Lee Child - Without Fail

The bed was cold and hard and the new sheets were stiff with starch. He slipped in alone and stared at the ceiling for an hour and thought hard. Then he switched off abruptly and made himself sleep. He dreamed of his brother strolling hand in hand with Froelich all the way around the Tidal Basin in summer. The light was soft and golden and the blood streaming from her neck hung in the still warm air like a shimmering red ribbon five feet above the ground. It hung there undisturbed by the passing crowds and it made a full mile-wide circle when she and Joe arrived back where they had started. Then she changed into Swain and Joe changed into the Bismarck cop. The cop’s coat flapped open as he walked and Swain said I think we miscounted to everybody he met. Then Swain changed into Armstrong. Armstrong smiled his brilliant politician’s smile and said I’m so sorry and the cop turned and threaded a long gun out from under his flapping coat and slowly racked the bolt and shot Armstrong in the head. There was no sound, because the gun was silenced. No sound, even as Armstrong hit the water and floated away.

There was an alarm call from the desk at six o’clock and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Reacher rolled out of bed and wrapped a towel around his waist and checked the spy hole. It was Neagley, with coffee for him. She was all dressed and ready to go. He let her in and sat on the bed and started the coffee and she paced the narrow alley that led to the window. She was wired. Looked like she’d been drinking coffee all night.

“OK, Armstrong’s father?” she said, like she was asking the question for him. “He was drafted right at the end of Korea. Never saw active service. But he went through officer training and came out a second lieutenant and was assigned to an infantry company. They were stationed in Alabama, some place that’s long gone. They were ordered to achieve battle readiness for a fight everybody knew was already over. And you know how that stuff went, right?”

Reacher nodded sleepily. Sipped his coffee.

“Some idiot captain running endless competitions,” he said. “Points for this, points for that, deductions all over the place, at the end of the month Company B gets to keep a flag in its barracks for kicking Company A’s ass.”

“And Armstrong senior usually won,” Neagley said. “He ran a tight unit. But he had a temper problem. It was unpredictable. If somebody screwed up and lost points he could fly into a rage. Happened a couple of times. Not just the usual officer bullshit. It’s described in the records as serious uncontrolled temper tantrums. He went way too far, like he couldn’t stop himself.”

“And?”

“They let him get away with it twice. It wasn’t constant. It was purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote it up as generic battle stress, even though he’d never been a combat officer.”

Reacher made a face. “He must have had friends. And so must you, to get that deep into the records.”

“I’ve been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant’s going to have a coronary when he sees the motel bill.”

“How many individual victims?”

“My first thought, but we can forget them. There were three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died ten years ago in Palm Springs, and the third is more than seventy years old, lives in Florida.”

“Dry hole,” Reacher said.

“But it explains why they left it out of the campaign.”

Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. “Any chance Armstrong himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she’d seen him angry.”

“That was my second thought,” Neagley said. “It’s conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was insisting on going to her service, wasn’t there? But I assume the broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The guy’s been running for office at one level or another his whole life. And this all started with the campaign this summer. We already agreed on that.”

Reacher nodded, vaguely.

“The campaign,” he repeated. He sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at the wall, one full minute, then two.

“What?” Neagley asked.

He didn’t reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C. under the gray dawn sky.

“What did Armstrong do in the campaign?” he asked.

“Lots of things.”

“How many Representatives does New Mexico have?”

“I don’t know,” Neagley said.

“I think it’s three. Can you name them?”

“No.”

“Would you recognize any of them on the street?”

“No.”

“Oklahoma?”

“Don’t know. Five?”

“Six, I think. Can you name them?”

“One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can’t remember his name.”

“Senators from Tennessee?”

“What’s your point?”

Reacher stared out of the window.

“We’ve got Beltway disease,” he said. “We’re all caught up in it. We’re not looking at this thing like real people. To almost everybody else out there in the country all these politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said you’re interested in politics but you couldn’t name all hundred senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested than you. Most people wouldn’t recognize another state’s junior senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard of Armstrong before.”

“So?”

“So Armstrong did one absolutely basic, fundamental, elemental thing in the campaign. He put himself in the public eye, nationally. For the very first time in his life ordinary people outside of his home state and outside of his circle of friends saw his face. Heard his name. For the first time ever. I think this all could be as basic as that.”

“In what way?”

“Suppose his face came back at somebody from way in the past. Completely out of the blue. Like a sudden shock.”

“Like who?”

“Like you’re some guy somewhere and long ago some young man lost his temper and smacked you around. Some situation like that. Maybe in a bar, maybe over a girl. Maybe he humiliated you by doing so. You never see the guy again, but the incident festers in your mind. Years pass, and suddenly there’s the guy all over the papers and the TV. He’s a politician, running for Vice President. You never heard of him in the years before, because you don’t watch C-SPAN or CNN. But now, there he is, everywhere, in your face. So what do you do? If you’re politically aware you might call the opposing campaign and dish the dirt. But you’re not politically aware, because this is the first time you’ve ever seen him since the fight in the bar a lifetime ago. So what do you do? The sight of him brings it all back. It’s been festering.”

“You think about some kind of revenge.”

Reacher nodded. “Which would explain Swain’s thing about wanting him to suffer. But maybe Swain’s been looking in the wrong place. Maybe we all have. Because maybe this isn’t personal to Armstrong the politician. Maybe it’s personal to Armstrong the man. Maybe it’s really personal.”

Neagley stopped pacing and sat down in the chair.

“It’s very tenuous,” she said. “People get over things, don’t they?”

“Do they?”

“Mostly.”

Reacher glanced down at her. “You haven’t gotten over whatever makes it that you don’t like people to touch you.”

The room went quiet.

“OK,” she said. “ Normal people get over things.”