Lee Child - Without Fail

Stuyvesant glanced at Swain, but Swain said nothing.

“Time is ticking by,” Bannon said.

“This isn’t an ideal context,” Swain said.

Bannon smiled. “What, you only preach to the choir?”

Nobody spoke.

“You’ve got no case,” Bannon said. “I mean, who cares about a Vice President? They’re nobodies. What was it, a bucket of warm spit?”

“It was a pitcher,” Swain said. “John Nance Garner said the Vice Presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. He also called it a spare tire on the automobile of government. He was FDR’s first running mate. John Adams called it the most insignificant office man had ever invented, and he was the first Vice President of all.”

“So who cares enough to shoot a spare tire or an insignificant pitcher of spit?”

“Let me start from the beginning,” Swain said. “What does a Vice President do?”

“He sits around,” Bannon says. “Hopes the big guy dies.”

Swain nodded. “Somebody else said the Vice President’s job is merely about waiting. In case the President dies, sure, but more often for the nomination in his own right eight years down the track. But in the short term, what is the Vice President for ?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Bannon said.

“He’s there to be a candidate,” Swain said. “That’s the bottom line. His design life lasts from when he’s tapped in the summer until election day. He’s useful for four or five months, tops. He starts out as a pick-me-up for the campaign. Everybody’s bored to death with the presidential nominees by midsummer, so the VP picks put a jolt into the campaigns. Suddenly we’ve all got something else to talk about. Somebody else to analyze. We look at their qualities and their records. We figure out how well they balance the tickets. That’s their initial function. Balance and contrast. Whatever the presidential nominee isn’t, the VP nominee is , and vice versa. Young, old, racy, dull, northern, southern, dumb, smart, hard, soft, rich, poor.”

“We get the picture,” Bannon said.

“So he’s there for what he is ,” Swain said. “Initially he’s just a photograph and a biography. He’s a concept . Then his duties start. He’s got to have campaigning skills, obviously. Because he’s there to be the attack dog. He’s got to be able to say the stuff the presidential candidate isn’t allowed to say himself. If the campaign scripts an attack or a put-down, it’s the VP candidate they get to deliver it. Meanwhile the presidential candidate stands around somewhere else looking all statesmanlike. Then the election happens and the presidential candidate goes to the White House and the VP gets put away in a closet. His usefulness is over, first Tuesday in November.”

“Was Armstrong good at that kind of stuff?”

“He was excellent. The truth is he was a very negative campaigner, but the polls didn’t really show it because he kept that nice smile on his face the whole time. Truth is he was deadly.”

“And you think he trod on enough toes to get himself assassinated for it?”

Swain nodded. “That’s what I’m working on now. I’m analyzing every speech and comment, matching up his attacks against the profile of the people he was attacking.”

“The timing is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “Nobody can argue with that. He was in the House for six years and the Senate for another six and barely got a nasty letter. This whole thing was triggered by something recent.”

“And his recent history is the campaign,” Swain said.

“Nothing way in his background?” Bannon asked.

Swain shook his head.

“We’re covered four ways,” he said. “First and most recent was your own FBI check when he was nominated. We’ve got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we’ve got opposition research from the other campaign from this time around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys dig up way more stuff than you do. And he’s clean.”

“North Dakota sources?”

“Nothing,” Swain said. “We talked to all the papers up there, matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there’s nothing wrong with the guy.”

“So it was the campaign,” Stuyvesant said. “He pissed somebody off.”

“Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons,” Bannon said. “Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can’t mail something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?”

Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked his watch. Took his cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. It sat there, silent.

“I’m sticking with the theory,” he said. “Except now I’m listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is.”

The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief ? because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.

“Sacramento?” Stuyvesant asked.

“No,” Bannon said. “Local. They found the rifle.”

They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.

“Was it a Vaime Mk2?” Bannon asked.

“Without a doubt,” one of the techs said.

“Serial number on it?”

The guy shook his head. “Removed with acid.”

“Anything you can do?”

The guy shook his head again.

“No,” he said. “If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.”

“So where is it now?”

“We’re fuming it for prints,” the guy said. “But it’s hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s been wiped.”

“Where was it found?”

“In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms.”

“I guess they waited in there,” Bannon said. “Maybe five minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads.”

“Shell cases?” Neagley asked.

“None,” the tech said. “They must have collected their brass. But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is intact. The mud preserved it.”

He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich’s case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti’s. The Minnesota bullet looked new. Its passage through the farmyard mud had scoured it clean.