Without Fail

guess I’ve read it,” Stuyvesant said. “A long time ago, probably.”
    “Me too,” Reacher said. “Some school I was at gave us a copy each. It was a thin little book, thick cardboard covers. Very narrow when it was shut. The edges were hard. We used to karate-chop each other with it. Hurt like hell.”
    “So?”
    “It’s a legal document, basically. Historical, too, of course, but it’s fundamentally legal. So when somebody prints it up as a book, they can’t mess with it. They have to reproduce it exactly word for word, otherwise it wouldn’t be valid. They can’t modernize the language, they can’t clean it up.”
    “Obviously not.”
    “The early parts are from 1787. The last amendment in my copy was the twenty-sixth, from 1971, lowering the voting age to eighteen. A span of a hundred and eighty-four years. With everything reproduced exactly like it was written down at the particular time.”
    “So?”
    “One thing I remember is that in the first part, Vice President is written without a hyphen between the two words. Same in the latest part. No hyphen. But in the stuff that was written in the middle period, there is a hyphen. It’s Vice-President with a hyphen between the words. So clearly from about the 1860s up to maybe the 1930s it was considered correct usage to use a hyphen there.”
    “These guys use a hyphen,” Stuyvesant said.
    “They sure do,” Reacher said. “Right there in the second message.”
    “So what does that mean?”
    “Two things,” Reacher said. “We know they paid attention in class, because they’re reasonably literate. So the first thing it means is that they went to school someplace where they used old textbooks and old style manuals that were way out of date. Which explains the third message’s archaic feel, maybe. And which is why I figured they might be from a poor rural area with low school taxes. Second thing it means is they never worked for the Secret Service. Because you guys are buried in paperwork. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Army. Anybody who worked here would have written Vice President a million times over in their career. All with the modern usage without the hyphen. They would have gotten totally used to it that way.”
    There was quiet for a moment.
    “Maybe the other guy wrote it,” Stuyvesant said. “The one who didn’t work here. The one with the thumbprint.”
    “Makes no difference,” Reacher said. “Like Bannon figured, they’re a unit. They’re collaborators. And perfectionists. If one guy had written it wrong, the other guy would have corrected it. But it wasn’t corrected, therefore neither of them knew it was wrong. Therefore neither of them worked here.”
    Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.
    “I want to believe it,” he said. “But you’re basing everything on a hyphen.”
    “Don’t dismiss it,” Reacher said.
    “I’m not dismissing it,” Stuyvesant said. “I’m thinking.”
    “About whether I’m crazy?”
    “About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch.”
    “That’s the beauty of it,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the alternative scenario.”
    “It could be deliberate,” Neagley said. “They might be misleading us. Trying to disguise their background or their education level. Throwing us off.”
    Reacher shook his head.
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “This is too subtle. They’d do all the usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen between Vice and President is something you don’t know from right or wrong. It’s something you just do.”
    “What are the exact implications?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “Age is critical,” Reacher said. “They can’t be older than early fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders, down stairs. They can’t be younger than mid-forties, because you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970 every school in America had new books. I think they were in junior high at or toward the end of the period when isolated rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date maps on the wall, you’re sitting there with all your cousins listening to some gray-haired old lady.”
    “It’s very speculative,” Stuyvesant said. “It’s a pyramid too, balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over.”
    Silence in the room.
    “Well, I’m