Without Fail

“No.”

“That’s awful.”

“Not really. I got them instead.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you think?”

“OK, how?”

“It was a father-and-son team. I drowned the son in a swimming pool. I burned the father to death in a fire. After shooting him in the chest with a hollow-point.44.”

“That ought to do it.”

“Moral of the story, don’t mess with me or mine. I just wish they’d known that ahead of time.”

“Any comeback?”

“I exfiltrated fast. Stayed out of circulation. Had to miss the funeral.”

“Bad business.”

“The guy he was meeting with got it, too. Bled to death under a highway ramp. There was a woman, as well. From Joe’s office. His assistant, Molly Beth Gordon. They knifed her at the Atlanta airport.”

“I saw her name. On the roll of honor.”

Reacher was quiet a beat. The video sped backward. Three in the morning, then two-fifty-something. Then two-forty. Nothing happening.

“The whole thing was a can of worms,” he said. “It was his own fault, really.”

“That’s harsh.”

“It was a stretch for him. I mean, would you get ambushed at a rendezvous?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“I’d do all the usual stuff,” Neagley said. “You know, arrive three hours early, stake it out, surveil, block the approaches.”

“But Joe didn’t do any of that. He was out of his depth. Thing about Joe, he looked tough. He was six-six, two-fifty, built like a brick outhouse. Hands like shovels, face like a catcher’s mitt. We were clones, physically, the two of us. But we had different brains. Deep down, he was a cerebral guy. Kind of pure. Naive, even. He never thought dirty. Everything was a game of chess with him. He gets a call, he sets up a meet, he drives down there. Like he’s moving his knight or his bishop around. He just didn’t expect somebody to come along and blow the whole chessboard away.”

Neagley said nothing. The tape sped on backward. Nothing was happening on it. The square office area just sat there, dim and steady.

“Afterward I was angry he was so careless,” Reacher said. “But then I figured I couldn’t blame him for that. To be careless, first of all you’ve got to know what you’re supposed to be careful about. And he just didn’t. He didn’t know. He didn’t see stuff like that. Didn’t think that way.”

“So?”

“So I guess I was angry I didn’t do it for him.”

“Could you have?”

He shook his head. “I hadn’t seen him for seven years. I had no idea where he was. He had no idea where I was. But somebody like me should have done it for him. He should have asked for help.”

“Too proud?”

“No, too naive. That’s the bottom line.”

“Could he have reacted? At the scene?”

Reacher made a face. “They were pretty good, I guess. Semiproficient, by our standards. There must have been some chance. But it would have been a split-second thing, purely instinctive. And Joe’s instincts were all buried under the cerebral stuff. He probably stopped to think. He always did. Just enough to make him come out timid.”

“Naive and timid,” Neagley said. “They don’t share that opinion around here.”

“Around here he must have looked like a wild man. Everything’s comparative.”

Neagley shifted in her chair and watched the screen.

“Stand by,” she said. “The witching hour approaches.”

The timer spun back through half past midnight. The office was undisturbed. Then at sixteen minutes past midnight the cleaning crew rushed backward out of the gloom of the exit corridor. Reacher watched them at high speed until they reversed into Stuyvesant’s office at seven minutes past. Then he ran the tape forward at normal speed and watched them come out again and clean the secretarial station.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“They look pretty normal,” Neagley said.

“If they’d just left the letter in there, would they look so composed?”

They weren’t hurrying. They weren’t furtive or anxious or stressed or excited. They weren’t glancing backward at Stuyvesant’s door. They were just cleaning, efficiently and speedily. He reversed the tape again and sped back through seven minutes past midnight and onward until it jammed to a stop at midnight exactly. He ejected it and inserted the first tape. Wound to the far end and sca

“So where would it be?” he asked.

“Like Froelich speculated,” Neagley said. “Could be anywhere.”

He nodded. She was right. Between the three of them and the cleaning cart, they could have concealed a dozen letters.

“Do they look worried?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Run the tape. See how they move.”

He let them walk onward. They headed straight for Stuyvesant’s door and disappeared from view inside, eleven fifty-two exactly.

“Show me again,” Neagley said.

He ran the segment again. Neagley leaned back and half-closed her eyes.

“Their energy level is a little different than when they came out,” she said.

“You think?”

She nodded. “A little slower? Like they’re hesitant?”

“Or like they’re dreading having to do something bad in there?”

He ran it again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Kind of hard to interpret. And it’s no kind of evidence, that’s for sure. Just a subjective feeling.”

He ran it again. There was no real overt difference. Maybe they looked a little less wired going in than coming out. Or more tired. But then, they spent fifteen minutes in there. And it was a relatively small office. Already quite clean and neat. Maybe it was their habit to take a ten-minute rest in there, out of sight of the camera. Cleaners weren’t dumb. Maybe they put their feet on the desk, not a letter.

“I don’t know,” Neagley said again.

“Inconclusive?” Reacher said.

“Naturally. But who else have we got?”

“Nobody at all.”

He hit fast rewind and stared at nothing until he found eight o’clock in the evening. The secretary got up from her desk, put her head around Stuyvesant’s door, and went home. He wound back to seven thirty-one and watched Stuyvesant himself leave.

“OK,” he said. “The cleaners did it. On their own initiative?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“So who told them to?”

They stopped in the foyer and found Nendick and sent him back to tidy up his equipment room. Then they went in search of Froelich and found her deep in a stack of paperwork at her desk, on the phone, coordinating Brook Armstrong’s return from Camp David.

“We need to speak with the cleaners,” Reacher said.

“Now?” Froelich said.

“No better time. Late-night interrogation always works best.”

She looked blank. “OK, I’ll drive you, I guess.”

“Better that you’re not there,” Neagley said.

“Why not?”

“We’re military. We’ll probably want to slap them around some.”

Froelich stared at her. “You can’t do that. They’re department members, no different than me.”

“She’s kidding,” Reacher said. “But they’re going to feel better talking to us if there’s nobody else from the department around.”

“OK, I’ll wait outside. But I’m going with you.”

She finished up her phone calls and tidied up her paperwork and then led them back to the elevator and down to the garage. They climbed into the Suburban and Reacher closed his eyes for twenty minutes as she drove. He was tired. He had been working hard for six days straight. Then the car came to a stop and he opened his eyes again in a mean neighborhood full of ten-year-old sedans and hurricane fencing. There was orange glow from streetlights here and there. Patched blacktop and scrawny weeds in the sidewalks. The thump of a loud car stereo blocks away.

“This is it,” Froelich said. “Number 2301.”