food was emptied it was replaced by a new one passed out
through the kitchen window. Armstrong was smiling like he
was enjoying himself. The line of homeless people shuffled
forward. The cameras rolled. The only sound was the clatter of
metal utensils in the serving dishes and the repeated banalities
from the servers. Enjoy! Happy Thanksgiving! Thanks for
coming by!
Reacher glanced at Neagley. She raised her eyebrows. He
glanced up at the warehouse roofs. Glanced at Froelich, busy
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with her long-handled spoon. Looked at the television people.
They were clearly bored. They were taping a whole hour
and they knew it would be edited to eight seconds maximum
with boilerplate commentary laid over it. Vice President-elect
Armstrong served the traditional Thanksgiving turkey today at a
homeless shelter here in Washington D.C. Cut to first-quarter
football highlights.
The line was still thirty people long when it happened.
Reacher sensed a dull chalky impact nearby and something
stung him on the right cheek. In the corner of his eye he saw a
puff of dust around a small cratered chip on the surface of the
back wall. No sound. No sound at all. A split second later his
brain told him: bullet. Silencer. He looked at the line. Nobody
moving. He snapped his head to the left and up. The roof
Crosetti wasn’t there. Crosetti was there. He was twenty feet out of
position. He was shooting. It wasn’t Crosetti.
Then he tried to defeat time and move faster than the awful
slow motion of panic would allow him. He pushed off the wall
and tilled his lungs with air and turned toward Froelich as
slowly as a man running through a swimming pool. His mouth
opened and desperate words formed in his throat and he tried
to shout them out. But she was already well ahead of him.
She was screaming, ‘G-u-u-n!’
She was spinning in slow motion. Her spoon was loose in the
air, arcing up over the table, glittering in the sun, spraying food.
She was on Armstrong’s left. She was jumping sideways at him.
Her left arm was scything up to shield him. She was jumping
like a basketball player going for a hook shot. Twisting in
mid-air. She got her right hand on his shoulder for a pivot and
used the momentum of her left to turn herself around face on to
him. She drew her knees up and landed square on his upper
chest. Breath punched out of him and his legs buckled and he
was going down backward when the second silenced bullet hit
her in the neck. There was no sound. No sound at all. Just a
bright vivid backward spray of blood in the sunlight, as fine as
autumn mist.
It hung there in a long conical cloud, like vapour, pink and
iridescent. It stretched to a point as she fell. Her spoon came
down through it, tumbling end over end, disturbing its shape. It
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lengthened in a long graceful curve. She went down and left her
blood in the air behind her like a question mark. Reacher
turned his head like it was clamped with an enormous weight
and saw the slope of a shoulder far away on the roof, moving
backward out of sight. He turned infinitely slowly back to the
yard and saw the wet pink arrow of Froelich’s blood pointing
down to a place now out of sight behind the tables.
Then time restarted and a hundred things happened all
at once, all at high speed, all with shattering noise. Agents
smothered Armstrong’s wife and hauled her to the ground. She
was screaming loud. Shrieking desperately. Agents pulled their
guns and started firing up at the warehouse roof. There was
shouting and wailing from the crowd. People were stampeding.
Running everywhere under the heavy repeated thumping of
powerful handguns. Reacher clawed at the serving tables
and hurled them behind him and fought his way through the
wreckage to Froelich. Agents were dragging Armstrong out
from underneath her. Auto engines were revving. Tyres were
squealing. Guns were firing. There was smoke in the air. Sirens
were yelping. Armstrong disappeared off the floor and Reacher
fell to his knees in a lake of blood next to Froelich and cradled