"What?" Reacher asked again.
"Back to base," Froelich said. "Now. That was Stuyvesant. Seems like we've got a real big problem."
Chapter 9
She used the red strobes behind the Suburban's grille and barged through the evening traffic like it was life and death. She lit up the siren at every light. Pushed through and accelerated hard into gaps. Didn't talk at all. Reacher sat completely still in the front passenger seat and Neagley leaned forward from the back with her eyes locked on the road ahead. The three-ton vehicle bucked and swayed. The tires fought for grip on the slick pavement. They made it back to the garage inside four minutes. They were in the elevator thirty seconds later. In Stuyvesant's office less than one minute after that. He was sitting motionless behind his immaculate desk. Slumped in his chair like he had taken a punch to the stomach. He was holding a sheaf of papers. The light shone through them and showed the kind of random coded headings you get by printing from a database. There were two blocks of dense text under the headings. His secretary was standing next to him, handing him more paper, sheet by sheet. She was white in the face. She left the room without saying a single word. Closed the door, which intensified the silence.
"What?" Reacher said.
Stuyvesant glanced up at him. "Now I know."
"Know what?"
"That this is an outside job. For sure. Without any possible doubt."
"How?"
"You predicted theatrical," Stuyvesant said. "Or spectacular. Those were your predictions. To which we might add dramatic, or incredible, or whatever."
"What was it?"
"Do you know what the homicide rate is, nationally?"
Reacher shrugged. "High, I guess."
"Almost twenty thousand every year."
"OK."
"That's about fifty-four homicides every day."
Reacher did the math in his head.
"Nearer fifty-five," he said. "Except in leap years."
"Want to hear about two of today's?" Stuyvesant asked.
"Who?" Froelich asked.
"Small sugar beet farm in Minnesota," Stuyvesant said. "The farmer walks out his back gate this morning and gets shot in the head. For no apparent reason. Then this afternoon there's a small strip mall outside of Boulder, Colorado. A CPA's office in one of the upstairs rooms. The guy comes down and walks out of the rear entrance and gets killed with a machine gun in the service yard. Again, no apparent reason."
"So?"
"The farmer's name was Bruce Armstrong. The accountant's was Brian Armstrong. Both of them were white men about Brook Armstrong's age, about his height, about his weight, similar appearance, same color eyes and hair."
"Are they family? Are they related?"
"No," Stuyvesant said. "Not in any way. Not to each other, not to the VP. So therefore I'm asking myself, what are the odds? That two random men whose last name is Armstrong and whose first names both begin with BR are going to get senselessly killed the same day we're facing a serious threat against our guy? And I'm thinking, the answer is about a trillion billion to one."
Silence in the office.
"The demonstration," Reacher said.
"Yes," Stuyvesant said. "That was the demonstration. Cold-blooded murder. Two innocent men. So I agree with you. These are not insiders having a joke."
Neagley and Froelich made it to Stuyvesant's visitor chairs and just sat down without being asked. Reacher leaned on a tall file cabinet and stared out the window. The blinds were still open, but it was full dark outside. Washington's orange nighttime glow was the only thing he could see.
"How were you notified?" he asked. "Did they call in and claim responsibility?"
Stuyvesant shook his head. "FBI alerted us. They've got software that scans the NCIC reports. Armstrong is one of the names that they flag up."
"So now they're involved anyway."
Stuyvesant shook his head again. "They passed on some information, is all. They don't understand its significance."
The room stayed quiet. Just four people breathing, lost in somber thoughts.
"We got any details from the scenes?" Neagley asked.
"Some," Stuyvesant said. "The first guy was a single shot to the head. Killed him instantly. They can't find the bullet. The guy's wife didn't hear anything."
"Where was she?"
"About twenty feet away in the kitchen. Doors and windows shut because of the weather. But you'd expect her to hear something. She hears hunters all the time."
"How big was the hole in his head?" Reacher asked.
"Bigger than a.22," Stuyvesant said. "If that's what you're thinking."
Reacher nodded. The only handgun inaudible from twenty feet would be a silenced.22. Anything bigger than that, you'd probably hear something, suppressor or no suppressor, windows or no windows.
"So it was a rifle," he said.
"Trajectory looks like it," Stuyvesant said. "Medical examiner figures the bullet was traveling downward. It went through his head front to back, high to low."
"Hilly country?"
"All around."
"So it was either a very distant rifle or a silenced rifle. And I don't like either one. Distant rifle means somebody's a great shooter, silenced rifle means somebody owns a bunch of exotic weapons."
"What about the second guy?" Neagley asked.
"It was less than eight hours later," Stuyvesant said. "But more than eight hundred miles away. So most likely the team split up for the day."
"Details?"
"Coming through in bits and pieces. First impression from the locals is the weapon was some kind of machine gun. But again, nobody heard anything."
"A silenced machine gun?" Reacher said. "Are they sure?"
"No question it was a machine gun," Stuyvesant said. "The corpse was all chewed up. Two bursts, head and chest. Hell of a mess."
"Hell of a demonstration," Froelich said.
Reacher stared through the window. There was light fog in the air.
"But what exactly does it demonstrate?" he said.
"That these are not very nice people."
He nodded. "But not very much more than that, does it? It doesn't really demonstrate Armstrong's vulnerability as such, not if they weren't connected to him in any way. Are we sure they weren't related? Like very distant cousins or something? At least the farmer? Minnesota is next to North Dakota, right?"
Stuyvesant shook his head.
"My first thought, obviously," he said. "But I double-checked. First, the VP isn't from North Dakota originally. He moved in from Oregon. Plus we have the complete text of his FBI background check from when he was nominated. It's pretty exhaustive. And he doesn't have any living relatives that anybody's aware of except an elder sister who lives in California. His wife has got a bunch of cousins but none of them are called Armstrong and most of them are younger. Kids, basically."
"OK," Reacher said. Kids. He had a flash in his mind of a seesaw, and stuffed toys and lurid paintings stuck to a refrigerator with magnets. Cousins.
"It's weird," he said. "Killing two random unconnected lookalikes called Armstrong is dramatic enough, I guess, but it doesn't show any great ingenuity. Doesn't prove anything. Doesn't make us worried about our security here."
"Makes us sad for them," Froelich said. "And their families."
"No doubt," Reacher said. "But two hicks in the sticks going down doesn't really make us sweat, does it? It's not like we were protecting them as well. Doesn't make us doubt ourselves. I really thought it would be something more personal. More intriguing. Like some equivalent of the letter showing up on your desk."
"You sound disappointed," Stuyvesant said.
"I am disappointed. I thought they might come close enough to give us a chance at them. But they stayed away. They're cowards."
Nobody spoke.
"Cowards are bullies," Reacher said. "Bullies are cowards."
Neagley glanced at him. Knew him well enough to sense when to push.
"So?" she asked.
"So we need to go back and rethink a couple of things. Information is stacking up fast and we're not processing it. Like, now we know these guys are outsiders. Now we know this is not a genteel inside game."
"So?" Neagley asked again.
"And what happened in Minnesota and Colorado shows us these guys are prepared to do just about anything at all."
"So?"
"The cleaners. What do we know about them?"
"That they're involved. That they're scared. That they're not saying anything."
"Correct," Reacher said. "But why are they scared? Why aren't they saying anything? Way back we thought they might be playing some cute game with an insider. But they're not doing that. Because these guys aren't insiders. And they're not cute people. And this isn't a game."
"So?"
"So they're being coerced in some serious way. They're being scared and silenced. By some serious people."
"OK, how?"
"You tell me. How do you scare somebody without leaving a mark on them?"
"You threaten something plausible. Serious harm in the future, maybe."