Lee Child - Without Fail

“Get the rifle,” Bannon said.

It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot super-glue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.

“That’s the wrong scope,” Reacher said. “That’s a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes.”

“Yeah, it’s been modified,” one of the techs said. “We already logged that.”

“By the factory?”

The guy shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “High standard, but it’s not factory workmanship.”

“So what does that mean?” Bannon asked.

“I’m not sure,” Reacher said.

“Is a Hensoldt better than a Bushnell?”

“Not really. They’re both fine scopes. Like BMW and Mercedes. Like Canon and Nikon.”

“So a person might have a preference?”

“Not a government person,” Reacher said. “Like, what would you say if one of your crime scene photographers came to you and said, I want a Canon instead of this Nikon you gave me?”

“I’d probably tell him to get lost.”

“Exactly. He works with what he’s got. So I don’t see somebody going to their department armorer and asking him to junk a thousand-dollar Bushnell just because he prefers the feel of a thousand-dollar Hensoldt.”

“So why the switch?”

“I’m not sure,” Reacher said again. “Damage, maybe. If you drop a rifle you can damage a sniper scope pretty easily. But a government repairer would use another Bushnell. They don’t just buy the rifles. They buy crateloads of spare parts along with them.”

“Suppose they were short? Suppose the scopes got damaged a lot?”

“Then they might use a Hensoldt, I guess. Hensoldts usually come with SIG rifles. You need to look at your lists again. Find out if there’s anybody who buys Vaimes and SIGs for their snipers.”

“Is the SIG silenced too?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“So there you go,” Bannon said. “Some agency needs two types of sniper rifles, it buys Vaimes as the silenced option and SIGs as the unsilenced option. Two types of scope in the spare-parts bins. They run out of Bushnells, they start in on the Hensoldts.”

“Possible,” Reacher said. “You should make the inquiries. You should ask specifically if anybody has fitted a Hensoldt scope to a Vaime rifle. And if they haven’t, you should start asking commercial gunsmiths. Start with the expensive ones. These are rare pieces. This could be important.”

Stuyvesant was staring into the distance. Worry in the slope of his shoulders.

“What?” Reacher asked.

Stuyvesant focused, and shook his head. A defeated little gesture.

“I’m afraid we bought SIGs,” he said, quietly. “We had a batch of SG550s about five years ago. Unsilenced semiautomatics, as an alternative option. But we don’t use them much because the automatic mechanism makes them a little inaccurate for close crowd situations. They’re mostly stored. We use the Vaimes everywhere now. So I’m sure the SIG parts bins are still full.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Bannon’s phone rang again. The insane little overture trilled into the silence. He clicked it on and put it to his ear and said yeah and listened.

“I see,” he said. Listened some more.

“The doctor agree?” he asked. Listened some more.

“I see,” he said, and listened.

“I guess,” he said, and listened.

“Two?” he asked, and listened.

“OK,” he said, and clicked the phone off.

“Upstairs,” he said. He was pale.

Stuyvesant and Reacher and Neagley followed him out to the elevator and rode with him up to the conference room. He sat at the head of the table and the others stayed together toward the other end, like they didn’t want to get too close to the news. The sky was full dark outside the windows. Thanksgiving Day was grinding to a close.

“His name is Andretti,” Bannon said. “Age seventy-three, retired carpenter, retired volunteer firefighter. He’s got granddaughters. That’s where the pressure came from.”

“Is he talking?” Neagley asked.

“Some,” Bannon said. “Sounds like he’s made of slightly sterner stuff than Nendick.”

“So how did it go down?”

“He frequents a cop bar outside of Sacramento, from his firefighting days. He met two guys in there.”

“Were they cops?” Reacher asked.

“Cop-like,” Bannon said. “That was his description. They got to talking, they got to showing each other pictures of the family. They got to talking about what a rotten world it is, and what they would do to protect their families from it. It was gradual, he said.”

“And?”

“He clammed up on us for a spell, but then our doctor took a look at his hand. The left thumb has been surgically removed. Well, not really surgically . Somewhere between severed and hacked off, our guy said. But there was an attempt at neatness. Andretti stuck to his carpentry story. Our doctor said, no way was that a saw. Like, no way . Andretti seemed pleased to be contradicted, and he talked some more.”

“And?”

“He lives alone. Widower. The two cop-like guys had wormed an invitation home with him. They were asking him, what would you do to protect your family? Like, what would you do ? How far would you go? It was all rhetorical at first, and then it got practical fast. They told him he would have to give up his thumb or his granddaughters. His choice. They held him down and did it. They took his photographs and his address book. Told him now they knew what his granddaughters looked like and where they lived. Told him they’d take out their ovaries the same way they’d taken off his thumb. And he was ready to believe them, obviously. He would be, right? They’d just done it to him . They stole a cooler from the kitchen and some ice from the refrigerator to transport the thumb. They left and he made it to the hospital.”

Silence in the room.

“Descriptions?” Stuyvesant asked.

Bannon shook his head.

“Too scared,” he said. “My guys talked about Witness Protection for the whole family, but he’s not going to bite. My guess is we’ve got all we’re going to get.”

“Forensics in the house?”

“Andretti cleaned it thoroughly. They made him. They watched him do it.”

“What about the bar? Anybody see them talking?”

“We’ll ask. But this was nearly six weeks ago. Don’t hold your breath.”

Nobody spoke for a long time.

“Reacher?” Neagley said.

“What?”

“What are you thinking?”

He shrugged.

“I’m thinking about Dostoyevsky,” he said. “I just found a copy of Crime and Punishment that I sent Joe for a birthday present. I remember I almost sent him The Brothers Karamazov instead, but I decided against it. You ever read that book?”

Neagley shook her head.

“Part of it is about what the Turks did in Bulgaria,” he said. “There was all kinds of rape and pillage going on. They hanged prisoners in the mornings after making them spend their last night nailed to a fence by their ears. They threw babies in the air and caught them on bayonets. They said the best part was doing it in front of the mothers. Ivan Karamazov was seriously disillusioned by it all. He said no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel . Then I was thinking about these guys making Andretti clean his house while they watched. I guess he had to do it one-handed. He probably struggled with it. Dostoyevsky put his feelings in a book. I don’t have his talent. So now I’m thinking I’m going to find these guys and impress on them the error of their ways in whatever manner my own talent allows.”