

“You know what?” he said.

“What?”

“Put a list of who buys Heckler amp; Koch MP5s in America side to side with a list of who buys Vaime Mk2s, and you see only one official purchaser on both lists.”

“Who?”

“The United States Secret Service.”

The room went quiet. Nobody spoke. There was a knock at the door. The duty officer. He stood there, framed in the doorway.

“Mail just arrived,” he said. “Something you need to see.”

They laid it on the conference room table. It was a familiar brown envelope, gummed flap, metal closure. A computer-printed self-adhesive address label. Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. Clear black-on-white Times New Roman lettering. Bannon opened his briefcase and took out a pair of white cotton gloves. Pulled them on, right hand, left hand. Tightened them over his fingers.