Lee Child - Without Fail

“So?” Stuyvesant asked.

“Look at the fourth message,” Reacher said. “ Vulnerability is correctly spelled.”

“So?”

“That’s a big word. And look at the last message. The apostrophe in it’s is correct. Lots of people get that wrong, you know, it’s and its . There are periods at the ends, except for the question mark.”

“So?”

“The messages are reasonably literate.”

“OK.”

“Now look at the third message.”

“What about it?”

“Neagley?” Reacher asked.

“It’s a little fancy,” she said. “A little awkward and old-fashioned. The upon which thing. And the fast approaching thing.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “A little archaic.”

“But what does all this prove?” Stuyvesant asked.

“Nothing, really,” Reacher said. “But it suggests something. Have you ever read the Constitution?”

“Of what? The United States?”

“Sure.”

“I guess I’ve read it,” Stuyvesant said. “A long time ago, probably.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Some school I was at gave us a copy each. It was a thin little book, thick cardboard covers. Very narrow when it was shut. The edges were hard. We used to karate-chop each other with it. Hurt like hell.”

“So?”

“It’s a legal document, basically. Historical, too, of course, but it’s fundamentally legal. So when somebody prints it up as a book, they can’t mess with it. They have to reproduce it exactly word for word, otherwise it wouldn’t be valid. They can’t modernize the language, they can’t clean it up.”

“Obviously not.”

“The early parts are from 1787. The last amendment in my copy was the twenty-sixth, from 1971, lowering the voting age to eighteen. A span of a hundred and eighty-four years. With everything reproduced exactly like it was written down at the particular time.”

“So?”

“One thing I remember is that in the first part, Vice President is written without a hyphen between the two words. Same in the latest part. No hyphen. But in the stuff that was written in the middle period, there is a hyphen. It’s Vice-President with a hyphen between the words. So clearly from about the 1860s up to maybe the 1930s it was considered correct usage to use a hyphen there.”

“These guys use a hyphen,” Stuyvesant said.

“They sure do,” Reacher said. “Right there in the second message.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Two things,” Reacher said. “We know they paid attention in class, because they’re reasonably literate. So the first thing it means is that they went to school someplace where they used old textbooks and old style manuals that were way out of date. Which explains the third message’s archaic feel, maybe. And which is why I figured they might be from a poor rural area with low school taxes. Second thing it means is they never worked for the Secret Service. Because you guys are buried in paperwork. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Army. Anybody who worked here would have written Vice President a million times over in their career. All with the modern usage without the hyphen. They would have gotten totally used to it that way.”

There was quiet for a moment.

“Maybe the other guy wrote it,” Stuyvesant said. “The one who didn’t work here. The one with the thumbprint.”

“Makes no difference,” Reacher said. “Like Bannon figured, they’re a unit. They’re collaborators. And perfectionists. If one guy had written it wrong, the other guy would have corrected it. But it wasn’t corrected, therefore neither of them knew it was wrong. Therefore neither of them worked here.”

Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.

“I want to believe it,” he said. “But you’re basing everything on a hyphen.”

“Don’t dismiss it,” Reacher said.

“I’m not dismissing it,” Stuyvesant said. “I’m thinking.”

“About whether I’m crazy?”

“About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the alternative scenario.”

“It could be deliberate,” Neagley said. “They might be misleading us. Trying to disguise their background or their education level. Throwing us off.”

Reacher shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is too subtle. They’d do all the usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen between Vice and President is something you don’t know from right or wrong. It’s something you just do.”

“What are the exact implications?” Stuyvesant asked.

“Age is critical,” Reacher said. “They can’t be older than early fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders, down stairs. They can’t be younger than mid-forties, because you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970 every school in America had new books. I think they were in junior high at or toward the end of the period when isolated rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date maps on the wall, you’re sitting there with all your cousins listening to some gray-haired old lady.”

“It’s very speculative,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s a pyramid too, balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over.”

Silence in the room.

“Well, I’m going to pursue it,” Reacher said. “With Armstrong, or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if necessary. For Froelich’s sake. She deserves it.”

Stuyvesant nodded. “If neither of them worked for us, how would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

“How did they decoy Crosetti?”

“I don’t know.”

“How would they get our weapons?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did they know where M. E. lived?”

“Nendick told them.”

Stuyvesant nodded. “OK. But what would be their motive?”

“Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician must make plenty of enemies.”

Silence again.

“Maybe it’s half and half,” Neagley said. “Maybe they’re outsiders with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work here. Maybe they’re some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs. They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons you buy.”

“That’s possible,” Stuyvesant said. “We turn down a lot of people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be right.”

“No,” Reacher said. “She’s wrong. Why would they wait? I’m sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?”

“That’s a good point too,” Stuyvesant said.

“This is about Armstrong personally,” Reacher said. “It has to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and effect. Armstrong became the running mate during the summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich told me that herself. Now we’re getting threats against him. Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign, that’s why.”

Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned over and butted the first message under the second. Then both of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and closed it.