Without Fail - Lee Child [129]
Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.
“I want to believe it,” he said. “But you’re basing everything on a hyphen.”
“Don’t dismiss it,” Reacher said.
“I’m not dismissing it,” Stuyvesant said. “I’m thinking.”
“About whether I’m crazy?”
“About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the alternative scenario.”
“It could be deliberate,” Neagley said. “They might be misleading us. Trying to disguise their background or their education level. Throwing us off.”
Reacher shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is too subtle. They’d do all the usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen between Vice and President is something you don’t know from right or wrong. It’s something you just do.”
“What are the exact implications?” Stuyvesant asked.
“Age is critical,” Reacher said. “They can’t be older than early fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders, down stairs. They can’t be younger than mid-forties, because you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970 every school in America had new books. I think they were in junior high at or toward the end of the period when isolated rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date maps on the wall, you’re sitting there with all your cousins listening to some gray-haired old lady.”
“It’s very speculative,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s a pyramid too, balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over.”
Silence in the room.
“Well, I’m going to pursue it,” Reacher said. “With Armstrong, or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if necessary. For Froelich’s sake. She deserves it.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “If neither of them worked for us, how would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said.
“How did they decoy Crosetti?”
“I don’t know.”
“How would they get our weapons?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did they know where M. E. lived?”
“Nendick told them.”
Stuyvesant nodded. “OK. But what would be their motive?”
“Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician must make plenty of enemies.”
Silence again.
“Maybe it’s half and half,” Neagley said. “Maybe they’re outsiders with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work here. Maybe they’re some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs. They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons you buy.”
“That’s possible,” Stuyvesant said. “We turn down a lot of people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be right.”
“No,” Reacher said. “She’s wrong. Why would they wait? I’m sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?”
“That’s a good point too,” Stuyvesant said.
“This is about Armstrong personally,” Reacher said. “It has to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and effect. Armstrong became the running mate during the summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich told me that herself. Now we’re getting threats against him. Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign, that’s why.”
Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned over and butted the first message under the second. Then both of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and closed it.
“OK, this is what we’re going to do,” he said.