Chapter 13
Every city has a cusp, where the good part of town turns bad. Washington D. C. was no different. The border between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim inroads of its own. It was pierced in some places by gentrified corridors. Elsewhere it worked gradually, shading imperceptibly over hundreds of yards down streets where you could buy thirty different blends of tea at one end and cash checks at the other for thirty percent of the proceeds.
The shelter selected for Armstrong's appearance was halfway into the no-man's-land north of Union Station. To the east were train tracks and switching yards. To the west was a highway running underground in a tunnel. All around were decayed buildings. Some of them were warehouses and some of them were apartments. Some of them were abandoned, some of them were not. The shelter itself was exactly what Froelich had described. It was a long low one-story building made of brick. It had large metal-framed windows evenly spaced in the walls. It had a yard next to it twice its own size. The yard was closed in on three sides by high brick walls. It was impossible to decipher the building's original purpose. Maybe it had been a stable, back when Union Station's freight had been hauled away by horses. Maybe later it was updated with new windows and used as a trucking depot after the horses faded away. Maybe it had served time as an office. It was impossible to tell.
It housed fifty homeless people every night. They were woken early every morning and given breakfast and turned out on the streets. Then the fifty cots were stacked and stored and the floor was washed and the air was misted with disinfectant. Metal tables and chairs were carried in and placed where the beds had been. Lunch was available every day, and dinner, and then the reverse conversion to a dormitory took place at nine every evening.
But this day was different. Thanksgiving Day was always different, and this year it was more different than usual. Wake-up call happened a little earlier and breakfast was served a little faster. The overnighters were shown the door a full half hour before normal, which was a double blow to them because cities are notoriously quiet on Thanksgiving Day and panhandling receipts are dismal. The floor was washed more thoroughly than usual and more disinfectant was sprayed into the air. The tables were positioned more exactly, the chairs were lined up more precisely, more volunteers were on hand, and all of them were wearing fresh white sweatshirts with the benefactor's name brightly printed in red.
The first Secret Service agents to arrive were the line-of-sight team. They had a large-scale city surveyor's map and a telescopic sight removed from a sniper rifle. One agent walked through every step that Armstrong was scheduled to take. Every separate pace he would stop and turn around and squint through the scope and call out every window and every rooftop he could see. Because if he could see a rooftop or a window, a potential marksman on that rooftop or in that window could see him. The agent with the map would identify the building concerned and check the scale and calculate the range. Anything under seven hundred feet he marked in black.
But it was a good location. The only available sniper nests were on the roofs of the abandoned five-story warehouses opposite. The guy with the map finished up with a straight line of just five black crosses, nothing more. He wrote checked with scope, clear daylight, 0845 hrs, all suspect locations recorded across the bottom of the map and signed his name and added the date. The agent with the scope countersigned and the map was rolled and stored in the back of a department Suburban, awaiting Froelich's arrival.
Next on scene was a convoy of police vans with five separate canine units in them. One unit cleared the shelter. Two more entered the warehouses. The last two were explosives hunters who checked the surrounding streets in all directions on a four-hundred-yard radius. Beyond four hundred yards, the maze of streets meant there were too many potential access routes to check, and therefore too many to bomb with any realistic chance of success. As soon as a building or a street was pronounced safe a D. C. patrolman took up station on foot. The sky was still clear and the sun was still out. It gave an illusion of warmth. It kept grousing to a minimum.
By nine thirty the shelter was the epicenter of a quarter of a square mile of secure territory. D. C. cops held the perimeter on foot and in cars and there were better than fifty more loose in the interior. They made up the majority of the local population. The city was still quiet. Some of the shelter inhabitants were hanging around. There was nowhere productive to go, and they knew from experience that to be early in the lunch line was better than late. Politicians didn't understand portion control, and pickings could be getting slim after the first thirty minutes.
Froelich arrived at ten o'clock exactly, driving her Suburban, Reacher and Neagley riding with her. Stuyvesant was right behind in a second Suburban. Behind him were four more trucks carrying five department sharpshooters and fifteen general-duty agents. Froelich parked on the sidewalk tight against the base of the warehouse wall. Normally she might have just blocked the street beyond the shelter entrance, but she didn't want to reveal the direction of Armstrong's intended approach to onlookers. He was actually scheduled to come in from the south, but that information and ten minutes with a map could predict his route all the way from Georgetown.
She assembled her people in the shelter's yard and sent the sharpshooters to secure the warehouse roofs. They would be up there three hours before the event started, but that was normal. Generally they were the first to arrive and the last to leave. Stuyvesant pulled Reacher aside and asked him to go up there with them.
