Without Fail

Stuyvesant’s visitor chairs and just sat down without being asked. Reacher leaned on a tall file cabinet and stared out the window. The blinds were still open, but it was full dark outside. Washington’s orange nighttime glow was the only thing he could see.
    “How were you notified?” he asked. “Did they call in and claim responsibility?”
    Stuyvesant shook his head. “FBI alerted us. They’ve got software that scans the NCIC reports. Armstrong is one of the names that they flag up.”
    “So now they’re involved anyway.”
    Stuyvesant shook his head again. “They passed on some information, is all. They don’t understand its significance.”
    The room stayed quiet. Just four people breathing, lost in somber thoughts.
    “We got any details from the scenes?” Neagley asked.
    “Some,” Stuyvesant said. “The first guy was a single shot to the head. Killed him instantly. They can’t find the bullet. The guy’s wife didn’t hear anything.”
    “Where was she?”
    “About twenty feet away in the kitchen. Doors and windows shut because of the weather. But you’d expect her to hear something. She hears hunters all the time.”
    “How big was the hole in his head?” Reacher asked.
    “Bigger than a .22,” Stuyvesant said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
    Reacher nodded. The only handgun inaudible from twenty feet would be a silenced .22. Anything bigger than that, you’d probably hear something, suppressor or no suppressor, windows or no windows.
    “So it was a rifle,” he said.
    “Trajectory looks like it,” Stuyvesant said. “Medical examiner figures the bullet was traveling downward. It went through his head front to back, high to low.”
    “Hilly country?”
    “All around.”
    “So it was either a very distant rifle or a silenced rifle. And I don’t like either one. Distant rifle means somebody’s a great shooter, silenced rifle means somebody owns a bunch of exotic weapons.”
    “What about the second guy?” Neagley asked.
    “It was less than eight hours later,” Stuyvesant said. “But more than eight hundred miles away. So most likely the team split up for the day.”
    “Details?”
    “Coming through in bits and pieces. First impression from the locals is the weapon was some kind of machine gun. But again, nobody heard anything.”
    “A silenced machine gun?” Reacher said. “Are they sure?”
    “No question it was a machine gun,” Stuyvesant said. “The corpse was all chewed up. Two bursts, head and chest. Hell of a mess.”
    “Hell of a demonstration,” Froelich said.
    Reacher stared through the window. There was light fog in the air.
    “But what exactly does it demonstrate?” he said.
    “That these are not very nice people.”
    He nodded. “But not very much more than that, does it? It doesn’t really demonstrate Armstrong’s vulnerability as such, not if they weren’t connected to him in any way. Are we sure they weren’t related? Like very distant cousins or something? At least the farmer? Minnesota is next to North Dakota, right?”
    Stuyvesant shook his head.
    “My first thought, obviously,” he said. “But I double-checked. First, the VP isn’t from North Dakota originally. He moved in from Oregon. Plus we have the complete text of his FBI background check from when he was nominated. It’s pretty exhaustive. And he doesn’t have any living relatives that anybody’s aware of except an elder sister who lives in California. His wife has got a bunch of cousins but none of them are called Armstrong and most of them are younger. Kids, basically.”
    “OK,” Reacher said. Kids . He had a flash in his mind of a seesaw, and stuffed toys and lurid paintings stuck to a refrigerator with magnets. Cousins .
    “It’s weird,” he said. “Killing two random unconnected lookalikes called Armstrong is dramatic enough, I guess, but it doesn’t show any great ingenuity. Doesn’t prove anything. Doesn’t make us worried about our security here.”
    “Makes us sad for them,” Froelich said. “And their families.”
    “No doubt,” Reacher said. “But two hicks in the sticks going down doesn’t really make us sweat , does it? It’s not like we were protecting them as well. Doesn’t make us doubt ourselves. I really thought it would be something more personal. More intriguing. Like some equivalent of the letter showing up on your desk.”
    “You sound disappointed,” Stuyvesant said.
    “I am disappointed. I thought they might come close