Without Fail by Lee Child Read Free Book Online

Dakota, so he was temporarily living alone in his Georgetown row house. Froelich packed his protection detail with her best agents and kept them all on high alert.
    He had four agents camping out with him in the house and four Metro cops permanently stationed outside in cars, two in front and two in the alley behind. A Secret Service limo picked him up every morning and drove him to the Senate offices, with a second car following. The gun car , it was called. There was the usual efficient transfer across the sidewalks at both ends. Then three agents stayed with him throughout the day. His personal detail, three tall men, dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties, sunglasses even in November. They kept him inside a tight unobtrusive triangle of protection, always unsmiling, eyes always roving, physical placement always subtly adjusting. Sometimes he could hear faint sounds from their radio earpieces. They wore microphones on their wrists and carried automatic weapons under their jackets. He thought the whole experience was impressive, but he knew he was in no real danger inside the office building. There were D.C. cops outside, the Hill’s own security inside, permanent metal detectors on all the street doors, and all the people he saw were either elected members or their staffers, who had been security-cleared many times over.
    But Froelich wasn’t as sanguine as Armstrong was. She watched for Reacher in Georgetown and on the Hill, and saw no sign of him. He wasn’t there. Neither was anybody else worth worrying about. It should have relaxed her, but it didn’t.
    The first scheduled reception for mid-level donors was held on the Thursday evening, in the ballroom of a big chain hotel. The whole building was swept by dogs during the afternoon, and key interior positions were occupied by Metro cops who would stay put until Armstrong finally left many hours later. Froelich put two Secret Service agents on the door, six in the lobby, and eight in the ballroom itself. Another four secured the loading dock, which is where Armstrong would enter. Discreet video cameras covered the whole of the lobby and the whole of the ballroom and each was connected to its own recorder. The recorders were all slaved to a master timecode generator, so there would be a permanent real-time record of the whole event.
    The guest list was a thousand people long. November weather meant they couldn’t line up on the sidewalk and the tenor of the event meant security had to be pleasantly unobtrusive, so the standard winter protocol applied, which was to get the guests in off the street and into the lobby immediately through a temporary metal detector placed inside the frame of the entrance door. Then they milled around inside the lobby and eventually made their way to the ballroom door. Once there, their printed invitations were checked and they were asked for photo ID. The invitations were laid facedown on a glass sheet for a moment, and then handed back as souvenirs. Under the glass sheet was a video camera working to the same timecode as the others, so names and faces were permanently tied together in the visual record. Finally, they passed through a second metal detector and onward into the ballroom. Froelich’s crew were serious but good-humored, and made it seem more like they were protecting the guests themselves from some thrilling unspecified danger, rather than protecting Armstrong from them .
    Froelich spent her time staring at the video monitors, looking for faces that didn’t fit. She saw none, but she kept on worrying anyway. She saw no sign of Reacher. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed about that. Was he doing it or not? She thought about cheating and issuing his description to her team. Then she thought better of it. Win or lose, I need to know , she thought.
    Armstrong’s two-car convoy entered the loading dock a half hour later, by which time the guests had drunk a couple of glasses of cheap sparkling wine and eaten as