Without Fail

"There’s a factory here," she said.

Reacher nodded. "No kidding."

She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.

"This is your guy?" Reacher asked.

Neagley nodded. "What do we want?"

Reacher shrugged. "No point planning it to death. Something short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition, I guess. That should do it."

She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a personnel entrance and got halfway to the car before he saw who it was. He was tall and heavy through the neck and shoulders. He had short fair hair and an open amiable face, but he had big hands and thick wrists and wasn’t the sort of guy you’d mess with on a whim. He sketched a wave and ducked back inside and a moment later the big door started rolling up. Neagley drove in under it and it came back down behind them.

On the inside the building was about half the size it should have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers’ lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated. Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.

"This is Eddie Brown," Neagley said.

"Not my real name," the big guy said.

He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.

The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil. The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition. Reacher could smell the new brass and the crisp cardboard and faint traces of powder.

"I’m impressed," he said.

"Take what you need," Eddie said.

"Where do the serial numbers lead to?"

"The Austrian Army," Eddie said. "They kind of fizzle out after that."

Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Reacher’s new jacket carefully spread out in the Yukon’s load space over two nine-millimeter Steyr GBs, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 unsilenced machine gun, an M16 rifle, and boxes full of two hundred rounds for each weapon.

They entered Wyoming after dark, driving north on I-25. They turned left at Cheyenne and picked up I-80. They rolled west to Laramie and then headed north. The town called Grace was still five hours away, well beyond Casper. The map showed it nestled in the middle of nowhere between towering mountains on one side and infinite grasslands on the other.

"We’ll stop in Medicine Bow," Reacher said. "Sounds like a cool place. We’ll aim to get to Grace at dawn tomorrow."

Medicine Bow didn’t look like much of a cool place in the dark, but it had a motel about two miles out with rooms available. Neagley paid for them. Then they found a steakhouse a mile in the other direction and ate twelve-ounce sirloins that cost less than a drink in D.C. The place closed up around them so they took the hint and headed back to their rooms. Reacher left his coat in the truck, to hide the firepower from curious eyes. They said goodnight in the lot. Reacher went straight to bed. He heard Neagley in the shower. She was singing to herself. He could hear it, through the wall.

He woke up at four in the morning, Saturday. Neagley was showering again, and still singing. He thought: When the hell does she sleep? He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Turned his shower on hot, which must have made hers run cold, because he heard a muffled scream through the wall. So he turned it off again and waited until he heard her finish. Then he showered and dressed and met her out by the car. It was still pitch dark. Still very cold. There were flakes of snow blowing in from the west. They were drifting slowly through the parking lot lights.

"Can’t find any coffee," Neagley said.

They found some an hour north. A roadside diner was opening for breakfast. They saw its lights a mile away. It was next to the mouth of a dirt road leading down through the darkness to the Medicine Bow National Forest. The diner looked like a barn, long and low, made out of red boards. Cold outside, warm inside. They sat at a table by a curtained window and ate eggs and bacon and toast and drank strong bitter coffee.

"OK, we’ll call them one and two," Neagley said. "One is the Bismarck guy. You’ll recognize him. Two is the guy from the garage video. We might recognize him from his build. But we don’t really know what he looks like."

Reacher nodded. "So we’ll look for the Bismarck guy hanging out with some other guy. No point planning it to death."

"You don’t sound very enthusiastic."

"You should go home."

"Now that I’ve gotten you here?"

"I’ve got a bad feeling about this."

"You’re uptight that Froelich was killed. That’s all. Doesn’t mean anything’s going to happen to me."

He said nothing.

"We’re two against two," Neagley said. "You and me against two bozos, and you’re worried about it?"

"Not very," he said.

"Maybe they won’t even show. Bannon figured they’d know it was a trap."

"They’ll show," Reacher said. "They’ve been challenged. It’s a testosterone thing. And they’ve got more than enough screws loose to jump right on it."

"Nothing’s going to happen to me, if they do."

"I’d feel bad if it did."

"It’s not going to," she said.

"Tell me I’m not making you do this."

"My own free will," she said.

He nodded. "So let’s go."

They got back on the road. Snowflakes hung in the headlight beams. They drifted in weightlessly from the west and shone bright in the light and then whipped backward as they drove. They were big flakes, dry and powdery, not many of them. The road was narrow. It wandered left and right. The surface was lumpy. All around it in the darkness was a vastness so large it sucked the noise of the car away into nothing. They were driving in a bright tunnel of silence, leaping ahead from one lonely snowflake to the next.

"I guess Casper will have a police department," Reacher said.

Neagley nodded at the wheel. "Could be a hundred strong. Casper is nearly as big as Cheyenne. Nearly as big as Bismarck, actually."

"And they’ll be responsible for Grace," Reacher said.

"Alongside the state troopers, I guess."

"So any other cops we find there are our guys."

"You’re still certain they’re cops?"

He nodded. "It’s the only way everything makes sense. The initial contact with Nendick and Andretti in the cop bars, the familiarity with the NCIC, the access to the government weapons. Plus the way they slip in and out everywhere. Crowds, confusion, a gold shield gets you anywhere. And if Armstrong’s right and their dad was a cop, that’s a pretty good predictor. It’s a family trade, like the military."

"My dad wasn’t in the military."

"But mine was, so there’s fifty percent right away. Better than most other professions. And you know what the clincher is?"

"What?"

"Something we should have figured long ago. But we just skated right on by. We missed it, totally. The two dead Armstrongs. How the hell do you just find two white guys with fair hair and blue eyes and the right dates of birth and the right faces and above all the right first and last names? That’s a very tall order. But these guys did it. And there’s only one practical way of doing it, which is the national DMV database. Driver’s license information, names, addresses, dates of birth, photographs. It’s all right there, everything you need. And nobody can get into it, except cops, who can dial it right up."

Neagley was silent for a moment.

"OK, they are cops," she said.

"They sure are. And we’re brain dead for not spotting it on Tuesday."

"But cops would have heard of Armstrong long ago, wouldn’t they?"

"Why would they? Cops know about their own little world, that’s all, same as anybody else. If you worked in some rural police department in Maine or Florida or outside San Diego you might know the New York Giants quarterback or the Chicago White Sox center fielder but there’s no reason why you would have heard of North Dakota’s junior senator. Unless you were a politics junkie, and most people aren’t."

Neagley drove on. Way to the right, far to the east, a narrow band of sky was a fraction lighter than it had been. It had turned the color of dark charcoal against the blackness beyond it. The snow was no heavier, no lighter. The big lazy flakes drifted in from the mountains, floating level, sometimes rising.