on it, printed it out, laminated it with a thing we bought from
Staples for sixty bucks, sandpapered the edges clean, scuffed it
around a little bit and shoved it in my bag. Then I dressed
up some and took Ms Wright’s party invitation with me and
headed downstairs. I got into the ballroom OK. With the knife
in my pocket.’
‘And?’
‘I hung around, then I got hold of your guy. Held on for a
spell.’
Froelich looked straight at her. ‘How would you have done
it?’
‘I had hold of his right hand in my right. I pulled him close,
he rotated slightly, I had a clear shot at the right side of his
neck. Three-and-a-half-inch blade, I’d have stuck it through his
carotid artery. Then jerked it around some. He’d have bled to
death inside thirty seconds. I was one arm movement away
from doing it. Your guys were ten feet away. They’d have
plugged me afterward for sure, but they couldn’t have stopped
me from getting it done.’
Froelich was pale and silent. Neagley looked away.
‘Without the knife would have been harder,’ she said. ‘But not
impossible. Breaking his neck would have been tricky because
he’s got some muscle up there. I’d have had to do a quick
two-step to get his weight moving, and if your guys were fast
enough they might have stopped me halfway. So I guess I’d
have gone with a blow to his larynx, hard enough to crush it. A
jab with my left elbow would have done the trick. I’d have been
dead before him, probably, but he’d have suffocated right afterwards,
unless you’ve got people who could do an emergency
57
tracheotomy on the ballroom floor within a minute or so, which
I guess you don’t have.’
‘No,’ Froelich said. ‘We don’t have.’ Then she fell silent
again.
‘Sorry to ruin your day,’ Neagley said. ‘But hey, you wanted to
know this stuff, right? No point doing a security audit and not
telling you the outcome.’
Froelich nodded. ‘What did you whisper to him?’
‘I said, I’ve got a knife. Just for the hell of it. But very quietly.
If anybody had challenged me I was going to claim I’d said,
where’s your wife? Like I was coming on to him. I imagine that
happens, time to time.’
Froelich nodded again. ‘It does,’ she said. q’ime to time. What
else?’
‘Well, he’s safe in his house,’ Neagley said.
‘You checked?’
‘Every day,’ Reacher said. ‘We’ve been on the ground in
Georgetown since Tuesday night.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘That was the plan.’
‘How did you know where he lives?’
‘We followed your limos.’
Froelich said nothing.
‘Good limos,’ Reacher said. ‘Slick tactics.’
‘Friday morning was especially good,’ Neagley said.
‘But the rest of Friday was pretty bad,’ Reacher said. ‘Lack of
co-ordination produced a major communications error.’
‘Where?’
‘Your D.C. people had video of the ballroom but clearly your
New York people never saw it, because as well as being the
woman in the party dress Thursday night Neagley was also one
of the photographers outside the Stock Exchange.’
‘Some North Dakota paper has a web site,’ Neagley said. ‘Like
all of them, with a graphic of their masthead. I downloaded it
and modified it into a press pass. Laminated it and put brass
eyelets in it and slung it around my neck with a nylon cord.
Trawled the secondhand stores in lower Manhattan for battered
old photo gear. Kept a camera up in front of my face the whole
time so Armstrong wouldn’t recognize me.’
58
‘You should operate an access list,’ Reacher said. ‘Control it,
somehow.’
‘We can’t,’ Froelich said. ‘It’s a constitutional thing. The First
Amendment guarantees journalistic access, any old time they
want it. But they were all searched.’
‘I wasn’t carrying,’ Neagley said. ‘I was just breaching your
security for the hell of it. But I could have been carrying, that’s
for damn sure. I could have gotten a bazooka past that kind of a
search.’
Reacher stood up and stepped to the credenza. Pulled open
a drawer and took out a stack of photographs. They were
commercial one-hour six-by-four colour prints. He held up the