department. Nothing from North Dakota, nothing from the FBI.
Updates were still streaming into the National Crime Information
Center’s database. Froelich started combing through
the day’s reports. She found nothing of interest. Her cell phone
rang at eleven thirty. All was quiet and peaceful in Georgetown.
She turned back to the computer. Nothing doing. Time ticked
around to midnight. Monday finished and Tuesday started.
Stuyvesant showed up again. He just appeared in the doorway
like he had before. Said nothing. The only chair in the room
was Froelich’s own. Stuyvesant leaned against the door fi-ame.
Reacher sat on the floor. Neagley perched on a file cabinet.
Froelich waited ten minutes and called the D.C. cops. They
had nothing to report. She called the Hoover Building and the
FBI told her nothing significant had happened before midnight
in the east. She turned back to the computer screen. Called out
occasional incoming stories but neither Stuyvesant nor Reacher
nor Neagley could twist them into any kind of a connection with
a potential threat to Armstrong.,The clock moved on to one in
the morning. Midnight, central time. She called the police
department in Bismarck. They had nothing for her. She called
the North Dakota State Police. Nothing at all. She tried the FBI
again. Nothing reported from their field offices in the last sixty
minutes. She put the phone down and scooted her chair back
from her desk. Breathed out.
‘Well, that’s it,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened.’
‘Excellent,’ Stuyvesant said.
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘Not excellent. Not excellent at all. It’s the
worst possible news we could have gotten.’
149
EIGHT
S
TUYVESANT LED THEM STRAIGHT BACK TOWARDS THE CONference
room. Neagley walked next to Reacher, close by his shoulder in the narrow corridors.
‘Great suit,’ she whispered.
‘First one I ever wore,’ he whispered back. ‘We on the same
page with this?’
‘On the same page and out of a job, probably,’ she said. Rat
is, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.’
They turned a corner. Walked on. Stuyvesant stopped and
shepherded them into the conference room and came in after
them and hit the lights and closed the door. Reacher and
Neagley sat together on one side of the long table and Stuyve
sant sat next to Froelich on the other, like he foresaw an
adversarial element to the conversation.
‘Explain,’ he said.
Silence for a second.
is is definitely not an inside job,’ Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. ‘Although we were fooling ourselves by ever
thinking it was entirely one thing or the other. It was always
both. But it was useful shorthand. The real question was where
the balance lay. Was it fundamentally an inside job with trivial
150
help from the outside? Or was it basically an outside job with trivial help from the inside?’
The trivial help being what?’ Stuyvesant asked.
‘A potential insider needed a thumbprint that wasn’t his. A
potential outsider needed a way to get the second message inside this building.’
‘And you’ve concluded that it’s the outsider?’
Reacher nodded again. ‘Which is absolutely the worst news
we could have gotten. Because whereas an insider messing
around is merely a pain in the ass, an outsider is truly dangerous.’
Stuyvesant looked away. ‘Who?’
‘No idea,’ Reacher said. ‘Just some outsider with a loose
one-time connection to an insider, sufficient to get the message
in and nothing more.’
Fhe insider being one of the cleaners.’
‘Or all of them,’ Froelich said.
‘I assume so, yes,’ Reacher said.
‘You sure about this?’
‘Completely.’
‘How?’ Stuyvesant asked.
Reacher shrugged. ‘Lots of reasons,’ he said. ‘Some of them
small, one of them big.’
‘Explain,’ Stuyvesant said again.
‘I look for simplicity,’ Reacher said.
Stuyvesant nodded. ‘So do I. I hear hoof beats, I think horses,
not zebras. But the simple explanation here is an insider trying
to get under Froelich’s skin.’
‘Not really,’ Reacher said. i’he chosen method is way too
complex for that. They’d be doing all the usual stuff instead.
The easy stuff. I’m sure we’ve all seen it before. Mysterious
communications failures, computer crashes, bogus alarm calls
to non-existent addresses in the bad part of town, she arrives,
calls in for back-up, nobody shows, she gets scared, she panics