Alice Vaz asked mostly wider questions. The others debated rifle stocks made of composite materials, which wouldn’t shrink or swell no matter the conditions, and she asked about the conditions. Where in the world was this rifle likely to go? How hot? How cold? How high? How wet? She didn’t get clear answers, and after a spell she gave up. There were no A.V. attributions in the last twenty pages of the transcript.

Christopher asked, ‘Gut feeling?’

Reacher said, ‘Just from this?’

‘Why not?’

‘Then I would say it’s Christine Richardson. She sounds like the prime mover. She wants everything spelled out every which way. No secrets with that woman.’

‘I could say she’s trying to sell it. I could say she thinks the political guys will find that stuff interesting.’

‘No, she knows they don’t. But she keeps on talking anyway. She won’t let them leave anything vague or unspecified. Why is that?’

‘Maybe she has OCD.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Obsessive compulsive disorder. Like alphabetizing your underwear.’

‘How do you alphabetize underwear?’

‘Figure of speech.’

‘So you’re happy with Richardson?’

‘No,’ Christopher said. ‘We think it’s her too. From the externalities in the transcripts, at least. The issue is going to be proving it.’

The woman with the fanny pack and the headband was on Mass Ave, approaching Scott Circle, and the man in the car was on 16th Street, approaching Scott Circle. Their average speeds for the last many minutes had been more or less identical, at ten miles an hour, her progress steady and resolute and relentless, his frustratingly stop-start-fast-fast-slow. She was pushing hard, ready for an iconic athletic breakthrough, desperate for it, and he was agitated about the time, anxious about being late, wishing he could have parked and taken the Metro without getting back at the end of the day to find all his wheels had been stolen.