mugs over without much expression. Armstrong looked up
from his papers.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother,’ Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded. ‘Mr Stuyvesant told me you want a
private conversation,’ he said.
‘Private would be good,’ Reacher said.
‘Should my wife join us?’
‘hat depends on your definition of privacy.’
Mrs Armstrong glanced at her husband. ‘You can tell me
afterwards,’ she said. ‘Before you leave. If you need to.’
Armstrong nodded again and made a show of folding his
newspapers. Then he stood up and detoured to the coffee
machine and refilled his mug.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He led them back to the dog-legged hallway and into a
side room. Two agents followed and stood one each side of the
door on the outside. Armstrong glanced out at them as if in
apology and shut the door on them. Walked round and stood
behind a desk. The room was set up like a study, but it was
more recreational than for real. There was no computer. The
desk was a big old item made from dark wood. There were
leather chairs and books chosen for the look of their spines.
There was panelling and an old Persian rug. There was an air
335
freshener somewhere putting fragrance into the hush. There
was a flamed photograph on the wall, showing a person of
indeterminate gender standing on an ice floe. He or she was
wearing an enormous padded down coat with a hood and thick
mittens that reached the elbow. The hood had a big fur ruff
that flamed the face tight. The face itself was entirely hidden by
a ski mask and smoked yellow snow goggles. One of the
elbow-high mittens was raised in greeting.
‘Our daughter,’ Armstrong said. ‘We asked her for a photo,
because we miss her. That’s what she sent. She has a sense of
humour.’
He sat down behind the desk. Reacher and Neagley took a
chair each.
¢I’his all feels very confidential,’ Armstrong said.
Reacher nodded. ‘And in the end I think we’ll all agree it
should be kept confidential.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Mr Stuyvesant gave us some ground rules,’ Reacher said.
Tm going to start breaking them right now. The Secret Service
intercepted six threatening messages against you. The first
came in the mail eighteen days ago. Two more came in the mail
subsequently and three were hand-delivered.’
Armstrong said nothing.
‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Reacher said.
Armstrong shrugged. ‘Politics is a surprising business,’ he
said.
‘I guess it is,’ Reacher said. ‘All six messages were signed
with a thumbprint. We traced the print to an old guy in
California. His thumb had been amputated and stolen and used
like a rubber stamp.’
Armstrong said nothing.
‘The second message showed up in Stuyvesant’s own office.
Eventually it was proved that a surveillance technician named
Nendick had placed it there. Nendick’s wife had been kidnapped
in order to coerce his actions. He was so frightened of
the danger to her posed by his inevitable interrogation that he
went into some kind of a coma. But we’re guessing she was
already dead by then anyway.’
Armstrong was silent.
336
Fhere’s a researcher in the office called Swain who made an
important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting.
He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in
himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we
added the guy in California who’d had his thumb removed
and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides
on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One
in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers
named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration
against you.’
‘Oh no,’ Armstrong said.
‘So, ten messages,’ Reacher said. ‘All of them designed to
torment you, except you hadn’t been told about any of them.
But then I started wondering whether we’re still miscounting, And you know what? I’m pretty sure we are. I think there were
at least eleven messages.’
Silence in the small room.
‘What would be the eleventh?’ Armstrong asked.
‘Something that slipped through,’ Reacher said. ‘Something
that came in the mail, addressed to you, something that the
Secret Service didn’t see as a threat. Something that meant