Without Fail

Stuyvesant said nothing. Ba

“I’m sticking with the theory,” he said. “Except now I’m listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is.”

The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief? because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.

“Sacramento?” Stuyvesant asked.

“No,” Ba

They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.

“Was it a Vaime Mk2?” Ba

“Without a doubt,” one of the techs said.

“Serial number on it?”

The guy shook his head. “Removed with acid.”

“Anything you can do?”

The guy shook his head again.

“No,” he said. “If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.”

“So where is it now?”

“We’re fuming it for prints,” the guy said. “But it’s hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s been wiped.”

“Where was it found?”

“In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms.”

“I guess they waited in there,” Ba

“Shell cases?” Neagley asked.

“None,” the tech said. “They must have collected their brass. But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Mi

He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich’s case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti’s. The Mi

“Get the rifle,” Ba

It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot super-glue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.

“That’s the wrong scope,” Reacher said. “That’s a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes.”

“Yeah, it’s been modified,” one of the techs said. “We already logged that.”

“By the factory?”

The guy shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “High standard, but it’s not factory workmanship.”

“So what does that mean?” Ba

“I’m not sure,” Reacher said.

“Is a Hensoldt better than a Bushnell?”

“Not really. They’re both fine scopes. Like BMW and Mercedes. Like Canon and Nikon.”

“So a person might have a preference?”

“Not a government person,” Reacher said. “Like, what would you say if one of your crime scene photographers came to you and said, I want a Canon instead of this Nikon you gave me?”

“I’d probably tell him to get lost.”

“Exactly. He works with what he’s got. So I don’t see somebody going to their department armorer and asking him to junk a thousand-dollar Bushnell just because he prefers the feel of a thousand-dollar Hensoldt.”

“So why the switch?”

“I’m not sure,” Reacher said again. “Damage, maybe. If you drop a rifle you can damage a sniper scope pretty easily. But a government repairer would use another Bushnell. They don’t just buy the rifles. They buy crateloads of spare parts along with them.”

“Suppose they were short? Suppose the scopes got damaged a lot?”

“Then they might use a Hensoldt, I guess. Hensoldts usually come with SIG rifles. You need to look at your lists again. Find out if there’s anybody who buys Vaimes and SIGs for their snipers.”

“Is the SIG silenced too?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“So there you go,” Ba

“Possible,” Reacher said. “You should make the inquiries. You should ask specifically if anybody has fitted a Hensoldt scope to a Vaime rifle. And if they haven’t, you should start asking commercial gunsmiths. Start with the expensive ones. These are rare pieces. This could be important.”

Stuyvesant was staring into the distance. Worry in the slope of his shoulders.

“What?” Reacher asked.

Stuyvesant focused, and shook his head. A defeated little gesture.

“I’m afraid we bought SIGs,” he said, quietly. “We had a batch of SG550s about five years ago. Unsilenced semiautomatics, as an alternative option. But we don’t use them much because the automatic mechanism makes them a little inaccurate for close crowd situations. They’re mostly stored. We use the Vaimes everywhere now. So I’m sure the SIG parts bins are still full.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Ba

“I see,” he said. Listened some more.

“The doctor agree?” he asked. Listened some more.

“I see,” he said, and listened.

“I guess,” he said, and listened.

“Two?” he asked, and listened.

“OK,” he said, and clicked the phone off.

“Upstairs,” he said. He was pale.

Stuyvesant and Reacher and Neagley followed him out to the elevator and rode with him up to the conference room. He sat at the head of the table and the others stayed together toward the other end, like they didn’t want to get too close to the news. The sky was full dark outside the windows. Thanksgiving Day was grinding to a close.

“His name is Andretti,” Ba

“Is he talking?” Neagley asked.

“Some,” Ba

“So how did it go down?”

“He frequents a cop bar outside of Sacramento, from his firefighting days. He met two guys in there.”

“Were they cops?” Reacher asked.

“Cop-like,” Ba