Lee Child - Without Fail

Froelich arrived at ten o’clock exactly, driving her Suburban, Reacher and Neagley riding with her. Stuyvesant was right behind in a second Suburban. Behind him were four more trucks carrying five department sharpshooters and fifteen general-duty agents. Froelich parked on the sidewalk tight against the base of the warehouse wall. Normally she might have just blocked the street beyond the shelter entrance, but she didn’t want to reveal the direction of Armstrong’s intended approach to onlookers. He was actually scheduled to come in from the south, but that information and ten minutes with a map could predict his route all the way from Georgetown.

She assembled her people in the shelter’s yard and sent the sharpshooters to secure the warehouse roofs. They would be up there three hours before the event started, but that was normal. Generally they were the first to arrive and the last to leave. Stuyvesant pulled Reacher aside and asked him to go up there with them.

“Then come find me,” he said. “I want a firsthand report about how bad it is.”

So Reacher walked across the street with an agent called Crosetti and they ducked past a cop into a damp hallway full of trash and rat droppings. There were stairs winding up through a central shaft. Crosetti was in a Kevlar vest and was carrying a rifle in a hard case. But he was a fit guy. He was half a flight ahead of Reacher at the top.

The stairs came out inside a rooftop hutch. There was a wooden door that opened outward into the sunlight. The roof was flat. It was made of asphalt. There were pigeon corpses here and there. There were dirty skylights made of wired glass and small metal turrets on top of ventilation pipes. The roof was lipped with a low wall, set on top with eroded coping stones. Crosetti walked to the left edge, and then the right. Made visual contact with his colleagues on either side. Then he walked to the front to check the view. Reacher was already there.

The view was good and bad. Good in the conventional sense because the sun was shining and they were five floors up in a low-built part of town. Bad because the shelter’s yard was right there underneath them. It was like looking down into a shoe box from a distance of three feet up and three feet away. The back wall where Armstrong would be standing was dead ahead. It was made out of old brick and looked like the execution wall in some foreign prison. Hitting him would be easier than shooting a fish in a barrel.

“What’s the range?” Reacher asked.

“Your guess?” Crosetti said.

Reacher put his knees against the lip of the roof and glanced out and down.

“Ninety yards?” he said.

Crosetti unsnapped a pocket in his vest and took out a range finder.

“Laser,” he said. He switched it on and lined it up.

“Ninety-two to the wall,” he said. “Ninety-one to his head. That was a pretty good guess.”

“Windage?”

“Slight thermal coming up off the concrete down there,” Crosetti said. “Nothing else, probably. No big deal.”

“Practically like standing right next to him,” Reacher said.

“Don’t worry,” Crosetti said. “As long as I’m up here nobody else can be. That’s the job today. We’re sentries, not shooters.”

“Where are you going to be?” Reacher asked.

Crosetti glanced all around his little piece of real estate and pointed.

“Over there, I guess,” he said. “Tight in the far corner. I’ll face parallel with the front wall. Slight turn to my left and I’m covering the yard. Slight turn to my right, I’m covering the head of the stairwell.”

“Good plan,” Reacher said. “You need anything?”

Crosetti shook his head.

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll leave you to it. Try to stay awake.”

Crosetti smiled. “I usually do.”

“Good,” Reacher said. “I like that in a sentry.”

He went back down five flights through the darkness and stepped out into the sun. Walked across the street and glanced up. Saw Crosetti nestled comfortably in the angle of the corner. His head and his knees were visible. So was his rifle barrel. It was jutting upward against the bright sky at a relaxed forty-five degrees. He waved. Crosetti waved back. He walked on and found Stuyvesant in the yard. He was hard to miss, given the color of his sweater and the brightness of the daylight.

“It’s OK up there,” Reacher said. “Hell of a firing platform, but as long as your guys hold it we’re safe enough.”

Stuyvesant nodded and turned around and scanned upward. All five warehouse roofs were visible from the yard. All five were occupied by sharpshooters. Five silhouetted heads, five silhouetted rifle barrels.

“Froelich is looking for you,” Stuyvesant said.

Nearer the building, staff and agents were hauling long trestle tables into place. The idea was to form a barrier with them. The right-hand end would be hard against the shelter’s wall. The left-hand end would be three feet from the yard wall opposite. There would be a pen six feet deep behind the line of tables. Armstrong and his wife would be in the pen with four agents. Directly behind them would be the execution wall. Up close it didn’t look so bad. The old bricks looked warmed by the sun. Rustic, even friendly. He turned his back on them and looked up at the warehouse roofs. Crosetti waved again. I’m still awake , the wave said.

“Reacher,” Froelich called.

He turned around and found her walking out of the shelter toward him. She was carrying a clipboard thick with paper. She was up on her toes, busy, in charge, in command. She looked magnificent. The black clothes emphasized her litheness and made her eyes blaze with blue. Dozens of agents and scores of cops swirled all around her, every one of them under her personal control.

“We’re doing fine here,” she said. “So I want you to take a stroll. Just check around. Neagley’s already out there. You know what to look for.”

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“What?”

“Doing something really well,” he said. “Taking charge.”

“Think I’m doing well?”

“You’re the best,” he said. “This is tremendous. Armstrong’s a lucky man.”

“I hope,” she said.

“Believe it,” he said.

She smiled, quickly and shyly, and moved on, leafing through her paperwork. He turned the other way and walked back out to the street. Turned right and planned a route in his head that would keep him on a block-and-a-half radius.

There were cops on the corner and the beginnings of a ragged crowd of people waiting for the free lunch. There were two television trucks setting up fifty yards down the street from the shelter. Hydraulic masts were unfolding themselves and satellite dishes were rotating. Technicians were unrolling cable and shouldering cameras. He saw Bannon with six men and a woman he guessed were the FBI task force. They had just arrived. Bannon had a map unrolled on the hood of his car and his agents were clustered around looking at it. Reacher waved to Bannon and turned left and passed the end of an alley that led down behind the warehouses. He could hear a train on the tracks ahead of him. The mouth of the alley was manned by a D.C. cop, facing outward, standing easy. There was a police cruiser parked nearby. Another cop in it. Cops everywhere. The overtime bill was going to be something to see.

There were broken-down stores here and there, but they were all closed for the holiday. Some of the storefronts were churches, also closed. There were auto body shops nearer the railroad tracks, all shuttered and still. There was a pawnshop with a very old guy outside washing the windows. He was the only thing moving on the street. His store was tall and narrow and had concertina barriers inside the glass. The display space was crammed with junk of every description. There were clocks, coats, musical instruments, alarm radios, hats, record players, car stereos, binoculars, strings of Christmas lights. There was writing on the windows, offering to buy just about any article ever manufactured. If it didn’t grow in the ground or move by itself, this guy would give you money for it. He also offered services. He would cash checks, appraise jewelry, repair watches. There was a tray of watches on view. They were mostly old-fashioned wind-up items, with bulging crystals and big square luminescent figures and sculpted hands. Reacher glanced again at the sign: Watches Repaired . Then he glanced again at the old guy. He was up to his elbows in soap suds.