And it was big. Very big. The pad of the thumb measured nearly
an inch and a half across. Reacher pressed his own thumb
alongside it. His thumb was smaller, and he didn’t have the
most delicate hands in the world.
if’hat’s not a watchmaker’s thumb,’ Froelich said.
Reacher nodded slowly. The guy must have hands like
bunches of bananas. And rough skin, to print with that degree
of clarity.
‘Manual worker,’ he said.
‘Shark fisherman,’ Froelich said. ‘Where do they catch a lot of
sharks?’
‘Florida, maybe.’
‘Orlando’s in Florida.’
Her phone rang. She picked it up and her face fell. She looked up at the ceiling and pressed the phone into her
shoulder.
‘Armstrong needs to go over to the Department of Labor,’ she
said. ‘And he wants to walk.’
129
SEVEN
I
T WAS E'[ACTLY TWO MILES FROM THE TREASURY BUILDING TO THE Senate Offices and Froelich drove the whole way one
handed while she talked on her phone. The weather
was grey and the traffic was heavy and the trip was slow.
She parked at the mouth of the white tent on First Street and
killed the motor and snapped her phone closed all at the same
time.
‘Can’t the Labor guys come over here?’ Reacher asked.
She shook her head. ‘It’s a political thing. There are going to
be changes over there and it’s more polite if Armstrong makes
the effort himself.’
‘Why does he want to walk?’
‘Because he’s an outdoors type. He likes fresh air. And he’s
stubborn.’
‘Where does he have to go, exactly?’
She pointed due west. ‘Less than half a mile that way. Call it
six or seven hundred yards across Capitol Plaza.’
‘Did he call them or did they call him?’
‘He called them. It’s going to leak so he’s trying to preempt
the bad news.’
‘Can you stop him going?’
130
q’heoretically,’ she said. ‘But I really don’t want to. That’s not
the sort of argument I want to have right now.’
Reacher turned and looked down the street behind
them. Nothing there except grey weather and speeding cars on
Constitution Avenue.
‘So let him do it,’ he said. ‘He called them. Nobody’s luring
him out into the open. It’s not a trick.’
She glanced ahead through the windshield. Then she turned
and stared past him, through his side window, down the length
of the tent. Flipped her phone open and spoke to people in her
office again. She used abbreviations and a torrent of jargon he
couldn’t follow. Finished the call and closed her phone.
‘We’ll bring a Metro traffic chopper in,’ she said. ‘Keep it
low enough to be obvious. He’ll have to pass the Armenian
Embassy, so we’ll put some extra cops there. They’ll blend in.
I’ll follow him in the car on D Street fifty yards behind. I want
you out ahead of him with your eyes wide open.’
‘When are we doing this?’
‘Within ten minutes. Go up the street and left.’
‘OK,’ he said. She restarted the car and rolled forward so he
could step onto the sidewalk clear of the tent. He got out and
zipped his jacket and walked away into the cold. Up First Street
and left onto C Street. There was traffic on Delaware Avenue
ahead of him and beyond it he could see Capitol Plaza. There
were low bare trees and open brown lawns. Paths made from
crushed sandstone. A fountain in the centre. A pool to the right.
To the left and farther on, some kind of an obelisk memorial to
somebody.
He dodged cars and ran across Delaware. Walked on into the
plaza. Grit crunched under his shoes-. It was very cold. His soles
were thin. It felt like there were ice crystals mixed in with the
crushed stone underfoot. He stopped just short of the fountain.
Looked around. Perimeters were good. To the north was open
ground and then a semicircle of state flags and some other
monument and the bulk of Union Station. To the south was
nothing except for the Capitol Building itself far away across
Constitution Avenue. Ahead to the west was a building he
assumed was the Department of Labor. He looped around the