sure they know who he is, specifically. They’re night workers.
All they see is a bunch of offices. They don’t see people. They
didn’t react to his name at all. They didn’t really react
to anything. Just sat there, scared to death, looking at their
lawyers, saying nothing.’
‘You’re slipping. People used to eat out of your hand, the way
I recall it.’
She nodded. ‘I told you, I’m getting old..I couldn’t get a
handle on them anywhere. The lawyers wouldn’t let me, really.
The civilian justice system is very off-putting. I never felt so
disconnected.’
139
Reacher said nothing. Checked his watch.
‘So what now?’ Neagley asked.
‘We wait,’ he said.
The wait went slowly. Froelich came back after an hour and a
half and reported that Armstrong was safely back in his own
office. She had persuaded him to come with her in the car. She
told him she understood that he preferred to walk, but she
made the point that her team needed operational fine-tuning
and there was no better time to do it than right now. She
pushed it to the point where a refusal would have seemed like a
prima-donna pain in the ass, and Armstrong wasn’t like that,
so he climbed into the Suburban quite happily. The transfer
through the tent at the Senate Offices had worked without
incident.
‘Now make some calls,’ Reacher said. ‘See if anything’s
happened that we need to know about.’
She checked with the D.C. cops first. There was the usual
list of urban crimes and misdemeanours, but it would have been
a stretch to categorize any of them as a demonstration of
Armstrong’s vulnerability. She transferred to the precinct
holding the crazy guy and took a long verbal report on his
status. Hung up and shook her head.
‘Not connected,’ she said. ‘They know him. IQ below eighty,
alcoholic, sleeps on the street, barely literate, and his prints
don’t match. He’s got a record a yard long for jumping on
anybody he’s ever seen in the newspapers he sleeps under.
Some kind of a bipolar problem. I suggest we forget all about
him.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said.
Then she opened up the National Crime Information Center
database and looked at recent entries. They were flooding in
from all over the country at a rate faster than one every second.
Faster than she could read them.
‘Hopeless,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait until midnight.’
‘Or one o’clock,’ Neagley said. ‘It might happen on central
time, out there in Bismarck. They might shoot up his house. Or
throw a rock through the window.’
So Froelich called the cops in Bismarck and asked for
140 :i
immediate notification of anything that could be even remotely
connected to an interest in Armstrong. Then she made the
same request to the North Dakota State Police and the FBI
nationwide.
‘Maybe it won’t happen,’ she said.
Reacher looked away. You better hope it does, he thought.
Around seven o’clock in the evening the office complex began
to quiet down. Most of the people visible in the corridors
were drifting one way only, towards the front exit. They were
wearing raincoats and carrying bags and briefcases.
‘Did you check out of the hotel?’ Froelich asked.
‘Yes,’ Reacher said.
‘No,’ Neagley said. ‘I make a terrible house guest.’
Froelich paused, a little taken aback. But Reacher wasn’t
surprised. Neagley was a very solitary person. Always had
been. She kept herself to herself. He didn’t know why.
‘OK,’ Froelich said. ‘But we should take some time out. Rest
up and regroup later. I’ll drop you guys off and then go try to
get Armstrong home safely.’
They rode together down to the garage and Froelich fired up
her Suburban and drove Neagley to the hotel. Reacher walked
with her as far as the bell captain’s stand and reclaimed his
Atlantic City clothes. They were packed with his old shoes and
his toothbrush and his razor, folded up inside a black garbage
bag he had taken from a maid’s cart. It didn’t impress the
bellboy. But he carried it out to the Suburban anyway and
Reacher took it from him and gave him a dollar. Then he
climbed back in alongside Froelich and she drove on. It