Without Fail

Her cell phone rang in the car as they got close to La Guardia. It was her senior colleague from the Treasury side of the organization, at his desk in D.C.

“That bank account we’re tracking?” he said. “The customer just called in again. He’s wiring twenty grand to Western Union in Chicago.”

“In cash?”

“No, cashier’s check.”

“A Western Union cashier’s check? For twenty grand? He’s paying somebody for something. Goods or services. Got to be.”

Her colleague made no reply, and she clicked her phone off and just held it in her hand for a second. Chicago? Armstrong wasn’t going anywhere near Chicago.

Air Force Two landed in Bismarck and Armstrong went home to join his wife and spend the night in his own bed in the family house in the lake country south of the city. It was a big old place with an apartment above the garage block that the Secret Service took over as its own. Froelich withdrew Mrs. Armstrong’s personal detail to give the couple some privacy. She gave all the personal agents the rest of the night off and tasked four more to stake out the house, two in front, two behind. State troopers made up the numbers, parked in cars on a three-hundred-yard radius. She walked the whole area herself as a final check, and her cell phone rang as she came back into the driveway.

“Froelich?” Reacher said.

“How did you get this number?”

“I was a military cop. I can get numbers.”

“Where are you?”

“Don’t forget those musicians, OK? In Atlantic City? Tonight’s the night.”

Then the phone went dead. She walked up to the apartment above the garage and idled some time away. She called the Atlantic City office at one in the morning and was told that the old couple had been paid the right money at the right time and escorted to their car and all the way out to I-95, where they had turned north. She clicked off her phone and sat for a spell in a window seat, just thinking. It was a quiet night, very dark. Very lonely. Cold. Distant dogs barked occasionally. No moon, no stars. She hated nights like this. The family-house situations were always the trickiest. Eventually anybody got thoroughly sick of being guarded, and even though Armstrong was still amused by the novelty she could tell he was ready for some down time. And certainly his wife was. So she had nobody at all in the interior and was relying exclusively on perimeter defense. She knew she should be doing more, but she had no real option, at least not until they explained the extent of the present danger to Armstrong himself, which they hadn’t yet done, because the Secret Service never does.

Saturday dawned bright and cold in North Dakota, and preparations began immediately after breakfast. The rally was scheduled for one o’clock on the grounds of a church community center on the south side of the city. Froelich had been surprised that it was an outdoors event, but Armstrong had told her that it would be heavy overcoat weather, nothing more. He told her that North Dakotans usually didn’t retreat indoors until well after Thanksgiving. At which point she was almost overcome by an irrational desire to cancel the whole event. But she knew the transition team would oppose her, and she didn’t want to fight losing battles this early. So she said nothing. Then she almost proposed Armstrong wear a Kevlar vest under his heavy overcoat, but eventually she decided against it. Poor guy’s got four years of this, maybe eight, she thought. He’s not even inaugurated yet. Too early. Later, she wished she’d gone with her first instinct.

The church community center’s grounds were about the size of a soccer field and were bordered to the north by the church itself, which was a handsome white clapboard structure traditional in every way. The other three sides were well fenced and two of them backed onto established housing subdivisions, with the third fronting onto the street. There was a wide gateway that opened into a small parking lot. Froelich ba

The Armstrongs made it a rule never to eat at public events. It was too easy to look like idiots, greasy fingers, trying to talk while chewing. So they had an early lunch at home and drove up in convoy and got right to the business at hand. It was easy enough. Even relaxing, in a way. Local politics was not Armstrong’s problem anymore. Wouldn’t be much of a problem for his successor either, to be truthful. He had a handsome newly minted plurality and was basking in a lot of reflected glow. So the afternoon turned out to be not much more than a pleasant stroll around a pleasant piece of real estate. His wife was beautiful, his successor stayed at his side throughout, there were no awkward questions from the press, all four network affiliates and CNN were there, all the local papers had sent photographers, and stringers from The Washington Post and The New York Times showed up, too. All in all it went so well he began to wish they hadn’t bothered to schedule the follow-up event. It really wasn’t necessary.

Froelich watched the faces. She watched the perimeters. She watched the crowd, straining to sense any alteration in the herd behavior that might indicate tension or uneasiness or sudden panic. She saw nothing. Saw no sign of Reacher, either.

Armstrong stayed thirty minutes longer than anticipated, because the weak fall sun bathed the field in gold, and there was no breeze, and he was having a good time, and there was nothing scheduled for the evening except a quiet di

But late on the Sunday morning a Navy steward found her at breakfast in the mess hall and plugged a telephone into a baseboard socket near her chair. Nobody uses cordless or cellular phones at Camp David. Too vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping.

“Call transferred from your main office, ma’am,” the steward said.