Without Fail Read Online Free PDF Page B

at his funeral.”
    “It came at an inopportune time.”
    “You sound just the same.”
    “Brothers often do.”
    The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.
    “People liked him,” Froelich said.
    “He was OK, I guess.”
    “Is that all?”
    “That’s a compliment, one brother to another.”
    He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.
    “You drink it black,” Froelich said. “Just like Joe.”
    Reacher nodded. “Thing I can’t get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I’m three years older than he ever got to be.”
    Froelich looked away. “I know. He just stopped being there, but the world carried on anyway. It should have changed, just a little bit.”
    She sipped her coffee. Black, no sugar. Just like Joe .
    “Nobody ever think of doing it, apart from him?” Reacher asked. “Using an outsider for a security audit?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Secret Service is a relatively old organization.”
    “So?”
    “So I’m going to ask you an obvious question.”
    She nodded. “President Lincoln signed us into existence just after lunch on April fourteenth, 1865. Then he went to the theater that same night and got assassinated.”
    “Ironic.”
    “From our perspective, now. But back then we were only supposed to protect the currency. Then McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they figured they should have somebody looking out for the President full-time, and we got the job.”
    “Because there was no FBI until the 1930s.”
    She shook her head. “Actually there was an early incarnation called the Office of the Chief Examiner, founded in 1908. It became the FBI in 1935.”
    “That sounds like the sort of pedantic stuff Joe would know.”
    “I think it was him who told me.”
    “He would. He loved all that historical stuff.”
    He saw her make an effort not to go quiet again.
    “So what was your obvious question?” she said.
    “You use an outsider for the very first time in a hundred and one years, got to be because of something more than you’re a perfectionist.”
    She started to answer, and then she stopped. She paused a beat. He saw her decide to lie. He could sense it, in the angle of her shoulder.
    “I’m under big pressure,” she said. “You know, professionally. There are a lot of people waiting for me to screw up. I need to be sure.”
    He said nothing. Waited for the embellishments. Liars always embellish.
    “I wasn’t an easy choice,” she said. “It’s still rare for a woman to head up a team. There’s a gender thing going on, same as anywhere else, I guess, same as always. Some of my colleagues are a little Neanderthal.”
    He nodded. Said nothing.
    “It’s always on my mind,” she said. “I’ve got to slam-dunk the whole thing.”
    “Which Vice President?” he asked. “The new one or the old one?”
    “The new one,” she said. “Brook Armstrong. The Vice President–elect, strictly speaking. I was assigned to lead his team back when he joined the ticket, and we want continuity, so it’s a little bit like an election for us, too. If our guy wins, we stay on the job. If our guy loses, we’re back to being footsoldiers.”
    Reacher smiled. “So did you vote for him?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “What did Joe say about me?” he asked.
    “He said you’d relish the challenge. You’d beat your brains out to find a way of getting it done. He said you had a lot of ingenuity and you’d find three or four ways of doing it and we’d learn a lot from you.”
    “And you said?”
    “This was eight years ago, don’t forget. I was kind of full of myself, I guess. I said no way would you even get close.”
    “And he said?”
    “He said plenty of people had made that same mistake.”
    Reacher shrugged. “I was in the Army eight years ago. I was probably ten thousand