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 Bannon. Reacher was in his Atlantic City coat and the third of Joe's abandoned Italian suits and the third Somebody amp; Somebody shirt and a plain blue tie. Froelich was in another black pant suit. Neagley was in the same suit she had worn on Sunday evening. It was the one that showed off her figure. The one that Nendick had ignored. She was cycling through her wardrobe as fast as the hotel laundry would let her. Stuyvesant was immaculate in his usual Brooks Brothers. Maybe it was fresh on, maybe it wasn't. There was no way to tell. All his suits were the same. He looked very tired. Actually they all looked very tired, and Reacher was a little worried about that. In his experience tiredness impaired operational efficiency as badly as a drink too many.
"We'll sleep on the plane," Froelich said. "We'll tell the pilot to fly slow."
Bannon was a guy of about forty. He was in a tweed sport coat and gray flannels and looked bluff and Irish and was tall and heavy. He had a red complexion that the winter morning hadn't helped. But he was polite and cheerful and he had supplied the doughnuts and the coffee himself. Two different stores, each chosen for its respective quality. He had been well received. Twenty bucks' worth of food and drink had broken a lot of interagency ice.
"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 Minnesota. Third, the scene in Colorado."
"Are your people in charge out there?" Froelich asked.
"Both places," Bannon said. "Our ballistics people figure the Colorado weapon for a Heckler and Koch submachine gun called the MP5."
"We already concluded that," Neagley said. "And it was probably silenced, which makes it the MP5SD6."
Bannon nodded. "You're one of the ex-military, right? In which case you've seen MP5s before. As I have. They're military and paramilitary weapons. Police and federal SWAT teams use them."
Then he went quiet and looked around the assembled faces, like there was more to his point than he had actually articulated.
"What about Minnesota?" Neagley asked.
"We found the bullet," Bannon said. "We swept the farmyard with a metal detector. It was buried about nine inches deep in the mud. Consistent with a shot from a small wooded hillside about a hundred and twenty yards away to the north. Maybe eighty feet of elevation."
"What was the bullet?" Reacher asked.
"NATO 7.62 millimeter," Bannon said.
Reacher nodded. "You test it?"
"For what?"
"Burn."
Bannon nodded. "Low power, weak charge."
"Subsonic ammunition," Reacher said. "In that caliber it has to be a Vaime Mk2 silenced sniper rifle."
"Which is also a police and paramilitary weapon," Bannon said. "Often supplied to antiterrorist units."
He looked around the room again, like he was inviting a comment. Nobody made one. So he pitched it himself.
"You know what?" he said.
"What?"
"Put a list of who buys Heckler amp; Koch MP5s in America side to side with a list of who buys Vaime Mk2s, and you see only one official purchaser on both lists."
"Who?"
"The United States Secret Service."
The room went quiet. Nobody spoke. There was a knock at the door. The duty officer. He stood there, framed in the doorway.
"Mail just arrived," he said. "Something you need to see."
They laid it on the conference room table. It was a familiar brown envelope, gummed flap, metal closure. A computer-printed self-adhesive address label. Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. Clear black-on-white Times New Roman lettering. Bannon opened his briefcase and took out a pair of white cotton gloves. Pulled them on, right hand, left hand. Tightened them over his fingers.
"Got these from the lab," he said. "Special circumstances. We don't want to use latex. Don't want to confuse the talcum traces."
The gloves were clumsy. He had to slide the envelope to the edge of the table to pick it up. He held it with one hand and looked for something to open it with. Reacher took his ceramic knife out of his pocket and snapped it open. Offered it handle-first. Bannon took it and eased the tip of the blade under the corner of the flap. Moved the envelope backward and the knife forward. The blade cut the paper like it was cutting air. He handed the knife back to Reacher and pressed on the sides of the envelope so it made a mouth. Glanced inside. Turned the envelope over and tipped something out.
It was a single sheet of letter-size paper. Heavyweight white stock. It landed and skidded an inch on the polished wood and settled flat. It had a question printed over two lines, centered between the margins, a little higher than halfway up the sheet. Five words, in the familiar severe typeface: Did you like the demonstration? The last word was the only word on the second line. That isolation gave it some kind of extra emphasis.
Bannon turned the envelope over and checked the postmark.
"Vegas again," he said. "Saturday. They're real confident, aren't they? They're asking if he liked the demonstration three days before they staged it."
"We have to move out now," Froelich said. "Lift-off at ten. I want Reacher and Neagley with me. They've been there before. They know the ground."
Stuyvesant raised his hand. A vague gesture. Either OK or whatever or don't bother me, Reacher couldn't tell.
"I want twice-daily meetings," Bannon said. "In here, seven every morning and maybe ten at night?"
"If we're in town," Froelich said. She headed for the door. Reacher and Neagley followed her out of the room. Reacher caught her and nudged her elbow and steered her left instead of right, down the corridor toward her office.
"Do the database search," he whispered.
She glanced at her watch. "It's way too slow."
"So start it now and let it compile all day."
"Won't Bannon do it?"
"Probably. But double-checking never hurt anybody."
She paused. Then she turned and headed for the interior of the floor. Lit up her office and turned on her computer. The NCIC database had a complex search protocol. She entered her password and clicked the cursor into the box and typed thumbprint.
"Be more specific," Reacher said. "That's going to give you ten zillion plain-vanilla fingerprint cases."
She tabbed backward and typed thumbprint+document+ letter+signature.
"OK?" she said.
He shrugged. "I was born before these things were invented."
"It's a start," Neagley said. "We can refine it later if we need to."
So Froelich clicked on search and the hard disk chattered and the inquiry box disappeared from the screen.
"Let's go," she said.
Moving a threatened Vice President-elect from the District of Columbia to the great state of North Dakota was a complicated undertaking. It required eight separate Secret Service vehicles, four police cars, a total of twenty agents, and an airplane. Staging the local political rally itself required twelve agents, forty local police officers, four State Police vehicles, and two local canine units. Froelich spent a total of four hours on the radio in order to coordinate the whole operation.