Without Fail

office?”
    “Not in a million years. I like a low profile, Reacher. I was a sergeant, and I always will be, inside. Never wanted to be an officer.”
    “You had the potential.”
    She shrugged and smiled, all at the same time. “Maybe I did. But what I didn’t have was the desire. And you know what? Sergeants have plenty of power. More than you guys ever realized.”
    “Hey, I realized,” he said. “Believe me, I realized.”
    “She’s not coming back, you know. We’re sitting here talking and wasting time and I’m missing all kinds of flights home, and she’s not coming back.”
    “She’s coming back.”

    Froelich parked in the garage and headed upstairs. Presidential protection was a 24/7 operation, but Sundays still felt different. People dressed different, the air was quieter, phone traffic was down. Some people spent the day at home. Like Stuyvesant, for instance . She closed her office door and sat at her desk and opened a drawer. Took out the things she needed and slipped them into a large brown envelope. Then she opened Reacher’s expenses file and copied the figure on the bottom line onto the top sheet of her yellow pad and switched her shredder on. Fed the whole file into it, sheet by sheet, and then followed it with the file of recommendations and all the six-by-four photographs, one by one. She fed the file folders themselves in and stirred the long curling shreds around in the output bin until they were hopelessly tangled. Then she switched the machine off again and picked up the envelope and headed back down to the garage.

    Reacher saw her car from the hotel room window. It came around the corner and slowed. There was no traffic on the street. Late in the afternoon, on a November Sunday in D.C. The tourists were in their hotels, showering, getting ready for dinner. The natives were home, reading their newspapers, watching the NFL on television, paying bills, doing chores. The air was fogging with evening. Streetlights were sputtering to life. The black Suburban had its headlights on. It pulled a wide U across both lanes and slid into an area reserved for waiting taxis.
    “She’s back,” Reacher said.
    Neagley joined him at the window. “We can’t help her.”
    “Maybe she isn’t looking for help.”
    “Then why would she come back?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “A second opinion? Validation? Maybe she just wants to talk. You know, a problem shared is a problem halved.”
    “Why talk to us?”
    “Because we didn’t hire her and we can’t fire her. And we weren’t rivals for her position. You know how these organizations work.”
    “Is she allowed to talk to us?”
    “Didn’t you ever talk to somebody you shouldn’t have?”
    Neagley made a face. “Occasionally. Like, I talked to you.”
    “And I talked to you, which was worse, because you weren’t an officer.”
    “But I had the potential.”
    “That’s for damn sure,” he said, looking down. “Now she’s just sitting there.”
    “She’s on the phone. She’s calling somebody.”
    The room phone rang.
    “Us, evidently,” Reacher said.
    He picked up the phone.
    “We’re still here,” he said.
    Then he listened for a moment.
    “OK,” he said, and put the phone down.
    “She coming up?” Neagley asked. He nodded and went back to the window in time to see Froelich climbing out of the car. She was holding an envelope. She skipped across the sidewalk and disappeared from sight. Two minutes later they heard the distant chime of the elevator arriving on their floor. Twenty seconds after that, a knock on the door. Reacher stepped over and opened up and Froelich walked in and stopped in the middle of the room. Glanced first at Neagley, and then at Reacher.
    “Can we have a minute in private?” she asked him.
    “Don’t need one,” he said. “The answer is yes.”
    “You don’t know the question yet.”
    “You trust me, because you trusted Joe and Joe trusted me, therefore that loop is closed. Now you want to know if I trust Neagley, so you can close that loop also, and the answer is yes, I trust her absolutely, therefore you can too.”
    “OK,” Froelich said. “I guess that was the question.”
    “So take your jacket off and make yourself at home. You want more coffee?”
    Froelich slipped out of her jacket and dumped it on the bed. Stepped over to the table and laid the envelope down.
    “More coffee would be fine,” she said.
    Reacher dialed room service and asked for a large pot and