Lee Child - Without Fail

Armstrong said nothing.

“I think it came first,” Reacher said. “Right at the very beginning, maybe, before the Secret Service even caught on. I think it was like an announcement , that only you would understand. So I think you’ve known about all this all along. I think you know who’s doing it, and I think you know why .”

“People have died,” Armstrong said. “That’s a hell of an accusation.”

“Do you deny it?”

Armstrong said nothing.

Reacher leaned forward.

“Some crucial words were never spoken,” he said. “Thing is, if I was standing there serving turkey and then somebody started shooting and somebody else was suddenly bleeding to death on top of me, sooner or later I’d be asking, who the hell were they? What the hell did they want ? Why the hell were they doing that? Those are fairly basic questions. I’d be asking them loud and clear, believe me. But you didn’t ask them. We saw you twice, afterward. In the White House basement, and then later at the office. You said all kinds of things. You asked, had they been captured yet? That was your big concern. You never asked who they might be or what their possible motive was. And why didn’t you ask? Only one possible explanation. You already knew .”

Armstrong said nothing.

“I think your wife knows, too,” Reacher said. “You conveyed her anger at you for putting people at risk. I don’t think she was generalizing. I think she knows you know, and she thinks you should have told somebody.”

Armstrong was silent.

“So I think you’re feeling a little guilty now,” Reacher said. “I think that’s why you agreed to make the television statement for me and that’s why you suddenly want to go to the service itself. Some kind of a conscience thing. Because you knew , and you didn’t tell anybody.”

“I’m a politician,” Armstrong said. “We have hundreds of enemies. There was no point in speculating.”

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. “This isn’t political. This is personal. Your kind of political enemy is some North Dakota soybean grower you made ten cents a week poorer by altering a subsidy. Or some pompous old senator you declined to vote with. The soybean grower might make a halfhearted effort against you at election time and the senator might bide his time and screw you on some big floor issue but neither one of them is going to do what these guys are doing.”

Armstrong said nothing.

“I’m not a fool,” Reacher said. “I’m an angry man who watched a woman I was fond of bleed to death.”

“I’m not a fool either,” Armstrong said.

“I think you are. Something’s coming back at you from the past and you think you can just ignore it and hope for the best? Didn’t you realize it would happen? You people have no perspective. You thought you were world famous already just because you were in the House and the Senate? Well, you weren’t. Real people never heard of you until the campaign this summer. You thought all your little secrets were already out? Well, they weren’t, either.”

Armstrong said nothing.

“Who are they?” Reacher asked.

Armstrong shrugged. “Your guess?”

Reacher paused a beat.

“I think you’ve got a temper problem,” he said. “Same as your dad. I think way back before you learned to control it you made people suffer, and some of them forgot about it, but some of them didn’t. I think it’s a part of some particular person’s life that somebody once did something bad to them. Maybe hurt them, or hurt their self-esteem, or screwed them up in some other kind of a big way. I think that particular person repressed it deep down inside until they turned on the TV one day and saw your face for the first time in thirty years.”

Armstrong sat still for a long moment.

“How far along is the FBI with this?” he asked.

“They’re nowhere. They’re out beating the bushes for people that don’t exist. We’re way ahead of them.”

“And what are your intentions?”

“I’m going to help you,” Reacher said. “Not that you deserve it in any way at all. It’ll be a purely accidental by-product of me standing up for Nendick and his wife, and an old guy called Andretti, and two people called Armstrong, and Crosetti, and especially for Froelich, who was my brother’s friend.”

There was silence.

“Will this stay confidential?” Armstrong asked.

Reacher nodded. “It’ll have to. Purely for my sake.”

“Sounds like you’re contemplating a very serious course of action.”

“People play with fire, they get burned.”

“That’s the law of the jungle.”

“Where the hell else do you think you live?”

Armstrong was quiet, another long moment.

“So then you’ll know my secret and I’ll know yours,” he said.

Reacher nodded. “And we’ll all live happily ever after.”

There was another long silence. It lasted a whole minute. Reacher saw Armstrong the politician fade away, and Armstrong the man replace him.

“You’re wrong in most ways,” he said. “But not all of them.”

He leaned down and opened a drawer. Took out a padded mailer and tossed it on the desk. It skidded on the shiny wood and came to rest an inch from the edge.

“I guess this counts as the first message,” he said. “It arrived on Election Day. I suppose the Secret Service must have been a little puzzled, but they didn’t see anything really wrong with it. So they passed it right along.”

The mailer was a standard commercial stationery product. It was addressed to Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C . The address was printed on a familiar self-adhesive label in the familiar computer font, Times New Roman, fourteen point, bold. It had been mailed somewhere in the state of Utah on October 28. The flap had been opened a couple of times and resealed. Reacher eased it back and looked inside. Held it so Neagley could see.

There was nothing in the envelope except a miniature baseball bat. It was the kind of thing sold as a souvenir or given away as a token. It was plain lacquered softwood the color of honey. It was about an inch wide around the barrel and would have been about fifteen inches long except that it was broken near the end of the handle. It had been broken deliberately. It had been partially sawn through and then snapped where it was weak. The raw end had been scratched and scraped to make it look accidental.

“I don’t have a temper problem,” Armstrong said. “But you’re right, my father did. We lived in a small town in Oregon, kind of lonely and isolated. It was a lumber town, basically. It was a mixed sort of place. The mill owners had big houses, the crew chiefs had smaller houses, the crews lived in shanties or rooming houses. There was a school. My mother owned the pharmacy. Down the road was the rest of the state, up the road was virgin forest. It felt like the frontier. It was a little lawless, but it wasn’t too bad. There were occasional whores and a lot of drinking, but overall it was just trying to be an American town.”

He went quiet for a moment. Placed his hands palms down on the desk and stared at them.

“I was eighteen,” he said. “Finished with high school, ready for college, spending my last few weeks at home. My sister was away traveling somewhere. We had a mailbox at the gate. My father had made it himself, in the shape of a miniature lumber mill. It was a nice thing, made out of tiny strips of cedar. At Halloween in the previous year it had been smashed up, you know, the traditional Halloween thing where the tough kids go out cruising with a baseball bat, bashing mailboxes. My father heard it happening and he chased them, but he didn’t really see them. We were a little upset, because it was a nice mailbox and destroying it seemed kind of senseless. But he rebuilt it stronger and became kind of obsessed about protecting it. Some nights he hid out and guarded it.”