Without Fail (14 page)

"Show me again," Neagley said.

He ran the segment again. Neagley leaned back and half closed her eyes.

"Their energy level is a little different than when they came out," she said.

"You think?"

She nodded. "A little slower? Like they're hesitant?"

"Or like they're dreading having to do something bad in there?"

He ran it again.

"I don't know," she said. "Kind of hard to interpret. And it's no kind of evidence, that's for sure. Just a subjective feeling."

He ran it again. There was no real overt difference. Maybe they looked a little less wired going in than coming out. Or more tired. But then, they spent fifteen minutes in there. And it was a relatively small office. Already quite clean and neat. Maybe it was their habit to take a ten-minute rest in there, out of sight of the camera. Cleaners weren't dumb. Maybe they put their feet on the desk, not a letter.

"I don't know," Neagley said again.

"Inconclusive?" Reacher said.

"Naturally. But who else have we got?"

"Nobody at all."

He hit fast rewind and stared at nothing until he found eight o'clock in the evening. The secretary got up from her desk, put her head round Stuyvesant's door, and went home. He wound back to seven thirty-one and watched Stuyvesant himself leave.

"OK," he said. "The cleaners did it. On their own initiative?"

"I seriously doubt it."

"So who told them to?"

They stopped in the foyer and found Nendick and sent him back to tidy up his equipment room. Then they went in search of Froelich and found her deep in a stack of paperwork at her desk, on the phone, co-ordinating Brook Armstrong's return from Camp David.

"We need to speak with the cleaners," Reacher said.

"Now?" Froelich said.

"No better time. Late-night interrogation always works best."

She looked blank. "OK. I'll drive you, I guess."

"Better that you're not there," Neagley said.

"Why not?"

"We're military. We'll probably want to slap them around some."

Froelich stared at her. "You can't do that. They're department members, no different than me."

"She's kidding," Reacher said. "But they're going to feel better talking to us if there's nobody else from the department around."

"OK, I'll wait outside. But I'm going with you."

She finished up her phone calls and tidied up her paperwork and then led them back to the elevator and down to the garage. They climbed into the Suburban and Reacher closed his eyes for twenty minutes as she drove. He was tired. He had been working hard for six days straight. Then the car came to a stop and he opened his eyes again in a mean neighbourhood full of ten-year-old sedans and hurricane fencing. There was an orange glow from streetlights here and there. Patched blacktop and scrawny weeds in the sidewalks. The thump of a loud car stereo blocks away.

"This is it," Froelich said. "Number 2301."

2301 was the left-hand half of a two-family house. It was a low clapboard structure with paired front doors in the centre and symmetrical windows left and right. There was a low wire fence defining a front yard. The yard had a lawn that was partly dead. No bushes or flowers or shrubs. But it was neat enough. No trash. The steps up to the door were swept clean.

"I'll wait right here," Froelich said.

Reacher and Neagley climbed out of the car. The night air was cold and the distant stereo was louder. They went in through the gate. Up a cracked concrete walk to the door. Reacher pressed the bell and heard it sound inside the house. They waited. Heard the slap of footsteps on what sounded like a bare floor, and then something metal being hauled out of the way. The door opened and a man stood there, holding the handle. He was the cleaner from the video, no doubt about it. They had looked at him forward and backward for hours. He was not young, not old. Not short, not tall. Just a completely average guy. He was wearing cotton pants and a Redskins sweatshirt. His skin was dark and his cheekbones were high and flat. His hair was black and glossy, with an old-fashioned cut still crisp and neat around the edges.

"Yes?" he said.

"We need to talk about the thing at the office," Reacher said. The guy didn't ask any questions. Didn't ask for ID. Just glanced at Reacher's face and stepped backward and over the thing he had moved to get the door open. It was a children's seesaw made out of brightly coloured curved metal tubes. It had little seats at each end, like you might see on a children's tricycle, and plastic horses" heads with little handlebars coming out of the sides below the ears.

"Can't leave it outside at night," the guy said. "It would be stolen."

Neagley and Reacher climbed over it into a narrow hallway. There were more toys neatly packed onto shelves. Bright grade-school paintings visible on the front of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The smell of cooking. There was a living room off the hallway with two silent, scared women in it. They were wearing Sunday dresses, which,were very different from their work overalls.

"We need to know your names," Neagley said.

Her voice was halfway between warm friendliness and the cold knell of doom. Reacher smiled to himself. That was Neagley's way. He remembered it well. Nobody ever argued with her. It was one of her strengths.

"Julio," the man said.

"Anita," the first woman said. Reacher assumed she was Julio's wife, by the way she glanced at him before answering. "Maria," the second woman said. "I'm Anita's sister."

