Lee Child - Without Fail

“We can get these guys,” Reacher said to her. “They’re right here, right now.”

She didn’t reply. Just grabbed him and Neagley by the arms and pulled them into the limo with her. It roared after the lead vehicles. The second cop fell in directly behind it and just twenty short seconds after the initial abort command the whole motorcade had formed up in a tight line and was screaming away from the scene at seventy miles an hour with every light flashing and every siren blaring.

Froelich slumped back in her seat.

“See?” she said. “We’re not proactive. Something happens, we run away.”

Froelich stood in the chill and spoke to Armstrong at the foot of the plane’s steps. It was a short conversation. She told him about the discovery of the concealed rifle and told him it was more than enough to justify the extraction. He didn’t argue. Didn’t ask any awkward leading questions. He seemed completely unaware of any larger picture. And he seemed completely unconcerned about his own safety. He was more anxious to calculate the public-relations consequences for his successor. He looked away and ran through the pluses and minuses in his head like politicians do and came back with a tentative smile. No damage done . Then he ran up the steps to the warmth inside the plane, ready to resume his agenda with the waiting journalists.

Reacher was faster with the seat selection second time around. He took a place in the forward-facing front row, next to Froelich and across the aisle from Neagley. Froelich used the taxi time doing the rounds of her team, quietly congratulating them on their performance. She spoke to each of them in turn, leaning close, talking, listening, finishing with discreet fist-to-fist contact like ballplayers after a vital hit. Reacher watched her. Good leader , he thought. She came back to her seat and buckled her belt. Smoothed her hair and pressed her fingertips hard into her temples like she was clearing her mind of past events and preparing to concentrate on the future.

“We should have stayed around,” Reacher said.

“The place is swarming with cops,” Froelich said. “FBI will join them. That’s their job. We focus on Armstrong. And I don’t like it any better than you do.”

“What was the rifle? Did you see it?”

She shook her head. “We’ll get a report. They said it was in a bag. Some kind of vinyl carrying case.”

“Hidden in the grass?”

She nodded. “Where it’s long at the base of the fence.”

“When was the church locked?”

“Last thing Sunday. More than sixty hours ago.”

“So I guess our guys picked the lock. It’s a crude old mechanism. The keyhole’s so big you can practically get your whole hand in there.”

“You sure you didn’t see them?”

Reacher shook his head. “But they saw me. They were in there with me. They saw where I hid the key. They let themselves out.”

“You probably saved Armstrong’s life. And my ass. Although I don’t understand their plan. They were in the church and their rifle was a hundred yards away?”

“Wait until we know what the rifle was. Then maybe we’ll understand.”

The plane turned at the end of the runway and accelerated immediately. Took off and climbed hard. The engine noise throttled back after five minutes and Reacher heard the journalists starting their foreign-relations conversation again. They didn’t ask any questions about the early return.

They touched down at Andrews at six-thirty local time. The city was quiet. The long Thanksgiving weekend had already started, halfway through the afternoon. The motorcade headed straight in on Branch Avenue and drove through the heart of the capital and out again to Georgetown. Armstrong was shepherded into his house through the white tent. Then the cars turned listlessly and headed back to base. Stuyvesant wasn’t around. Reacher and Neagley followed Froelich to her desk and she accessed her NCIC search results. They were hopeless. There was a small proud rubric at the top of the screen that claimed the software had compiled for five hours and twenty-three minutes and come up with no less than 243,791 matches. Anything that ever mentioned any two of a thumbprint or a document or a letter or a signature was neatly listed. The sequence began exactly twenty years ago and averaged more than thirty entries for each of the 7,305 days since. Froelich sampled the first dozen reports and then skipped ahead to random interim dates. There was nothing even remotely useful.

“We need to refine the parameters,” Neagley said. She squatted next to Froelich and moved the keyboard closer. Cleared the screen and called up the inquiry box and typed thumbprint-as-signature . Reached for the mouse and clicked on search . The hard drive chattered and the inquiry box disappeared. The phone rang and Froelich picked it up. Listened for a moment and put it down.

“Stuyvesant’s back,” she said. “He’s got the preliminary FBI report on the rifle. He wants us in the conference room.”

“We came close to losing today,” Stuyvesant said.

He was at the head of the table with sheets of faxed paper spread out in front of him. They were covered in dense type, a little blurred from transmission. Reacher could see the cover sheet’s heading, upside down. There was a small seal on the left, and U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation on the right.

“First factor is the unlocked door,” Stuyvesant said. “The FBI’s guess is the lock was picked early this morning. They say a child could have done it with a bent knitting needle. We should have secured it with a temporary lock of our own.”

“Couldn’t do it,” Froelich said. “It’s a landmark building. Can’t be touched.”

“Then we should have changed the venue.”

“I looked for alternatives first time around. Every other place was worse.”

“You should have had an agent on the roof,” Neagley said.

“No budget,” Stuyvesant said. “Until after the inauguration.”

“If you get that far,” Neagley said.

“What was the rifle?” Reacher asked, in the silence.

Stuyvesant squared the paper in front of him. “Your guess?”

“Something disposable,” Reacher said. “Something they weren’t actually planning on using. In my experience something that gets found that easily is supposed to get found that easily.”

Stuyvesant nodded. “It was barely a rifle at all. It was an ancient.22 varmint gun. Badly maintained, rusty, probably hadn’t been used in a generation. It was not loaded and there was no ammunition with it.”

“Identifying marks?”

“None.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Of course not.”

Reacher nodded.

“Decoy,” he said.

“The unlocked door is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “What did you do when you went in, for instance?”

“I locked it again behind me.”

“Why?”

“I like it that way, for surveillance.”

“But if you were going to be shooting?”

“Then I would have left it open, especially if I didn’t have the key.”

“Why?”

“So I could get out fast, afterward.”

Stuyvesant nodded. “The unlocked door means they were in there to shoot. My take is they were waiting in there with the MP5 or the Vaime Mk2. Maybe both weapons. They imagined the junk gun would be spotted far away at the fence, the bulk of the police presence would move somewhat toward it, we would move Armstrong toward the motorcade, whereupon they would have a clear shot at him.”

“Sounds right to me,” Reacher said. “But I didn’t actually see anybody in there.”

“Plenty of places to hide in a country church,” Stuyvesant said. “Did you check the crypt?”