Without Fail

finished and Tuesday started. Stuyvesant showed up again. He just appeared in the doorway like he had before. Said nothing. The only chair in the room was Froelich’s own. Stuyvesant leaned against the door frame. Reacher sat on the floor. Neagley perched on a file cabinet.
    Froelich waited ten minutes and called the D.C. cops. They had nothing to report. She called the Hoover Building and the FBI told her nothing significant had happened before midnight in the East. She turned back to the computer screen. Called out occasional incoming stories but neither Stuyvesant nor Reacher nor Neagley could twist them into any kind of a connection with a potential threat to Armstrong. The clock moved on to one in the morning. Midnight, Central time. She called the police department in Bismarck. They had nothing for her. She called the North Dakota State Police. Nothing at all. She tried the FBI again. Nothing reported from their field offices in the last sixty minutes. She put the phone down and scooted her chair back from her desk. Breathed out.
    “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Nothing happened.”
    “Excellent,” Stuyvesant said.
    “No,” Reacher said. “Not excellent. Not excellent at all. It’s the worst possible news we could have gotten.”

8
    Stuyvesant led them straight back toward the conference room. Neagley walked next to Reacher, close by his shoulder in the narrow corridors.
    “Great suit,” she whispered.
    “First one I ever wore,” he whispered back. “We on the same page with this?”
    “On the same page and out of a job, probably,” she said. “That is, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
    They turned a corner. Walked on. Stuyvesant stopped and shepherded them into the conference room and came in after them and hit the lights and closed the door. Reacher and Neagley sat together on one side of the long table and Stuyvesant sat next to Froelich on the other, like he foresaw an adversarial element to the conversation.
    “Explain,” he said.
    Silence for a second.
    “This is definitely not an inside job,” Neagley said.
    Reacher nodded. “Although we were fooling ourselves by ever thinking it was entirely one thing or the other. It was always both. But it was useful shorthand. The real question was where the balance lay. Was it fundamentally an inside job with trivial help from the outside? Or was it basically an outside job with trivial help from the inside?”
    “The trivial help being what?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “A potential insider needed a thumbprint that wasn’t his. A potential outsider needed a way to get the second message inside this building.”
    “And you’ve concluded that it’s the outsider?”
    Reacher nodded again. “Which is absolutely the worst news we could have gotten. Because whereas an insider messing around is merely a pain in the ass, an outsider is truly dangerous.”
    Stuyvesant looked away. “Who?”
    “No idea,” Reacher said. “Just some outsider with a loose one-time connection to an insider, sufficient to get the message in and nothing more.”
    “The insider being one of the cleaners.”
    “Or all of them,” Froelich said.
    “I assume so, yes,” Reacher said.
    “You sure about this?”
    “Completely.”
    “How?” Stuyvesant asked.
    Reacher shrugged.
    “Lots of reasons,” he said. “Some of them small, one of them big.”
    “Explain,” Stuyvesant said again.
    “I look for simplicity,” Reacher said.
    Stuyvesant nodded. “So do I. I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not zebras. But the simple explanation here is an insider trying to get under Froelich’s skin.”
    “Not really,” Reacher said. “The chosen method is way too complex for that. They’d be doing all the usual stuff instead. The easy stuff. I’m sure we’ve all seen it before. Mysterious communications failures, computer crashes, bogus alarm calls to nonexistent addresses in the bad part of town, she arrives, calls in for backup, nobody shows, she gets scared, she panics on the radio, a recording gets made and starts to circulate. Any law enforcement department has got a stack of examples a yard high.”
    “Including the military police?”
    “Sure. Especially with women officers.”
    Stuyvesant shook his head.
    “No,” he said. “That’s conjecture. I’m asking how you know .”
    “I know because nothing happened today.”
    “Explain,” Stuyvesant said for the third time.
    “This is a smart opponent,” Reacher said. “He’s bright and