Without Fail - Lee Child [78]
“Trajectory looks like it,” Stuyvesant said. “Medical examiner figures the bullet was traveling downward. It went through his head front to back, high to low.”
“Hilly country?”
“All around.”
“So it was either a very distant rifle or a silenced rifle. And I don’t like either one. Distant rifle means somebody’s a great shooter, silenced rifle means somebody owns a bunch of exotic weapons.”
“What about the second guy?” Neagley asked.
“It was less than eight hours later,” Stuyvesant said. “But more than eight hundred miles away. So most likely the team split up for the day.”
“Details?”
“Coming through in bits and pieces. First impression from the locals is the weapon was some kind of machine gun. But again, nobody heard anything.”
“A silenced machine gun?” Reacher said. “Are they sure?”
“No question it was a machine gun,” Stuyvesant said. “The corpse was all chewed up. Two bursts, head and chest. Hell of a mess.”
“Hell of a demonstration,” Froelich said.
Reacher stared through the window. There was light fog in the air.
“But what exactly does it demonstrate?” he said.
“That these are not very nice people.”
He nodded. “But not very much more than that, does it? It doesn’t really demonstrate Armstrong’s vulnerability as such, not if they weren’t connected to him in any way. Are we sure they weren’t related? Like very distant cousins or something? At least the farmer? Minnesota is next to North Dakota, right?”
Stuyvesant shook his head.
“My first thought, obviously,” he said. “But I double-checked. First, the VP isn’t from North Dakota originally. He moved in from Oregon. Plus we have the complete text of his FBI background check from when he was nominated. It’s pretty exhaustive. And he doesn’t have any living relatives that anybody’s aware of except an elder sister who lives in California. His wife has got a bunch of cousins but none of them are called Armstrong and most of them are younger. Kids, basically.”
“OK,” Reacher said. Kids. He had a flash in his mind of a seesaw, and stuffed toys and lurid paintings stuck to a refrigerator with magnets. Cousins.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Killing two random unconnected lookalikes called Armstrong is dramatic enough, I guess, but it doesn’t show any great ingenuity. Doesn’t prove anything. Doesn’t make us worried about our security here.”
“Makes us sad for them,” Froelich said. “And their families.”
“No doubt,” Reacher said. “But two hicks in the sticks going down doesn’t really make us sweat, does it? It’s not like we were protecting them as well. Doesn’t make us doubt ourselves. I really thought it would be something more personal. More intriguing. Like some equivalent of the letter showing up on your desk.”
“You sound disappointed,” Stuyvesant said.
“I am disappointed. I thought they might come close enough to give us a chance at them. But they stayed away. They’re cowards.”
Nobody spoke.
“Cowards are bullies,” Reacher said. “Bullies are cowards.”
Neagley glanced at him. Knew him well enough to sense when to push.
“So?” she asked.
“So we need to go back and rethink a couple of things. Information is stacking up fast and we’re not processing it. Like, now we know these guys are outsiders. Now we know this is not a genteel inside game.”
“So?” Neagley asked again.
“And what happened in Minnesota and Colorado shows us these guys are prepared to do just about anything at all.”
“So?”
“The cleaners. What do we know about them?”
“That they’re involved. That they’re scared. That they’re not saying anything.”
“Correct,” Reacher said. “But why are they scared? Why aren’t they saying anything? Way back we thought they might be playing some cute game with an insider. But they’re not doing that. Because these guys aren’t insiders. And they’re not cute people. And this isn’t a game.”
“So?”
“So they’re being coerced in some serious way. They’re being scared and silenced. By some serious people.”
“OK, how?”
“You tell me. How do you scare somebody without leaving a mark on them?”
“You threaten something plausible. Serious harm in the future, maybe.”
Reacher