and showered and back in the Secret Service conference room
eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with an FBI liaison agent
named Bannon. Reacher was in his Atlantic City coat and the
third of Joe’s abandoned Italian suits and the third Somebody &
Somebody shirt and a plain blue tie. Froelich was in another
black trouser suit. Neagley was in the same outfit she had worn
on Sunday evening. It was the one that showed off her figure.
The one that Nendick had ignored. She was cycling through
her wardrobe as fast as the hotel laundry would let her. Stuyve
sant was immaculate in his usual Brooks Brothers. Maybe it
was fresh on, maybe it wasn’t. There was no way to tell. All his
suits were the same. He looked very fired. Actually they all
looked very fired, and Reacher was a little worried about that.
In his experience tiredness impaired operational efficiency as
badly as a drink too many.
‘We’ll sleep on the plane,’ Froelich said. ‘We’ll tell the pilot to
fly slow.’
Bannon was a guy of about forty. He was in a tweed sports
coat and grey flannels and looked bluff and Irish and was tall
and heavy. He had a red complexion that the winter morning
hadn’t helped. But he was polite and cheerful and he had
supplied the doughnuts and the coffee himself. Two different
stores, each chosen for its respective quality. He had been well
received. Twenty bucks’ worth of food and drink had broken a
lot of inter-agency ice.
‘No secrets either way,’ he said. hat’s what we’re proposing.
And no blame anywhere. But no bullshit, either. I think we got
196
to face the fact that the Nendick woman is dead. We’ll look for
her like she wasn’t, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. So we’ve
got three down already. Some evidence, but not a lot. We’re
guessing Nendick has met with these guys, and we’re assuming
they’ve certainly been to his house, if only to grab up his wife.
So that’s a crime scene, and we’re going over it today, and we’ll
share what we get. Nendick will help us if he ever wakes up.
But assuming he won’t anytime soon, we’ll go at it from three
different directions. First, the message stuff that went down
here in D.C. Second, the scene in Minnesota. Third, the scene
in Colorado.’
‘Are your people in charge out there?’ Froelich asked.
‘Both places,’ Bannon said. ‘Our ballistics people figure the
Colorado weapon for a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun called
the MP5.’
‘We already concluded that,’ Neagley said. ‘And it was
probably silenced, which makes it the MP5SD6.’
Bannon nodded. ‘You’re one of the ex-military, right? In
which case you’ve seen MP5s before. As I have. They’re military
and paramilitary weapons. Police and federal SWAT teams
use them, people like that.’
Then he went quiet and looked round the assembled faces,
like there was more to his point than he had actually articulated.
‘What about Minnesota?’ Neagley asked.
‘We found the bullet,’ Bannon ,said. ‘We swept the farmyard
with a metal detector. It was buried about nine inches deep in
the mud. Consistent with a shot from a small wooded hillside
about a hundred and twenty yards away to the north. Maybe
eighty feet of elevation.’
‘What was the bullet?’ Reacher asked.
‘NATO 7.62 millimetre,’ Bannon said.
Reacher nodded. ‘You test it?’
‘For what?’
‘Burn.’
Bannon nodded. ‘Low power, weak charge.’
‘Subsonic ammunition,’ Reacher said. ‘In tha{ calibre it has to
be a Vaime Mk2 silenced sniper rifle.’
‘Which is also a police and paramilitary weapon,’ Bannon
197
said. ‘Often supplied to anti-terrorist units, people like that.’
He looked round the room again, like he was inviting a
comment. Nobody made one. So he pitched it himself.
You know what?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Put a list of who buys Heckler & Koch MP5s in America side
to side with a list of who buys Vaime Mk2s, and you see only
one official purchaser on both lists.’
‘Who?’
qne United States Secret Service.’
The room went quiet. Nobody spoke. There was a knock at
the door. The duty officer. He stood there, framed in the doorway.
‘Mail just arrived,’ he said. ‘Something you need to see.’