Without Fail

anywhere.
    “I knew your brother very well,” she said. “We dated, Joe and I. More than dated, really. We were pretty serious for a time. Before he died.”
    Reacher said nothing. The woman flushed.
    “Well, obviously before he died,” she said. “Stupid thing to say.”
    She went quiet.
    “When?” Reacher asked.
    “We were together two years. We broke up a year before it happened.”
    Reacher nodded.
    “I’m M. E. Froelich,” she said.
    She left an unspoken question hanging in the air: did he ever mention me? Reacher nodded again, trying to make it like the name meant something. But it didn’t. Never heard of you , he thought. But maybe I wish I had .
    “Emmy?” he said. “Like the television thing?”
    “M. E.,” she said. “I go by my initials.”
    “What are they for?”
    “I won’t tell you that.”
    He paused a beat. “What did Joe call you?”
    “He called me Froelich,” she said.
    He nodded. “Yes, he would.”
    “I still miss him,” she said.
    “Me too, I guess,” Reacher said. “So is this about Joe, or is it about something else?”
    She was still again, for another beat. Then she shook herself, a tiny subliminal quiver, and came back all business.
    “Both,” she said. “Well, mainly something else, really.”
    “Want to tell me what?”
    “I want to hire you for something,” she said. “On a kind of posthumous recommendation from Joe. Because of what he used to say about you. He talked about you, time to time.”
    Reacher nodded. “Hire me for what?”
    Froelich paused again and came up with a tentative smile.
    “I’ve rehearsed this line,” she said. “Couple of times.”
    “So let me hear it.”
    “I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States.”

2
    “Good line,” Reacher said. “Interesting proposition.”
    “What’s your answer?” Froelich asked.
    “No,” he said. “Right now I think that’s probably the safest all-around response.”
    She smiled the tentative smile again and picked up her purse.
    “Let me show you some ID,” she said.
    He shook his head.
    “Don’t need it,” he said. “You’re United States Secret Service.”
    She looked at him. “You’re pretty quick.”
    “It’s pretty clear,” he said.
    “Is it?”
    He nodded. Touched his right elbow. It was bruised.
    “Joe worked for them,” he said. “And knowing the way he was, he probably worked pretty hard, and he was a little shy, so anybody he dated was probably in the office, otherwise he would never have met them. Plus, who else except the government keeps two-year-old Suburbans this shiny? And parks next to hydrants? And who else but the Secret Service could track me this efficiently through my banking arrangements?”
    “You’re pretty quick,” she said again.
    “Thank you,” he said back. “But Joe didn’t have anything to do with Vice Presidents. He was in Financial Crimes, not the White House protection detail.”
    She nodded. “We all start out in Financial Crimes. We pay our dues as anticounterfeiting grunts. And he ran anticounterfeiting. And you’re right, we met in the office. But he wouldn’t date me then. He said it wasn’t appropriate. But I was planning on transferring across to the protection detail as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I did, we started going out.”
    Then she went a little quiet again. Looked down at her purse.
    “And?” Reacher said.
    She looked up. “Something he said one night. I was kind of keen and ambitious back then, you know, starting a new job and all, and I was always trying to figure out if we were doing the best we could, and Joe and I were goofing around, and he said the only real way for us to test ourselves would be to hire some outsider to try to get to the target. To see if it was possible, you know. A security audit, he called it. I asked him, like who? And he said, my little brother would be the one. If anybody could do it, he could. He made you sound pretty scary.”
    Reacher smiled. “That sounds like Joe. A typical harebrained scheme.”
    “You think?”
    “For a smart guy, Joe could be very dumb sometimes.”
    “Why is it dumb?”
    “Because if you hire some outsider, all you need to do is watch for him coming. Makes it way too easy.”
    “No, his idea was the person would come in anonymously and unannounced. Like now, absolutely nobody knows about you except me.”
    Reacher nodded. “OK, maybe he wasn’t so dumb.”
    “He felt it was the only way. You