Without Fail - Lee Child [17]
The guest list was a thousand people long. November weather meant they couldn’t line up on the sidewalk and the tenor of the event meant security had to be pleasantly unobtrusive, so the standard winter protocol applied, which was to get the guests in off the street and into the lobby immediately through a temporary metal detector placed inside the frame of the entrance door. Then they milled around inside the lobby and eventually made their way to the ballroom door. Once there, their printed invitations were checked and they were asked for photo ID. The invitations were laid facedown on a glass sheet for a moment, and then handed back as souvenirs. Under the glass sheet was a video camera working to the same timecode as the others, so names and faces were permanently tied together in the visual record. Finally, they passed through a second metal detector and onward into the ballroom. Froelich’s crew were serious but good-humored, and made it seem more like they were protecting the guests themselves from some thrilling unspecified danger, rather than protecting Armstrong from them.
Froelich spent her time staring at the video monitors, looking for faces that didn’t fit. She saw none, but she kept on worrying anyway. She saw no sign of Reacher. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed about that. Was he doing it or not? She thought about cheating and issuing his description to her team. Then she thought better of it. Win or lose, I need to know, she thought.
Armstrong’s two-car convoy entered the loading dock a half hour later, by which time the guests had drunk a couple of glasses of cheap sparkling wine and eaten as many soggy canapés as they wanted. His personal three-man detail brought him in through a rear passageway and kept to a ten-foot radius for the duration. His appearance was timed to last two hours, which gave him an average of a little over seven seconds per guest. On a rope line seven seconds would be an eternity, but this situation was different, primarily in the handshaking method. A campaigning politician learns very quickly to fumble a handshake and grip the back of the recipient’s hand, not the palm. It creates a breathless so-much-support-here-I’ve-got-to-be-quick type of drama, and better still it means it’s strictly the pol’s choice when he lets go, not the supporter’s. But in an event of this nature, Armstrong couldn’t use that tactic. So he had to shake properly and work fast to keep to seven seconds each. Some guests were content with brevity and others hung on a little longer, gushing their congratulations like maybe he hadn’t experienced any before. There were some men who went for the two-handed forearm grip. Some put their arms around his shoulders for private photographs. Some were disappointed that his wife wasn’t there. Some weren’t. There was one woman in particular who took his hand in a firm grip and held on for ten or twelve seconds, even pulling him nice and close and whispering something in his ear. She was surprisingly strong and nearly pulled him off balance. He didn’t really hear what she whispered. Maybe her room number. But she was slim and pretty, with dark hair and a great smile, so he wasn’t too upset about it. He just smiled back gratefully and moved on. His Secret Service detail didn’t bat an eye.
He worked a complete circle around the room, eating nothing, drinking nothing, and made it back out of the rear door after two hours and eleven minutes. His personal detail put him back in his car and drove him home. The sidewalk crossing was completely uneventful and another eight minutes later his house was locked down for the night and secure. Back at the hotel the rest of the security detail withdrew unnoticed and the thousand guests left over the next hour or so.
Froelich drove straight back to her office and called Stuyvesant at home just before midnight. He answered right away and sounded like he had been holding his breath and waiting for the