kinds of things. You asked, had they been captured yet? That was your big concern. You never asked who they might be or what their possible motive was. And why didn't you ask? Only one possible explanation. You already knew."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I think your wife knows, too," Reacher said. "You conveyed her anger at you for putting people at risk. I don't think she was generalizing. I think she knows you know, and she thinks you should have told somebody."
Armstrong was silent.
"So I think you're feeling a little guilty now," Reacher said. "I think that's why you agreed to make the television statement for me and that's why you suddenly want to go to the service itself. Some kind of a conscience thing. Because you knew, and you didn't tell anybody."
"I'm a politician," Armstrong said. "We have hundreds of enemies. There was no point in speculating."
"Bullshit," Reacher said. "This isn't political. This is personal. Your kind of political enemy is some North Dakota soybean grower you made ten cents a week poorer by altering a subsidy. Or some pompous old senator you declined to vote with. The soybean grower might make a halfhearted effort against you at election time and the senator might bide his time and screw you on some big floor issue but neither one of them is going to do what these guys are doing."
Armstrong said nothing.
"I'm not a fool," Reacher said. "I'm an angry man who watched a woman I was fond of bleed to death."
"I'm not a fool either," Armstrong said.
"I think you are. Something's coming back at you from the past and you think you can just ignore it and hope for the best? Didn't you realize it would happen? You people have no perspective. You thought you were world famous already just because you were in the House and the Senate? Well, you weren't. Real people never heard of you until the campaign this summer. You thought all your little secrets were already out? Well, they weren't, either."
Armstrong said nothing.
"Who are they?" Reacher asked.
Armstrong shrugged. "Your guess?"
Reacher paused a beat.
"I think you've got a temper problem," he said. "Same as your dad. I think way back before you learned to control it you made people suffer, and some of them forgot about it, but some of them didn't. I think it's a part of some particular person's life that somebody once did something bad to them. Maybe hurt them, or hurt their self-esteem, or screwed them up in some other kind of a big way. I think that particular person repressed it deep down inside until they turned on the TV one day and saw your face for the first time in thirty years."
Armstrong sat still for a long moment.
"How far along is the FBI with this?" he asked.
"They're nowhere. They're out beating the bushes for people that don't exist. We're way ahead of them."
"And what are your intentions?"
"I'm going to help you," Reacher said. "Not that you deserve it in any way at all. It'll be a purely accidental by-product of me standing up for Nendick and his wife, and an old guy called Andretti, and two people called Armstrong, and Crosetti, and especially for Froelich, who was my brother's friend."
There was silence.
"Will this stay confidential?" Armstrong asked.
Reacher nodded. "It'll have to. Purely for my sake."
"Sounds like you're contemplating a very serious course of action."
"People play with fire, they get burned."
"That's the law of the jungle."
"Where the hell else do you think you live?"
Armstrong was quiet, another long moment.
"So then you'll know my secret and I'll know yours," he said.
Reacher nodded. "And we'll all live happily ever after."
There was another long silence. It lasted a whole minute. Reacher saw Armstrong the politician fade away, and Armstrong the man replace him.
"You're wrong in most ways," he said. "But not all of them."
He leaned down and opened a drawer. Took out a padded mailer and tossed it on the desk. It skidded on the shiny wood and came to rest an inch from the edge.
"I guess this counts as the first message," he said. "It arrived on Election Day. I suppose the Secret Service must have been a little puzzled, but they didn't see anything really wrong with it. So they passed it right along."
The mailer was a standard commercial stationery product. It was addressed to Brook Armstrong, United States Senate, Washington D.C. The address was printed on a familiar self-adhesive label in the familiar computer font, Times New Roman, fourteen point, bold. It