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“I guess it does. But it can’t be co

Reacher nodded. “But I’d still like to know more about it. We could ask Armstrong direct, I guess.”

“Don’t need to,” Neagley said. “I can find out, if you really need me to. I can make some calls. We’ve got plenty of contacts. People who figure on getting a job with us when they quit are generally interested in making a good impression beforehand.”

Reacher yawned. “OK, do it. First thing tomorrow.”

“I’ll do it tonight. The military is still twenty-four/seven. Hasn’t changed any since we quit.”

“You should sleep. It can wait.”

“I never sleep anymore.”

Reacher yawned again. “Well, I’m going to.”

“Bad day,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “As bad as they get. So make the calls if you want to, but don’t wake me up to tell me about them. Tell me about them tomorrow.”

The night duty officer fixed them a ride back to the Georgetown motel and Reacher went straight to his room. It was quiet and still and empty. It had been cleaned and tidied. The bed was made. Joe’s box had gone. He sat in the chair for a moment and wondered if Stuyvesant had thought to cancel Froelich’s booking. Then the nighttime silence pressed in on him and he was overcome by a sense of something not there. A sense of absence. Things that should be there and weren’t. What exactly? Froelich, of course. He had an ache for her. She should be there, and she wasn’t. She had been there the last time he was in the room. Early that morning. Today’s the day we win or lose, she had said. Losing is not an option, he had replied.

Something not there. Maybe Joe himself. Maybe lots of things. There were lots of things missing from his life. Things not done, things not said. What exactly? Maybe it was just Armstrong’s father’s service career on his mind. But maybe it was more than that. Was something else missing? He closed his eyes and chased it hard but all he saw was the pink spray of Froelich’s blood arcing backward into the sunlight. So he opened his eyes again and stripped off his clothes and showered for the third time that day. He found himself staring down at the tray like he was still expecting to see it run red. But it stayed clear and white.

The bed was cold and hard and the new sheets were stiff with starch. He slipped in alone and stared at the ceiling for an hour and thought hard. Then he switched off abruptly and made himself sleep. He dreamed of his brother strolling hand in hand with Froelich all the way around the Tidal Basin in summer. The light was soft and golden and the blood streaming from her neck hung in the still warm air like a shimmering red ribbon five feet above the ground. It hung there undisturbed by the passing crowds and it made a full mile-wide circle when she and Joe arrived back where they had started. Then she changed into Swain and Joe changed into the Bismarck cop. The cop’s coat flapped open as he walked and Swain said I think we miscounted to everybody he met. Then Swain changed into Armstrong. Armstrong smiled his brilliant politician’s smile and said I’m so sorry and the cop turned and threaded a long gun out from under his flapping coat and slowly racked the bolt and shot Armstrong in the head. There was no sound, because the gun was silenced. No sound, even as Armstrong hit the water and floated away.

There was an alarm call from the desk at six o’clock and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Reacher rolled out of bed and wrapped a towel around his waist and checked the spy hole. It was Neagley, with coffee for him. She was all dressed and ready to go. He let her in and sat on the bed and started the coffee and she paced the narrow alley that led to the window. She was wired. Looked like she’d been drinking coffee all night.

“OK, Armstrong’s father?” she said, like she was asking the question for him. “He was drafted right at the end of Korea. Never saw active service. But he went through officer training and came out a second lieutenant and was assigned to an infantry company. They were stationed in Alabama, some place that’s long gone. They were ordered to achieve battle readiness for a fight everybody knew was already over. And you know how that stuff went, right?”

Reacher nodded sleepily. Sipped his coffee.

“Some idiot captain ru

“And Armstrong senior usually won,” Neagley said. “He ran a tight unit. But he had a temper problem. It was unpredictable. If somebody screwed up and lost points he could fly into a rage. Happened a couple of times. Not just the usual officer bullshit. It’s described in the records as serious uncontrolled temper tantrums. He went way too far, like he couldn’t stop himself.”

“And?”

“They let him get away with it twice. It wasn’t constant. It was purely episodic. But the third time, there was some real serious physical abuse and they kicked him out for it. And they covered it up, basically. They gave him a psychological discharge, wrote it up as generic battle stress, even though he’d never been a combat officer.”

Reacher made a face. “He must have had friends. And so must you, to get that deep into the records.”

“I’ve been on the phone all night. Stuyvesant’s going to have a coronary when he sees the motel bill.”

“How many individual victims?”

“My first thought, but we can forget them. There were three, one for each incident. One was KIA in Vietnam, one died ten years ago in Palm Springs, and the third is more than seventy years old, lives in Florida.”

“Dry hole,” Reacher said.





“But it explains why they left it out of the campaign.”

Reacher nodded. Sipped his coffee. “Any chance Armstrong himself inherited the temper? Froelich said she’d seen him angry.”

“That was my second thought,” Neagley said. “It’s conceivable. There was something there below the surface when he was insisting on going to her service, wasn’t there? But I assume the broader picture would have come out already, long ago. The guy’s been ru

Reacher nodded, vaguely.

“The campaign,” he repeated. He sat still with the coffee cup in his hand. Stared straight ahead at the wall, one full minute, then two.

“What?” Neagley asked.

He didn’t reply. Just got up and walked to the window. Pulled back the shades and looked out at slices and slivers of D.C. under the gray dawn sky.

“What did Armstrong do in the campaign?” he asked.

“Lots of things.”

“How many Representatives does New Mexico have?”

“I don’t know,” Neagley said.

“I think it’s three. Can you name them?”

“No.”

“Would you recognize any of them on the street?”

“No.”

“Oklahoma?”

“Don’t know. Five?”

“Six, I think. Can you name them?”

“One of them is an asshole, I know that. Can’t remember his name.”

“Senators from Te

“What’s your point?”

Reacher stared out of the window.

“We’ve got Beltway disease,” he said. “We’re all caught up in it. We’re not looking at this thing like real people. To almost everybody else out there in the country all these politicians are absolute nobodies. You said it yourself. You said you’re interested in politics but you couldn’t name all hundred senators. And most people are a thousand times less interested than you. Most people wouldn’t recognize another state’s junior senator if he ran up and bit them in the ass. Or she, as Froelich would have said. She actually admitted nobody had ever heard of Armstrong before.”