Without Fail

were smeared with black residue from Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich’s case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti’s. The Minnesota bullet looked new. Its passage through the farmyard mud had scoured it clean.
    “Get the rifle,” Bannon said.
    It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot super-glue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.
    “That’s the wrong scope,” Reacher said. “That’s a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes.”
    “Yeah, it’s been modified,” one of the techs said. “We already logged that.”
    “By the factory?”
    The guy shook his head.
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “High standard, but it’s not factory workmanship.”
    “So what does that mean?” Bannon asked.
    “I’m not sure,” Reacher said.
    “Is a Hensoldt better than a Bushnell?”
    “Not really. They’re both fine scopes. Like BMW and Mercedes. Like Canon and Nikon.”
    “So a person might have a preference?”
    “Not a government person,” Reacher said. “Like, what would you say if one of your crime scene photographers came to you and said, I want a Canon instead of this Nikon you gave me?”
    “I’d probably tell him to get lost.”
    “Exactly. He works with what he’s got. So I don’t see somebody going to their department armorer and asking him to junk a thousand-dollar Bushnell just because he prefers the feel of a thousand-dollar Hensoldt.”
    “So why the switch?”
    “I’m not sure,” Reacher said again. “Damage, maybe. If you drop a rifle you can damage a sniper scope pretty easily. But a government repairer would use another Bushnell. They don’t just buy the rifles. They buy crateloads of spare parts along with them.”
    “Suppose they were short? Suppose the scopes got damaged a lot?”
    “Then they might use a Hensoldt, I guess. Hensoldts usually come with SIG rifles. You need to look at your lists again. Find out if there’s anybody who buys Vaimes and SIGs for their snipers.”
    “Is the SIG silenced too?”
    “No,” Reacher said.
    “So there you go,” Bannon said. “Some agency needs two types of sniper rifles, it buys Vaimes as the silenced option and SIGs as the unsilenced option. Two types of scope in the spare-parts bins. They run out of Bushnells, they start in on the Hensoldts.”
    “Possible,” Reacher said. “You should make the inquiries. You should ask specifically if anybody has fitted a Hensoldt scope to a Vaime rifle. And if they haven’t, you should start asking commercial gunsmiths. Start with the expensive ones. These are rare pieces. This could be important.”
    Stuyvesant was staring into the distance. Worry in the slope of his shoulders.
    “What?” Reacher asked.
    Stuyvesant focused, and shook his head. A defeated little gesture.
    “I’m afraid we bought SIGs,” he said, quietly. “We had a batch of SG550s about five years ago. Unsilenced semiautomatics, as an alternative option. But we don’t use them much because the automatic mechanism makes them a little inaccurate for close crowd situations. They’re mostly stored. We use the Vaimes everywhere now. So I’m sure the SIG parts bins are still full.”
    The room was quiet for a moment. Then Bannon’s phone rang again. The insane little overture trilled into the silence. He clicked it on and put it to his ear and said yeah and listened.
    “I see,” he said. Listened some more.
    “The doctor agree?” he asked. Listened some more.
    “I see,” he said, and listened.
    “I guess,” he said, and listened.
    “Two?” he asked, and listened.
    “OK,” he said, and clicked the phone off.
    “Upstairs,” he said. He was pale.
    Stuyvesant and Reacher and Neagley followed him out to the elevator and rode with him up to the conference room. He sat at the head of the table and the others stayed together toward the other end, like they didn’t want to get too close to the news. The sky was full dark