"Then come find me," he said. "I want a firsthand report about how bad it is. "
So Reacher walked across the street with an agent called Crosetti and they ducked past a cop into a damp hallway full of trash and rat droppings. There were stairs winding up through a central shaft. Crosetti was in a Kevlar vest and was carrying a rifle in a hard case. But he was a fit guy. He was half a flight ahead of Reacher at the top.
The stairs came out inside a rooftop hutch. There was a wooden door that opened outward into the sunlight. The roof was flat. It was made of asphalt. There were pigeon corpses here and there. There were dirty skylights made of wired glass and small metal turrets on top of ventilation pipes. The roof was lipped with a low wall, set on top with eroded coping stones. Crosetti walked to the left edge, and then the right. Made visual contact with his colleagues on either side. Then he walked to the front to check the view. Reacher was already there.
The view was good and bad. Good in the conventional sense because the sun was shining and they were five floors up in a low-built part of town. Bad because the shelter's yard was right there underneath them. It was like looking down into a shoe box from a distance of three feet up and three feet away. The back wall where Armstrong would be standing was dead ahead. It was made out of old brick and looked like the execution wall in some foreign prison. Hitting him would be easier than shooting a fish in a barrel.
"What's the range?" Reacher asked.
"Your guess?" Crosetti said.
Reacher put his knees against the lip of the roof and glanced out and down.
"Ninety yards?" he said.
Crosetti unsnapped a pocket in his vest and took out a range finder.
"Laser," he said. He switched it on and lined it up.
"Ninety-two to the wall," he said. "Ninety-one to his head. That was a pretty good guess. "
"Windage?"
"Slight thermal coming up off the concrete down there," Crosetti said. "Nothing else, probably. No big deal. "
"Practically like standing right next to him," Reacher said.
"Don't worry," Crosetti said. "As long as I'm up here nobody else can be. That's the job today. We're sentries, not shooters. "
"Where are you going to be?" Reacher asked.
Crosetti glanced all around his little piece of real estate and pointed.
"Over there, I guess," he said. "Tight in the
far corner. I'll face parallel with the front wall. Slight turn to my left and I'm covering the yard. Slight turn to my right, I'm covering the head of the stairwell. "
"Good plan," Reacher said. "You need anything?"
Crosetti shook his head.
"OK," Reacher said. "I'll leave you to it. Try to stay awake. "
Crosetti smiled. "I usually do. "
"Good," Reacher said. "I like that in a sentry. "
He went back down five flights through the darkness and stepped out into the sun. Walked across the street and glanced up. Saw Crosetti nestled comfortably in the angle of the corner. His head and his knees were visible. So was his rifle barrel. It was jutting upward against the bright sky at a relaxed forty-five degrees. He waved. Crosetti waved back. He walked on and found Stuyvesant in the yard. He was hard to miss, given the color of his sweater and the brightness of the daylight.
"It's OK up there," Reacher said. "Hell of a firing platform, but as long as your guys hold it we're safe enough. "
Stuyvesant nodded and turned around and scanned upward. All five warehouse roofs were visible from the yard. All five were occupied by sharpshooters. Five silhouetted heads, five silhouetted rifle barrels.
"Froelich is looking for you," Stuyvesant said.
Nearer the building, staff and agents were hauling long trestle tables into place. The idea was to form a barrier with them. The right-hand end would be hard against the shelter's wall. The left-hand end would be three feet from the yard wall opposite. There would be a pen six feet deep behind the line of tables. Armstrong and his wife would be in the pen with four agents. Directly behind them would be the execution wall. Up close it didn't look so bad. The old bricks looked warmed by the sun. Rustic, even friendly. He turned his back on them and looked up at the warehouse roofs. Crosetti waved again. I'm still awake, the wave said.
"Reacher," Froelich called.
He turned around and found her walking out of the shelter toward him. She was carrying a clipboard thick with paper. She was up on her toes, busy, in charge, in command. She looked magnificent. The black clothes emphasized her litheness and made her eyes blaze with blue. Dozens of agents and scores of cops swirled all around her, every one of them under her personal control.
"We're doing fine here," she said. "So I want you to take a stroll. Just check around. Neagley's already out there. You know what to look for. "
"Feels good, doesn't it?" he asked.
"What?"
"Doing something really well," he said. "Taking charge. "
"Think I'm doing well?"
"You're the best," he said. "This is tremendous. Armstrong's a lucky man. "
"I hope," she said.
"Believe it," he said.
She smiled, quickly and shyly, and moved on, leafing through her paperwork. He turned the other way and walked back out to the street. Turned right and planned a route in his head that would keep him on a block-and-a-half radius.
