stretch showed up and parked with its passenger door tight
against the tent. Then two Metro cruisers sealed the street, top
and bottom. Their light bars were flashing. All vehicles were
using full headlights. The sky was dark grey and a light rain
was falling. Everybody kept their engines idling to power their
heaters and exhaust fumes were drifting and pooling near the
kerbs.
They waited. Froelich talked to the .personal detail in the
house and the air force ground crew at Andrews. She talked to
the cops in their cars. She listened to traffic reports from a radio
news helicopter. The city was jammed because of the weather.
The Metro traffic division was recommending a long loop right
round the Beltway. Andrews reported that the mechanics had
signed off on the plane and the pilots were aboard. The personal
detail reported that Armstrong had finished his morning coffee.
‘Move him,’ she said.
The transfer inside the tent was invisible, but she heard it
happen in her earpiece. The limo moved away from the kerb
and a Suburban jumped ahead of it and formed up behind the
lead cop. The gun car came next, then Froelich’s stretch, then
the second Suburban, then the trail cop. The convoy moved out
and straight up Wisconsin Avenue, through Bethesda, travelling
directly away from Andrews. But then it turned right and swung
onto the Beltway and settled in for a fast clockwise loop. By
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then Froelich was patched through to Bismarck and was checking
the arrival arrangements. Local ETA was one o’clock and
she wanted plans in place so she could sleep on the flight.
The convoy used the north gate into Andrews and swept right
onto the tarmac. Armstrong’s limo stopped with its passenger
door twenty feet from the bottom of the steps up to the plane.
The plane was a Gulfstream twinjet painted in the air force’s
ceremonial blue United States of America livery. Its engines
were whining loudly and blowing rain across the ground in
thin waves. The Suburbans spilled agentsand Armstrong slid
out of his limo and ran the twenty feet through the drizzle. His
personal detail followed, and then Froelich and Neagley and
Reacher. A waiting press van contributed two reporters. A
second three-man team of agents brought up the rear. Ground
crew wheeled the stairs away and a steward closed the plane
door.
Inside it was nothing like the Air Force One Reacher had
seen in the movies. It was more like the kind of bus a smalltime
rock band would ride in, a plain little vehicle customized
with twelve better-than-stock seats. Eight of them were
arranged in two groups of four with tables between each facing
pair, and there were four facing ahead in a row straight across
the front. The seats were leather and the tables were wood,
but they looked out of place in the utilitarian fuselage. There
was clearly a pecking order about who sat where. People
crowded the aisle until Armstrong chose his place. He went for
a backward-facing window seat in the port-side foursome. The
two reporters sat down opposite. Maybe they had arranged an
interview to kill the downtime. Froelich and the personal detail
took the other foursome. The back-up agents and Neagley took
the front row. Reacher was left with no choice. The one seat
that remained put him directly across the aisle from Froelich,
but it also put him right next to Armstrong.
He stuffed his coat into the overhead bin and slid into the
seat. Armstrong glanced at him like he was already an old
friend. The reporters checked him out. He.could feel their
enquiring gaze. They were looking at his suit. He could see
them thinking: too upmarket for an agent. So who is this guy?
An aide? An appointee? He buckled his seat belt like sitting
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next to vice presidents-elect was something he did every
four years, regular as clockwork. Armstrong did nothing to
disabuse his audience. Just sat there, poised, waiting for the
first question.
The engine noise built and the plane moved out to the
runway. By the time it took off and levelled out almost everybody
except those at Reacher’s table was fast asleep. They all