Without Fail (Page 10)

"And In the Line of Fire?" Reacher asked.

"John Malkovich played a renegade CIA operative," she said. "He manufactured a plastic pistol in his basement so he could beat the metal detectors and conned his way into a campaign rally and intended to shoot the President from very close range. Whereupon, as you say, we would have taken him down immediately."

"But old Clint jumped into the path of the bullet," Reacher said. "Good movie, I thought."

"Implausible, we thought," Froelich answered. "Two main faults. First, the idea that you can build a working pistol from hobbyist material is absurd. We look at stuff like that all the time. His gun would have exploded, blown his hand off at the wrist. The bullet would have just fallen out of the wreckage onto the floor. And second, he spent about a hundred thousand dollars along the way. Lots and lots of travel, phony offices for mail drops, plus a fifty-thousand-dollar donation to the party that got him into the campaign rally in the first place. Our assessment was a maniac personality like that wouldn’t have big bucks to spend. We dismissed it."

"It was only a movie," Reacher said. "But it was illustrative."

"Of what?"

"Of the idea of getting into a rally and attacking the target from close quarters, as opposed to the old idea of going for long-distance safety."

Froelich paused. Then she smiled, a little warily at first, like a grave danger might be receding into the distance.

"Is this all you’ve got?" she said. "Ideas? You had me worried."

"Like the rally here on Thursday night," Reacher said. "A thousand guests. Time and place announced in advance. Advertised, even."

"You found the transition’s website?"

Reacher nodded. "It was very useful. Lots of information."

"We vet it all."

"But it still told me every place Armstrong’s going to be," Reacher said. "And when. And in what kind of a context. Like the rally right here, Thursday night. With the thousand guests."

"What about them?"

"One of them was a dark-haired woman who got hold of Armstrong’s hand and pulled him a little off-balance."

She stared at him. "You were there?"

He shook his head. "No, but I heard about it."

"How?"

He ignored the question. "Did you see it?"

"Only on video," she said. "Afterward."

"That woman could have killed Armstrong. That was the first opportunity. Up to that point you were doing real well. You were scoring A-plus during the government stuff around the Capitol."

She smiled again, a little dismissively. "Could have? You’re wasting my time, Reacher. I wanted better than could have. I mean, anything could happen. A bolt of lightning could hit the building. A meteorite, even. The universe could stop expanding and time could reverse. That woman was an invited guest. She was a party contributor. She passed through two metal detectors and she was ID-checked at the door."

"Like John Malkovich."

"We’ve been through that."

"Suppose she was a martial-arts expert. Maybe military-trained in black ops. She could have broken Armstrong’s neck like you could break a pencil."

"Suppose, suppose."

"Suppose she was armed."

"She wasn’t. She passed through two metal detectors."

Reacher put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and came out with a slim brown object.

"Ever seen one of these?" he asked.

It looked like a penknife, maybe three and a half inches long. A curved handle. He clicked a button and a speckled brown blade snapped outward.

"This is entirely ceramic," he said. "Same basic stuff as a bathroom tile. Harder than anything except a diamond. Certainly harder than steel, and sharper than steel. And it doesn’t trigger a metal detector. That woman could have been carrying this thing. She could have slit Armstrong open from his belly button to his chin with it. Or cut his throat. Or stuck it in his eye."

He passed the weapon over. Froelich took it and studied it.

"Made by a firm called Boker," Reacher said. "In Solingen, Germany. They’re expensive, but they’re relatively available."

Froelich shrugged. "OK, so you bought a knife. Doesn’t prove anything."

"That knife was in the ballroom Thursday night. It was clutched in that woman’s left hand, in her pocket, with the blade open, all the time she was shaking Armstrong’s hand and pulling him close. She got his belly within three inches of it."

Froelich stared at him. "Are you serious? Who was she?"

"She was a party supporter called Elizabeth Wright, from Elizabeth, New Jersey, as it happens. She gave the campaign four thousand bucks, a grand each in her name, her husband’s, and her two kids’. She stuffed envelopes for a month, put a big sign in her front yard, and operated a phone tree on Election Day."