There were cops on the corner and the beginnings of a ragged crowd of people waiting for the free lunch. There were two television trucks setting up fifty yards down the street from the shelter. Hydraulic masts were unfolding themselves and satellite dishes were rotating. Technicians were unrolling cable and shouldering cameras. He saw Bannon with six men and a woman he guessed were the FBI task force. They had just arrived. Bannon had a map unrolled on the hood of his car and his agents were clustered around looking at it. Reacher waved to Bannon and turned left and passed the end of an alley that led down behind the warehouses. He could hear a train on the tracks ahead of him. The mouth of the alley was manned by a D. C. cop, facing outward, standing easy. There was a police cruiser parked nearby. Another cop in it. Cops everywhere. The overtime bill was going to be something to see.
There were broken-down stores here and there, but they were all closed for the holiday. Some of the storefronts were churches, also closed. There were auto body shops nearer the railroad tracks, all shuttered and still. There was a pawnshop with a very old guy outside washing the windows. He was the only thing moving on the street. His store was tall and narrow and had concertina barriers inside the glass. The display space was crammed with junk of every description. There were clocks, coats, musical instruments, alarm radios, hats, record players, car stereos, binoculars, strings of Christmas lights. There was writing on the windows, offering to buy just about any article ever manufactured. If it didn't grow in the ground or move by itself, this guy would give you money for it. He also offered services. He would cash checks, appraise jewelry, repair watches. There was a tray of watches on view. They were mostly old-fashioned wind-up items, with bulging crystals and big square luminescent figures and sculpted hands. Reacher glanced again at the sign: Watches Repaired. Then he glanced again at the old guy. He was up to his elbows in soap suds.
"You fix watches?" he asked.
"What have you got?" the old guy said. He had an accent. Russian, probably.
"A question," Reacher said.
"I thought you had a watch to fix. That was my business, originally. Before quartz. "
"My watch is fine," Reacher said. "Sorry. "
He pulled back his cuff to check the time. Quarter past eleven.
"Let me see that," the old guy said.
Reacher extended his wrist.
"Bulova," the old guy said. "American military issue before the Gulf War. A good watch. You buy it from a soldier?"
"No, I was a soldier. "
The old guy nodded. "So was I. In the Red Army. What's the question?"
"You ever heard of squalene?"
"It's a lubricant. "
"You use it?"
"Time to time. I don't fix so many watches now. Not since quartz. "
"Where do you get it?"
"Are you kidding?"
"No," Reacher said. "I'm asking a question. "
"You want to know where I get my squalene?"
"That's what questions are for. They seek to elicit information. "
The old guy smiled. "I carry it around with me. "
"Where?"
"You're looking at it. "
"Am I?"
The old guy nodded. "And I'm looking at yours. "
"My what?"
"Your supply of squalene. "
"I haven't got any squalene," Reacher said. "It comes from sharks' livers. Long time since I was next to a shark. "
The old man shook his head. "You see, the Soviet system was very frequently criticized, and believe me I've always been happy to tell the truth about it. But at least we had education. Especially in the natural sciences. "
"C-thirty H-fifty," Reacher said. "It's an acyclic hydrocarbon. Which when hydrogenated becomes squalane with an a. "
"You understand any of that?"
"No," Reacher said. "Not really. "
"Squalene is an oil," the old guy said. "It occurs naturally in only two places in the known biosphere. One is inside a shark's liver. The other is as a sebaceous product on the skin around the human nose. "
Reacher touched his nose. "Same stuff? Sharks' livers and people's noses?"
The old guy nodded. "Identical molecular structure. So if I need squalene to lubricate a watch, I just dab some off on my fingertip. Like this. "
He wiped his wet hand on his pant leg and extended a finger and rubbed it down where his nose joined his face. Then he held up the fingertip for inspection.
"Put that on the gear wheel and you're OK," he said.
"I see," Reacher said.
"You want to sell the Bulova?"
Reacher shook his head.
"Sentimental value," he said.
"From the Army?" the old guy said. "You're nekulturniy. "
He turned back to his task and Reacher walked on.
"Happy Thanksgiving," Reacher called. There was no reply. He met Neagley a block from the shelter. She was walking in from the opposite direction. She turned around a
nd walked back with him, keeping her customary distance from his shoulder.
"Beautiful day," she said. "Isn't it?"
"I don't know," he said.
"How would you do it?"
"I wouldn't," he said. "Not here. Not in Washington D. C. This is their backyard. I'd wait for a better chance someplace else. "
"Me too," she said. "But they missed in Bismarck. Wall Street in ten days is no good to them. Then they're deep into December, and the next thing is more holidays and then the inauguration. So they're running out of opportunities. And we know they're right here in town. "
Reacher said nothing. They walked past Bannon. He was sitting in his car.
