Without Fail

campaigner, but the polls didn’t really show it because he kept that nice smile on his face the whole time. Truth is he was deadly.”
    “And you think he trod on enough toes to get himself assassinated for it?”
    Swain nodded. “That’s what I’m working on now. I’m analyzing every speech and comment, matching up his attacks against the profile of the people he was attacking.”
    “The timing is persuasive,” Stuyvesant said. “Nobody can argue with that. He was in the House for six years and the Senate for another six and barely got a nasty letter. This whole thing was triggered by something recent.”
    “And his recent history is the campaign,” Swain said.
    “Nothing way in his background?” Bannon asked.
    Swain shook his head.
    “We’re covered four ways,” he said. “First and most recent was your own FBI check when he was nominated. We’ve got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we’ve got opposition research from the other campaign from this time around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys dig up way more stuff than you do. And he’s clean.”
    “North Dakota sources?”
    “Nothing,” Swain said. “We talked to all the papers up there, matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there’s nothing wrong with the guy.”
    “So it was the campaign,” Stuyvesant said. “He pissed somebody off.”
    “Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons,” Bannon said. “Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can’t mail something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?”
    Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked his watch. Took his cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. It sat there, silent.
    “I’m sticking with the theory,” he said. “Except now I’m listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is.”
    The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief? because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.
    “Sacramento?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “No,” Bannon said. “Local. They found the rifle.”

    They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.
    “Was it a Vaime Mk2?” Bannon asked.
    “Without a doubt,” one of the techs said.
    “Serial number on it?”
    The guy shook his head. “Removed with acid.”
    “Anything you can do?”
    The guy shook his head again.
    “No,” he said. “If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.”
    “So where is it now?”
    “We’re fuming it for prints,” the guy said. “But it’s hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s been wiped.”
    “Where was it found?”
    “In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms.”
    “I guess they waited in there,” Bannon said. “Maybe five minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads.”
    “Shell cases?” Neagley asked.
    “None,” the tech said. “They must have collected their brass. But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is intact. The mud preserved it.”
    He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two