Without Fail

“When can we talk to him?”

“No time soon. Depends on him, basically. He needs to come around.”

“It’s very important. He’s got critical information.”

The doctor shook his head.

“Could be days,” he said. “Could be never.”

They waited a long fruitless hour during which nothing changed. Nendick just lay there inert, surrounded by beeping machines. He breathed in and out, but that was all. So they gave it up and left him there and drove back to the office in the dark and the silence. Regrouped in the windowless conference room and faced the next big decision.

“Armstrong’s got to be told,” Neagley said. “They’ve staged their demonstration. No place to go now except stage the real thing.”

Stuyvesant shook his head. “We never tell them. It’s a rigid policy. Has been for a hundred and one years. We’re not going to change it now.”

“Then we should limit his exposure,” Froelich said.

“No,” Stuyvesant said. “That’s an admission of defeat in itself, and it’s a slippery slope. We pull out once, we’ll be pulling out forever, every single threat we get. And that must not happen. What must happen is that we defend him to the best of our ability. So we start pla

“That two men are already dead,” Froelich replied.

“Two men and one woman,” Reacher said. “Look at the statistics. Kidnapped is the same thing as dead, ninety-nine times in a hundred.”

“The photographs were proof of life,” Stuyvesant said.

“Until the poor guy delivered. Which he did almost two weeks ago.”

“He’s still delivering. He’s not talking. So I’m going to keep on hoping.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Know anything about her?” Neagley asked.

Stuyvesant shook his head. “Never met her. Don’t even know her name. I hardly know Nendick, either. He’s just some technical guy I sometimes see around.”

The room went quiet.

“FBI has got to be told as well,” Neagley said. “This isn’t just about Armstrong now. There’s a kidnap victim dead or in serious danger. That’s the Bureau’s jurisdiction, no question. Plus the interstate homicide. That’s their bag too.”

The room stayed very quiet. Stuyvesant sighed and looked around at each of the others, slowly and carefully, one at a time.

“Yes,” he said. “I agree. It’s gone too far. They need to know. God knows I don’t want to, but I’ll tell them. I’ll let us take the hit. I’ll hand everything over to them.”

There was silence. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. It was exactly the right thing to do, in the circumstances. Approval would have seemed sarcastic, and commiseration wasn’t appropriate. For the Nendick couple and two unrelated families called Armstrong, maybe, but not for Stuyvesant.

“Meanwhile we’ll focus on Armstrong,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

“Tomorrow is North Dakota again,” Froelich said. “More open-air fun and games. Same place as before. Not very secure. We leave at ten.”

“And Thursday?”

“Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. He’s serving turkey di

There was a long moment of silence. Stuyvesant sighed again, heavily, and placed his hands palms down on the long wooden table.

“OK,” he said. “Be back in here at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I’m sure the Bureau will be delighted to send over a liaison guy.”

Then he levered himself upright and left the room to head back to his office, where he would make the calls that would put a permanent asterisk next to his career.

“I feel helpless,” Froelich said. “I want to be more proactive.”

“Don’t like playing defense?” he asked.

They were in her bed, in her room. It was larger than the guest room. Prettier. And quieter, because it was at the back of the house. The ceiling was smoother. Although it would take angled sunlight to really test it. Which would happen at sunset instead of in the morning, because the window faced the other way. The bed was warm. The house was warm. It was like a cocoon of warmth in the cold gray city night.

“Defense is OK,” she said. “But attack is defense, isn’t it? In a situation like this? But we always let things come to us. Then we just run away from them. We’re too operational. We’re not investigative enough.”

“You have investigators,” he said. “Like the guy who watches the movies.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “The Office of Protection Research. It’s a strange role. Kind of academic, rather than specific. Strategic, rather than tactical.”

“So do it yourself. Try a few things.”

“Like what?”

“We’re back to the original evidence, with Nendick crapping out. So we have to start over. You should concentrate on the thumbprint.”

“It’s not on file.”

“Files have glitches. Files get updated. Prints get added. You should try again, every few days. And you should widen the search. Try other countries. Try Interpol.”

“I doubt if these guys are foreign.”

“But maybe they’re Americans who traveled. Maybe they got in trouble in Canada or Europe. Or Mexico or South America.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And you should check the thumbprint thing as an MO. You know, search the databases to see if anybody ever signed threatening letters with their thumb before. How far back do the archives go?”

“To the dawn of time.”

“So put a twenty-year limit on it. I guess way back at the dawn of time plenty of people signed things with their thumbs.”

She smiled, sleepily. He could feel it against his shoulder.

“Before they learned to write,” he said.

She didn’t reply. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, snuggled against his shoulder. He eased his position and felt a shallow dip on his side of the mattress. He wondered if Joe had made it. He lay quiet for a spell and then craned his arm up and switched out the light.

Seemed like about a minute and a half later they were up again and showered and back in the Secret Service conference room eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with an FBI liaison agent named Ba

“We’ll sleep on the plane,” Froelich said. “We’ll tell the pilot to fly slow.”

Ba

“No secrets either way,” he said. “That’s what we’re proposing. And no blame anywhere. But no bullshit, either. I think we got to face the fact that the Nendick woman is dead. We’ll look for her like she wasn’t, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. So we’ve got three down already. Some evidence, but not a lot. We’re guessing Nendick has met with these guys, and we’re assuming they’ve certainly been to his house, if only to grab up his wife. So that’s a crime scene, and we’re going over it today, and we’ll share what we get. Nendick will help us if he ever wakes up. But assuming he won’t anytime soon, we’ll go at it from three different directions. First, the message stuff that went down here in D.C. Second, the scene in Mi