Without Fail

"Then I thought about asking him to wear a vest."

"Wouldn’t have mattered. I would have aimed at his head. It was a beautiful day, Froelich. Clear sky, sunny, no wind at all. Cool, dense air. True air. I was a couple hundred feet away. I could have shot his eyes out."

She went quiet.

"John Malkovich or Edward Fox?" she asked.

"I’d have hit Armstrong and then as many other people as I could, three or four seconds. Cops mostly, I guess, but women and children too. I’d have aimed to wound them, not kill them. In the stomach, probably. More effective that way. People flopping around and bleeding all over the place, it would have created mass panic. Enough to get away, probably. I’d have busted out of the church within ten seconds and gotten away into the surrounding subdivision fast enough. Neagley was standing by in a car. She’d have been rolling soon as she heard the shots. So I’d probably have been Edward Fox."

Froelich stood up and walked to the window. Put her hands palms down on the sill and stared out at the weather.

"This is a disaster," she said.

Reacher said nothing.

"I guess I didn’t anticipate your level of focus," she said. "I didn’t know it was going to be all-out guerrilla warfare."

Reacher shrugged. "Assassins aren’t necessarily going to be the gentlest people you’ll ever meet. And they’re the ones who make the rules here."

Froelich nodded. "And I didn’t know you were going to get help, especially not from a woman."

"I kind of warned you," Reacher said. "I told you it couldn’t work if you were watching for me coming. You can’t expect assassins to call ahead with their plans."

"I know," she said. "But I was imagining a lone man, is all."

"It’s always going to be a team," Reacher said. "There are no lone men."

He saw an ironic half smile reflected in the glass.

"So you don’t believe the Warren Report?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Neither do you," he said. "No professional ever will."

"I don’t feel like much of a professional today," she said.

Neagley stood up and stepped over and perched on the sill, next to Froelich, her back against the glass.

"Context," she said. "That’s what you’ve got to think about. It’s not so bad. Reacher and I were United States Army Criminal Investigation Division specialists. We were trained in all kinds of ways. Trained to think, mostly. Trained to be inventive. And to be ruthless, for sure, and self-confident. And tougher than the people we were responsible for, and some of them were plenty tough. So we’re very unusual. People as specialized as us, there’s not more than maybe ten thousand in the whole country."

"Ten thousand is a lot," Froelich said.

"Out of two hundred eighty-one million? And how many of them are currently the right age and available and motivated? It’s a statistically irrelevant fraction. So don’t sweat it. You’ve got an impossible job. You’re required to leave him vulnerable. Because he’s a politician. He’s got to do all this visible stuff. We would never have dreamed of letting anybody do what Armstrong does. Never in a million years. It would have been completely out of the question."

Froelich turned around and faced the room. Swallowed once and nodded vaguely into the middle distance.

"Thanks," she said. "For trying to make me feel better. But I’ve got some thinking to do, don’t I?"

"Perimeters," Reacher said. "Keep the perimeters to a half-mile all around, keep the public away from him, and keep at least four agents literally within touching distance at all times. That’s all you can do."

Froelich shook her head.

"Can’t do it," she said. "It would be considered unreasonable. Undemocratic, even. And there are going to be hundreds of weeks like this one over the next three years. After three years it’ll start to get worse because they’ll be in their final year and they’ll be trying to get reelected and everything will have to be looser still. And about seven years from now Armstrong will start looking for the nomination in his own right. Seen how they do that? Crowd scenes all over the place from New Hampshire onward? Town meetings in shirtsleeves? Fund-raisers? It’s a complete nightmare."

The room went quiet. Neagley peeled off the windowsill and walked across the room to the credenza. Took two thin files out of the drawer the photographs had been in. She held up the first.

"A written report," she said. "Salient points and recommendations, from a professional perspective."

"OK," Froelich said.

Neagley held up the second file.

"And our expenses," she said. "They’re all accounted for. Receipts and all. You should make the check payable to Reacher. It was his money."

