Lee Child - Without Fail

“So who are they? Who hates him that bad?”

Swain made a gesture with his hand, like he was pushing that question aside.

“Something else,” he said. “This is a little off the wall, but I think we’re miscounting. How many messages have there been?”

“Six,” Reacher said.

“No,” Swain said. “I think there have been seven.”

“Where’s the seventh?”

“Nendick,” Swain said. “I think Nendick delivered the second message, and was the third message. You see, you got here and forty-eight hours later you got to Nendick, which was pretty quick. But with respect, we’d have gotten there anyway, sooner or later. It was inevitable. If it wasn’t the cleaners, it had to be the tapes. So we’d have gotten there. And what was waiting for us? Nendick wasn’t just a delivery system. He was a message in himself . He showed what these people are capable of. Assuming Armstrong was in the loop, he’d have been getting pretty shaky by that point.”

“Then there are nine messages,” Neagley said. “On that basis, we should add in the Minnesota and the Colorado situations.”

“Absolutely,” Swain said. “You see what I mean? Everything has fear as its purpose. Every single thing. Suppose Armstrong was in the loop all along. He gets the first message, he’s worried. We get the second message, he’s more worried. We trace its source, and he starts to feel better, but no, it gets even worse, because we find Nendick paralyzed with fear. Then we get the demonstration threat, he’s worried some more. Then the demonstration happens, and he’s devastated by how ruthless it was.”

Reacher said nothing. Just stared at the floor.

“You think I’m overanalytical,” Swain said.

Reacher shook his head, still looking at the floor. “No, I think I’m underanalytical. Maybe. Possibly. Because what are the thumbprints about?”

“They’re a taunt of a different sort,” Swain said. “They’re a boast. A puzzle. A tease. Can’t catch me sort of thing.”

“How long did you work with my brother?”

“Five years. I worked for him, really. I say with him as a vain attempt at status.”

“Was he a good boss?”

“He was a great boss,” Swain said. “Great guy all around.”

“And he ran random-observation sessions?”

Swain nodded. “They were fun. Anybody could say anything.”

“Did he join in?”

“He was very lateral.”

Reacher looked up. “You just said everything has fear as its purpose, every single thing. Then you said the thumbprints are a taunt of a different sort. So not everything is the same, right? Something’s different.”

Swain shrugged. “I could stretch it. The thumbprints induce the fear that these guys are too clever to be caught. Different sort of fear, but it’s still fear .”

Reacher looked away. Went quiet. Thirty seconds, a whole minute.

“I’m going to cave in,” he said. “Finally. I’m going to be like Joe. I’m wearing his suit. I was sleeping with his girlfriend. I keep meeting his old colleagues. So now I’m going to make a lateral random off-the-wall observation, just like he did, apparently.”

“What is it?” Neagley said.

“I think we missed something,” Reacher said. “Just skated right on by it.”

“What?”

“I’ve got all these weird images going around in my head. Like for instance, Stuyvesant’s secretary doing things at her desk.”

“What things?”

“I think we’ve got the thumbprint exactly ass-backward. All along we’ve assumed they knew it was untraceable. But I think we’re completely wrong. I think it’s just the opposite. I think they expected it would be traceable.”

“Why?”

“Because I think the thumbprint thing is exactly the same as the Nendick thing. I met a watchmaker today. He told me where squalene comes from.”

“Sharks’ livers,” Neagley said.

“And people’s noses,” Reacher said. “Same stuff. That gunk you wake up with in the morning is squalene. Same chemical exactly.”

“So?”

“So I think our guys gambled and got unlucky. Suppose you picked a random male person aged about sixty or seventy. What are the chances he’d have been fingerprinted at least once in his lifetime?”

“Pretty good, I guess,” Neagley said. “All immigrants are printed. American born, he’d have been drafted for Korea or Vietnam and printed even if he didn’t go. He’d have been printed if he’d ever been arrested or worked for the government.”

“Or for some private corporations,” Swain said. “Plenty of them require prints. Banks, retailers, people like that.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “So here’s the thing. I don’t think the thumbprint comes from one of the guys themselves. I think it comes from somebody else entirely. From some innocent bystander. From somebody they picked out at random. And it was supposed to lead us directly to that somebody.”

The room went quiet. Neagley stared at Reacher.

“What for?” she said.

“So we could find another Nendick,” he said. “The thumbprint was on every message, and the guy it came from was a message, just like Swain says Nendick was. We were supposed to trace the print and find the guy and find an exact replica of the Nendick situation. Some terrified victim, too scared to open his mouth and tell us anything. A message in himself. But by pure accident our guys hit on somebody who had never been printed, so we couldn’t find him.”

“But there were six paper messages,” Swain said. “Probably twenty days between the first one going in the mail and the last one being delivered to Froelich’s house. So what does that mean? All the messages were prepared in advance? That’s way too much planning ahead, surely.”

“It’s possible,” Neagley said. “They could have printed dozens of variations, one for every eventuality.”

“No,” Reacher said. “I think they printed them up as they went along. I think they kept the thumbprint available to them at all times.”

“How?” Swain asked. “They abducted some guy and took him hostage? They’ve stashed him somewhere? They’re taking him everywhere with them?”

“Couldn’t work,” Neagley said. “Can’t expect us to find him if he’s not home.”

“He’s home,” Reacher said. “But his thumb isn’t.”

Nobody spoke.

“Fire up a computer,” Reacher said. “Search NCIC for the word thumb .”

“We’ve got a big field office in Sacramento,” Bannon said. “Three agents are already mobile. A doctor, too. We’ll know in an hour.”

This time Bannon had come to them. They were in the Secret Service conference room, Stuyvesant at the head of the table, Reacher and Neagley and Swain together on one side, Bannon alone on the other.

“It’s a bizarre idea,” Bannon said. “What would they do? Keep it in the freezer?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “Thaw it a bit, rub it down their nose, print it on the paper. Just like Stuyvesant’s secretary with her rubber stamp. It’s probably drying out a bit with age, which is why the squalene percentage keeps getting higher.”

“What are the implications?” Stuyvesant said. “Assuming you’re right?”

Reacher made a face. “We can change one major assumption. Now I would guess they’ve both got prints on file, and they’ve both been wearing the latex gloves.”

“Two renegades,” Bannon said.

“Not necessarily ours,” Stuyvesant said.

“So explain the other factors,” Bannon said.

Nobody spoke. Bannon shrugged.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got an hour. And I don’t want to be looking in the wrong place. So convince me. Show me these are private citizens gunning for Armstrong personally.”