Without Fail

Neagley said.
    Reacher nodded. “Something else first. It kept me awake last night for an hour. It nagged at me. Something that’s not here, or something that hasn’t been done.”
    Neagley shrugged.
    “OK,” she said. “I’ll think about it. Now get your ass in gear.”

    He dressed in the last of Joe’s suits. It was charcoal gray and as fine as silk. He used the last of the clean shirts. It was stiff with starch and as white as new snow. The last tie was dark blue with a tiny repeated pattern. When you looked very closely you saw that each element of the pattern was a diagram of a pitcher’s hand, gripping a baseball, preparing to throw a knuckleball.
    He met Neagley out in the lobby and ate a muffin from the buffet and took a cup of coffee with him in the Secret Service Town Car. They were late into the conference room. Bannon and Stuyvesant were already there. Bannon was still dressed like a city cop. Stuyvesant was back in a Brooks Brothers suit. Reacher and Neagley left one seat unoccupied between themselves and Stuyvesant. Bannon stared at the empty place, like maybe it was supposed to symbolize Froelich’s absence.
    “The FBI is not going to have agents in Grace, Wyoming,” he said. “Special request from Armstrong, via the director. He doesn’t want a circus out there.”
    “Suits me,” Reacher said.
    “You’re wasting your time,” Bannon said. “We’re complying only because we’re happy to. The bad guys know how this stuff works. They were in the business. They’ll have understood his statement was a trap. So they won’t show up.”
    Reacher nodded. “Won’t be the first trip I ever wasted.”
    “I’m warning you against independent action.”
    “There won’t be any action, according to you.”
    Bannon nodded.
    “Ballistics tests are in,” he said. “The rifle we found in the warehouse is definitely the same gun that fired the Minnesota bullet.”
    “So how did it get here?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “We burned more than a hundred man-hours last night,” Bannon said. “All I can tell you for sure is how it didn’t get here. It didn’t fly in. We checked all commercial arrivals into eight airports and there were no firearms manifests at all. Then we traced all private planes into the same eight airports. Nothing even remotely suspicious.”
    “So they drove it in?” Reacher said.
    Bannon nodded. “But Bismarck to D.C. is more than thirteen hundred miles. That’s more than twenty hours absolute minimum, even driving like a lunatic. Impossible, in the time frame. So the rifle was never in Bismarck. It came in direct from Minnesota, which was a little more than eleven hundred miles in forty-eight hours. Your grandmother could do that.”
    “My grandmother couldn’t drive,” Reacher said. “Still figuring on three guys?”
    Bannon shook his head. “No, on reflection we’re sticking at two. The whole thing profiles better that way. We figure the team was split one and one between Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday and it stayed split afterward. The guy pretending to be the Bismarck cop was acting solo at the church. We figure he had the submachine gun only. Which makes sense, because he knew Armstrong was going to be buried in agents as soon as the decoy rifle was discovered. And a submachine gun is better than a rifle against a cluster of people. Especially an H&K MP5. Our people say it’s as accurate as a rifle at a hundred yards and a lot more powerful. Thirty-round magazines, he would have chewed through six agents and gotten to Armstrong easy enough.”
    “So why was the other guy bothering to drive here at the time?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “Because these are your people,” Bannon said. “They’re realistic professionals. They knew the odds. They knew they couldn’t guarantee a hit in any one particular place. So they went through Armstrong’s schedule and planned to leapfrog ahead of each other to cover all the bases.”
    Stuyvesant said nothing.
    “But they were together yesterday,” Reacher said. “You’re saying the first guy drove the Vaime here and I saw the guy from Bismarck on the warehouse roof.”
    Bannon nodded. “No more leapfrogging, because yesterday was the last good opportunity for a spell. The Bismarck guy must have flown in, commercial, not long after the Air Force brought you back.”
    “So where’s the H&K? He must have abandoned it in Bismarck somewhere between the church and the airport. You find it?”
    “No,” Bannon said.