"OK," Froelich said again. She took the files and clasped them to her chest, like they offered her protection from something.

"And there’s Elizabeth Wright from New Jersey," Reacher said. "Don’t forget her. She needs to be taken care of. I told her that to make up for missing the reception you’d probably invite her to the Inauguration Ball."

"OK," Froelich said for the third time. "The Ball, whatever. I’ll speak to somebody about it."

Then she just stood still.

"This is a disaster," she said again.

"You’ve got an impossible job," Reacher said. "Don’t beat up on yourself."

She nodded. "Joe used to tell me the same thing. He said, in the circumstances, we should consider a ninety-five percent success rate a triumph."

"Ninety-four percent," Reacher said. "You’ve lost one President out of eighteen since you guys took over. Six percent failure rate. That’s not too bad."

"Ninety-four, ninety-five," she said. "Whatever, I guess he was right."

"Joe was right about a lot of things, the way I recall it."

"But we’ve never lost a Vice President," she said. "Not yet."

She put the files under one arm and stacked the photographs on the credenza and butted them around with her fingertips until they were neatly piled. Picked them up and put them in her bag. Then she glanced at each of the four walls in turn, like she was memorizing their exact details. A distracted little gesture. She nodded at nothing in particular and headed for the door.

"Got to go," she said.

She walked out of the room and the door sucked shut behind her. There was silence for a spell. Then Neagley stood up straight at the end of one of the beds and clamped the cuffs of her sweatshirt in her palms and stretched her arms high above her head. She tilted her head back and yawned. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders. The hem of her shirt rode up and Reacher saw hard muscle above the waistband of her jeans. It was ridged like a turtle’s back.

"You still look good," he said.

"So do you, in black."

"Feels like a uniform," he said. "Five years since I last wore one."

Neagley finished stretching. Smoothed her hair and pulled the hem of her shirt back down into place.

"Are we done here?" she asked.

"Tired?"

"Exhausted. We worked our butts off, ruining that poor woman’s day."

"What did you think of her?"

"I liked her. And like I told her, I think she’s got an impossible job. And all in all, I think she’s pretty good at it. I doubt if anybody else could do it better. And I think she kind of knows that too, but it’s burning her up that she’s forced to settle for ninety-five percent instead of a hundred."

"I agree."

"Who’s this guy Joe she was talking about?"

"An old boyfriend."

"You knew him?"

"My brother. She dated him."

"When?"

"They broke up six years ago."

"What’s he like?"

Reacher glanced at the floor. Didn’t correct the is to a was.

"Like a civilized version of me," he said.

"So maybe she’ll want to date you, too. Civilized can be an overrated virtue. And collecting the complete set is always fun for a girl."

Reacher said nothing. The room went quiet.

"I guess I’ll head home," Neagley said. "Back to Chicago. Back to the real world. But I got to say, it was a pleasure working with you again."

"Liar."

"No, really, I mean it."

"So stick around. A buck gets ten she’ll be back inside an hour."

Neagley smiled. "What, to ask you out?"

Reacher shook his head. "No, to tell us what her real problem is."

Chapter 4

Froelich walked across the sidewalk to her Suburban. Spilled the files onto the passenger seat. Started the engine and kept her foot hard on the brake. Pulled her phone from her bag and flipped it open. Entered Stuyvesant’s home number digit by digit and then paused with her finger resting on the call button. The phone waited patiently with the number displayed on the tiny green screen. She looked ahead through the windshield, fighting with herself. She looked down at the phone. Back out at the street. Her finger rested on the button. Then she flipped the phone shut and dropped it on top of the files. Pulled the transmission lever into drive and took off from the curb with a loud chirp from all four tires. Hung a left and a right and headed for her office.

The room-service guy came back to collect the coffee tray and left with it. Reacher took his jacket off and hung it in the closet. Pulled the T-shirt out of the waistband of his jeans.