Without Fail

going to pursue it,” Reacher said. “With Armstrong, or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if necessary. For Froelich’s sake. She deserves it.”
    Stuyvesant nodded. “If neither of them worked for us, how would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?”
    “I don’t know,” Reacher said.
    “How did they decoy Crosetti?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How would they get our weapons?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How did they know where M. E. lived?”
    “Nendick told them.”
    Stuyvesant nodded. “OK. But what would be their motive?”
    “Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician must make plenty of enemies.”
    Silence again.
    “Maybe it’s half and half,” Neagley said. “Maybe they’re outsiders with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work here. Maybe they’re some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs. They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons you buy.”
    “That’s possible,” Stuyvesant said. “We turn down a lot of people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be right.”
    “No,” Reacher said. “She’s wrong. Why would they wait? I’m sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?”
    “That’s a good point too,” Stuyvesant said.
    “This is about Armstrong personally,” Reacher said. “It has to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and effect. Armstrong became the running mate during the summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich told me that herself. Now we’re getting threats against him. Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign, that’s why.”
    Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned over and butted the first message under the second. Then both of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and closed it.
    “OK, this is what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to give Neagley’s theory to Bannon. Somebody we refused to hire is more or less in the same category as somebody we eventually fired. The bitterness component would be about the same. The FBI can deal with all of that as a whole. We’ve got the paperwork. They’ve got the manpower. And the balance of probability is that they’re correct. But we’d be derelict if we didn’t also consider the alternative. That they might not be correct. So we’re going to spend our time looking at Reacher’s theory. Because we’ve got to do something , for Froelich’s sake, apart from anything else. So where do we start?”
    “With Armstrong,” Reacher said. “We figure out who hates him and why.”

    Stuyvesant called a guy from the Office of Protection Research and ordered him into the office immediately. The guy pleaded he was eating Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Stuyvesant relented and gave him two hours to finish up. Then he headed back to the Hoover Building to meet with Bannon again. Reacher and Neagley waited in reception. There was a television in there and Reacher wanted to see if Armstrong delivered on the early news. It was a half hour away.
    “You OK?” Neagley asked.
    “I feel weird,” Reacher said. “Like I’m two people. She thought I was Joe with her at the end.”
    “What would Joe have done about it?”
    “Same as I’m going to do about it, probably.”
    “So go ahead and do it,” Neagley said. “You always were Joe as far as she was concerned. You may as well square the circle for her.”
    He said nothing.
    “Close your eyes,” Neagley said. “Clear your mind. You need to concentrate on the shooter.”
    Reacher shook his head. “I won’t get it if I concentrate.”
    “So think about something else. Use peripheral vision. Pretend you’re looking somewhere else. The next roof along, maybe.”
    He closed his eyes. Saw the edge of the roof, harsh against the sun. Saw the sky, bright and pale all at the same time. A winter sky. Just a trace of uniform misty haze all over it. He gazed at the sky. Recalled the sounds he had been hearing. Nothing much from the crowd. Just the clatter of serving spoons, and Froelich saying thanks for