they’re a unit. They’re collaborators. And perfectionists. If one
guy had written it wrong, the other guy would have corrected it.
But it wasn’t corrected, therefore neither of them knew it was
wrong. Therefore neither of them worked here.’
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Stuyvesant was silent for a long moment.
‘I want to believe it,’ he said. ‘But you’re basing everything on
a hyphen.’
‘Don’t dismiss it,’ Reacher said.
‘I’m not dismissing it,’ Stuyvesant said. ‘I’m thinking.’
‘About whether I’m crazy?’
‘About whether I can afford to back this kind of hunch.’
qhat’s the beauty of it,’ Reacher said. ‘It doesn’t matter if
I’m completely wrong. Because the FBI is taking care of the
alternative scenario.’
‘It could be deliberate,’ Neagley said. qhey might be misleading
us. Trying to disguise their background or their
education level. Throwing us off.’
Reacher shook his head.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. qhis is too subtle. They’d do all the
usual things. Gross misspellings, bad punctuation. A hyphen
between Vice and President is something you don’t know from
right or wrong. It’s something you just do.’
‘What are the exact implications?’ Stuyvesant asked.
‘Age is critical,’ Reacher said. Fhey can’t be older than early
fifties, to be running around doing all this stuff. Up ladders,
down stairs. They can’t be younger than mid-forties, because
you read the Constitution in junior high, and surely by 1970
every school in America had new books. I think they were in
junior high at or towards the end of the period when isolated
rural schools were still way behind the times. You know, maybe
one-room schoolhouses, fifty-year-old textbooks, out-of-date
maps on the wall, you’re sitting there with all your cousins
listening to some grey-haired old lady.’
‘It’s very speculative,’ Stuyvesant said. ‘It’s a pyramid too,
balancing on its point. Looks good until it falls over.’
Silence in the room.
‘Well, I’m going to pursue it,’ Reacher said. ‘With Armstrong,
or without him. With you, or without you. By myself, if
necessary. For Froelich’s sake. She deserves it.’
Stuyvesant nodded. ‘If neither of them worked for us, how
would they know to rely on an FBI scan of the NCIC reports?’
‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said.
‘How did they decoy Crosetti?’
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‘I don’t know.’
‘How would they get our weapons?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did they know where M. E. lived?’
‘Nendick told them.’
Stuyvesant nodded. ‘OK. But what would be their motive?’
‘Animosity against Armstrong personally, I guess. A politician
must make plenty of enemies.’
Silence again.
‘Maybe it’s half and half,’ Neagley said. ‘Maybe they’re outsiders
with animosity against the Secret Service. Maybe guys
who got rejected for a job. Guys who really wanted to work
here. Maybe they’re some kind of nerdy law-enforcement buffs.
They might know about NCIC. They might know what weapons
you buy.’
hat’s possible,’ Stuyvesant said. ‘We turn down a lot of
people. Some of them get very upset about it. You could be
right.’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘She’s wrong. Why would they wait? I’m
sticking by my age estimate. And nobody applies for a Secret
Service job at the age of fifty. If they ever got turned down, it
was twenty-five years ago. Why wait until now to retaliate?’
hat’s a good point too,’ Stuyvesant said.
his is about Armstrong personally,’ Reacher said. ‘It has
to be. Think about the time line here. Think about cause and
effect. Armstrong became th running mate during the
summer. Before that nobody had ever heard of him. Froelich
told me that herself. Now we’re getting threats against him.
Why now? Because of something he did during the campaign,
that’s why.’
Stuyvesant stared down at the table. Placed his hands flat on
it. Moved them in small neat circles like there was a wrinkled
tablecloth under them that needed flattening. Then he leaned
over and butted the first message under the second. Then both
of them under the third. He kept at it until he had all six
stacked neatly. He scooped his file folder under the pile and
closed it.
‘OK, this is what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘We’re going to
give Neagley’s theory to Bannon. Somebody we refused to hire
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is more or less in the same category as somebody we eventually