"So why would she carry a knife?"

"Well, actually, she didn’t."

He stood up and walked to the connecting door. Pulled his half open and knocked hard on the inner half.

"OK, Neagley," he called.

The inner door opened and a woman walked in from the next room. She was somewhere in her late thirties, medium height and slim, dressed in blue jeans and a soft gray sweatshirt. She had dark hair. Dark eyes. A great smile. The way she moved and the tendons in her wrists spoke of serious gym time.

"You’re the woman on the video," Froelich said.

Reacher smiled. "Frances Neagley, meet M. E. Froelich. M. E. Froelich, meet Frances Neagley."

"Emmy?" Frances Neagley said. "Like the television thing?"

"Initials," Reacher said.

Froelich stared at him. "Who is she?"

"The best Master Sergeant I ever worked with. Beyond expert-qualified on every kind of close-quarters combat you can think of. Scares the hell out of me, certainly. She got cut loose around the same time I did. Works as a security consultant in Chicago."

"Chicago," Froelich repeated. "That’s why the check went there."

Reacher nodded. "She funded everything, because I don’t have a credit card or a checkbook. As you already know, probably."

"So what happened to Elizabeth Wright from New Jersey?"

"I bought these clothes," Reacher said. "Or rather, you bought them for me. And the shoes. Sunglasses, too. My version of Secret Service fatigues. I went to the barber. Shaved every day. I wanted to look plausible. Then I wanted a lone woman from New Jersey, so I met a couple of Newark flights at the airport here on Thursday. Watched the crowd and latched onto Ms. Wright and told her I was a Secret Service agent and there was a big security snafu going on and she should come with me."

"How did you know she was headed to the rally?"

"I didn’t. I just looked at all the women coming out of baggage claim and tried to judge by how they looked and what they were carrying. Wasn’t easy. Elizabeth Wright was the sixth woman I approached."

"And she believed you?"

"I had impressive ID. I bought this radio earpiece from Radio Shack, two bucks. Little electrical cord disappearing down the back of my neck, see? I had a rented Town Car, black. I looked the part, believe me. She believed me. She was quite excited about the whole thing, really. I brought her back to this room and guarded her all evening while Neagley took over. I kept listening to my earpiece and talking into my watch."

Froelich switched her gaze across to Neagley.

"We wanted New Jersey for a reason," Neagley said. "Their driver’s licenses are the easiest to forge, you know that? I had a laptop and a color printer with me. I’d just gotten through making Reacher’s Secret Service ID for him. No idea if it was anything like the real thing, but it sure looked good. So I made up a Jersey license with my picture and her name and address on it, printed it out, laminated it with a thing we bought from Staples for sixty bucks, sandpapered the edges clean, scuffed it around a little bit, and shoved it in my bag. Then I dressed up some and took Ms. Wright’s party invitation with me and headed downstairs. I got into the ballroom OK. With the knife in my pocket."

"And?"

"I hung around, then I got hold of your guy. Held on for a spell."

Froelich looked straight at her. "How would you have done it?"

"I had hold of his right hand in my right. I pulled him close, he rotated slightly, I had a clear shot at the right side of his neck. Three-and-a-half-inch blade, I’d have stuck it through his carotid artery. Then jerked it around some. He’d have bled to death inside thirty seconds. I was one arm movement away from doing it. Your guys were ten feet away. They’d have plugged me afterward for sure, but they couldn’t have stopped me from getting it done."

Froelich was pale and silent. Neagley looked away.

"Without the knife would have been harder," she said. "But not impossible. Breaking his neck would have been tricky because he’s got some muscle up there. I’d have had to do a quick two-step to get his weight moving, and if your guys were fast enough they might have stopped me halfway. So I guess I’d have gone with a blow to his larynx, hard enough to crush it. A jab with my left elbow would have done the trick. I’d have been dead before him, probably, but he’d have suffocated right afterward, unless you’ve got people that could do an emergency tracheotomy on the ballroom floor within a minute or so, which I guess you don’t have."