Without Fail

coffee,” he said.
    She moved toward the table like an automaton. He handed her a cup. She took it and backed away to the bed. The cup rattled in the saucer.
    “Two main approaches,” Reacher said. “Like in the movies, John Malkovich or Edward Fox. You’ve seen those movies?”
    She nodded blankly. “We have a guy monitoring the movies. In the Office of Protection Research. He analyzes all the assassination movies. John Malkovich made In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood.”
    “And Rene Russo,” Reacher said. “She was pretty good.”
    “Edward Fox was in The Day of the Jackal , way back.”
    Reacher nodded. “John Malkovich was looking to take out the President of the United States, and Edward Fox was looking to take out the President of France. Two competent assassins, working solo. But there was a fundamental difference between them. John Malkovich knew all along he wasn’t going to survive the mission. He knew he’d die a second after the President. But Edward Fox aimed to get away with it.”
    “He didn’t, though.”
    “It was a movie, Froelich. Had to end that way. He could have gotten away with it, easy as anything.”
    “So?”
    “It gives us two strategies to consider. A close-up suicide mission, or a clean long-distance job.”
    “We know all that. I told you, we have a person working on it. We get transcripts, analyses, memos, position papers. We talk to the screenwriters sometimes, if there’s new stuff. We want to know where they get their ideas from.”
    “Learn anything?”
    She shrugged and sipped her coffee and he saw her trawl back through her memory, like she had all the transcripts and all the memos and all the position papers stashed away in a mental filing cabinet.
    “ The Day of the Jackal impressed us, I think,” she said. “Edward Fox played a pro shooter who had a rifle built so it could be disguised as a crutch for a handicapped veteran. He used the disguise to get into a nearby building some hours before a public appearance and planned a long-range head shot from a high-floor window. He was using a silencer, so he could get away afterward. Could have worked, in theory. But the story was set a long time ago. Before I was born. Early sixties, I think. General de Gaulle, after the Algerian crisis, wasn’t it? We enforce far wider perimeters now. The movie was a factor in that, I guess. Plus our own problems in the early sixties, of course.”
    “And In the Line of Fire ?” Reacher asked.
    “John Malkovich played a renegade CIA operative,” she said. “He manufactured a plastic pistol in his basement so he could beat the metal detectors and conned his way into a campaign rally and intended to shoot the President from very close range. Whereupon, as you say, we would have taken him down immediately.”
    “But old Clint jumped into the path of the bullet,” Reacher said. “Good movie, I thought.”
    “Implausible, we thought,” Froelich answered. “Two main faults. First, the idea that you can build a working pistol from hobbyist material is absurd. We look at stuff like that all the time. His gun would have exploded, blown his hand off at the wrist. The bullet would have just fallen out of the wreckage onto the floor. And second, he spent about a hundred thousand dollars along the way. Lots and lots of travel, phony offices for mail drops, plus a fifty-thousand-dollar donation to the party that got him into the campaign rally in the first place. Our assessment was a maniac personality like that wouldn’t have big bucks to spend. We dismissed it.”
    “It was only a movie,” Reacher said. “But it was illustrative.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of the idea of getting into a rally and attacking the target from close quarters, as opposed to the old idea of going for long-distance safety.”
    Froelich paused. Then she smiled, a little warily at first, like a grave danger might be receding into the distance.
    “Is this all you’ve got?” she said. “Ideas? You had me worried.”
    “Like the rally here on Thursday night,” Reacher said. “A thousand guests. Time and place announced in advance. Advertised, even.”
    “You found the transition’s website?”
    Reacher nodded. “It was very useful. Lots of information.”
    “We vet it all.”
    “But it still told me every place Armstrong’s going to be,” Reacher said. “And when. And in what kind of a context. Like the rally right here, Thursday night. With the thousand guests.”
    “What about