Without Fail

care of it for us, that’s for sure. So it’s one less thing for us to worry about. But I’m pretty sure they’re wasting their time.”
    “Why?” Froelich asked.
    “Because I’m pretty sure neither of these guys ever worked here.”
    “So who are they?”
    “I think they’re both outsiders. I think they’re between two and ten years older than Armstrong himself, both of them brought up and educated in remote rural areas where the schools were decent but the taxes were low.”
    “What?”
    “Think of everything we know. Think of everything we’ve seen. Then think of the very smallest part of it. The very tiniest component.”
    “Tell us,” Froelich said.
    Stuyvesant checked his watch again. Shook his head.
    “Not now,” he said. “We need to move. You can tell us later. But you’re sure?”
    “They’re both outsiders,” Reacher said. “Guaranteed. It’s in the Constitution.”

13
    Every city has a cusp, where the good part of town turns bad. Washington D.C. was no different. The border between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim inroads of its own. It was pierced in some places by gentrified corridors. Elsewhere it worked gradually, shading imperceptibly over hundreds of yards down streets where you could buy thirty different blends of tea at one end and cash checks at the other for thirty percent of the proceeds.
    The shelter selected for Armstrong’s appearance was halfway into the no-man’s-land north of Union Station. To the east were train tracks and switching yards. To the west was a highway running underground in a tunnel. All around were decayed buildings. Some of them were warehouses and some of them were apartments. Some of them were abandoned, some of them were not. The shelter itself was exactly what Froelich had described. It was a long low one-story building made of brick. It had large metal-framed windows evenly spaced in the walls. It had a yard next to it twice its own size. The yard was closed in on three sides by high brick walls. It was impossible to decipher the building’s original purpose. Maybe it had been a stable, back when Union Station’s freight had been hauled away by horses. Maybe later it was updated with new windows and used as a trucking depot after the horses faded away. Maybe it had served time as an office. It was impossible to tell.
    It housed fifty homeless people every night. They were woken early every morning and given breakfast and turned out on the streets. Then the fifty cots were stacked and stored and the floor was washed and the air was misted with disinfectant. Metal tables and chairs were carried in and placed where the beds had been. Lunch was available every day, and dinner, and then the reverse conversion to a dormitory took place at nine every evening.
    But this day was different. Thanksgiving Day was always different, and this year it was more different than usual. Wake-up call happened a little earlier and breakfast was served a little faster. The overnighters were shown the door a full half hour before normal, which was a double blow to them because cities are notoriously quiet on Thanksgiving Day and panhandling receipts are dismal. The floor was washed more thoroughly than usual and more disinfectant was sprayed into the air. The tables were positioned more exactly, the chairs were lined up more precisely, more volunteers were on hand, and all of them were wearing fresh white sweatshirts with the benefactor’s name brightly printed in red.
    The first Secret Service agents to arrive were the line-of-sight team. They had a large-scale city surveyor’s map and a telescopic sight removed from a sniper rifle. One agent walked through every step that Armstrong was scheduled to take. Every separate pace he would stop and turn around and squint through the scope and call out every window and every rooftop he could see. Because if he could see a rooftop or a window, a potential marksman on that rooftop or in that window could see him. The agent with the map would identify the building concerned and check the scale and calculate the range. Anything under seven hundred feet he marked in black.
    But it was a good location. The only available sniper nests were on the roofs of the abandoned five-story warehouses opposite. The guy with the map finished up with a straight line of just five black crosses, nothing more.