Child, Lee – Without Fail

the cops here.’

‘Friends of yours?’

‘Recent.’

‘When’s payday supposed to be?’

‘Friday night, after the last set. Midnight, maybe. They need

to pick up their money and get their stuff to their car. They’ll be

heading to New York.’

‘I’ll ask one of our agents to check in with them every day.

Better than the cops, I think. We’ve got a field office here.

38

Big-time money laundering in Atlantic City. It’s the casinos. So

you’ll do it?’

Reacher went quiet again and thought about his brother. He’s

back to haunt me, he thought. I knew he would be, one day. His

coffee cup was empty but still warm. He lifted it off the saucer

and tilted it and watched the sludge in the bottom flow towards

him, slow and brown, like river silt.

‘When does it need to be done?’ he asked.

At that exact moment less than a hundred and thirty miles away

in a warehouse behind Baltimore’s Inner Harbor cash was

finally exchanged for two weapons and matching ammunition. A

lot of cash. Good weapons. Special ammunition. The planning

for the second attempt had started with an objective analysis of

the first attempt’s failure. As realistic professionals they were

reluctant to blame the whole debacle on inadequate hardware,

but they agreed that better firepower couldn’t hurt. So they had

researched their needs and located a supplier. He had what

they wanted. The price was right. They negotiated a guarantee.

It was their usual type of arrangement. They told the guy that if

there was a problem with the merchandise they would come

back and shoot him through the spinal cord, low down, put him

in a wheelchair.

Getting their hands on the guns was the last preparatory

step. Now they were ready to go fully operational.

Vice President-elect Brook Armstrong had six main tasks in

the ten weeks between election and inauguration. Sixth and

least important was the continuation of his duties as junior

senator from North Dakota until, his term officially ended.

There were nearly six hundred and fifty thousand people in the

state and any one of them might want attention at any time, but

Armstrong assumed they all understood they were in limbo

until his successor took over. Equally; Congress wasn’t doing

much of anything until January. So his senatorial duties didn’t

occupy much of his attention.

Fifth task was to ease his successor into place back home. He

had scheduled two rallies in the state so he could hand the new

guy on to his own tame media contacts. It had to be a visual

39

thing, shoulder to shoulder, plenty of grip-and-grin for the

cameras, Armstrong taking a metaphoric step backward, the

new guy taking a metaphoric step forward. “I3ae first rally was

planned for the twentieth of November, the other four days

later. Both would be irksome, but party loyalty demanded it.

Fourth task was to learn some things. He would be a member

of the National Security Council, for instance. He would be

exposed to stuff a junior senator from North Dakota couldn’t

be expected to know. A CIA staffer had been assigned as his

personal tutor, and there were Pentagon people coming in, and

Foreign Service people. It was all kept as fluid as possible, but

there was a lot of work to be fitted around everything else.

And everything else was increasingly urgent. The third task

was where it started to get important. There were some tens of

thousands of contributors who had supported the campaign

nationally. The really big donors would be taken care of in other

ways, but the individual thousand-dollar-and-up supporters

needed to share the success, too. So the party had scheduled a

number of big receptions in D.C. where they could all mill

around and feel important and at the centre of things. Their

local committees would invite them to fly in and dress up and

rub shoulders. They would be told it wasn’t officially certain

yet whether it would be the new President or the new Vice

President hosting them. In practice three-quarters of the duty

was already scheduled to fall to Armstrong.

The second task was where it started to get really important.

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