we bought from Staples for sixty bucks, sandpapered the edges clean, scuffed it around a little bit, and shoved it in my bag. Then I dressed up some and took Ms. Wright's party invitation with me and headed downstairs. I got into the ballroom OK. With the knife in my pocket."
"And?"
"I hung around, then I got hold of your guy. Held on for a spell."
Froelich looked straight at her. "How would you have done it?"
"I had hold of his right hand in my right. I pulled him close, he rotated slightly, I had a clear shot at the right side of his neck. Three-and-a-half-inch blade, I'd have stuck it through his carotid artery. Then jerked it around some. He'd have bled to death inside thirty seconds. I was one arm movement away from doing it. Your guys were ten feet away. They'd have plugged me afterward for sure, but they couldn't have stopped me from getting it done."
Froelich was pale and silent. Neagley looked away.
"Without the knife would have been harder," she said. "But not impossible. Breaking his neck would have been tricky because he's got some muscle up there. I'd have had to do a quick two-step to get his weight moving, and if your guys were fast enough they might have stopped me halfway. So I guess I'd have gone with a blow to his larynx, hard enough to crush it. A jab with my left elbow would have done the trick. I'd have been dead before him, probably, but he'd have suffocated right afterward, unless you've got people that could do an emergency tracheotomy on the ballroom floor within a minute or so, which I guess you don't have."
"No," Froelich said. "We don't have."
Then she fell silent again.
"Sorry to ruin your day," Neagley said. "But hey, you wanted to know this stuff, right? No point doing a security audit and not telling you the outcome."
Froelich nodded. "What did you whisper to him?"
"I said, I've got a knife. Just for the hell of it. But very quietly. If anybody had challenged me I was going to claim I'd said, where's your wife? Like I was coming on to him. I imagine that happens, time to time."
Froelich nodded again.
"It does," she said. "Time to time. What else?"
"Well, he's safe in his house," Neagley said.
"You checked?"
"Every day," Reacher said. "We've been on the ground in Georgetown since Tuesday night."
"I didn't see you."
"That was the plan."
"How did you know where he lives?"
"We followed your limos."
Froelich said nothing.
"Good limos," Reacher said. "Slick tactics."
"Friday morning was especially good," Neagley said.
"But the rest of Friday was pretty bad," Reacher said. "Lack of coordination produced a major communications error."
"Where?"
"Your D.C. people had video of the ballroom but clearly your New York people never saw it, because as well as being the woman in the party dress Thursday night Neagley was also one of the photographers outside the Stock Exchange."
"Some North Dakota paper has a website," Neagley said. "Like all of them, with a graphic of their masthead. I downloaded it and modified it into a press pass. Laminated it and put brass eyelets in it and slung it around my neck with a nylon cord. Trawled the secondhand stores in lower Manhattan for battered old photo gear. Kept a camera up in front of my face the whole time so Armstrong wouldn't recognize me."
"You should operate an access list," Reacher said. "Control it, somehow."
"We can't," Froelich said. "It's a constitutional thing. The First Amendment guarantees journalistic access, any old time they want it. But they were all searched."
"I wasn't carrying," Neagley said. "I was just breaching your security for the hell of it. But I could have been carrying, that's for damn sure. I could have gotten a bazooka past that kind of a search."
Reacher stood up and stepped to the credenza. Pulled open a drawer and took out a stack of photographs. They were commercial one-hour six-by-four-inch color prints. He held up the first picture. It was a low-angle shot of Armstrong standing outside the Stock Exchange with the carved lintel inscription floating like a halo over his head.
"Neagley's," Reacher said. "Good picture, I thought. Maybe we should sell it to a magazine, defray some of the twenty grand."
He stepped back to the bed and sat down and passed the photograph to Froelich. She took it and stared at it.
"Point is I was four feet away," Neagley said. "I could have gotten to him if I'd wanted to. A John Malkovich situation again, but