Without Fail

delicate hands in the world.
    “That’s not a watchmaker’s thumb,” Froelich said.
    Reacher nodded slowly. The guy must have hands like bunches of bananas. And rough skin, to print with that degree of clarity.
    “Manual worker,” he said.
    “Shark fisherman,” Froelich said. “Where do they catch a lot of sharks?”
    “Florida, maybe.”
    “Orlando’s in Florida.”
    Her phone rang. She picked it up and her face fell. She looked up at the ceiling and pressed the phone into her shoulder.
    “Armstrong needs to go over to the Department of Labor,” she said. “And he wants to walk.”

7
    It was exactly two miles from the Treasury Building to the Senate Offices and Froelich drove the whole way one-handed while she talked on her phone. The weather was gray and the traffic was heavy and the trip was slow. She parked at the mouth of the white tent on First Street and killed the motor and snapped her phone closed all at the same time.
    “Can’t the Labor guys come over here?” Reacher asked.
    She shook her head. “It’s a political thing. There are going to be changes over there and it’s more polite if Armstrong makes the effort himself.”
    “Why does he want to walk?”
    “Because he’s an outdoors type. He likes fresh air. And he’s stubborn.”
    “Where does he have to go, exactly?”
    She pointed due west. “Less than half a mile that way. Call it six or seven hundred yards across Capitol Plaza.”
    “Did he call them or did they call him?”
    “He called them. It’s going to leak so he’s trying to preempt the bad news.”
    “Can you stop him going?”
    “Theoretically,” she said. “But I really don’t want to. That’s not the sort of argument I want to have right now.”
    Reacher turned and looked down the street behind them. Nothing there except gray weather and speeding cars on Constitution Avenue.
    “So let him do it,” he said. “He called them. Nobody’s luring him out into the open. It’s not a trick.”
    She glanced ahead through the windshield. Then she turned and stared past him, through his side window, down the length of the tent. Flipped her phone open and spoke to people in her office again. She used abbreviations and a torrent of jargon he couldn’t follow. Finished the call and closed her phone.
    “We’ll bring a Metro traffic chopper in,” she said. “Keep it low enough to be obvious. He’ll have to pass the Armenian Embassy, so we’ll put some extra cops there. They’ll blend in. I’ll follow him in the car on D Street fifty yards behind. I want you out ahead of him with your eyes wide open.”
    “When are we doing this?”
    “Within ten minutes. Go up the street and left.”
    “OK,” he said. She restarted the car and rolled forward so he could step onto the sidewalk clear of the tent. He got out and zipped his jacket and walked away into the cold. Up First Street and left onto C Street. There was traffic on Delaware Avenue ahead of him and beyond it he could see Capitol Plaza. There were low bare trees and open brown lawns. Paths made from crushed sandstone. A fountain in the center. A pool to the right. To the left and farther on, some kind of an obelisk memorial to somebody.
    He dodged cars and ran across Delaware. Walked on into the plaza. Grit crunched under his shoes. It was very cold. His soles were thin. It felt like there were ice crystals mixed in with the crushed stone underfoot. He stopped just short of the fountain. Looked around. Perimeters were good. To the north was open ground and then a semicircle of state flags and some other monument and the bulk of Union Station. To the south was nothing except for the Capitol Building itself far away across Constitution Avenue. Ahead to the west was a building he assumed was the Department of Labor. He looped around the fountain with his eyes focused on the middle distance and saw nothing that worried him. Poor cover, no close windows. There were people in the park, but no assassin hangs around all day just in case somebody’s schedule changes unexpectedly.
    He walked on. C Street restarted on the far side of the plaza, just about opposite the obelisk. It was more of an upright slab, really. There was a sign pointing toward it: Taft Memorial . C Street crossed New Jersey Avenue and then Louisiana Avenue. There were crosswalks. Fast traffic. Armstrong was going to spend some time standing still waiting for lights. The Armenian Embassy was ahead on the left. A police cruiser was pulling