Without Fail

ten past ten. Bannon still looked more like a city cop than a federal agent. Donegal tweed, gray flannel, stout shoes, red face. Like a wise old high-mileage detective from Chicago or Boston or New York. He was carrying a thin file folder, and he was acting somber.
    “Nendick is still unresponsive,” he said.
    Nobody spoke.
    “He’s no better and no worse,” Bannon said. “They’re still worried about him.”
    He sat heavily in the chair opposite Neagley’s. Opened his file folder and took out a thin stack of color photographs. Dealt them like cards around the table. Two each.
    “Bruce Armstrong and Brian Armstrong,” he said. “Late of Minnesota and Colorado, respectively.”
    The photographs were large inkjet prints done on glossy paper. Not faxes. The originals must have been borrowed from the families and then scanned and e-mailed. They were snapshots, basically, each blown up and then cropped down to a useful head-and-shoulders format in the local FBI lab, presumably. The results looked artificial. Two bluff open faces, two innocent smiles, two fond gazes directed toward something that should have been there in the shot with them. Their names were neatly written in ballpoint pen in the bottom border. By Bannon himself, maybe. Bruce Armstrong, Brian Armstrong .
    They weren’t really similar to each other. And neither of them looked much like Brook Armstrong. Nobody would have had even a moment’s hesitation differentiating between the three of them. Not in the dark, not in a hurry. They were just three American men with fair hair and blue eyes, somewhere in their middle forties, that was all. But therefore, they were alike in another way. If you sliced and diced the human population of the world, you’d use up quite a few distinct divisions before you got around to separating the three of them out. Male or female, black or white, Asian or Caucasian or Mongoloid, tall or short, thin or fat or medium, young or old or middle-aged, dark or fair, blue eyes or brown eyes. You would have to make all those separate distinctions before you could say the three Armstrongs looked different from one another.
    “What do you think?” Bannon asked.
    “Close enough to make the point,” Reacher said.
    “We agree,” Bannon said. “Two widows and five fatherless children between them. This is fun, isn’t it?”
    Nobody replied to that.
    “You got anything else for us?” Stuyvesant asked.
    “We’re working hard,” Bannon said. “We’re running the thumbprint again. We’re trying every database in the known world. But we’re not optimistic. We canvassed Nendick’s neighbors. They didn’t get many visitors to the house. Seems like they socialized as a couple, mostly in a bar about ten miles from their place, out toward Dulles. It’s a cop bar. Seems like Nendick trades on his employment status. We’re trying to trace anybody he was seen talking to more than the average.”
    “What about two weeks ago?” Stuyvesant said. “When the wife got taken away? Must have been some kind of commotion.”
    Bannon shook his head. “There’s a fairly high daytime population in his street. Soccer moms all around. But it’s a dry hole. Nobody remembers anything. It could have happened at night, of course.”
    “No, I think Nendick delivered her somewhere,” Reacher said. “I think they made him do it. Like a refinement of the torture. To underline his responsibility. To put an edge on the fear.”
    “Possible,” Bannon said. “He’s afraid, that’s for damn sure.”
    Reacher nodded. “I think these guys are real good at the cruel psychological nuances. I think that’s why some of the messages came here direct. Nothing worse for Armstrong than to hear from the people paid to protect him that he’s in big trouble.”
    “Except he’s not hearing from them,” Neagley said.
    Bannon made no comment on that. Stuyvesant paused a beat.
    “Anything else?” he said.
    “We’ve concluded you won’t get any more messages,” Bannon said. “They’ll strike at a time and place of their own choosing, and obviously they won’t tip you off as to where and when. Conversely if they try and fail, they won’t want you to have known about it ahead of time, otherwise they’d look ineffective.”
    “Any feeling about where and when?”
    “We’ll talk about that tomorrow morning. We’re working on a theory right now. I assume you’ll all be here tomorrow morning?”
    “Why wouldn’t we be?”
    “It’s