There was a small sofa and two armchairs. Anita and Maria squeezed up to let Julio sit with them on the sofa. Reacher took that as an invitation and sat down in one of the armchairs. Neagley took the other. It put the two of them at a symmetrical angle, like the sofa was a television screen and they were sitting down to watch it.

"We think you guys put the letter in the office," Neagley said.

There was no reply. No reaction at all. No expression on the three faces. Just some kind of silent blank stoicism. "Did you?" Neagley asked. No reply.

"Are kids in bed?" Reacher asked.

"They're not here," Anita said.

"Are they yours or Maria's?"

"They're mine."

"Boys or girls?"

"Both girls."

"Where are they?"

She paused. "With cousins."

"Why?"

"Because we work nights."

"Not for much longer," Neagley said. "You won't be working at all, unless you tell somebody something."

No response.

"No more health insurance, no more benefits."

No response.

"You might even go to jail."

Silence in the room.

"Whatever happens to us will happen," Julio said.

"Did somebody ask you to put it there? Somebody you know in the office?"

Absolutely no response.

"Somebody you know outside the office?"

"We didn't do anything with any letter."

"So what did you do?" Reacher asked.

"We cleaned. That's what we're there for."

"You were in there an awful long time." Julio looked at his wife, like he was puzzled.

"We saw the tape," Reacher said.

"We know about the cameras," Julio said.

"You follow the same routine every night?"

"We have to."

"Spend that long in there every night?"

Julio shrugged. "I guess so."

"You rest up in there?"

"No, we clean."

"Same every night?"

"Everything's the same every night. Unless somebody's spilled some coffee or left a lot of trash around or something. That might slow us up some."

"Was there something like that in Stuyvesant's office that night?"

"No," Julio said. "Stuyvesant is a clean guy."

"You spent some big amount of time in there."

"No more than usual."

"You got an exact routine?"

"I guess so. We vacuum, wipe things off, empty the trash, put things neat, move on to the next office."

Silence in the room. Just the faint thump of the far-off car stereo, much attenuated by the walls and the windows.

"OK," Neagley said. "Listen up, guys. The tape shows you going in there. Afterwards, there was a letter on the desk. We think you put it there because somebody asked you to. Maybe they told you it was a joke or a trick. Maybe they told you it was OK to do it. And it was OK. There's no harm done. But we need to know who asked you. Because this is part of the game, too, us trying to find out. And now you've got to tell us, otherwise the game is over and we have lo figure you put it there off of your own bat. And that's not OK. That's real bad. That's making a threat against the Vice President-elect of the United States. And you can go to prison for that."

No reaction. Another long silence.

"Are we going to get fired?" Maria asked.

"Aren't you listening?" Neagley said. "You're going to jail, unless you tell us who it was."

Maria's face went still, like a stone. And Anita's, and Julio's. Still faces, blank eyes, stoic miserable expressions straight from a thousand years of peasant experience: sooner or later, the harvest always fails.

"Let's go," Reacher said.

They stood up and stepped through to the hallway. Climbed over the seesaw and let themselves out into the night. Made it back to the Suburban in time to see Froelich snapping her cell phone shut. There was panic in her eyes.

"What?" Reacher asked.

"We got another one," she said. "Ten minutes ago. And it's worse."

SIX

It was waiting for them in the centre of the long table in the conference room. A small crowd of people had gathered around it. The halogen spots in the ceiling lit it perfectly. There was a brown nine-by-twelve envelope with a metal closure and a torn flap. And a single sheet of white letter-size paper. On it were printed ten words: The day upon which Armstrong will die is fast approaching. The message was split into two lines, exactly centred between the margins and set slightly above the middle of the paper. There was nothing else visible. People stared at it in silence. The guy in the suit from the reception desk pushed backward through the crowd and spoke to Froelich.

"I handled the envelope," he said. "I didn't touch the letter. Just spilled it out."

"How did it arrive?" she asked.

"The garage guard took a bathroom break. Came back and found it on the ledge inside his booth. He brought it straight up to me. So I guess his prints are on the envelope too."

"When, exactly?"

"Half-hour ago."

"How does the garage guard work his breaks?" Reacher asked.

The room went quiet. People turned towards the new voice. The desk guy started in with a fierce who-the-hell-are-you look. But then he saw Froelich's face and shrugged and answered obediently.

"He locks the barrier down," he said. "That's how. Runs to the bathroom, runs back. Maybe two or three times a shift. He's down there eight hours at a stretch."

Froelich nodded. "Nobody's blaming him. Anybody call a forensic team yet?"

"We waited for you."

"OK, leave it on the table, nobody touch it, and seal this room tight."

"Is there a camera in the garage?" Reacher asked.

