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By Root 505 0

ended the call and threaded back into the Sunday traffic and drove the last mile and parked outside the hotel. The desk was expecting her and sent her straight up to 1201, twelfth floor. She followed a waiter through the door. He was carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two upside-down cups on saucers. No milk, no sugar, no spoons, and a single pink rose in a narrow china vase. The room was standard-issue city hotel. Two queen beds, flowery prints at the window, bland lithographs on the walls, a table, two chairs, a desk with a complicated phone, a credenza with a television, a connecting door to the next room. Reacher was sitting on the nearer bed. He was wearing a black nylon warm-up jacket with a black T-shirt and black jeans and black shoes. He had an earpiece in his ear and a pretty good fake Secret Service pin in the collar of the jacket. He was clean shaven and his hair had been cut very short and was neatly combed.

“What have you got for me?” she asked.

“Later,” he said.

The waiter put the tray on the table and backed silently out of the room. Froelich watched the door click shut behind him and turned back to Reacher. Paused a beat.

“You look just like one of us,” she said.

“You owe me lots of money,” he said.

“Twenty grand?”

He smiled. “Most of that. They told you about it?”

She nodded. “But why a cashier’s check? That puzzled me.” “It won’t, soon.”

He stood up and stepped across to the table. Righted the cups and picked up the pot and poured the coffee.

“You timed the room service well,” she said.

He smiled again. “I knew where you were, I knew you’d be driving back. It’s Sunday, no traffic. Easy enough to derive an ETA.”

“So what have you got to tell me?”

“That you’re good,” he said. “That you’re really, really good. That I don’t think anybody else could do this better than you.”

She went quiet. “But?”

“But you’re not good enough. You need to face that whoever it is out there could walk right in and get the job done.”

“I never said there’s anybody out there.”

He said nothing.

“Just give me the information, Reacher.”

“Three and a half,” he said.

“Three and a half what? Out of ten?”

“No, Armstrong’s dead, three and a half times over.”

She stared at him. “Already?”

“That’s how I score it,” he said.

“What do you mean, a half?”

“Three definites and one possible.”

She stopped halfway to the table and just stood there, bewildered.

“In five days?” she said. “How? What aren’t we doing?”

“Have some coffee,” he said.

She moved toward the table like an automaton. He handed her a cup. She took it and backed away to the bed. The cup rattled in the saucer.

“Two main approaches,” Reacher said. “Like in the movies, John Malkovich or Edward Fox. You’ve seen those movies?”

She nodded blankly. “We have a guy monitoring the movies. In the Office of Protection Research. He analyzes all the assassination movies. John Malkovich made In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood.”

“And Rene Russo,” Reacher said. “She was pretty good.”

“Edward Fox was in The Day of the Jackal, way back.”

Reacher nodded. “John Malkovich was looking to take out the President of the United States, and Edward Fox was looking to take out the President of France. Two competent assassins, working solo. But there was a fundamental difference between them. John Malkovich knew all along he wasn’t going to survive the mission. He knew he’d die a second after the President. But Edward Fox aimed to get away with it.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“It was a movie, Froelich. Had to end that way. He could have gotten away with it, easy as anything.”

“So?”

“It gives us two strategies to consider. A close-up suicide mission, or a clean long-distance job.”

“We know all that. I told you, we have a person working on it. We get transcripts, analyses, memos, position papers. We talk to the screenwriters sometimes, if there’s new stuff. We want to know where they get their ideas from.”

“Learn anything?”

She shrugged and sipped her coffee and he saw her trawl back through her memory, like she had all the transcripts and all the memos and all the position