Without Fail - Lee Child [115]
Stuyvesant nodded in the silence.
“We will,” he said. “You can count on that.”
“My people will be in place two hours in advance,” Bannon said.
“Ours will be in place an hour before that,” Froelich replied.
Bannon smiled a tight little smile and pushed back his chair and stood up.
“See you there,” he said.
He left the room and closed the door behind him, firmly, but quietly.
Stuyvesant checked his watch. “Well?”
They had sat quiet for a moment, and then strolled out to the reception area and got coffee. Then they regrouped in the conference room, in the same seats, each of them looking at the place Bannon had vacated like he was still there.
“Well?” Stuyvesant said again.
Nobody spoke.
“Inevitable, I guess,” Stuyvesant said. “They can’t pin the thumbprint guy on us, but the other one is definitely one of ours. It’ll be all smiles over at the Hoover Building. They’ll be grinning from ear to ear. Laughing up their sleeves at us.”
“But does that make them wrong?” Neagley asked.
“No,” Froelich said. “These guys know where I live. So I think Bannon’s right.”
Stuyvesant flinched, like the umpire had called strike one.
“And you?” he said to Neagley.
“Worrying about DNA on envelopes sounds like insiders,” Neagley said. “But one thing bothers me. If they’re familiar with your procedures, then they didn’t interpret the Bismarck situation very well. They expected the cops would move toward the decoy rifle and Armstrong would move toward the cars, thereby traversing their field of fire. But that didn’t happen. Armstrong waited in the blind spot and the cars came to him.”
Froelich shook her head.
“No, I’m afraid their interpretation was correct,” she said. “Normally Armstrong would have been well out in the middle of the field, letting people get a good look at him. Right there in the center of things. We don’t usually make them skulk around the edges. It was a last-minute change to keep him near the church. Based on Reacher’s input. And normally there’s absolutely no way I would allow a rear-wheel-drive limo on the grass. Too easy to bog down and get stuck. That’s an article of faith. But I knew the ground was dry and hard. It was practically frozen. So I improvised. That maneuver would have struck an insider as completely off the wall. It would have been the very last thing they were expecting. They would have been totally surprised by it.”
Silence for a beat.
“Then Bannon’s theory is perfectly plausible,” Neagley said. “I’m very sorry.”
Stuyvesant nodded, slowly. Strike two.
“Reacher?” he said.
“Can’t argue with a word of it.”
Strike three. Stuyvesant’s head dropped, like his last hope was gone.
“But I don’t believe it,” Reacher said.
Stuyvesant’s head came up again.
“I’m glad they’re pursuing it,” Reacher said. “Because it needs to be pursued, I guess. We need to eliminate all possibilities. And they’ll go at it like crazy. If they’re right, they’ll take care of it for us, that’s for sure. So it’s one less thing for us to worry about. But I’m pretty sure they’re wasting their time.”
“Why?” Froelich asked.
“Because I’m pretty sure neither of these guys ever worked here.”
“So who are they?”
“I think they’re both outsiders. I think they’re between two and ten years older than Armstrong himself, both of them brought up and educated in remote rural areas where the schools were decent but the taxes were low.”
“What?”
“Think of everything we know. Think of everything we’ve seen. Then think of the very smallest part of it. The very tini est component.”
“Tell us,” Froelich said.
Stuyvesant checked his watch again. Shook his head.
“Not now,” he said. “We need to move. You can tell us later. But you’re sure?”
“They’re both outsiders,” Reacher said. “Guaranteed. It’s in the Constitution.”
13
Every city has a cusp, where the good part of town turns bad. Washington D.C. was no different. The border between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim inroads