Without Fail

know, however hard we work, we’re always thinking inside the box. He felt we should be prepared to test ourselves against some random challenge from the outside.”
    “And he nominated me?”
    “He said you’d be ideal.”
    “So why wait so long to try it? Whenever this conversation was, it had to be at least six years ago. Didn’t take you six years to find me.”
    “It was eight years ago,” Froelich said. “Right at the start of our relationship, just after I got the transfer. And it only took me one day to find you.”
    “So you’re pretty quick, too,” Reacher said. “But why wait eight years?”
    “Because now I’m in charge. I was promoted head of the Vice President’s detail four months ago. And I’m still keen and ambitious, and I still want to know that we’re doing it right. So I decided to follow Joe’s advice, now that it’s my call. I decided to try a security audit. And you were recommended, so to speak. All those years ago, by somebody I trusted very much. So I’m here to ask you if you’ll do it.”
    “You want to get a cup of coffee?”
    She looked surprised, like coffee wasn’t on the agenda.
    “This is urgent business,” she said.
    “Nothing’s too urgent for coffee,” he said. “That’s been my experience. Drive me back to my motel and I’ll take you to the downstairs lounge. Coffee’s OK, and it’s a very dark room. Just right for a conversation like this.”

    The government Suburban had a DVD-based navigation system built into the dash, and Reacher watched her fire it up and pick the motel’s street address off a long list of potential Atlantic City destinations.
    “I could have told you where it is,” he said.
    “I’m used to this thing,” she said. “It talks to me.”
    “I wasn’t going to use hand signals,” he said.
    She smiled again and pulled out into the traffic. There wasn’t much. Evening gloom was falling. The wind was still blowing. The casinos might do OK, but the boardwalk and the piers and the beaches weren’t going to see much business for the next six months. He sat still next to her in the warmth from the heater and thought about her with his dead brother for a moment. Then he just watched her drive. She was pretty good at it. She parked outside the motel door and he led her inside and down a half-flight of stairs to the lounge. It smelled stale and sticky, but it was warm and there was a flask of coffee on the machine behind the bar. He pointed at it, and then at himself and Froelich, and the barman got busy. Then he walked to a corner booth and slid in across the vinyl with his back to the wall and the whole room in sight. Old habits . Froelich clearly had the same habits because she did the same thing, so they ended up close together and side by side. Their shoulders were almost touching.
    “You’re very similar to him,” she said.
    “In some ways,” he said. “Not in others. Like, I’m still alive.”
    “You weren’t at his funeral.”
    “It came at an inopportune time.”
    “You sound just the same.”
    “Brothers often do.”
    The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.
    “People liked him,” Froelich said.
    “He was OK, I guess.”
    “Is that all?”
    “That’s a compliment, one brother to another.”
    He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.
    “You drink it black,” Froelich said. “Just like Joe.”
    Reacher nodded. “Thing I can’t get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I’m three years older than he ever got to be.”
    Froelich looked away. “I know. He just stopped being there, but the world carried on anyway. It should have changed, just a little bit.”
    She sipped her coffee. Black, no sugar. Just like Joe .
    “Nobody ever think of doing it, apart from him?” Reacher asked. “Using an outsider for a security audit?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Secret Service is a relatively old organization.”
    “So?”
    “So I’m going to ask you an obvious question.”
    She nodded. “President Lincoln signed us into existence just after lunch on April fourteenth, 1865. Then he went to the theater that same night and got assassinated.”
    “Ironic.”
    “From our perspective, now. But back then we were only supposed to protect the currency. Then McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they