thing was triggered by something recent.’
‘And his recent history is the campaign,’ Swain said.
‘Nothing way in his background?’ Bannon asked.
Swain shook his head. ‘We’re covered four ways,’ he said.
‘First and most recent was your own FBI check When he was
nominated. We’ve got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we’ve
got opposition research from the other campaign from this time
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around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys
dig up way more stuff than you do. And he’s clean.’
‘North Dakota sources?’
‘Nothing,’ Swain said. ‘We talked to all the papers up there,
matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there’s
nothing wrong with the guy.’
‘So it was the campaign,’ Stuyvesant said. ‘He pissed somebody
off.’
‘Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons,’ Bannon said.
‘Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret
Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can’t mail
something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich
lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck,
sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?’
Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked his watch. Took his
cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of
him. It sat there, silent.
‘I’m sticking with the theory,’ he said. ‘Except now I’m listing
both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher
turns out to be fight, that is.’
The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a
squeaky little rendition of some famous, classical overture. It
sounded ludicrous in the sombre stillness of the room. He
picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody
must have said chief? because he said yeah and then just
listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked
the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.
‘Sacramento?’ Stuyvesant asked.
‘No,’ Bannon said. ‘Local. They found the rifle.’
They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside
the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all
looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types
dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who
had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for
the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a
couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them,
vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.
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‘Was it a Vaime Mk2?’ Bannon asked.
‘Without a doubt,’ one of the techs said.
‘Serial number on it?’
The guy shook his head. ‘Removed with acid.’
‘Anything you can do?’
The guy shook his head again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If it was a
stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough
distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but
Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do.’
‘So where is it now?’
‘We’re fuming it for prints,’ the guy said. ‘But it’s hopeless.
We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It’s
been wiped.’
‘Where was it found?’
‘In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor
rooms.’
‘I guess they waited in there,’ Bannon said. ‘Maybe five
minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads.’
‘Shell cases?’ Neagley asked.
‘None,’ the tech said. ffhey must have collected their brass.
But we’ve got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked
from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is
intact. The mud preserved it.’
He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a
sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were
crushed to distorted blobs by ,impact. One of the three was
clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the
wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from
Crosetti’s brains and Froelich’s blood respectively. The remains
of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and
burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then
the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and