"Nothing way in his background?" Bannon asked.
Swain shook his head.
"We're covered four ways," he said. "First and most recent was your own FBI check when he was nominated. We've got a copy and it shows nothing. Then we've got opposition research from the other campaign from this time around and from both of his congressional races. Those guys dig up way more stuff than you do. And he's clean. "
"North Dakota sources?"
"Nothing," Swain said. "We talked to all the papers up there, matter of course. Local journalists know everything, and there's nothing wrong with the guy. "
"So it was the campaign," Stuyvesant said. "He pissed somebody off. "
"Somebody who owns Secret Service weapons," Bannon said. "Somebody who knows about the interface between the Secret Service and the FBI. Somebody who knows you can't mail something to the Vice President without it going through the Secret Service office first. Somebody who knew where Froelich lived. You ever heard of the duck test? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck?"
Stuyvesant said nothing. Bannon checked
his watch. Took his cell phone out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. It sat there, silent.
"I'm sticking with the theory," he said. "Except now I'm listing both of the bad guys as yours. If this phone rings and Reacher turns out to be right, that is. "
The phone rang right then. He had the ringer set to a squeaky little rendition of some famous classical overture. It sounded ludicrous in the somber stillness of the room. He picked it up and clicked it on. The fatuous tune died. Somebody must have said chief? because he said yeah and then just listened, not more than eight or nine seconds. Then he clicked the phone off and dropped it back in his jacket pocket.
"Sacramento?" Stuyvesant asked.
"No," Bannon said. "Local. They found the rifle. "
They left Swain behind and headed over to the FBI labs inside the Hoover Building. An expert staff was assembling. They all looked a lot like Swain himself, academic and scientific types dragged in from home. They were dressed like family men who had expected to remain inert in front of the football game for the rest of the day. A couple of them had already enjoyed a couple of beers. That was clear. Neagley knew one of them, vaguely, from her training stint in the labs many years before.
"Was it a Vaime Mk2?" Bannon asked.
"Without a doubt," one of the techs said.
"Serial number on it?"
The guy shook his head. "Removed with acid. "
"Anything you can do?"
The guy shook his head again.
"No," he said. "If it was a stamped number, we could go down under it and find enough distressed crystals in the metal to recover the number, but Vaime uses engraving instead of stamping. Nothing we can do. "
"So where is it now?"
"We're fuming it for prints," the guy said. "But it's hopeless. We got nothing on the fluoroscope. Nothing on the laser. It's been wiped. "
"Where was it found?"
"In the warehouse. Behind the door of one of the third-floor rooms. "
"I guess they waited in there," Bannon said. "Maybe five minutes, slipped out at the height of the mayhem. Cool heads. "
"Shell cases?" Neagley asked.
"None," the tech said. "They must have collected their brass. But we've got all four bullets. The three from today are wrecked from impact on hard surfaces. But the Minnesota sample is intact. The mud preserved it. "
He walked to a lab bench where the bullets were laid out on a sheet of clean white butcher paper. Three of them were crushed to distorted blobs by impact. One of the three was clean. That was the one that had missed Armstrong and hit the wall. The other two were smeared with black residue from Crosetti's brains and Froelich's blood, respectively. The remains of the human tissue had printed on the copper jackets and burned on the hot surface in characteristic lacy patterns. Then the patterns had collapsed after the bullets had flown on and impacted whatever came next. The back wall, in Froelich's case. The interior hallway wall, presumably, in Crosetti's. The Minnesota bullet looked new. Its passage through the farmyard mud had scoured it clean.
"Get the rifle," Bannon said.
It came out of the laboratory still smelling of the hot super-glue fumes that had been blown all over it in the hope of finding latent fingerprints. It was a dull, boxy, undramatic weapon. It was painted all over in factory-finish black epoxy paint. It had a short stubby bolt and a relatively short barrel made much longer by the fat suppressor. It had a powerful scope fixed to the sight mounts.
"That's the wrong scope," Reacher said. "That's a Hensoldt. Vaime uses Bushnell scopes. "
"Yeah, it's been modified," one of the techs said. "We already logged that. "
"By the factory?"
The guy shook his head.
"I don't think so," he said. "High standard, but it's not factory workmanship. "
"So what does that mean?" Bannon asked.
"I'm not sure," Reacher said.
"Is a Hensoldt better than a Bushnell?"
"Not really. They're both fine scopes. Like BMW and Mercedes. Like Canon and Nikon. "
"So a person might have a preference?"
"Not a government person," Reacher said. "Like, what would you say if one of your crime scene photographers came to you and said, I want a Canon instead of this Nikon you gave me?"
"I'd probably tell him to get lost. "
"Exactly. He works with what he's got. So I don't see somebody going to their department armorer and asking him to junk a thousand-dollar Bushnell just because he prefers the feel of a thousand-dollar Hensoldt. "
"So why the switch?"
"I'm not sure," Reacher said again. "Damage, maybe. If you drop a rifle you can damage a sniper scope pretty easily. But a government repairer would use another Bushnell. They don't just buy the rifles. They buy crateloads of spare parts along with them. "
"Suppose they were short? Suppose the scopes got damaged a lot?"
"Then they might use a Hensoldt, I guess. Hensoldts usually come with SIG rifles. You need to look at your lists again. Find out if there's anybody who buys Vaimes and SIGs for their snipers. "
"Is the SIG silenced too?"
"No," Reacher said.