"Yes, there is."

"So get Nendick to bring us tonight's tape, right now." Neagley craned over the table. "Rather florid wording, don't you think? And "fast" definitely takes the prediction defence away, I would say. Turns the whole thing into an overt threat."

Froelich nodded. "You got that right," she said slowly. "If this is somebody's idea of a game or a joke, it just turned very serious very suddenly."

She said it loud and clear and Reacher caught her purpose fast enough to watch the faces in the room. There was absolutely no reaction on any of them. Froelich checked her watch.

"Armstrong's in the air," she said. "On his way home." Then she was quiet for a beat. "Call out an extra team," she said. "Half to Andrews, half to Armstrong's house. And put an extra vehicle in the convoy. And take an indirect route back."

There was a split second of hesitation and then people started moving with the practised efficiency of an elite team readying itself for action. Reacher watched them carefully, and he liked what he saw. Then he and Neagley followed Froelich back to her office. She called an FBI number and asked for a forensics team, urgent. Listened to the reply and hung up.

"Not that there's much doubt about what they'll find," she said, to nobody in particular. Then Nendick knocked and came in, carrying two video tapes.

"Two cameras," he said. "One is inside the booth, high up, looking down and sideways, supposed to ID individual drivers in their cars. The other is outside, looking straight up the alley, supposed to pick up approaching vehicles."

He put both cassettes on the desk and went back out. Froelich picked up the first tape and scooted her chair over to her television set. Put the tape in and pressed play. It was the sideways view from inside the booth. The angle was high, but it was about right to catch a driver framed in a car window. She wound back thirty-five minutes. Pressed play again. The guard was shown sitting on his stool with the back of his left shoulder in shot. Doing nothing. She fast-wound forward until he stood up. He touched a couple of buttons and disappeared. Nothing happened for thirty seconds. Then an arm snaked into view from the extreme right edge of the picture. Just an arm, in a heavy soft sleeve. A tweed overcoat, maybe. The hand on the end of it was gloved in leather. There was an envelope in the hand. It was pushed through the half-closed sliding window and dropped onto the ledge. Then the arm disappeared.

"He knew about the camera," Froelich said.

"Clearly," Neagley said. "He was a yard shy of the booth, stretching out."

"But did he know about the other camera?" Reacher asked. Froelich ejected the first tape and inserted the second. Wound backward thirty-five minutes. Pressed play. The view was straight up the alley. The quality was poor. There were pools of light from outdoor spotlights and the contrast with areas of darkness was vivid. The shadows lacked detail. The angle was high and tight. The top of the picture cut off well before the street end of the alley. The bottom of the shot stopped maybe six feet in front of the booth. But the width was good. Very good. Both walls of the alley were clearly in view. There was no way of approaching the garage entrance without passing through the camera's field of vision.

The tape ran. Nothing happened. They watched the fimecode counter until it reached a point twenty seconds before the arm had appeared. Then they watched the screen. A figure appeared at the top. Definitely male. No doubt about it. There was no mistaking the shoulders or the walk. He was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat, maybe grey or dark brown. Dark pants, heavy shoes, a muffler round his neck. And a hat on his head. A wide-brimmed hat, dark in colour, tilted way down in front. He walked with his chin tucked down. The video picked up a perfect view of the crown of his hat, all the way down the alley.

"He knew about the second camera," Reacher said.

The tape ran on. The guy walked fast, but purposefully, not hurrying, not running, not out of control. He had the envelope in his right hand, holding it flat against his body. He disappeared out of the bottom of the shot and reappeared three seconds later. Without the envelope. He walked at the same purposeful pace all the way back up the alley and out of shot at the top of the screen.

Froelich froze the tape. "Description?"

"Impossible," Neagley said. "Male, a little short and squat. Right-handed, probably. No visible limp. Apart from that we don't know diddly. We saw nothing."

"Maybe not too squat," Reacher said. "The angle foreshortens things a little."

"He had inside knowledge," Froelich said. "He knew about the cameras and the bathroom breaks. So he's one of us."

"Not necessarily," Reacher said. "He could be an outsider who staked you out. The exterior camera must be visible if you're looking for it. And he could assume the interior camera. Most places have them. And a couple of nights' surveillance would teach him the bathroom break procedure. But you know what? Insider or outsider, we drove right past him. We must have. When we went out to see the cleaners. Because even if he's an insider, he needed to time the bathroom break exactly right. So he needed to be watching. He must have been across the street for a couple of hours looking down the alley. Maybe with binoculars."

The office went quiet.

"I didn't see anybody," Froelich said.

"The neither," Neagley said.

"I had my eyes closed," Reacher said.

"We wouldn't have seen him," Froelich said. "He hears a vehicle coming up the ramp, he ducks out of sight, surely."

