“Age?”

“Middle or late forties.”

“Rank?”

“He showed me a gold badge, but he stayed twenty feet away. I couldn’t read it. He struck me as a senior guy. Maybe a detective lieutenant, maybe even a captain.”

“Did he speak?”

“He shouted from twenty feet away. Couple dozen words, maybe.”

“Was he the guy on the phone?”

“No.”

“So now we know both of them,” Stuyvesant said. “A shorter squat guy in a herringbone overcoat from the garage video and a tall lean cop from Bismarck. The squat guy spoke on the phone, and it’s his thumbprint. And he was in Colorado with the machine gun because the cop is the marksman with the rifle. That’s why he was heading for the church tower. He was going to shoot.”

Bannon opened a file. Pulled a sheet of paper. Studied it carefully.

“Our Bismarck field office listed all attending personnel,” he said. “There were forty-two local cops on the field. Nobody above the rank of sergeant except for two, firstly the senior officer present, who was a captain, and his second-in-command, who was a lieutenant.”

“Might have been either one of them,” Reacher said.

Bannon sighed. “This puts us in a difficult spot.”

Stuyvesant stared at him. “Now you’re worried about upsetting the Bismarck PD? You didn’t worry too much about upsetting us.”

“I’m not worried about upsetting anybody,” Bannon said. “I’m thinking tactically, is all. If it had been a patrolman out there I could call the captain or the lieutenant and ask him to investigate. Can’t do that the other way around. And alibis are going to be all over the place. Senior ranks will be off-duty today for the holiday.”

“Call now,” Neagley said. “Find out who’s not in town. They can’t be home yet. You’re watching the airports.”

Bannon shook his head. “People aren’t home today for lots of reasons. They’re visiting family, stuff like that. And this guy could be home already. He could have gotten through the airports easy as anything. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Mayhem like we had today, multiple agencies out and looking, nobody knows each other, all he’s got to do is hustle along holding his badge up and he walks straight through anywhere. That’s obviously how they got into the immediate area. And out again. What’s more natural in the circumstances than a cop running full speed with his badge held up?”

The room went quiet.

“Personnel files,” Stuyvesant said. “We should get Bismarck PD to send us their files and let Reacher look at the photographs.”

“That would take days,” Bannon said. “And who would I ask? I might be speaking directly to the bad guy.”

“So speak to your Bismarck field office,” Neagley said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if the local FBI had illicit summaries on the whole police department, with photographs.”

Bannon smiled. “You’re not supposed to know about things like that.”

Then he stood up slowly and went out to his office to make the necessary call.

“So Armstrong made the statement,” Stuyvesant said. “Did you see it? But it’s going to cost him politically, because I can’t let him go.”

“I need a decoy, is all,” Reacher said. “Better for me if he doesn’t really show up. And the last thing I care about right now is politics.”

Stuyvesant didn’t answer. Nobody spoke again. Bannon came back into the room after fifteen minutes. He had a completely neutral look on his face.

“Good news and bad news,” he said. “Good news is that Bismarck isn’t the largest city on earth. Police department employs a hundred thirty-eight people, of which thirty-two are civilian workers, leaving a hundred and six badged officers. Twelve of those are women, so we’re down to ninety-four already. And thanks to the miracles of illicit intelligence and modern technology we’ll have scanned and e-mailed mug shots of all ninety-four of them within ten minutes.”

“What’s the bad news?” Stuyvesant asked.

“Later,” Bannon said. “After Reacher has wasted a little more of our time.”

He looked around the room. Wouldn’t say anything more. In the end the wait was a little less than ten minutes. An agent in a suit hurried in with a sheaf of paper. He stacked it in front of Bannon. Bannon pushed the pile across to Reacher. Reacher picked it up and flicked through. Sixteen sheets, some of them still a little wet from the printer. Fifteen sheets had six photographs each and the sixteenth had just four. Ninety-four faces in total. He started with the last sheet. None of the four faces was even close.

He picked up the fifteenth sheet. Glanced across the next six faces and put the paper down again. Picked up the fourteenth sheet. Scanned all six pictures. He worked fast. He didn’t need to study carefully. He had the guy’s features fixed firmly in his mind. But the guy wasn’t on the fourteenth sheet. Or the thirteenth.

“How sure are you?” Stuyvesant asked.

Nothing on the twelfth sheet.

“I’m sure,” Reacher said. “That was the guy, and the guy was a cop. He had a badge and he looked like a cop. He looked as much like a cop as Bannon.”

Nothing on the eleventh sheet. Or the tenth.

“I don’t look like a cop,” Bannon said.

Nothing on the ninth sheet.

“You look exactly like a cop,” Reacher said. “You’ve got a cop coat, cop pants, cop shoes. You’ve got a cop face.”

Nothing on the eighth sheet.

“He acted like a cop,” Reacher said.

Nothing on the seventh sheet.

“He smelled like a cop,” Reacher said.

Nothing on the sixth sheet. Nothing on the fifth sheet.

“What did he say to you?” Stuyvesant asked.

Nothing on the fourth sheet.

“He asked me if the church was secure,” Reacher said. “I asked him what was going on. He said some kind of big commotion. Then he yelled at me for leaving the church door open. Just like a cop would talk.”

Nothing on the third sheet. Or the second. He picked up the first sheet and knew instantly that the guy wasn’t on it. He dropped the paper and shook his head.

“OK, now for the bad news,” Bannon said. “Bismarck PD had nobody there in plain clothes. Nobody at all. It was considered a ceremonial occasion. They were all in full uniform. All forty-two of them. Especially the brass. The captain and the lieutenant were in full dress uniform. White gloves and all.”

“The guy was a Bismarck cop,” Reacher said.

“No,” Bannon said. “The guy was not a Bismarck cop. At best he was a guy impersonating a Bismarck cop.”

Reacher said nothing.

“But he was obviously making a pretty good stab at it,” Bannon said. “He convinced you, for instance. Clearly he had the look, and the mannerisms.”

Nobody spoke.

“So nothing’s changed, I’m afraid,” Bannon said. “We’re still looking at recent Secret Service ex-employees. Because who better to impersonate a provincial cop than some other law-enforcement veteran who just worked his whole career alongside provincial cops at events exactly like that one?”