"So there you go," Bannon said. "Some agency needs two types of sniper rifles, it buys Vaimes as the silenced option and SIGs as the unsilenced option. Two types of scope in the spare-parts bins. They run out of Bushnells, they start in on the Hensoldts. "
"Possible," Reacher said. "You should make the inquiries. You should ask specifically if anybody has fitted a Hensoldt scope to a Vaime rifle. And if they haven't, you should start asking commercial gunsmiths. Start with the expensive ones. These are rare pieces. This could be important. "
Stuyvesant was staring into the distance. Worry in the slope of his shoulders.
"What?" Reacher asked.
Stuyvesant focused, and shook his head. A defeated little gesture.
"I'm afraid we bought SIGs," he said, quietly. "We had a batch of SG550s about five years ago. Unsilenced semiautomatics, as an alternative option. But we don't use them much because the automatic mechanism makes them a little inaccurate for close crowd situations. They're mostly stored. We use the Vaimes everywhere now. So I'm sure the SIG parts bins are still full. "
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Bannon's phone rang again. The insane little overture trilled into the silence. He clicked it on and put it to his ear and said yeah and listened.
"I see," he said. Listened some more.
"The doctor agree?" he asked. Listened some more.
"I see," he said, and listened.
"I guess," he said, and listened.
"Two?" he asked, and listened.
"OK," he said, and clicked the phone off.
"Upstairs," he said. He was pale.
Stuyvesant and Reacher and Neagley followed him out to the elevator and rode with him up to the conference room. He sat at the head of the table and the others stayed together toward the other end, like they didn't want to get too close to the news. The sky was full dark outside the windows. Thanksgiving Day was grinding to a close.
"His name is Andretti," Bannon said. "Age seventy-three, retired carpenter, retired volunteer firefighter. He's got granddaughters. That's where the pressure came from. "
"Is he talking?" Neagley asked.
"Some," Bannon said. "Sounds like he's made of slightly sterner stuff than Nendick. "
"So how did it go down?"
"He frequents a cop bar outside of Sacramento, from his firefighting days. He met two guys in there. "
"Were they cops?" Reacher asked.
"Cop-like," Bannon said. "That was his description. They got to talking, they got to showing each other pictures of the family. They got to talking about what a rotten world it is, and what they would do to protect their families from it. It was gradual, he said. "
"And?"
"He clammed up on us for a spell, but then our doctor to
ok a look at his hand. The left thumb has been surgically removed. Well, not really surgically. Somewhere between severed and hacked off, our guy said. But there was an attempt at neatness. Andretti stuck to his carpentry story. Our doctor said, no way was that a saw. Like, no way. Andretti seemed pleased to be contradicted, and he talked some more. "
"And?"
"He lives alone. Widower. The two cop-like guys had wormed an invitation home with him. They were asking him, what would you do to protect your family? Like, what would you do? How far would you go? It was all rhetorical at first, and then it got practical fast. They told him he would have to give up his thumb or his granddaughters. His choice. They held him down and did it. They took his photographs and his address book. Told him now they knew what his granddaughters looked like and where they lived. Told him they'd take out their ovaries the same way they'd taken off his thumb. And he was ready to believe them, obviously. He would be, right? They'd just done it to him. They stole a cooler from the kitchen and some ice from the refrigerator to transport the thumb. They left and he made it to the hospital. "
Silence in the room.
"Descriptions?" Stuyvesant asked.
Bannon shook his head.
"Too scared," he said. "My guys talked about Witness Protection for the whole family, but he's not going to bite. My guess is we've got all we're going to get. "
"Forensics in the house?"
"Andretti cleaned it thoroughly. They made him. They watched him do it. "
"What about the bar? Anybody see them talking?"
"We'll ask. But this was nearly six weeks ago. Don't hold your breath. "
Nobody spoke for a long time.
"Reacher?" Neagley said.
"What?"
"What are you thinking?"
He shrugged.
"I'm thinking about Dostoyevsky," he said. "I just found a copy of Crime and Punishment that I sent Joe for a birthday present. I remember I almost sent him The Brothers Karamazov instead, but I decided against it. You ever read that book?"
Neagley shook her head.
"Part of it is about what the Turks did in Bulgaria," he said. "There was all kinds of rape and pillage going on. They hanged prisoners in the mornings after making them spend their last night nailed to a fence by their ears. They threw babies in the air and caught them on bayonets. They said the best part was doing it in front of the mothers. Ivan Karamazov was seriously disillusioned by it all. He said no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. Then I was thinking about these guys making Andretti clean his house while they watched. I guess he had to do it one-handed. He probably struggled with it. Dostoyevsky put his feelings in a book. I don't have his talent. So now I'm thinking I'm going to find these guys and impress on them the error of their ways in whatever manner my own talent allows. "
"You didn't strike me as a reader," Bannon said.
"I get by," Reacher said.
"And I would caution you against vigilantism. "
"That's a big word for a Special Agent. "
"Whatever, I don't want independent action. "
Reacher nodded.
"Noted," he said.
Bannon smiled. "You done the math puzzle yet?"
"What math puzzle?"
"We're assuming that Vaime rifle was in Minnesota on Tuesday and North Dakota yesterday. Now it's here in D. C. today. They didn't fly it in, that's for damn sure, because putting long guns on a commercial flight leaves a paper trail a mile long. And it's too far to drive in the time they had. So either one guy was on his own with the Heckler amp; Koch in Bismarck while the other guy was driving all the way from Minnesota to here with the Vaime. Or if both guys were in Bismarck then they must own two Vaimes, one there, one stashed here. And if both guys were in Bismarck but they own only one Vaime, then somebody else drove it in from Minnesota for them, in which case we're dealing with three guys, not two. "