"I don't believe it," Froelich said. She stared at the pictures. "This can't be Friday night. This was some other night. You weren't really there."
Reacher said nothing.
"Were you?" she asked.
"Well, check this out," Reacher said. He handed her another photograph. It was a telephoto shot. It showed her sitting in the apartment window above the garage, staring out into the darkness, holding her cell phone. Her heat signature was picked up in strange reds and oranges and purples. But it was her. No doubt about it. Like she was close enough to touch.
"I was calling New Jersey," she said, quietly. "Your musician friends got away OK."
"Good," Reacher said. "Thanks for arranging it."
She stared at the three infrared pictures, one after the other, and said nothing.
"So the ballroom and the family house were definites," Reacher said. "Two-zip for the bad guys. But the next day was the real clincher. Yesterday. That rally at the church."
He passed the last photo across. It was regular daylight film, taken from a high angle. It showed Armstrong in his heavy overcoat walking across the community center lawns. The late golden sun threw a long shadow out behind him. He was surrounded by a loose knot of people, but his head was clearly visible. It had another crude gunsight inked around it.
"I was in the church tower," Reacher said.
"The church was locked."
"At eight o'clock in the morning. I'd been in there since five."
"It was searched."
"I was up where the bells were. At the top of a wooden ladder, behind a trapdoor. I put pepper on the ladder. Your dogs lost interest and stayed on the first floor."
"It was a local unit."
"They were sloppy."
"I thought about canceling the event."
"You should have."
"Then I thought about asking him to wear a vest."
"Wouldn't have mattered. I would have aimed at his head. It was a beautiful day, Froelich. Clear sky, sunny, no wind at all. Cool, dense air. True air. I was a couple hundred feet away. I could have shot his eyes out."
She went quiet.
"John Malkovich or Edward Fox?" she asked.
"I'd have hit Armstrong and then as many other people as I could, three or four seconds. Cops mostly, I guess, but women and children too. I'd have aimed to wound them, not kill them. In the stomach, probably. More effective that way. People flopping around and bleeding all over the place, it would have created mass panic. Enough to get away, probably. I'd have busted out of the church within ten seconds and gotten away into the surrounding subdivision fast enough. Neagley was standing by in a car. She'd have been rolling soon as she heard the shots. So I'd probably have been Edward Fox."
Froelich stood up and walked to the window. Put her hands palms down on the sill and stared out at the weather.
"This is a disaster," she said.
Reacher said nothing.
"I guess I didn't anticipate your level of focus," she said. "I didn't know it was going to be all-out guerrilla warfare."
Reacher shrugged. "Assassins aren't necessarily going to be the gentlest people you'll ever meet. And they're the ones who make the rules here."
Froelich nodded. "And I didn't know you were going to get help, especially not from a woman."
"I kind of warned you," Reacher said. "I told you it couldn't work if you were watching for me coming. You can't expect assassins to call ahead with their plans."
"I know," she said. "But I was imagining a lone man, is all."
"It's always going to be a team," Reacher said. "There are no lone men."
He saw an ironic half smile reflected in the glass.
"So you don't believe the Warren Report?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"Neither do you," he said. "No professional ever will."
"I don't feel like much of a professional today," she said.
Neagley stood up and stepped over and perched on the sill, next to Froelich, her back against the glass.
"Context," she said. "That's what you've got to think about. It's not so bad. Reacher and I were United States Army Criminal Investigation Division specialists. We were trained in all kinds of ways. Trained to think, mostly. Trained to be inventive. And to be ruthless, for sure, and self-confident. And tougher than the people we were responsible for, and some of them were plenty tough. So we're very unusual. People as specialized as us, there's not more than maybe ten thousand in the whole country."
"Ten thousand is a lot," Froelich said.
"Out of two hundred eighty-one million? And how many of them are currently