—
Sinclair said she knew her real license by a long-forgotten smudge of ballpoint ink in one corner. From cashing a check in a D.C. bank, she said, where she needed ID, and where the writing ledge was cramped and narrow due to the thickness of the teller’s bulletproof window. The exuberant underline beneath her signature had swerved off the check and touched her license. She had rubbed the mark with her thumb, removing some of it and spreading the rest.
She put her real license back in her purse, and she put her purse back in her pocketbook. She left the fake license on the bed, and sat down next to it. She trapped it under her fingernail, as if it might float away. She said, “I guess this raises a large number of questions.”
“One, at least,” Reacher said.
“Only one?”
“Have you ever mislaid your license before?”
“Is this the question?”
“Yes.”
“No, never.”
“Then I would say Mr. Ratcliffe has work to do.”
“Why him?”
“Because they won’t want to give it to the FBI. Too high a risk of a scandal.”
“Who won’t?”
“The White House.”
“Forget the White House. Someone is running around Hamburg pretending to be me.”
“Or vice versa.”
“What does that mean?”
“You might be a foreign spy,” Reacher said. “Maybe it’s the real Marian Sinclair who’s running around Hamburg.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No stone unturned.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Do you follow baseball?”
“What?”
“Baseball,” Reacher said. “Do you follow it?”
“Socially, I suppose.”
“Where do you go?”
“The Orioles.”
“What do you see beyond the right-field wall?”
Sinclair said, “A warehouse.”
“OK, you pass the test.”
“Were you serious?”
“No, I was pulling your leg. Obviously you’re real, because you brought Neagley’s mail.”
“There’s a time and a place, major.”
“These are as good as any. We could get depressed otherwise.”
“The White House didn’t forge a copy of my driver’s license.”
“I agree.”
“We’re a stone’s throw from a bar where this stuff is for sale.”
“Coincidence,” Reacher said.
“I don’t believe in coincidence. Neither should you.”
“Sometimes we have to. If that license had been made here in Germany, however good these people are, they would have been forced to use a press photograph. From a newspaper or a magazine. Re-shot on regular film, to make it look like the real thing, and definitely you, but it couldn’t be the exact same photograph as on your real license, because they don’t have that photograph. Only the Virginia DMV has that photograph. You never mislaid your license, so it can’t have been copied direct.”
“So who made it?”
“The Virginia DMV.”
“Which is many things, but not a criminal organization.”
“Far from it. They did it as a statutory duty. As a service to the public. When you mislaid your first license and requested a replacement.”
“But I never did. I told you that.”
“They didn’t know it wasn’t you. Someone filled out the form, with your name and address, and mailed it in, and then monitored your mailbox until the replacement arrived.”
“Who?”
“Someone who works in the White House travel office. An older person, who has been in government service a long time. Hence the potential embarrassment. Hence Ratcliffe won’t give it to the FBI.”
“Why the travel office?”
“Partly because DMV paperwork needs more than just your name and address. There are all kinds of numbers. The people who book your flights and your cars and your hotels would know them all.”
“My lawyer knows them all. My accountant knows them all. Probably my housekeeper knows them all.”
“You were eating breakfast under an assumed name four thousand miles from home. Your replica DL was dropped twenty feet away. You don’t believe in coincidence. Who knew you were here?”
Sinclair paused a beat and said, “The White House travel office.”
“Who else?”
“No one else.”
“Not even the hotel desk,” Reacher said. “You’re using a different name. Only one possible explanation. Someone in the travel office made a phone call.”
“To who? Some local woman trained to impersonate me?”
“There is no local woman. No one went to the desk. No one entered the lobby except a small man in a raincoat.”
“So what happened?”
“The small man in the raincoat knew your ETA. The night flight, on Lufthansa. Someone in the travel office told him all about it. He followed you from the airport to the hotel, he hung around across the street, he saw you check in, he saw you get in the elevator, he snuck in the lobby, he called the elevator back down, he dropped the license on the floor, and he turned around and walked away.”