"I guess so," Reacher said. "But we were real close to him, temporarily."

"Shit," Froelich said.

"Yeah, shit," Neagley echoed.

"So what do we do?" Froelich asked.

"Nothing," Reacher said. "Nothing we can do. This was more than forty minutes ago. If he's an insider, he's back home by now. Maybe tucked up in bed. If he's an outsider, he's already on 1-95 or something, west or north or south, maybe thirty miles away. We can't call the troopers in four states and ask them to look for a right-handed man in a car who doesn't limp, no better description than that."

"They could look for an overcoat and a hat on the back seat or in the trunk."

"It's November, Froelich. Everybody's got a hat and a coat with them."

"So what do we do?" she asked again.

"Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case this whole thing is for real. Keep him wrapped up tight. Like Stuyvesant said, threatening isn't necessarily the same thing as succeeding."

"What's his schedule?" Neagley asked.

"Home tonight, the Hill tomorrow," Froelich said.

"So you'll be OK. You scored,perfect around the Capitol. If Reacher and I couldn't get to him there, no squat guy in an overcoat is going to. Assuming a squat guy in an overcoat wants to, instead of just shaking you up for the fun of it."

"You think?"

"Like Stuyvesant said, take a deep breath and tough it out. Be confident."

"Doesn't feel good. I need to know who this guy is."

"We'll find out who he is, sooner or later. Until then, if you can't attack at one end you have to defend at the other."

"She's right," Reacher said. "Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case."

Froelich nodded vaguely and took the tape out of the machine and put the first one back in. Restarted it and stared at the screen until the garage guard came back from his bathroom break and noticed the envelope and picked it up and hurried out of shot with it.

"Doesn't feel good," she said again. An FBI forensics crew came by an hour later and photographed the sheet of paper on the conference room table. They used an office ruler for a scale reference and then used a pair of sterile plastic tweezers to lift the paper and the envelope into separate evidence bags. Froelich signed a form to keep the chain of evidence intact and they took both items away for examination. Then she got on the phone for twenty minutes and tracked Armstrong out of the Marine helicopter at Andrews and all the way home.

"OK, we're secure," she said. "For now."

Neagley yawned and stretched. "So take a break. Be ready for a hard week."

"I feel stupid," Froelich said. "I don't know if this is a game or for real."

"You feel too much," Neagley said.

Froelich looked at the ceiling. "What would Joe do now?"

Reacher paused and smiled. "Go to the store and buy a suit, probably."

"No, seriously."

"He'd close his eyes for a minute and work it all out like it was a chess puzzle. He read Karl Marx, you know that? He said Marx had this trick of explaining everything with one single question, which was, who benefits?"

"So?"

"Let's say it is an insider doing this. Karl Marx would say, OK, the insider plans to benefit from it. Joe would ask, OK, how does he plan to benefit from it?"

"By making me look bad in front of Stuyvesant."

"And getting you demoted or fired or whatever, because that rewards him in some way. That would be his aim. But that would be his only aim. Situation like that, there's no serious threat against Armstrong. That's an important point. And then Joe would say, OK, suppose it's not an insider, suppose it's an outsider. How does he plan to benefit?"

"By assassinating Armstrong."

"Which gratifies him in some other way. So Joe would say what you've got to do is proceed as if it's an outsider, and proceed very calmly and without panicking, and above all successfully. That's two birds with one stone. If you're calm, you deny the insider his benefit. If you're successful, you deny the outsider his benefit."

Froelich nodded, frustrated. "But which is it? What did the cleaners tell you?"

"Nothing," Reacher said. "My read is somebody they know persuaded them to smuggle it in, but they aren't admitting to anything."

"I'll tell Armstrong to stay home tomorrow."

Reacher shook his head. "You can't. You do that, you'll be seeing shadows every day and he'll be in hiding for the next four years. Just stay calm and tough it out."

"Easy to say."

"Easy to do. Just take a deep breath."

Froelich was still and silent for a spell. Then she nodded. "OK," she said. "I'll get you a driver. Be back here at nine in the morning. There'll be another strategy meeting. Exactly a week after the last one." The morning was damp and very cold, as if nature wanted to be done with fall and get started with winter. Exhaust fumes drifted down the streets in lov(white clouds and pedestrians hurried by on the sidewalks with their faces ducked deep into scarves. Neagley and Reacher met at eight forty at the cab line outside the hotel and found a Secret Service Town Car waiting for them. It was double-parked with the engine running and the driver standing next to it. He was maybe thirty years old, dressed in a dark overcoat and gloves, and he was up on his toes, scanning the crowd anxiously. He was breathing hard and his breath was pluming in the air.