Without Fail

escape system.
    There was a regular knob on the back of the door that operated the same latch as the push bar. It had a keyhole, but it wasn’t locked. It turned easily. Makes sense , he thought. The building was secure as a whole. They didn’t need for every floor to be isolated as well. He let the door close behind him and waited in the gloom on the stairwell for a second. Turned the knob again and reopened the door and stepped back into the brightness of the secretarial area, one pace. Twisted and looked up at the surveillance camera. It was right there above his head, set so it would pick him up sometime during his second step. He inched forward and let the door close behind him. Checked the camera again. It would be seeing him by now. And he still had more than eight feet to go before he reached Stuyvesant’s door.
    “The cleaners put the message there,” the secretary said. “There’s no other possible explanation.”
    Then her phone rang and she excused herself politely and answered it. Reacher and Neagley walked back through the maze of corridors and found Froelich’s office. It was quiet and dark and empty. Neagley flicked the halogen lights on and sat down at the desk. There was no other chair, so Reacher sat on the floor with his legs straight out and his back propped against the side of a file cabinet.
    “Tell me about the cleaners,” he said.
    Neagley drummed a rhythm on the desk with her fingers. The click of her nails alternated with little papery thumps from the pads of her fingers.
    “They’re all lawyered up,” she said. “The department sent them attorneys, one each. They’re all Mirandized, too. Their human rights are fully protected. Wonderful, isn’t it? The civilian world?”
    “Terrific. What did they say?”
    “Nothing much. They clammed up tight. Stubborn as hell. But worried as hell, too. They’re looking at a rock and a hard place. Obviously very frightened about revealing who told them to put the paper there, and equally frightened about losing their jobs and maybe going to jail. They can’t win. It wasn’t attractive.”
    “You mention Stuyvesant’s name?”
    “Loud and clear. They know his name, obviously, but I’m not sure they know who he is , specifically. They’re night workers. All they see is a bunch of offices. They don’t see people. They didn’t react to his name at all. They didn’t really react to anything. Just sat there, scared to death, looking at their lawyers, saying nothing.”
    “You’re slipping. People used to eat out of your hand, the way I recall it.”
    She nodded. “I told you, I’m getting old. I couldn’t get a handle on them anywhere. The lawyers wouldn’t let me, really. The civilian justice system is very off-putting. I never felt so disconnected.”
    Reacher said nothing. Checked his watch. “So what now?” Neagley asked.
    “We wait,” he said.

    The wait went slowly. Froelich came back after an hour and a half and reported that Armstrong was safely back in his own office. She had persuaded him to come with her in the car. She told him she understood that he preferred to walk, but she made the point that her team needed operational fine-tuning and there was no better time to do it than right now. She pushed it to the point where a refusal would have seemed like a prima-donna pain in the ass, and Armstrong wasn’t like that, so he climbed into the Suburban quite happily. The transfer through the tent at the Senate Offices had worked without incident.
    “Now make some calls,” Reacher said. “See if anything’s happened that we need to know about.”
    She checked with the D.C. cops first. There was the usual list of urban crimes and misdemeanors, but it would have been a stretch to categorize any of them as a demonstration of Armstrong’s vulnerability. She transferred to the precinct holding the crazy guy and took a long verbal report on his status. Hung up and shook her head.
    “Not connected,” she said. “They know him. IQ below eighty, alcoholic, sleeps on the street, barely literate, and his prints don’t match. He’s got a record a yard long for jumping on anybody he’s ever seen in the newspapers he sleeps under. Some kind of a bipolar problem. I suggest we forget all about him.”
    “OK,” Reacher said.
    Then she opened up the National Crime Information Center database and looked at recent entries. They were flooding in from all over the country at a rate faster than one every second. Faster than