he has a grown-up kid, right? We have to assume that messing
with his family would be a pretty good demonstration of his
vulnerability.’
Froelich nodded. ‘His wife is back here in D.C. She
came in from North Dakota yesterday. As long as she stays in
or near the house she’s OK. His daughter is doing graduate
work in Antarctica. Meteorology, or something. She’s in a hut
surrounded by a hundred thousand square miles of ice. Better
protection than we could give her.’
Reacher put the Polaroid back down on the table.
‘Are you confident?’ he asked. ‘About today?’
‘I’m nervous as hell.’
‘But?’
‘I’m as confident as I can be.’
‘I want Neagley and me on the ground, observing.’
hink we’re going to screw up?’
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‘No, but I think you’re going to have your hands full. If the
guy’s in the neighbourhood, you might be too busy to spot him.
And he’ll have to be in the neighbourhood if he’s for real and he
wants to stage a demonstration of something.’
‘OK,’ Stuyvesant said. ‘You and Ms Neagley, on the ground,
observing.’
Froelich drove them to Georgetown in her Suburban. They
arrived just before ten o’clock. They got out three blocks short
of Armstrong’s house and Froelich drove on. It was a cold day,
but a watery sun was trying its best. Neagley stood still and
glanced around, all four directions.
‘Deployment?’ she asked.
‘Circles, on a three-block radius. You go clockwise and I’ll go
counterclockwise. Then you stay south and I’ll stay north. Meet
back at the house after he’s gone.’
Neagley nodded and walked away west. Reacher went
east into the weak morning sun. He wasn’t especially familiar
with Georgetown. Apart from short periods during the previous
week spent watching Armstrong’s house he had explored it
only once, briefly, just after he left the service. He was familiar
with the college feel and the coffee shops and the smart houses.
But he didn’t know it the way a cop knows his beat. A
cop depends on a sense of inappropriateness. What doesn’t fit?
What’s out of the ordinary? What’s the wrong type of face or the
wrong type of car for the neighbourhood? Impossible to answer
those questions without long habituation to the place. And
maybe impossible to answer them at all in a place like Georgetown.
Everybody who lives there comes from somewhere else.
They’re there for a reason, to study at the university or to work
in the government. It’s a transient place. It has a temporary,
shifting population. You graduate, you leave. You get voted out,
you go someplace else. You get rich, you move to Chevy Chase.
You go broke, you go leep in a park.
So just about everybody he saw was suspicious. He could
have made a case against any of them. Who belonged? An old
Porsche with a blown exhaust rumbled past him. Oklahoma
plates. An unshaven driver. Who was he? A brand new Mercury
Sable was parked nose to tail with a rusted-out Rabbit. The
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Sable was red and almost certainly a rental. Who was using it?
Some guy just in for the day for a special purpose? He detoured
next to it and glanced in through the windows at the rear seat.
No overcoat, no hat. No open ream of Georgia-Pacific office
paper. No box of latex medical gloves. And who owned the
Rabbit? A graduate student? Or some backwoods anarchist with
a Hewlett-Packard printer at home?
There were people on the sidewalks. Maybe four or five of
them visible at any one time in any one direction. Young, old,
white, black, brown. Men, women, young people carrying backpacks
full of books. Some of them hurrying, some of them
strolling. Some of them obviously on their way to the market,
some of them obviously on their way back. Some of them
looking like they had no particular place to go. He watched
them all in the corner of his eye, but nothing special jumped out
at him.
Time to time he checked upper-storey windows as he walked.
There were a lot of them. It was good rifle territory. A warren
of houses, back gates, narrow alleys. But a rifle would be no