ours. It’ll be all smiles over at the Hoover Building. They’ll be
grinning from ear to ear. Laughing up their sleeves at us.’
‘But does that make them wrong?’ Neagley asked.
‘No,’ Froelich said. Fhese guys know whre I live. So I think
Bannon’s right.’
Stuyvesant flinched, like the umpire had called strike one. ‘And you?’ he said to Neagley.
‘Worrying about DNA on envelopes sounds like insiders,’
Neagley said. ‘But one thing bothers me. If they’re familiar
with your procedures, then they didn’t interpret the Bismarck
situation very well. You said they expected the cops would
move towards the decoy rifle and Armstrong would move
towards the cars, thereby traversing their field of fire. But that
didn’t happen. Armstrong waited in the blind spot and the cars
came to him.’
Froelich shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid their interpretation
was correct,’ she said. ‘Normally Armstrong would have been
well out in the middle of the field, letting people get a good look
at him. Right there in the centre of things. We don’t usually
make them skulk around the edg, es. It was a last-minute change
to keep him near the church. Based on Reacher’s input. And
normally there’s absolutely no way I would allow a rear-wheel
drive limo on the grass. Too easy to bog down and get stuck.
That’s an article of faith. But I knew the ground was dry and
hard. It was practically frozen. So I improvised. That manoeuvre
would have struck an insider as completely off the wall. It would
have been the very last thing they were expecting. They
would have been totally surprised by it.’
Silence.
if’hen Bannon’s theory is perfectly plausible,’ Neagley said.
‘I’m very sorry.’
Stuyvesant nodded, slowly. Strike two.
‘Reacher?’ he said.
253
‘Can’t argue with a word of it.’
Strike three. Stuyvesant’s head dropped, like his last hope was
gone.
‘But I don’t believe it,’ Reacher said.
Stuyvesant’s head came up again.
‘I’m glad they’re pursuing it,’ Reacher said. ‘Because it needs
to be pursued, I guess. We need to eliminate all possibilities.
And they’ll go at it like crazy. If they’re right, they’ll take care of
it for us, that’s for sure. So it’s one less thing for us to worry
about. But I’m pretty sure they’re wasting their time.’
‘Why?’ Froelich asked.
‘Because I’m pretty sure neither of these guys ever worked
here.’
‘So who are they?’
‘I think they’re both outsiders. I think they’re between two
and ten years older than Armstrong himself, both of them
brought up and educated in remote rural areas where the
schools were decent but the taxes were low.’
‘What?’
Fhink of everything we know. Think of everything we’ve
seen. Then think of the very smallest part of it. The very tiniest
component.’
if’ell us,’ Froelich said.
Stuyvesant checked his watch again. Shook his head. ‘Not
now,’ he said. ‘We need to move. You can tell us later. But
you’re sure?’
q’hey’re both outsiders,’ Reacher said. ‘Guaranteed. It’s in the
Constitution.’
254
THIRTEEN
E
VERY CITY HAS A CUSP, WHERE THE GOOD PART OF TOWN TURNS bad. Washington D.C. was no different. The border
between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged
irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate
reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim
inroads of its own. It was pierced in some places by gentrified
corridors. Elsewhere it worked gradually, shading imperceptibly
over hundreds of yards ,down streets where you could
buy thirty different blends of tea at one end and cash cheques
at the other for thirty per cent of the proceeds.
The shelter selected for Armstrong’s appearance was halfway
into the no-man’s-land north of Union Station. To the east were
train tracks and switching yards. To the west was a highway
running underground in a tunnel. All around were decayed
buildings. Some of them were warehouses and some of them
were apartments. Some of them were abandoned, some of
them were not. The shelter itself was exactly what Froelich had
described. It was a long low one-storey building made of brick.
It had large metal-framed windows evenly spaced in the walls. It
had a yard next to it twice its own size. The yard was closed