Lee Child - Without Fail

Froelich was pale and silent. Neagley looked away.

“Without the knife would have been harder,” she said. “But not impossible. Breaking his neck would have been tricky because he’s got some muscle up there. I’d have had to do a quick two-step to get his weight moving, and if your guys were fast enough they might have stopped me halfway. So I guess I’d have gone with a blow to his larynx, hard enough to crush it. A jab with my left elbow would have done the trick. I’d have been dead before him, probably, but he’d have suffocated right afterward, unless you’ve got people that could do an emergency tracheotomy on the ballroom floor within a minute or so, which I guess you don’t have.”

“No,” Froelich said. “We don’t have.”

Then she fell silent again.

“Sorry to ruin your day,” Neagley said. “But hey, you wanted to know this stuff, right? No point doing a security audit and not telling you the outcome.”

Froelich nodded. “What did you whisper to him?”

“I said, I’ve got a knife. Just for the hell of it. But very quietly. If anybody had challenged me I was going to claim I’d said, where’s your wife? Like I was coming on to him. I imagine that happens, time to time.”

Froelich nodded again.

“It does,” she said. “Time to time. What else?”

“Well, he’s safe in his house,” Neagley said.

“You checked?”

“Every day,” Reacher said. “We’ve been on the ground in Georgetown since Tuesday night.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“That was the plan.”

“How did you know where he lives?”

“We followed your limos.”

Froelich said nothing.

“Good limos,” Reacher said. “Slick tactics.”

“Friday morning was especially good,” Neagley said.

“But the rest of Friday was pretty bad,” Reacher said. “Lack of coordination produced a major communications error.”

“Where?”

“Your D.C. people had video of the ballroom but clearly your New York people never saw it, because as well as being the woman in the party dress Thursday night Neagley was also one of the photographers outside the Stock Exchange.”

“Some North Dakota paper has a website,” Neagley said. “Like all of them, with a graphic of their masthead. I downloaded it and modified it into a press pass. Laminated it and put brass eyelets in it and slung it around my neck with a nylon cord. Trawled the secondhand stores in lower Manhattan for battered old photo gear. Kept a camera up in front of my face the whole time so Armstrong wouldn’t recognize me.”

“You should operate an access list,” Reacher said. “Control it, somehow.”

“We can’t,” Froelich said. “It’s a constitutional thing. The First Amendment guarantees journalistic access, any old time they want it. But they were all searched.”

“I wasn’t carrying,” Neagley said. “I was just breaching your security for the hell of it. But I could have been carrying, that’s for damn sure. I could have gotten a bazooka past that kind of a search.”

Reacher stood up and stepped to the credenza. Pulled open a drawer and took out a stack of photographs. They were commercial one-hour six-by-four-inch color prints. He held up the first picture. It was a low-angle shot of Armstrong standing outside the Stock Exchange with the carved lintel inscription floating like a halo over his head.

“Neagley’s,” Reacher said. “Good picture, I thought. Maybe we should sell it to a magazine, defray some of the twenty grand.”

He stepped back to the bed and sat down and passed the photograph to Froelich. She took it and stared at it.

“Point is I was four feet away,” Neagley said. “I could have gotten to him if I’d wanted to. A John Malkovich situation again, but what the hell.”

Froelich nodded blankly. Reacher dealt the next print, like a playing card. It was a grainy telephoto picture clearly taken from a great distance, looking down from way above street level. It showed Armstrong outside the Stock Exchange, tiny in the center of the frame. There was a crude gunsight drawn around his head with a ballpoint pen.

“This is the half,” Reacher said. “I was on the sixtieth floor of an office building three hundred yards away. Inside the police perimeter, but higher than they were checking.”

“With a rifle?”

He shook his head. “With a piece of wood the same size and shape as a rifle. And another camera, obviously. And a big lens. But I played it out for real. I wanted to see if it was possible. I figured people wouldn’t like to see a rifle-shaped package, so I got a big square box from a computer monitor and put the wood in diagonally, top corner to bottom corner. Then I just wheeled it into the elevator on a hand truck, pretended it was real heavy. I saw a few cops. I was wearing these clothes without the fake pin or the earpiece. I guess they thought I was a delivery driver or something. Friday after the closing bell, the district was getting quiet enough to be convenient. I found a window in an empty conference room. It wouldn’t open, so I guess I’d have had to cut out a circle of glass. But I could have taken a shot, just like I took the picture. And I’d have been Edward Fox. I could have gotten clean away.”

Froelich nodded, reluctantly.

“Why only a half?” she asked. “Looks like you had him fair and square.”

“Not in Manhattan,” Reacher said. “I was about nine hundred feet away and six hundred feet up. That’s an eleven-hundred-foot shot, give or take. Not a problem for me ordinarily, but the wind currents and the thermals around those towers turn it into a lottery. They’re always changing, second to second. Swirling, up and down and side to side. They make it so you can’t guarantee a hit. That’s the good news, really. No competent rifleman would try a distance shot in Manhattan. Only an idiot would, and an idiot’s going to miss anyway.”

Froelich nodded again, a little relieved.

“OK,” she said.

So she’s not worried about an idiot , Reacher thought. Must be a professional .

“So,” he said. “Call it a total score of three, if you want, and forget the half. Don’t worry about New York at all. It was tenuous.”

“But Bismarck wasn’t tenuous,” Neagley said. “We got there about midnight. Commercial flights, through Chicago.”

“I called you from a mile away,” Reacher said. “About the musicians.”

He dealt the next two photographs.

“Infrared film,” he said. “In the dark.”

The first picture showed the back of the Armstrong family house. The colors were washed out and distorted, because of the infrared photography. But it was a fairly close shot. Every detail was clearly visible. Doors, windows. Froelich could even see one of her agents, standing in the yard.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“On the neighbor’s property,” Reacher said. “Maybe fifty feet away. Simple night maneuver, infiltration in the dark. Standard infantry techniques, quiet and stealthy. Couple of dogs barked some, but we got around them. The state troopers in the cars didn’t see a thing.”

Neagley pointed to the second picture. It showed the front of the house. Same colors, same detail, same distance.

“I was across the street, at the front,” she said. “Behind somebody’s garage.”

Reacher sat forward on the bed. “Plan would have been to have an M16 each, with the grenade launcher on it. Plus some other full-auto long guns. Maybe even M60 machine guns on tripods. We certainly had enough time to set them up. We’d have put phosphorous grenades into the building with the M16s, simultaneously front and back, one each, ground floor, and either Armstrong would burn up in bed or we’d shoot him down as he ran out the door or jumped out the window. We’d have timed it for maybe four in the morning. Shock would have been total. Confusion would have been tremendous. We could have taken your agents out in the melee, easy as anything. We could have chewed the whole house to splinters. We’d have probably exfiltrated OK too, and then it would have boiled down to a standard manhunt situation, which wouldn’t have been ideal out there in the boonies, but we’d probably have made it, with a bit of luck. Edward Fox again.”