Lee Child - Without Fail

There was silence.

“I don’t believe it,” Froelich said. She stared at the pictures. “This can’t be Friday night. This was some other night. You weren’t really there.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Were you?” she asked.

“Well, check this out,” Reacher said. He handed her another photograph. It was a telephoto shot. It showed her sitting in the apartment window above the garage, staring out into the darkness, holding her cell phone. Her heat signature was picked up in strange reds and oranges and purples. But it was her. No doubt about it. Like she was close enough to touch.

“I was calling New Jersey,” she said, quietly. “Your musician friends got away OK.”

“Good,” Reacher said. “Thanks for arranging it.”

She stared at the three infrared pictures, one after the other, and said nothing.

“So the ballroom and the family house were definites,” Reacher said. “Two-zip for the bad guys. But the next day was the real clincher. Yesterday. That rally at the church.”

He passed the last photo across. It was regular daylight film, taken from a high angle. It showed Armstrong in his heavy overcoat walking across the community center lawns. The late golden sun threw a long shadow out behind him. He was surrounded by a loose knot of people, but his head was clearly visible. It had another crude gunsight inked around it.

“I was in the church tower,” Reacher said.

“The church was locked.”

“At eight o’clock in the morning. I’d been in there since five.”

“It was searched.”

“I was up where the bells were. At the top of a wooden ladder, behind a trapdoor. I put pepper on the ladder. Your dogs lost interest and stayed on the first floor.”

“It was a local unit.”

“They were sloppy.”

“I thought about canceling the event.”

“You should have.”

“Then I thought about asking him to wear a vest.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered. I would have aimed at his head. It was a beautiful day, Froelich. Clear sky, sunny, no wind at all. Cool, dense air. True air. I was a couple hundred feet away. I could have shot his eyes out.”

She went quiet.

“John Malkovich or Edward Fox?” she asked.

“I’d have hit Armstrong and then as many other people as I could, three or four seconds. Cops mostly, I guess, but women and children too. I’d have aimed to wound them, not kill them. In the stomach, probably. More effective that way. People flopping around and bleeding all over the place, it would have created mass panic. Enough to get away, probably. I’d have busted out of the church within ten seconds and gotten away into the surrounding subdivision fast enough. Neagley was standing by in a car. She’d have been rolling soon as she heard the shots. So I’d probably have been Edward Fox.”

Froelich stood up and walked to the window. Put her hands palms down on the sill and stared out at the weather.

“This is a disaster,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

“I guess I didn’t anticipate your level of focus,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to be all-out guerrilla warfare.”

Reacher shrugged. “Assassins aren’t necessarily going to be the gentlest people you’ll ever meet. And they’re the ones who make the rules here.”

Froelich nodded. “And I didn’t know you were going to get help, especially not from a woman.”

“I kind of warned you,” Reacher said. “I told you it couldn’t work if you were watching for me coming. You can’t expect assassins to call ahead with their plans.”

“I know,” she said. “But I was imagining a lone man, is all.”

“It’s always going to be a team,” Reacher said. “There are no lone men.”

He saw an ironic half smile reflected in the glass.

“So you don’t believe the Warren Report?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Neither do you,” he said. “No professional ever will.”

“I don’t feel like much of a professional today,” she said.

Neagley stood up and stepped over and perched on the sill, next to Froelich, her back against the glass.

“Context,” she said. “That’s what you’ve got to think about. It’s not so bad. Reacher and I were United States Army Criminal Investigation Division specialists. We were trained in all kinds of ways. Trained to think, mostly. Trained to be inventive. And to be ruthless, for sure, and self-confident. And tougher than the people we were responsible for, and some of them were plenty tough. So we’re very unusual. People as specialized as us, there’s not more than maybe ten thousand in the whole country.”

“Ten thousand is a lot,” Froelich said.

“Out of two hundred eighty-one million? And how many of them are currently the right age and available and motivated? It’s a statistically irrelevant fraction. So don’t sweat it. You’ve got an impossible job. You’re required to leave him vulnerable. Because he’s a politician. He’s got to do all this visible stuff. We would never have dreamed of letting anybody do what Armstrong does. Never in a million years. It would have been completely out of the question.”

Froelich turned around and faced the room. Swallowed once and nodded vaguely into the middle distance.

“Thanks,” she said. “For trying to make me feel better. But I’ve got some thinking to do, don’t I?”

“Perimeters,” Reacher said. “Keep the perimeters to a half-mile all around, keep the public away from him, and keep at least four agents literally within touching distance at all times. That’s all you can do.”

Froelich shook her head.

“Can’t do it,” she said. “It would be considered unreasonable. Undemocratic, even. And there are going to be hundreds of weeks like this one over the next three years. After three years it’ll start to get worse because they’ll be in their final year and they’ll be trying to get reelected and everything will have to be looser still. And about seven years from now Armstrong will start looking for the nomination in his own right. Seen how they do that? Crowd scenes all over the place from New Hampshire onward? Town meetings in shirtsleeves? Fund-raisers? It’s a complete nightmare.”

The room went quiet. Neagley peeled off the windowsill and walked across the room to the credenza. Took two thin files out of the drawer the photographs had been in. She held up the first.

“A written report,” she said. “Salient points and recommendations, from a professional perspective.”

“OK,” Froelich said.

Neagley held up the second file.

“And our expenses,” she said. “They’re all accounted for. Receipts and all. You should make the check payable to Reacher. It was his money.”

“OK,” Froelich said again. She took the files and clasped them to her chest, like they offered her protection from something.

“And there’s Elizabeth Wright from New Jersey,” Reacher said. “Don’t forget her. She needs to be taken care of. I told her that to make up for missing the reception you’d probably invite her to the Inauguration Ball.”

“OK,” Froelich said for the third time. “The Ball, whatever. I’ll speak to somebody about it.”

Then she just stood still.

“This is a disaster,” she said again.

“You’ve got an impossible job,” Reacher said. “Don’t beat up on yourself.”

She nodded. “Joe used to tell me the same thing. He said, in the circumstances, we should consider a ninety-five percent success rate a triumph.”

“Ninety-four percent,” Reacher said. “You’ve lost one President out of eighteen since you guys took over. Six percent failure rate. That’s not too bad.”

“Ninety-four, ninety-five,” she said. “Whatever, I guess he was right.”