Without Fail

you a matching tape showing nothing at all between midnight and six. If they’d been in and out after midnight, that’s what you’d have seen. But the way it happened, he had to use one that showed them leaving only.”
    “Nendick left the letter?” Stuyvesant asked.
    Reacher nodded. “Nendick is the insider. Not the cleaners. What that particular camera really recorded that night was the cleaners leaving just after midnight and then sometime before six in the morning Nendick himself stepping in through the fire door with gloves on and the letter in his hand. Probably around five-thirty, I would guess, so he wouldn’t have to wait long before trashing the real tape and choosing his substitute.”
    “But it showed me arriving in the morning. My secretary, too.”
    “That was the third tape. There was another change at six A . M ., back to the real thing. Only the middle tape was swapped.”
    Silence in the room.
    “He probably described the garage cameras for them too,” Reacher said. “For the Sunday night delivery.”
    “How did you spot it?” Stuyvesant asked. “The hair?”
    “Partly. It was Neagley’s ass, really. Nendick was so nervous around the tapes he didn’t pay attention to Neagley’s ass. She noticed. She told me that’s very unusual.”
    Stuyvesant blushed again, like maybe he was able to vouch for that fact personally.
    “So we should let the cleaners go,” Reacher said. “Then we should talk with Nendick. He’s the one who met with these guys.”
    Stuyvesant nodded. “And been threatened by them, presumably.”
    “I hope so,” Reacher said. “I hope he’s not involved of his own free will.”

    Stuyvesant used his master key and entered the video recording room with the duty officer as a witness. They found that ten consecutive midnight-to-six tapes were missing prior to the Thursday in question. Nendick had entered them in a technical log as faulty recordings. Then they picked a dozen random tapes from the last three months and watched parts of them. They confirmed that the cleaners never spent more than nine minutes in his office. So Stuyvesant made a call and secured their immediate release.
    Then there were three options: either call Nendick in on a pretext, or send agents out to arrest him, or drive themselves over to his house and get some questioning started before the Sixth Amendment kicked in and began to complicate things.
    “We should go right now,” Reacher said. “Exploit the element of surprise.”
    He was expecting resistance, but Stuyvesant just nodded blankly. He looked pale and tired. He looked like a man with problems. Like a man juggling a sense of betrayal and righteous anger against the standard Beltway instinct for concealment. And the instinct for concealment was going to be much stronger with a guy like Nendick than with the cleaners. Cleaners would be regarded as mere ciphers. Sooner or later somebody could spin it hey, cleaners, what can you do ? But a guy like Nendick was different. A guy like that was a main component in an organization that should know better. So Stuyvesant booted up his secretary’s computer and found Nendick’s home address. It was in a suburb ten miles out in Virginia. It took twenty minutes to get there. He lived on a quiet winding street in a subdivision. The subdivision was old enough that the trees and the foundation plantings were mature but new enough that the whole place still looked smart and well kept. It was a medium-priced area. There were foreign cars on most of the driveways, but they weren’t this year’s models. They were clean, but a little tired. Nendick’s house was a long low ranch with a khaki roof and a brick chimney. It was dark except for the blue flicker of a television set in one of the windows.
    Froelich swung straight onto the driveway and parked in front of the garage. They climbed out into the cold and walked to the front door. Stuyvesant put his thumb on the bell and left it there. Thirty seconds later a light came on in the hallway. It blazed orange in a fan-shaped window above the door. A yellow porch light came on over their heads. The door opened and Nendick just stood in his hallway and said nothing. He was wearing a suit, like he was just home from work. He looked slack with fear, like a new ordeal was about to be piled on top of an old one. Stuyvesant looked at him and paused and then stepped inside. Froelich followed him. Then Reacher. Then Neagley. She closed the door behind her