They arrived back at the shelter at noon exactly. Stuyvesant was standing near the entrance. He nodded a cautious greeting. Inside the yard everything was ready. The serving tables were lined up. They were draped with pure white cloths that hung down to the floor. They were loaded with food warmers laid out in a line. There were ladles and long-handled spoons neatly arrayed. The kitchen window opened directly into the pen behind the tables. The shelter hall itself was set up for dining. There were police sawhorses arranged so that the crowd would be funneled down the left edge of the yard. Then there was a right turn across the face of the serving area. Then another right along the wall of the shelter and in through the door. Froelich was detailing positions for each of the general-duty agents. Four would be at the entrance to the yard. Six would line the approach to the serving area. One would secure each end of the pen, from the outside. Three would patrol the exit line.
"OK, listen up," Froelich called. "Remember, it's very easy to look a little like a homeless person, but very hard to look exactly like a homeless person. Watch their feet. Are their shoes right? Look at their hands. We want to see gloves, or ingrained dirt. Look at their faces. They need to be lean. Hollow cheeks. We want to see dirty hair. Hair that hasn't been washed for a month or a year. We want to see clothes that are molded to the body. Any questions?"
Nobody spoke.
"Any doubt at all, act first and think later," Froelich called. "I'm going to be serving behind the tables with the Armstrongs and the personal detail. We're depending on you not to send us anybody you don't like, OK?"
She checked her watch.
"Five past twelve," she said. "Fifty-five minutes to go. "
Reacher squeezed through at the left-hand end of the serving tables and stood in the pen. Behind him was a wall. To his right was a wall. To his left were the shelter windows. Ahead to his right was the approach line. Any individual would pass four agents at the yard entrance and six more as he shuffled along. Ten suspicious pairs of eyes before anybody got face-to-face with Armstrong himself. Ahead to the left was the exit line. Three agents funneling people into the hall. He raised his eyes. Dead ahead were the warehouses. Five sentries on five roofs. Crosetti waved. He waved back.
"OK?" Froelich asked.
She was standing across the serving table from him. He smiled.
"Dark or light?" he asked.
"We'll eat later," she said. "I want you and Neagley freelance in the yard. Stay near the exit line, so you get a wide view. "
"OK," he said.
"Still think I'm doing well?"
He pointed left.
"I don't like those windows," he said. "Suppose somebody bides his time all the way through the line, keeps his head down, behaves himself, picks up his food, makes it inside, sits down, and then pulls a gun and fires back through the window?"
She nodded.
"Already thought about it," she said. "I'm bringing three cops in from the perimeter. Putting one in each window, standing up, facing the room. "
"That should do it," he said. "Great job. "
"And we're going to be wearing vests," she said. "Everybody in the pen. The Armstrongs, too. "
She checked her watch again.
"Forty-five minutes," she said. "Walk with me. "
They walked out of the yard and across the street to where she had parked her Suburban. It was in a deep shadow made by the warehouse wall. She unlocked the tailgate and swung it open. The shadow and the tinted glass made it dark inside. The load bay was neatly packed with equipment. But the backseat was empty.
"We could get in," Reacher said. "You know, fool around a little. "
"We could not. "
"You said it was fun, fooling around at work. "
"I meant the office. "
"Is that an invitation?"
She paused. Straightened up. Smiled.
"OK," she said. "Why not? I might like that. "
Then she smiled wider.
"OK," she said again. "Soon as Armstrong is secure, we'll go do it on Stuyvesant's desk. As a celebration. "
She leaned in and grabbed her vest and stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. Then she ducked away and headed back. He slammed the tailgate and she locked it from forty feet away with the remote.
With thirty minutes to go she put her vest on under her jacket and ran a radio check. She told the police commander he could start marshaling the crowd near the entrance. Told the media they could come into the yard and start the tapes rolling. With fifteen minutes to go she announced that the Armstrongs were on their way.
"Get the food out," she called.
The kitchen crew swarmed into the pen and the cooks passed pans of food out through the kitchen window. Reacher leaned on the shelter wall at the end of the line of serving tables, on the public side. He put his back flat on the bricks between the kitchen window and the first hall window. He would be looking straight down the food line. A half-turn to his left, he would be looking at the approach line. A half-turn to his right, he would be looking into the pen. People would have to skirt around him with their loaded plates. He wanted a close-up view. Neagley stood six feet away, in the body of the yard, in the angle the sawhorses made. Froelich paced near her, nervous, thinking through the last-minute checks for the hundredth time.
"Arrival imminent," she said into her wrist microphone. "Driver says they're two blocks away. You guys on the roof see them yet?"
She listened to her earpiece and then spoke again.
"Two blocks away," she repeated.