for a white tent leading to a side door in the Senate Offices.
There were two Secret Service Town Cars flanking the tent.
Four agents out on the sidewalks, looking cautious and cold.
Froelich drove straight for the tent and eased to a stop tight
against the kerb. Checked her position and rolled forward a
foot to put Armstrong’s door right inside the canvas shelter.
Reacher saw a group of three agents waiting inside the tunnel.
One of them stepped forward and opened the Suburban’s door.
Armstrong raised his eyebrows, like he was bemused by all the
attention.
‘Good meeting you both,’ he said. ‘And thanks, M. E.’
Then he stepped out into the canvas gloom and shut the
door and the agents surrounded him and walked him down
the length of the tent towards the building. Reacher glimpsed
uniformed Capitol security people waiting inside. Armstrong
stepped through the door and,it closed solidly behind him.
Froelich pulled away from the kerb and eased round the parked
cars and headed north in the direction of Union Station.
‘OK,’ she said, like she was very relieved. ‘So far so good.’
‘You took a chance there,’ Reacher said.
rwo in two hundred and eighty-one million,’ Neagley said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Could have been one of us who sent the letters.’
Froelich smiled. ‘My guess is it wasn’t. What did you think of
him?’
‘I liked him,’ Reacher said. ‘I really did.’
The too,’ Neagley said. ‘I’ve liked him since Thursday. So
now what?’
‘He’s in there all day for meetings. Lunch in the dining room.
127
We’ll take him home around seven o’clock. His wife is home. So
we’ll rent them a video or something. Keep them locked up
tight all evening.’
‘We need intelligence,’ Reacher said. ‘We don’t know what
exact form this demonstration might take. Or where it will be.
Could be anything from graffiti upward. We don’t want to let it
pass us by without noticing. If it happens at all.’
Froelich nodded. ‘We’ll check at midnight. Assuming we get
to midnight.’
‘And I want Neagley to interview the cleaners again. We get
what we need from them, we can put our minds at rest.’
‘I’d like to do that,’ Froelich said.
They dropped Neagley at the Federal lock-up and then drove
back to Froelich’s office. Written FBI forensics reports were in
on the latest two messages. They were identical to the first two
in every respect. But there was a supplementary report from a
Bureau chemist. He had detected something unusual about the
thumbprints.
‘Squalene,’ Froelich said. ‘You ever heard of that?’
Reacher shook his head.
‘It’s an acyclic hydrocarbon. A type of oil. There are traces of
it present in the thumbprints. Slightly more on the third and
fourth than the first and second.’
‘Prints always have oils. That’s how they get made.’
‘But usually it’s regular human finger oil. This stuff is
different. C-thirty-H-fifty. It’s a fish oil. Shark-liver oil, basically.’
She passed the paper across her desk. It was all covered
in complicated stuff about organic chemistry. Squalene was
a natural oil used as an old-fashioned lubricant for delicate
machinery, like clockwork watches. There was an addendum at
the bottom which said that when hydrogenated, squalene with
an e becomes squalane with an a.
‘What’s hydrogenatedy Reacher asked.
‘You add water?’ Froelich said. ‘Like hydroelectric power?’
He shrugged and she pulled a dictionary off the shelf and
flicked through to H.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It means you add extra hydrogen atoms to the
molecule.’
‘Well, that makes everything clear as mud. I scored pretty
low in chemistry.’
‘It means this guy could be a shark fisherman.’
‘Or he guts fish for a living,’ Reacher said. ‘Or he works in a
fish store. Or he’s an antique watchmaker with his hands dirty
from lubricating something.’
Froelich opened a drawer and flipped through a file and
pulled a single sheet. Passed it across. It was a life-size fluoro
scope photograph of a thumbprint.
“I’his our guy?’ Reacher asked.
Froelich nodded. It was a very clear print. Maybe the clearest
print Reacher had ever seen° All the ridges and whorls were
exactly delineated. It was bold and astonishingly provocative.