Bad Luck and Trouble

by Lee Child

  the four of us left.”

  Then Neagley talked for five minutes. She gave the same kind of clear concise briefing she had given a thousand times before. No wasted words, no omitted details. She covered all the hard intelligence and all the speculation from Angela Franz’s first phone call onward. The autopsy report, the small house in Santa Monica, the trashed Culver City office, the flash memories, the New Age building, O’Donnell’s arrival, the dead dog, the unfortunate attack on the LA County deputy outside Swan’s house in Santa Ana, the subsequent decision to ditch the Hertz cars to derail the inevitable pursuit.

  “Well, that part is taken care of at least,” Dixon said. “Nobody is following us now, so this car is clean for the time being.”

  “Conclusions?” Reacher asked.

  Dixon thought for three hundred yards of slow boulevard traffic. Then she slid onto the 405, the San Diego Freeway, but heading north, away from San Diego, toward Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys.

  “One conclusion, mainly,” she said. “This wasn’t about Franz calling only some of us because he assumed only some of us would be available. And it wasn’t about him calling only some of us because he underestimated the extent of his problem. Franz was way too smart for that. And too cautious now, apparently, what with the kid and all. So we need to shift the paradigm. Look at who’s here and who isn’t. I think this was about Franz calling only those of us who could get to him in a big hurry. Real fast. Swan, obviously, because he was right here in town, and then Sanchez and Orozco because they were only an hour or so away in Vegas. The rest of us were no good to him. Because we were all at least a day away. So this is about speed and panic and urgency. The kind of thing where half a day makes a difference.”

  “Specifically?” Reacher asked.

  “No idea. It’s a shame you burned the first eleven passwords. We could have seen what information was new or different.”

  O’Donnell said, “It’s got to be the names. They were the only hard data.”

  “Numbers can be hard data, too,” Dixon said.

  “You’ll go blind figuring them out.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes numbers speak to me.”

  “These won’t.”

  There was quiet in the car for a moment. Traffic was moving OK. Dixon stayed on the 405 and blew through the intersection with the 10.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked.

  Neagley said, “Let’s go to the Chateau Marmont. It’s out of the way and discreet.”

  “And expensive,” Reacher said. Something in his tone made Dixon take her eyes off the road and glance behind her. Neagley said, “Reacher’s broke.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Dixon said. “He hasn’t worked in nine years.”

  “He didn’t do much when he was in the army, either,” O’Donnell said. “Why change the habit of a lifetime?”

  “He’s sensitive about other people paying for him,” Neagley said.

  “Poor baby,” Dixon said.

  Reacher said, “I’m just trying to be polite.”

  Dixon stayed on the 405 until Santa Monica Boulevard. Then she struck out north and east, aiming to pass through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to hit Sunset right at the base of Laurel Canyon.

  “Mission statement,” she said. “You do not mess with the special investigators. The four of us here have to make that stick. On behalf of the four of us who aren’t here. So we need a command structure and a plan and a budget.”

  Neagley said, “I’ll take care of the budget.”

  “Can you?”

  “This year alone there’s seven billion dollars of Homeland Security money washing around the private system. Some of it comes our way in Chicago and I own half of whatever part of it sticks in our books.”

  “So are you rich?”

  “Richer than I was when I was a sergeant.”

  “We’ll get it back anyway,” O’Donnell said. “People get killed for love or money, and our guys sure as hell didn’t get killed for love. So there’s money in this somewhere.”

  “So are we agreed on Neagley staking the budget?” Dixon asked.

  “What is this, a democracy?” Reacher said.

  “Temporarily. Are we agreed?”

  Four raised hands. Two majors and a captain, letting a sergeant pick up the tab.

  “OK, the plan,” Dixon said.

  “Command structure first,” O’Donnell said. “Can’t put the cart before the horse.”

  “OK,” Dixon said. “I nominate Reacher for CO.”

  “Me too,” O’Donnell said.

  “Me three,” Neagley said. “Like it always was.”

  “Can’t do it,” Reacher said. “I hit that cop. If it comes to it, I’m going to have to put my hands up for it and leave the rest of you to carry on without me. Can’t have a CO in that position.”

  Dixon said, “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it.”

  “We’re coming to it,” Reacher said. “For sure. Tomorrow or the next day at the latest.”

  “Maybe they’ll let it go.”

  “Dream on. Would we have let it go?”

  “Maybe he’ll be too shamefaced to report it.”

  “He doesn’t have to report it. People will notice. He’s got a busted window and a busted nose.”

  “Does he even know who you are?”

  “He put Neagley’s name in the machine. He was tailing us. He knows who we are.”

  “You can’t put your hands up for it,” O’Donnell said. “You’ll go to jail. If it comes to it, you’ll have to get out of town.”

  “Can’t do that. If they don’t get me, they’ll come after you and Neagley as accessories. We don’t want that. We need boots on the ground here.”

  “We’ll get you a lawyer. A cheap one.”

  “No, a good one,” Dixon said.

  “Whatever, I’ll still be preoccupied,” Reacher said.

  Nobody spoke.

  Reacher said, “Neagley should be CO.”

  “I decline,” Neagley said.

  “You can’t decline. It’s an order.”

  “It can’t be an order until you’re CO.”

  “Dixon, then.”

  “Declined,” Dixon said.

  “OK, O’Donnell.”

  “Pass.”

