Without Fail

three cups, three saucers, and absolutely nothing else.
    “I only told you half the truth before,” Froelich said.
    “I guessed,” Reacher said.
    Froelich nodded apologetically and picked up the envelope. Opened the flap and pulled out a clear vinyl page protector. There was something in it.
    “This is a copy of something that came in the mail,” she said.
    She dropped it on the table and Reacher and Neagley inched their chairs closer to take a look. The page protector was a standard office product. The thing inside it was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a single sheet of white paper. It was shown lying on a wooden surface and had a wooden office ruler laid alongside it to indicate scale. It looked like a normal letter-sized sheet. Centered left to right on it, an inch or so above the middle, were five words: You are going to die . The words were crisp and bold, obviously printed from a computer.
    The room stayed quiet.
    “When did it come?” Reacher asked.
    “The Monday after the election,” Froelich said. “First-class mail.”
    “Addressed to Armstrong?”
    Froelich nodded. “At the Senate. But he hasn’t seen it yet. We open all public mail addressed to protectees. We pass on whatever is appropriate. We didn’t think this was appropriate. What do you think of it?”
    “Two things, I guess. First, it’s true.”
    “Not if I can help it.”
    “You discovered the secret of immortality? Everybody’s going to die, Froelich. I am, you are. Maybe when we’re a hundred, but we aren’t going to live forever. So technically it’s a statement of fact. An accurate prediction, as much as a threat.”
    “Which raises a question,” Neagley said. “Is the sender smart enough to have phrased it that way on purpose?”
    “What would be the purpose?”
    “To avoid prosecution if you find him? Or her? To be able to say, hey, it wasn’t a threat, it was a statement of fact? Anything we can infer from the forensics about the sender’s intelligence?”
    Froelich looked at her in surprise. And with a measure of respect.
    “We’ll get to that,” she said. “And we’re pretty sure it’s a him, not a her.”
    “Why?”
    “We’ll get to that,” Froelich said again.
    “But why are you worrying about it?” Reacher asked. “That’s my second reaction. Surely those guys get sackloads of threats in the mail.”
    Froelich nodded. “Several thousand a year, typically. But most of them are sent to the President. It’s fairly unusual to get one directed specifically at the Vice President. And most of them are on old scraps of paper, written in crayon, bad spelling, crossings out. Defective, in some way. And this one isn’t defective. This one stood out from the start. So we looked at it pretty hard.”
    “Where was it mailed?”
    “Las Vegas,” Froelich said. “Which doesn’t really help us. In terms of Americans traveling inside America, Vegas has the biggest transient population there is.”
    “You’re sure an American sent it?”
    “It’s a percentage game. We’ve never had a written threat from a foreigner.”
    “And you don’t think he’s a Vegas resident?”
    “Very unlikely. We think he traveled there to mail it.”
    “Because?” Neagley asked.
    “Because of the forensics,” Froelich said. “They’re spectacular. They indicate a very careful and cautious guy.”
    “Details?”
    “Were you a specialist? In the military police?”
    “She was a specialist in breaking people’s necks,” Reacher said. “But I guess she took an intelligent interest in the other stuff.”
    “Ignore him,” Neagley said. “I spent six months training in the FBI labs.”
    Froelich nodded. “We sent this to the FBI. Their facilities are better than ours.”
    There was a knock at the door. Reacher stood up and walked over and put his eye to the peephole. The room-service guy, with the coffee. Reacher opened the door and took the tray from him. A large pot, three upside-down cups, three saucers, no milk or sugar or spoons, and a single pink rose in a thin china vase. He carried the tray back to the table and Froelich moved the photograph to give him room to put it down. Neagley righted the cups and started to pour.
    “What did the FBI find?” she asked.
    “The envelope was clean,” Froelich said. “Standard brown letter size, gummed flap, metal butterfly closure. The address was printed on a self-adhesive label, presumably by the same computer that printed the message. The message was