qhis is the Wednesday evening,’ she said. ‘Six p.m. onward.’
The picture was grey and milky and the detail definition
was soft, but the clarity was completely adequate. The camera
showed the whole square area from behind the secretary’s
head. She was at her desk, on the phone. She looked old. She
had white hair. Stuyvesant’s door was on the right of the
picture. It was closed. There was a date and time burned into
the picture at the bottom left. Froelich hit fast wind and the
motion sped up. The secretary’s white head moved with comical
jerkiness. Her hand batted up and down as she finished calls
and fielded new ones. Some person bustled into shot and
delivered a stack of internal mail and turned and bustled away.
The secretary sorted the mail with the speed of a machine. She
opened every envelope and piled the contents neatly and took
out a stamp and ink pad and stamped every new letter at the
top.
‘What’s she doing?’ Reacher asked.
‘Date of receipt,’ Froelich said. Fhis Whole operation runs on
accurate paperwork. Always has.’
The secretary was using her left hand to curl each sheet back
and her right to stamp the date. The tape’s fast motion made
her look frantic. In the bottom corner of the picture the date
held steady and the time unspooled just about fast enough to
read. Reacher turned away from the screen and looked around
Froelich’s office. It was a typical government space, pretty much
the civilian equivalent of the offices he’d spent his time in,
aggressively plain and expensively shoehorned into a fine old
building. Tough grey rylon carpet, laminate furniture, IT wiring
routed carefully in white plastic conduit. Foot-high piles of
paper everywhere, reports and memoranda tacked to the walls.
There was a glass-fronted cabinet with a yard of procedure
manuals inside. There was no window in the room. But she still
had a plant. It was in a plastic pot on the desk, pale and dry and
82
struggling to survive. There were no photographs. No mementoes.
Nothing personal at all except a faint trace of her perfume
in the air and the fabric of her chair.
‘OK, this is where Stuyvesant goes home,’ she said.
Reacher looked back at the screen and saw the time counter
race through seven thirty, and then seven thirty-one. Stuyve
sant stepped out of his office at triple speed. He was a tall man,
wide across the shoulders, slightly stooped, greying at the
temples. He was carrying a slim briefcase. The video made
him move with absurd energy. He raced across to the coat rack
and took down a black raincoat. Hurled it onto his shoulders
and raced back to the secretary’s desk. Bent abruptly and said
something and raced away again out of sight. Froelich pressed
the fast wind button harder and the speed redoubled again. The
secretary jerked and swayed in her seat. The time counter
blurred. As the seven turned to an eight the secretary jumped
up and Froelich slowed the tape back to triple speed in time to
catch her opening Stuyvesant’s door for a second. She held on
to the handle and leaned inside with one foot off the ground and
turned immediately and closed the door. Rushed around the
square space and collected her purse and an umbrella and a
coat and disappeared into the gloom at the far end of the
corridor. Froelich doubled the playback speed once again and
the time counter unspooled faster but the picture remained
entirely static. The stillness of a deserted office descended and
held steady as time rushed by.
‘When do the cleaners come in?’ Reacher asked.
‘Just before midnight,’ Froelich said.
I’hat late?’
if’hey’re night workers. This is a round-the-clock operation.’
‘And there’s nothing else visible before then?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘So spool ahead. We get the picture.’
Froelich operated the buttons and shuttled between fast
forward with snow on the screen and regular-speed playback
with a picture to check the timecode. At eleven.fifty p.m. she let
the tape run. The counter clicked ahead, a second at a time. At
eleven fifty-two there was motion at the far end of the corridor.