"Did you vote in the election?" Neagley asked him.
He shook his head. "I'm not registered anywhere. Did you?"
"Sure," she said. "I always vote."
"Did you vote for Armstrong?"
"Nobody votes for Vice President. Except his family, maybe."
"But did you vote for that ticket?"
She nodded. "Yes, I did. Would you have?"
"I guess so," he said. "You ever hear anything about Armstrong before?"
"Not really," she said. "I mean, I'm interested in politics, but I'm not one of those people who can name all hundred senators."
"Would you run for office?"
"Not in a million years. I like a low profile, Reacher. I was a sergeant, and I always will be, inside. Never wanted to be an officer."
"You had the potential."
She shrugged and smiled, all at the same time. "Maybe I did. But what I didn't have was the desire. And you know what? Sergeants have plenty of power. More than you guys ever realized."
"Hey, I realized," he said. "Believe me, I realized."
"She's not coming back, you know. We're sitting here talking and wasting time and I'm missing all kinds of flights home, and she's not coming back."
"She's coming back."
Froelich parked in the garage and headed upstairs. Presidential protection was a 24/7 operation, but Sundays still felt different. People dressed different, the air was quieter, phone traffic was down. Some people spent the day at home. Like Stuyvesant, for instance. She closed her office door and sat at her desk and opened a drawer. Took out the things she needed and slipped them into a large brown envelope. Then she opened Reacher's expenses file and copied the figure on the bottom line onto the top sheet of her yellow pad and switched her shredder on. Fed the whole file into it, sheet by sheet, and then followed it with the file of recommendations and all the six-by-four photographs, one by one. She fed the file folders themselves in and stirred the long curling shreds around in the output bin until they were hopelessly tangled. Then she switched the machine off again and picked up the envelope and headed back down to the garage.
Reacher saw her car from the hotel room window. It came around the corner and slowed. There was no traffic on the street. Late in the afternoon, on a November Sunday in D.C. The tourists were in their hotels, showering, getting ready for dinner. The natives were home, reading their newspapers, watching the NFL on television, paying bills, doing chores. The air was fogging with evening. Streetlights were sputtering to life. The black Suburban had its headlights on. It pulled a wide U across both lanes and slid into an area reserved for waiting taxis.
"She's back," Reacher said.
Neagley joined him at the window. "We can't help her."
"Maybe she isn't looking for help."
"Then why would she come back?"
"I don't know," he said. "A second opinion? Validation? Maybe she just wants to talk. You know, a problem shared is a problem halved."
"Why talk to us?"
"Because we didn't hire her and we can't fire her. And we weren't rivals for her position. You know how these organizations work."
"Is she allowed to talk to us?"
"Didn't you ever talk to somebody you shouldn't have?"
Neagley made a face. "Occasionally. Like, I talked to you."
"And I talked to you, which was worse, because you weren't an officer."
"But I had the potential."
"That's for damn sure," he said, looking down. "Now she's just sitting there."
"She's on the phone. She's calling somebody."
The room phone rang.
"Us, evidently," Reacher said.
He picked up the phone.
"We're still here," he said.
Then he listened for a moment.
"OK," he said, and put the phone down.
"She coming up?" Neagley asked. He nodded and went back to the window in time to see Froelich climbing out of the car. She was holding an envelope. She skipped across the sidewalk and disappeared from sight. Two minutes later they heard the distant chime of the elevator arriving on their floor. Twenty seconds after that, a knock on the door. Reacher stepped over and opened up and Froelich walked in and stopped in the middle of the room. Glanced first at Neagley, and then at Reacher.
"Can we have a minute in private?" she asked him.
"Don't need one," he said. "The answer is yes."
"You don't know the question yet."
"You trust me, because you trusted Joe and Joe trusted me, therefore that loop is closed. Now you want to know if I trust Neagley, so you can close that loop also, and the answer is yes, I trust her absolutely, therefore you can too."
"OK," Froelich said. "I guess that was the question."
"So take your jacket off and make yourself at home. You want more coffee?"
Froelich slipped out of her jacket and dumped it on the bed. Stepped over to the table and laid the envelope down.
"More coffee would be fine," she said.
Reacher dialed room service and asked for a large pot and three cups, three saucers, and absolutely nothing else.
"I only told you half the truth before," Froelich said.
"I guessed," Reacher said.
Froelich nodded apologetically and picked up the envelope. Opened the flap and pulled out a clear vinyl page protector. There was something in it.
"This is a copy of something that came in the mail," she said.
She dropped it on the table and Reacher and Neagley inched their chairs closer to take a look. The page protector was a standard office product. The thing inside it was an eight-by-ten color photograph of a single sheet of white paper. It was shown lying on a wooden surface and had a wooden office ruler laid alongside it to indicate scale. It looked like a normal letter-sized sheet. Centered left to right on it, an inch or so above the middle, were five words: You are going to die. The words were crisp and bold, obviously printed from a computer.
The room stayed quiet.
"When did it come?" Reacher asked.
"The Monday after the election," Froelich said. "First-class mail."
"Addressed to Armstrong?"
Froelich nodded. "At the Senate. But he hasn't seen it yet. We open all public mail addressed to protectees. We pass on whatever is appropriate. We didn't think this was appropriate. What do you think of it?"
"Two things, I guess. First, it's true."
"Not if I can help it."
"You discovered the secret of immortality? Everybody's going to die, Froelich. I am, you are. Maybe when we're a hundred, but we aren't going to live forever. So technically it's a statement of fact. An accurate prediction, as much as a threat."
"Which raises a question," Neagley said. "Is the sender smart enough to have phrased it that way on purpose?"
"What would be the purpose?"
"To avoid prosecution if you find him? Or her? To be able to say, hey, it wasn't a threat, it was a statement of fact? Anything we can infer from the forensics about the sender's intelligence?"
Froelich looked at her in surprise. And with a measure of respect.
"We'll get to that," she said. "And we're pretty sure it's a him, not a her."
"Why?"
"We'll get to that," Froelich said again.
"But why are you worrying about it?" Reacher asked. "That's my second reaction. Surely those guys get sackloads of threats in the mail."
Froelich nodded. "Several thousand a year, typically. But most of them are sent to the President. It's fairly unusual to get one directed specifically at the Vice President. And most of them are on old scraps of paper, written in crayon, bad spelling, crossings out. Defective, in some way. And this one isn't defective. This one stood out from the start. So we looked at it pretty hard."
"Where was it mailed?"
"Las Vegas," Froelich said. "Which doesn't really help us. In terms of Americans traveling inside America, Vegas has the biggest transient population there is."
"You're sure an American sent it?"
"It's a percentage game. We've never had a written threat from a foreigner."
"And you don't think he's a Vegas resident?"
"Very unlikely. We think he traveled there to mail it."
"Because?" Neagley asked.
"Because of the forensics," Froelich said. "They're spectacular. They indicate a very careful and cautious guy."
"Details?"
"Were you a specialist? In the military police?"
"She was a specialist in breaking people's necks," Reacher said. "But I guess she took an intelligent interest in the other stuff."
"Ignore him," Neagley said. "I spent six months training in the FBI labs."
Froelich nodded. "We sent this to the FBI. Their facilities are better than ours."
There was a knock at the door. Reacher stood up and walked over and put his eye to the peephole. The room-service guy, with the coffee. Reacher opened the door and took the tray from him. A large pot, three upside-down cups, three saucers, no milk or sugar or spoons, and a single pink rose in a thin china vase. He carried the tray back to the table and Froelich moved the photograph to give him room to put it down. Neagley righted the cups and started to pour.