Without Fail

desk, it would stand out.”
    Reacher nodded. The desktop looked like the foredeck of a battleship made ready for inspection by an admiral. A speck of dust would have stood out.
    “Eight o’clock Thursday morning, the secretary comes in again,” Froelich said. “She walks straight to her own desk and starts work. Doesn’t open Stuyvesant’s door at all. Ten after eight, Stuyvesant himself shows up. He’s carrying a briefcase and wearing a raincoat. He takes off the raincoat and hangs it up on the coatrack. His secretary speaks to him and he sets his briefcase upright on her desk and confers with her about something. Then he opens his door and walks into his office. He’s not carrying anything. He’s left his briefcase on the secretary’s desk. About four or five seconds later he comes back out. Calls his secretary in. They both confirm that at that point, the sheet of paper was there on the desk.”
    Neagley glanced around the office, at the door, at the desk, at the distance between the door and the desk.
    “Is this just their testimony?” she asked. “Or do the surveillance cameras record to videotape?”
    “Both,” Froelich said. “All the cameras record to separate tapes. I’ve looked at this one, and everything happens exactly as they describe it, coming and going.”
    “So unless they’re in it together, neither of them put the paper there.”
    Froelich nodded. “That’s the way I see it.”
    “So who did?” Reacher asked. “What else does the tape show?”
    “The cleaning crew,” Froelich said.

    She led them back to her own office and took three video-cassettes out of her desk drawer. Stepped over to a bank of shelves, where a small Sony television with a built-in VCR nestled between a printer and a fax machine.
    “These are copies,” she said. “The originals are locked away. The recorders work on timers, six hours on each tape. Six in the morning until noon, noon until six, six until midnight, midnight until six, and start again.”
    She found the remote in a drawer and switched the television on. Put the first tape in the mechanism. It clicked and whirred and a dim picture settled on the screen.
    “This is the Wednesday evening,” she said. “Six P . M . onward.”
    The picture was gray and milky and the detail definition was soft, but the clarity was completely adequate. The camera showed the whole square area from behind the secretary’s head. She was at her desk, on the phone. She looked old. She had white hair. Stuyvesant’s door was on the right of the picture. It was closed. There was a date and time burned into the picture at the bottom left. Froelich hit fast wind and the motion sped up. The secretary’s white head moved with comical jerkiness. Her hand batted up and down as she finished calls and fielded new ones. Some person bustled into shot and delivered a stack of internal mail and turned and bustled away. The secretary sorted the mail with the speed of a machine. She opened every envelope and piled the contents neatly and took out a stamp and ink pad and stamped every new letter at the top.
    “What’s she doing?” Reacher asked.
    “Date of receipt,” Froelich said. “This whole operation runs on accurate paperwork. Always has.”
    The secretary was using her left hand to curl each sheet back and her right to stamp the date. The tape’s fast motion made her look frantic. In the bottom corner of the picture the date held steady and the time unspooled just about fast enough to read. Reacher turned away from the screen and looked around Froelich’s office. It was a typical government space, pretty much the civilian equivalent of the offices he’d spent his time in, aggressively plain and expensively shoehorned into a fine old building. Tough gray nylon carpet, laminate furniture, IT wiring routed carefully in white plastic conduit. Foot-high piles of paper everywhere, reports and memoranda tacked to the walls. There was a glass-fronted cabinet with a yard of procedure manuals inside. There was no window in the room. But she still had a plant. It was in a plastic pot on the desk, pale and dry and struggling to survive. There were no photographs. No mementos. Nothing personal at all except a faint trace of her perfume in the air and the fabric of her chair.
    “OK, this is where Stuyvesant goes home,” she said.
    Reacher looked back at the screen and saw the time counter race through seven-thirty, and then seven-thirty-one. Stuyvesant stepped out of his