Without Fail - Lee Child [128]
“OK,” Reacher said. “Examine them. Everything about them. And remember why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for Froelich.”
The line of photographs was four feet long, and they had to stand up and shuffle left to right along the table to inspect them all.
You are going to die.
Vice-President-elect Armstrong is going to die.
The day upon which Armstrong will die is fast approaching.
A demonstration of your vulnerability will be staged today.
Did you like the demonstration?
It’s going to happen soon.
“So?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Look at the fourth message,” Reacher said. “Vulnerability is correctly spelled.”
“So?”
“That’s a big word. And look at the last message. The apostrophe in it’s is correct. Lots of people get that wrong, you know, it’s and its. There are periods at the ends, except for the question mark.”
“So?”
“The messages are reasonably literate.”
“OK.”
“Now look at the third message.”
“What about it?”
“Neagley?” Reacher asked.
“It’s a little fancy,” she said. “A little awkward and old-fashioned. The upon which thing. And the fast approaching thing.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “A little archaic.”
“But what does all this prove?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Nothing, really,” Reacher said. “But it suggests something. Have you ever read the Constitution?”
“Of what? The United States?”
“Sure.”
“I guess I’ve read it,” Stuyvesant said. “A long time ago, probably.”
“Me too,” Reacher said. “Some school I was at gave us a copy each. It was a thin little book, thick cardboard covers. Very narrow when it was shut. The edges were hard. We used to karate-chop each other with it. Hurt like hell.”
“So?”
“It’s a legal document, basically. Historical, too, of course, but it’s fundamentally legal. So when somebody prints it up as a book, they can’t mess with it. They have to reproduce it exactly word for word, otherwise it wouldn’t be valid. They can’t modernize the language, they can’t clean it up.”
“Obviously not.”
“The early parts are from 1787. The last amendment in my copy was the twenty-sixth, from 1971, lowering the voting age to eighteen. A span of a hundred and eighty-four years. With everything reproduced exactly like it was written down at the particular time.”
“So?”
“One thing I remember is that in the first part, Vice President is written without a hyphen between the two words. Same in the latest part. No hyphen. But in the stuff that was written in the middle period, there is a hyphen. It’s Vice-President with a hyphen between the words. So clearly from about the 1860s up to maybe the 1930s it was considered correct usage to use a hyphen there.”
“These guys use a hyphen,” Stuyvesant said.
“They sure do,” Reacher said. “Right there in the second message.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Two things,” Reacher said. “We know they paid attention in class, because they’re reasonably literate. So the first thing it means is that they went to school someplace where they used old textbooks and old style manuals that were way out of date. Which explains the third message’s archaic feel, maybe. And which is why I figured they might be from a poor rural area with low school taxes. Second thing it means is they never worked for the Secret Service. Because you guys are buried in paperwork. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Army. Anybody who worked here would have written Vice President a million times over in their career. All with the modern usage without the hyphen. They would have gotten totally used to it that way.”
There was quiet for a moment.
“Maybe the other guy wrote it,” Stuyvesant said. “The one who didn’t work here. The one with the thumbprint.”
“Makes no difference,” Reacher