Without Fail

side.
    “Coffee?” Mrs. Armstrong asked.
    Reacher nodded and she stood up and walked into the kitchen area and pulled two more mugs off hooks and filled them. Walked back with one in each hand. Reacher couldn’t decide if she was short or tall. She was one of those women who look short in flat shoes and tall in heels. She handed the mugs over without much expression. Armstrong looked up from his papers.
    “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Neagley said.
    Armstrong nodded.
    “Mr. Stuyvesant told me you want a private conversation,” he said.
    “Private would be good,” Reacher said.
    “Should my wife join us?”
    “That depends on your definition of privacy.”
    Mrs. Armstrong glanced at her husband.
    “You can tell me afterward,” she said. “Before you leave. If you need to.”
    Armstrong nodded again and made a show of folding his newspapers. Then he stood up and detoured to the coffee machine and refilled his mug.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    He led them back to the doglegged hallway and into a side room. Two agents followed and stood on each side of the door on the outside. Armstrong glanced out at them as if in apology and shut the door on them. Walked around and stood behind a desk. The room was set up like a study, but it was more recreational than for real. There was no computer. The desk was a big old item made from dark wood. There were leather chairs and books chosen for the look of their spines. There was paneling and an old Persian rug. There was an air freshener somewhere putting fragrance into the hush. There was a framed photograph on the wall. It showed a person of indeterminate gender standing on an ice floe. He or she was wearing an enormous padded down coat with a hood and thick mittens that reached the elbow. The hood had a big fur ruff that framed the face tight. The face itself was entirely hidden by a ski mask and smoked yellow snow goggles. One of the elbow-high mittens was raised in greeting.
    “Our daughter,” Armstrong said. “We asked her for a photo, because we miss her. That’s what she sent. She has a sense of humor.”
    He sat down behind the desk. Reacher and Neagley took a chair each.
    “This all feels very confidential,” Armstrong said.
    Reacher nodded. “And in the end I think we’ll all agree it should be kept confidential.”
    “What’s on your mind?”
    “Mr. Stuyvesant gave us some ground rules,” Reacher said. “I’m going to start breaking them right now. The Secret Service intercepted six threatening messages against you. The first came in the mail eighteen days ago. Two more came in the mail subsequently and three were hand-delivered.”
    Armstrong said nothing.
    “You don’t seem surprised,” Reacher said.
    Armstrong shrugged.
    “Politics is a surprising business,” he said.
    “I guess it is,” Reacher said. “All six messages were signed with a thumbprint. We traced the print to an old guy in California. His thumb had been amputated and stolen and used like a rubber stamp.”
    Armstrong said nothing.
    “The second message showed up in Stuyvesant’s own office. Eventually it was proved that a surveillance technician named Nendick had placed it there. Nendick’s wife had been kidnapped in order to coerce his actions. He was so frightened of the danger to her posed by his inevitable interrogation that he went into some kind of a coma. But we’re guessing she was already dead by then anyway.”
    Armstrong was silent.
    “There’s a researcher in the office called Swain who made an important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting. He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we added the guy in California who’d had his thumb removed and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration against you.”
    “Oh no,” Armstrong said.
    “So, ten messages,” Reacher said. “All of them designed to torment you, except you hadn’t been told about any of them. But then I started wondering whether we’re still miscounting. And you know what? I’m pretty sure we are. I think there were at least eleven messages.”
    Silence in the small room.
    “What would be the eleventh?” Armstrong asked.
    “Something that slipped through,” Reacher said. “Something that came in the mail,