Without Fail

Without the envelope. He walked at the same purposeful pace all the way back up the alley and out of shot at the top of the screen.
    Froelich froze the tape. “Description?”
    “Impossible,” Neagley said. “Male, a little short and squat. Right-handed, probably. No visible limp. Apart from that we don’t know diddly. We saw nothing.”
    “Maybe not too squat,” Reacher said. “The angle foreshortens things a little.”
    “He had inside knowledge,” Froelich said. “He knew about the cameras and the bathroom breaks. So he’s one of us.”
    “Not necessarily,” Reacher said. “He could be an outsider who staked you out. The exterior camera must be visible if you’re looking for it. And he could assume the interior camera. Most places have them. And a couple of nights’ surveillance would teach him the bathroom break procedure. But you know what? Insider or outsider, we drove right past him. We must have. When we went out to see the cleaners. Because even if he’s an insider, he needed to time the bathroom break exactly right. So he needed to be watching. He must have been across the street for a couple of hours, looking down the alley. Maybe with binoculars.”
    The office went quiet.
    “I didn’t see anybody,” Froelich said.
    “Me neither,” Neagley said.
    “I had my eyes closed,” Reacher said.
    “We wouldn’t have seen him,” Froelich said. “He hears a vehicle coming up the ramp, he ducks out of sight, surely.”
    “I guess so,” Reacher said. “But we were real close to him, temporarily.”
    “Shit,” Froelich said.
    “Yeah, shit,” Neagley echoed.
    “So what do we do?” Froelich asked.
    “Nothing,” Reacher said. “Nothing we can do. This was more than forty minutes ago. If he’s an insider, he’s back home by now. Maybe tucked up in bed. If he’s an outsider, he’s already on I-95 or something, west or north or south, maybe thirty miles away. We can’t call the troopers in four states and ask them to look for a right-handed man in a car who doesn’t limp, no better description than that.”
    “They could look for an overcoat and a hat on the backseat or in the trunk.”
    “It’s November, Froelich. Everybody’s got a hat and a coat with them.”
    “So what do we do?” she asked again.
    “Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case this whole thing is for real. Keep him wrapped up tight. Like Stuyvesant said, threatening isn’t necessarily the same thing as succeeding.”
    “What’s his schedule?” Neagley asked.
    “Home tonight, the Hill tomorrow,” Froelich said.
    “So you’ll be OK. You scored perfect around the Capitol. If Reacher and I couldn’t get to him there, no squat guy in an overcoat is going to. Assuming a squat guy in an overcoat wants to, instead of just shaking you up for the fun of it.”
    “You think?”
    “Like Stuyvesant said, take a deep breath and tough it out. Be confident.”
    “Doesn’t feel good. I need to know who this guy is.”
    “We’ll find out who he is, sooner or later. Until then, if you can’t attack at one end you have to defend at the other.”
    “She’s right,” Reacher said. “Concentrate on Armstrong, just in case.”
    Froelich nodded vaguely and took the tape out of the machine and put the first one back in. Restarted it and stared at the screen until the garage guard came back from his bathroom break and noticed the envelope and picked it up and hurried out of shot with it.
    “Doesn’t feel good,” she said again.

    An FBI forensic crew came by an hour later and photographed the sheet of paper on the conference room table. They used an office ruler for a scale reference and then used a pair of sterile plastic tweezers to lift the paper and the envelope into separate evidence bags. Froelich signed a form to keep the chain of evidence intact and they took both items away for examination. Then she got on the phone for twenty minutes and tracked Armstrong all the way out of the Marine helicopter at Andrews and all the way home.
    “OK, we’re secure,” she said. “For now.”
    Neagley yawned and stretched. “So take a break. Be ready for a hard week.”
    “I feel stupid,” Froelich said. “I don’t know if this is a game or for real.”
    “You feel too much,” Neagley said.
    Froelich looked at the ceiling. “What would Joe do now?”
    Reacher paused and smiled. “Go to the store and buy a suit, probably.”
    “No, seriously.”
    “He’d close his