stood on each side of the door on the outside. Armstrong glanced out at them as if in apology and shut the door on them. Walked around and stood behind a desk. The room was set up like a study, but it was more recreational than for real. There was no computer. The desk was a big old item made from dark wood. There were leather chairs and books chosen for the look of their spines. There was paneling and an old Persian rug. There was an air freshener somewhere putting fragrance into the hush. There was a framed photograph on the wall. It showed a person of indeterminate gender standing on an ice floe. He or she was wearing an enormous padded down coat with a hood and thick mittens that reached the elbow. The hood had a big fur ruff that framed the face tight. The face itself was entirely hidden by a ski mask and smoked yellow snow goggles. One of the elbow-high mittens was raised in greeting.
"Our daughter," Armstrong said. "We asked her for a photo, because we miss her. That's what she sent. She has a sense of humor."
He sat down behind the desk. Reacher and Neagley took a chair each.
"This all feels very confidential," Armstrong said.
Reacher nodded. "And in the end I think we'll all agree it should be kept confidential."
"What's on your mind?"
"Mr. Stuyvesant gave us some ground rules," Reacher said. "I'm going to start breaking them right now. The Secret Service intercepted six threatening messages against you. The first came in the mail eighteen days ago. Two more came in the mail subsequently and three were hand-delivered."
Armstrong said nothing.
"You don't seem surprised," Reacher said.
Armstrong shrugged.
"Politics is a surprising business," he said.
"I guess it is," Reacher said. "All six messages were signed with a thumbprint. We traced the print to an old guy in California. His thumb had been amputated and stolen and used like a rubber stamp."
Armstrong said nothing.
"The second message showed up in Stuyvesant's own office. Eventually it was proved that a surveillance technician named Nendick had placed it there. Nendick's wife had been kidnapped in order to coerce his actions. He was so frightened of the danger to her posed by his inevitable interrogation that he went into some kind of a coma. But we're guessing she was already dead by then anyway."
Armstrong was silent.
"There's a researcher in the office called Swain who made an important mental connection. He felt we were miscounting. He realized that Nendick was supposed to be a message in himself, thereby making seven messages, not six. Then we added the guy in California who'd had his thumb removed and made it eight messages. Plus there were two homicides on Tuesday which made the ninth and tenth messages. One in Minnesota, and one in Colorado. Two unrelated strangers named Armstrong were killed as a kind of demonstration against you."
"Oh no," Armstrong said.
"So, ten messages," Reacher said. "All of them designed to torment you, except you hadn't been told about any of them. But then I started wondering whether we're still miscounting. And you know what? I'm pretty sure we are. I think there were at least eleven messages."
Silence in the small room.
"What would be the eleventh?" Armstrong asked.
"Something that slipped through," Reacher said. "Something that came in the mail, addressed to you, something that the Secret Service didn't see as a threat. Something that meant nothing at all to them, but something that meant a lot to you."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think it came first," Reacher said. "Right at the very beginning, maybe, before the Secret Service even caught on. I think it was like an announcement, that only you would understand. So I think you've known about all this all along. I think you know who's doing it, and I think you know why."
"People have died," Armstrong said. "That's a hell of an accusation."
"Do you deny it?"
Armstrong said nothing.
Reacher leaned forward.
"Some crucial words were never spoken," he said. "Thing is, if I was standing there serving turkey and then somebody started shooting and somebody else was suddenly bleeding to death on top of me, sooner or later I'd be asking, who the hell were they? What the hell did they want? Why the hell were they doing that? Those are fairly basic questions. I'd be asking them loud and clear, believe me. But you didn't ask them. We saw you twice, afterward. In the White House basement, and then later at the office. You said all