She went quiet.

“When?” Reacher asked.

“We were together two years. We broke up a year before it happened.”

Reacher nodded.

“I’m M. E. Froelich,” she said.

She left an unspoken question hanging in the air: did he ever mention me? Reacher nodded again, trying to make it like the name meant something. But it didn’t. Never heard of you, he thought. But maybe I wish I had.

“Emmy?” he said. “Like the television thing?”

“M. E.,” she said. “I go by my initials.”

“What are they for?”

“I won’t tell you that.”

He paused a beat. “What did Joe call you?”

“He called me Froelich,” she said.

He nodded. “Yes, he would.”

“I still miss him,” she said.

“Me too, I guess,” Reacher said. “So is this about Joe, or is it about something else?”

She was still again, for another beat. Then she shook herself, a tiny subliminal quiver, and came back all business.

“Both,” she said. “Well, mainly something else, really.”

“Want to tell me what?”

“I want to hire you for something,” she said. “On a kind of posthumous recommendation from Joe. Because of what he used to say about you. He talked about you, time to time.”

Reacher nodded. “Hire me for what?”

Froelich paused again and came up with a tentative smile.

“I’ve rehearsed this line,” she said. “Couple of times.”

“So let me hear it.”

“I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States.”

“Good line,” Reacher said. “Interesting proposition.”

“What’s your answer?” Froelich asked.

“No,” he said. “Right now I think that’s probably the safest all-around response.”

She smiled the tentative smile again and picked up her purse.

“Let me show you some ID,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Don’t need it,” he said. “You’re United States Secret Service.”

She looked at him. “You’re pretty quick.”

“It’s pretty clear,” he said.

“Is it?”

He nodded. Touched his right elbow. It was bruised.

“Joe worked for them,” he said. “And knowing the way he was, he probably worked pretty hard, and he was a little shy, so anybody he dated was probably in the office, otherwise he would never have met them. Plus, who else except the government keeps two-year-old Suburbans this shiny? And parks next to hydrants? And who else but the Secret Service could track me this efficiently through my banking arrangements?”

“You’re pretty quick,” she said again.

“Thank you,” he said back. “But Joe didn’t have anything to do with Vice Presidents. He was in Financial Crimes, not the White House protection detail.”

She nodded. “We all start out in Financial Crimes. We pay our dues as anticounterfeiting grunts. And he ran anticounterfeiting. And you’re right, we met in the office. But he wouldn’t date me then. He said it wasn’t appropriate. But I was planning on transferring across to the protection detail as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I did, we started going out.”

Then she went a little quiet again. Looked down at her purse.

“And?” Reacher said.

She looked up. “Something he said one night. I was kind of keen and ambitious back then, you know, starting a new job and all, and I was always trying to figure out if we were doing the best we could, and Joe and I were goofing around, and he said the only real way for us to test ourselves would be to hire some outsider to try to get to the target. To see if it was possible, you know. A security audit, he called it. I asked him, like who? And he said, my little brother would be the one. If anybody could do it, he could. He made you sound pretty scary.”

Reacher smiled. “That sounds like Joe. A typical harebrained scheme.”

“You think?”

“For a smart guy, Joe could be very dumb sometimes.”

“Why is it dumb?”

“Because if you hire some outsider, all you need to do is watch for him coming. Makes it way too easy.”

“No, his idea was the person would come in anonymously and unannounced. Like now, absolutely nobody knows about you except me.”

Reacher nodded. “OK, maybe he wasn’t so dumb.”

“He felt it was the only way. You know, however hard we work, we’re always thinking inside the box. He felt we should be prepared to test ourselves against some random challenge from the outside.”

“And he nominated me?”

“He said you’d be ideal.”

“So why wait so long to try it? Whenever this conversation was, it had to be at least six years ago. Didn’t take you six years to find me.”

“It was eight years ago,” Froelich said. “Right at the start of our relationship, just after I got the transfer. And it only took me one day to find you.”

“So you’re pretty quick, too,” Reacher said. “But why wait eight years?”

“Because now I’m in charge. I was promoted head of the Vice President’s detail four months ago. And I’m still keen and ambitious, and I still want to know that we’re doing it right. So I decided to follow Joe’s advice, now that it’s my call. I decided to try a security audit. And you were recommended, so to speak. All those years ago, by somebody I trusted very much. So I’m here to ask you if you’ll do it.”

“You want to get a cup of coffee?”

She looked surprised, like coffee wasn’t on the agenda.

“This is urgent business,” she said.

“Nothing’s too urgent for coffee,” he said. “That’s been my experience. Drive me back to my motel and I’ll take you to the downstairs lounge. Coffee’s OK, and it’s a very dark room. Just right for a conversation like this.”

The government Suburban had a DVD-based navigation system built into the dash, and Reacher watched her fire it up and pick the motel’s street address off a long list of potential Atlantic City destinations.

“I could have told you where it is,” he said.

“I’m used to this thing,” she said. “It talks to me.”

“I wasn’t going to use hand signals,” he said.

She smiled again and pulled out into the traffic. There wasn’t much. Evening gloom was falling. The wind was still blowing. The casinos might do OK, but the boardwalk and the piers and the beaches weren’t going to see much business for the next six months. He sat still next to her in the warmth from the heater and thought about her with his dead brother for a moment. Then he just watched her drive. She was pretty good at it. She parked outside the motel door and he led her inside and down a half-flight of stairs to the lounge. It smelled stale and sticky, but it was warm and there was a flask of coffee on the machine behind the bar. He pointed at it, and then at himself and Froelich, and the barman got busy. Then he walked to a corner booth and slid in across the vinyl with his back to the wall and the whole room in sight. Old habits. Froelich clearly had the same habits because she did the same thing, so they ended up close together and side by side. Their shoulders were almost touching.

“You’re very similar to him,” she said.

“In some ways,” he said. “Not in others. Like, I’m still alive.”

“You weren’t at his funeral.”

“It came at an inopportune time.”

“You sound just the same.”

“Brothers often do.”

The barman brought the coffee, on a beer-stained cork tray. Two cups, black, little plastic pots of fake milk, little paper packets of sugar. Two cheap little spoons, pressed out of stainless steel.

“People liked him,” Froelich said.

“He was OK, I guess.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s a compliment, one brother to another.”

He lifted his cup and tipped the milk and the sugar and the spoon off his saucer.

“You drink it black,” Froelich said. “Just like Joe.”

Reacher nodded. “Thing I can’t get my head around is I was always the kid brother, but now I’m three years older than he ever got to be.”