Without Fail

again.
    “How long did you see him for in Bismarck?” Bannon asked.
    “Ten seconds, maybe,” Reacher said. “He was heading for the church. Maybe he’d seen me inside, ducked out, saw me leave, turned around, got ready to go back in.”
    “Ten and a quarter seconds total,” Bannon said. “Both times in panic situations. Defense counsel would eat you up.”
    “It makes sense,” Stuyvesant said. “Bismarck is Armstrong’s hometown. Hometowns are the places to look for feuds.”
    Bannon made a face. “Description?”
    “Tall,” Reacher said. “Sandy hair going gray. Lean face, lean body. Long coat, some kind of a heavy twill, reddish-brown, open. Tweed jacket, white shirt, tie, gray flannel pants. Big old shoes.”
    “Age?”
    “Middle or late forties.”
    “Rank?”
    “He showed me a gold badge, but he stayed twenty feet away. I couldn’t read it. He struck me as a senior guy. Maybe a detective lieutenant, maybe even a captain.”
    “Did he speak?”
    “He shouted from twenty feet away. Couple dozen words, maybe.”
    “Was he the guy on the phone?”
    “No.”
    “So now we know both of them,” Stuyvesant said. “A shorter squat guy in a herringbone overcoat from the garage video and a tall lean cop from Bismarck. The squat guy spoke on the phone, and it’s his thumbprint. And he was in Colorado with the machine gun because the cop is the marksman with the rifle. That’s why he was heading for the church tower. He was going to shoot.”
    Bannon opened a file. Pulled a sheet of paper. Studied it carefully.
    “Our Bismarck field office listed all attending personnel,” he said. “There were forty-two local cops on the field. Nobody above the rank of sergeant except for two, firstly the senior officer present, who was a captain, and his second-in-command, who was a lieutenant.”
    “Might have been either one of them,” Reacher said.
    Bannon sighed. “This puts us in a difficult spot.”
    Stuyvesant stared at him. “Now you’re worried about upsetting the Bismarck PD? You didn’t worry too much about upsetting us.”
    “I’m not worried about upsetting anybody,” Bannon said. “I’m thinking tactically, is all. If it had been a patrolman out there I could call the captain or the lieutenant and ask him to investigate. Can’t do that the other way around. And alibis are going to be all over the place. Senior ranks will be off-duty today for the holiday.”
    “Call now,” Neagley said. “Find out who’s not in town. They can’t be home yet. You’re watching the airports.”
    Bannon shook his head. “People aren’t home today for lots of reasons. They’re visiting family, stuff like that. And this guy could be home already. He could have gotten through the airports easy as anything. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Mayhem like we had today, multiple agencies out and looking, nobody knows each other, all he’s got to do is hustle along holding his badge up and he walks straight through anywhere. That’s obviously how they got into the immediate area. And out again. What’s more natural in the circumstances than a cop running full speed with his badge held up?”
    The room went quiet.
    “Personnel files,” Stuyvesant said. “We should get Bismarck PD to send us their files and let Reacher look at the photographs.”
    “That would take days,” Bannon said. “And who would I ask? I might be speaking directly to the bad guy.”
    “So speak to your Bismarck field office,” Neagley said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if the local FBI had illicit summaries on the whole police department, with photographs.”
    Bannon smiled. “You’re not supposed to know about things like that.”
    Then he stood up slowly and went out to his office to make the necessary call.

    “So Armstrong made the statement,” Stuyvesant said. “Did you see it? But it’s going to cost him politically, because I can’t let him go.”
    “I need a decoy, is all,” Reacher said. “Better for me if he doesn’t really show up. And the last thing I care about right now is politics.”
    Stuyvesant didn’t answer. Nobody spoke again. Bannon came back into the room after fifteen minutes. He had a completely neutral look on his face.
    “Good news and bad news,” he said. “Good news is that Bismarck isn’t the largest city on earth. Police department employs a hundred thirty-eight people, of which thirty-two are civilian workers, leaving a hundred and six badged officers. Twelve of those are