  Dixon said, “Reacher until he goes to jail. Then Neagley. All in favor?”

  Three hands went up.

  “You’ll regret this,” Reacher said. “I’ll make you regret it.”

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.

  “Same as ever,” he said. “We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

  25

  The Chateau Marmont was a bohemian old pile on Sunset, near the foot of Laurel Canyon. All kinds of movie stars and rock stars had stayed there. There were plenty of photographs on the walls. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, James Dean, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane had booked in there. John Belushi had died in there, after speedballing enough heroin and cocaine to take down every guest in the hotel. There were no photographs of him.

  The desk clerk wanted IDs along with Neagley’s platinum card, so they all checked in under their real names. No choice. Then the guy told them there were only three rooms available. Neagley had to be alone, so Reacher and O’Donnell bunked together and let the women have a room each. Then O’Donnell drove Neagley back to the Beverly Wilshire in Dixon’s car to pick up their bags and check out. Then Neagley would take the Mustang back to LAX and O’Donnell would follow her in convoy to bring her back. It would be a three-hour hiatus. Reacher and Dixon would stay behind and spend the three hours working on the numbers.

  They set up in Dixon’s room. According to the desk guy, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in there once, but there was no re
maining sign of him. Reacher laid the seven spreadsheets side by side on the bed and watched as Dixon bent down and scanned them, the same way some people read music or poetry.

  “Two key issues,” she said immediately. “There are no hundred percent scores. No ten out of ten, no nine out of nine.”

  “And?”

  “The first three sheets have twenty-six numbers, the fourth has twenty-seven, and the last three all have twenty-six again.”

  “Which means what?”

  “I don’t know. But none of the sheets is full. Therefore the twenty-six thing and the twenty-seven thing must mean something. It’s deliberate, not accidental. It’s not just a continuous list of numbers with page breaks. If it was, Franz could have gotten them onto six sheets, not seven. So it’s seven separate categories of something.”

  “Separate but similar,” Reacher said. “It’s a descriptive sequence.”

  “The scores get worse,” Dixon said.

  “Radically.”

  “And quite suddenly. They’re OK, and then they fall off a cliff.”

  “But what are they?”

  “No idea.”

  Reacher asked, “What can be measured like that, repetitively?”

  “Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse.”

  “What are the categories? What are we looking at? Seven of what?”

  Dixon nodded. “That’s the key. We need to understand that first.”

  “Can’t be medical tests. Can’t be any kind of tests. Why stick twenty-seven questions in the middle of a sequence where everything else is twenty-six questions? That would destroy consistency.”

  Dixon shrugged and stood up straight. She took off her jacket and dumped it on a chair. Walked to the window and pulled a faded drape aside and looked out and down. Then up at the hills.

  “I like LA,” she said.

  “Me too, I guess,” Reacher said.

  “I like New York better.”

  “Me too, probably.”

  “But the contrast is nice.”

  “I guess.”

  “Shitty circumstances, but it’s great to see you again, Reacher. Really great.”

  Reacher nodded. “Likewise. We thought we’d lost you. Didn’t feel good.”

  “Can I hug you?”

  “You want to hug me?”

  “I wanted to hug all of you at the Hertz office. But I didn’t, because Neagley wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “She shook Angela Franz’s hand. And the dragon lady’s, at New Age.”

  “That’s progress,” Dixon said.

  “A little,” Reacher said.

  “She was abused, way back. That was always my guess.”

  “She’ll never talk about it,” Reacher said.

  “It’s sad.”

  “You bet.”

  Karla Dixon turned to him and Reacher took her in his arms and hugged her hard. She was fragrant. Her hair smelled of shampoo. He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, a complete slow circle. She felt light and thin and fragile. Her back was narrow. She was wearing a black silk shirt, and her skin felt warm underneath it. He set her back on her feet and she stretched up tall and kissed his cheek.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed you all, I mean.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much.”

  “You like life after the army?” she asked.

  “Yes, I like it fine.”

  “I don’t. But maybe you’re reacting better than me.”

  “I don’t know how I’m reacting. I don’t know whether I’m reacting at all. I look at you people and I feel like I’m just treading water. Or drowning. You all are swimming.”

  “Are you really broke?”

  “Almost penniless.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I earn three hundred grand a year and I’m on the breadline. That’s life. You’re well out of it.”

  “I feel that way, usually. Until I have to get back in it. Neagley put a thousand and thirty bucks in my bank account.”

  “Like a ten-thirty radio code? Smart girl.”

  “And for my airfare. Without that I’d still be on my way down here, hitch-hiking.”

  “You’d be walking. Nobody in their right mind would pick you up.”

  Reacher glanced at himself in an old spotted mirror. Six-five, two-fifty, hands as big as frozen turkeys, hair all over the place, unshaven, torn shirtcuffs up on his forearms like Frankenstein’s monster.

  A bum.

  From the big green machine to this.

  Dixon said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I always wished we had done more than just work together.”

  “Who?”

  “You and me.”

  “That was a statement, not a question.”

  “Did you feel the same way?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Please.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So why didn’t we do more?”

  “Wouldn’t have been right.”

  “We ignored all kinds of other regulations.”

  “It would have wrecked the unit. The others would have been jealous.”

  “Including Neagley?”

  “In her way.”

  “We could have kept it a secret.”

  Reacher said, “Dream on.”

  “We could keep it a secret now. We’ve got three hours.”

  Reacher said nothing.