"I don't know whether to hope you're right or wrong," he said. "About Wyoming, I mean. We'll have three agents and some local cops. That's not a lot of cover, if things turn out bad."
He passed the envelopes across the desk.
"There's a car waiting downstairs," he said. "You get a one-way ride to Georgetown, and then you're on your own."
They went down in the elevator and Reacher detoured into the main hall. It was vast and dark and gray and deserted, and the cold marble echoed with his footsteps. He stopped underneath the carved panel and glanced up at his brother's name. Glanced at the empty space where Froelich's would soon be added. Then he glanced away and walked back and joined Neagley. They pushed through the small door with the wired glass porthole and found their car.
The white tent was still in place across the sidewalk in front of Armstrong's house. The driver pulled up with the rear door tight against the contour and spoke into his wrist microphone. A second later Armstrong's front door opened and three agents stepped out. One walked forward through the canvas tunnel and opened the car door. Reacher got out and Neagley slid out beside him. The agent closed the door again and stood impassive on the curb and the car drove away. The second agent held his arms out in a brief mime that they should stand still and be searched. They waited in the whitened canvas gloom. Neagley tensed while strange hands patted her down. But it was superficial. They barely touched her. And they missed Reacher's ceramic knife. It was hidden in his sock.
The agents led them inside to Armstrong's hallway and closed the door. The house was larger than it appeared from the outside. It was a big substantial place that looked like it had been standing for a hundred years and was good for maybe a hundred more. The hallway had dark antiques and striped paper on the walls and a clutter of framed pictures everywhere. There were rugs on the floors laid over thick wall-to-wall carpeting. There was a battered garment bag resting in a corner, presumably ready for the emergency trip to Oregon.
"This way," one of the agents said.
He led them deep into the house and through a dogleg in the hallway to a huge eat-in kitchen that would have looked at home in a log cabin. It was all pine, with a big table at one end and all the cooking equipment at the other. There was a strong smell of coffee. Armstrong and his wife were sitting at the table with heavy china mugs and four different newspapers. Mrs. Armstrong was wearing a jogging suit and a sheen of sweat, like there might be a home gym in the basement. It looked like she wasn't going to Oregon with her husband. She had no makeup on. She looked a little tired and dispirited, like the events of Thanksgiving Day had altered her feelings in a fundamental way. Armstrong himself looked composed. He was wearing a clean shirt under a jacket with the sleeves pulled up over his forearms. No tie. He was reading the editorials from The New York Times and The Washington Post side by side.
"Coffee?" Mrs. Armstrong asked.
Reacher nodded and she stood up and walked into the kitchen area and pulled two more mugs off hooks and filled them. Walked back with one in each hand. Reacher couldn't decide if she was short or tall. She was one of those women who look short in flat shoes and tall in heels. She handed the mugs over without much expression. Armstrong looked up from his papers.
"I'm sorry to hear about your mother," Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded.
"Mr. Stuyvesant told me you want a private conversation," he said.
"Private would be good," Reacher said.
"Should my wife join us?"
"That depends on your definition of privacy."
Mrs. Armstrong glanced at her husband.
"You can tell me afterward," she said. "Before you leave. If you need to."
Armstrong nodded again and made a show of folding his newspapers. Then he stood up and detoured to the coffee machine and refilled his mug.
"Let's go," he said.
He led them back to the doglegged hallway and into a side room. Two agents followed and stood on each side of the door on the outside. Armstrong glanced out at them as if in apology and shut the door on them. Walked around and stood behind a desk. The room was set up like a study, but it was more recreational than for real. There was no computer. The desk was a big old item made from dark wood. There were leather chairs and books chosen for the look of their spines. There was paneling and an old Persian rug. There was an air freshener somewhere putting fragrance into the hush. There was a framed photograph on the wall. It showed a person of indeterminate gender standing on an ice floe. He or she was wearing an enormous padded down coat with a hood and thick mittens that reached the elbow. The hood had a big fur ruff that framed the face tight. The face itself was entirely hidden by a ski mask and smoked yellow snow goggles. One of the elbow-high mittens was raised in greeting.
"Our daughter," Armstrong said. "We asked her for a photo, because we miss her. That's what she sent. She has a sense of humor."
He sat down behind the desk. Reacher and Neagley took a chair each.
"This all feels very confidential," Armstrong said.
Reacher nodded. "And in the end I think we'll all agree it should be kept confidential."
"What's on your mind?"
"Mr. Stuyvesant gave us some ground rules," Reacher said. "I'm going to start breaking them right now. The Secret Service intercepted six threatening messages against you. The first came in the mail eighteen days ago. Two more came in the mail subsequently and three were hand-delivered."
Armstrong said nothing.
"You don't seem surprised," Reacher said.
Armstrong shrugged.
"Politics is a surprising business," he said.
"I guess it is," Reacher said. "All six messages were signed with a thumbprint. We traced the print to an old guy in California. His thumb had been amputated and stolen and used like a rubber stamp."
Armstrong said nothing.
"The second message showed up in Stuyvesant's own office. Eventually it was proved that a surveillance technician named Nendick had placed it there. Nendick's wife had been kidnapped in order to coerce his actions. He was so frightened of the danger to her posed by his inevitable interrogation that he went into some kind of a coma. But we're guessing she was already dead by then anyway."
Armstrong was silent.
"There's a researcher in the office called Swain who made an important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting. He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we added the guy in California who'd had his thumb removed and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration against you."
"Oh no," Armstrong said.
"So, ten messages," Reacher said. "All of them designed to torment you, except you hadn't been told about any of them. But then I started wondering whether we're still miscounting. And you know what? I'm pretty sure we are. I think there were at least eleven messages."
Silence in the small room.
"What would be the eleventh?" Armstrong asked.
"Something that slipped through," Reacher said. "Something that came in the mail, addressed to you, something that the Secret Service didn't see as a threat. Something that meant nothing at all to them, but something that meant a lot to you."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think it came first," Reacher said. "Right at the very beginning, maybe, before the Secret Service even caught on. I think it was like an announcement, that only you would understand. So I think you've known about all this all along. I think you know who's doing it, and I think you know why."
"People have died," Armstrong said. "That's a hell of an accusation."
"Do you deny it?"
Armstrong said nothing.
Reacher leaned forward.
"Some crucial words were never spoken," he said. "Thing is, if I was standing there serving turkey and then somebody started shooting and somebody else was suddenly bleeding to death on top of me, sooner or later I'd be asking, who the hell were they? What the hell did they want? Why the hell were they doing that? Those are fairly basic questions. I'd be asking them loud and clear, believe me. But you didn't ask them. We saw you twice, afterward. In the White House basement, and then later at the office. You said all kinds of things. You asked, had they been captured yet? That was your big concern. You never asked who they might be or what their possible motive was. And why didn't you ask? Only one possible explanation. You already knew."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think your wife knows, too," Reacher said. "You conveyed her anger at you for putting people at risk. I don't think she was generalizing. I think she knows you know, and she thinks you should have told somebody."
Armstrong was silent.
"So I think you're feeling a little guilty now," Reacher said. "I think that's why you agreed to make the television statement for me and that's why you suddenly want to go to the service itself. Some kind of a conscience thing. Because you knew, and you didn't tell anybody."
"I'm a politician," Armstrong said. "We have hundreds of enemies. There was no point in speculating."