by Lee Child
Not good.
You’re well out of it, Dixon had said.
I usually feel that way, he had replied.
All that we’ve got that you don’t is suitcases, O’Donnell had said.
But what have I got that you don’t? he had replied.
He finished the meal a little closer to an answer than before.
After Barstow came Victorville and Lake Arrowhead. Then the mountains reared in front of them. But first, this time to their right, were the badlands where the helicopter had flown. Once again Reacher told himself he wouldn’t look, but once again he did. He took his eyes off the road and glanced north and west for seconds at a time. Sanchez and Swan were out there somewhere, he guessed. He saw no reason to hope otherwise.
They passed through an active cell and Neagley’s phone rang. Diana Bond, all set to leave Edwards at a moment’s notice. Reacher said, “Tell her to meet us at that Denny’s on Sunset. Where we were before.” Neagley made a face and he said, “It’s going to taste like Maxim’s in Paris after that place we just stopped.”
So Neagley arranged the rendezvous and he kicked the transmission down and climbed onto Mount San Antonio’s first low slopes. Less than an hour later they were checking in at the Dunes Motel.
The Dunes was the kind of place where no room went even close to three figures for the night and where guests were required to leave a security deposit for the TV remote, which was issued with great ceremony along with the key. Reacher paid cash from his stolen wad for all four rooms, which got around the necessity for real names and ID. They parked the cars out of sight of the street and regrouped in a dark battered lounge next to a laundry room, as anonymous as four people could get in Los Angeles County.
Reacher’s kind of place.
An hour later Diana Bond called Neagley to say she was pulling into the Denny’s lot.
54
They walked a short stretch of Sunset and stepped into the Denny’s neon lobby and found a tall blonde woman waiting for them. She was alone. She was dressed all in black. Black jacket, black blouse, black skirt, black stockings, black high-heeled shoes. Serious East Coast style, a little out of place on the West Coast and seriously out of place in a Denny’s on the West Coast. She was slim, attractive, clearly intelligent, somewhere in her late thirties.
She looked a little irritated and preoccupied.
She looked a little worried.
Neagley introduced her all around. “This is Diana Bond,” she said. “From Washington D.C. via Edwards Air Force Base.”
Diana Bond had nothing with her except a small crocodile purse. No briefcase, not that Reacher expected notes or blueprints. They led her through the shabby restaurant and found a round table in back. Five people wouldn’t fit in a booth. A waitress came over and they ordered coffee. The waitress came back with five heavy mugs and a flask, and poured. They each took a preliminary sip, in silence. Then Diana Bond spoke. She didn’t start with small talk. Instead she said, “I could have you all arrested.”
Reacher nodded.
“I’m kind of surprised you haven’t,” he said. “I was kind of expecting to find a bunch of agents here with you.”
Bond said, “One call to the Defense Intelligence Agency would have done it.”
“So why didn’t you make that call?”
“I’m trying to be civilized.”
“And loyal,” Reacher said. “To your boss.”
“And to my country. I really would urge you not to pursue this line of inquiry.”
Reacher said, “That would give you another wasted journey.”
“I’d be very happy to waste another journey.”
“Our tax dollars at work.”
“I’m pleading with you.”
“Deaf ears.”
“I’m appealing to your patriotism. This is a question of national security.”
Reacher said, “Between the four of us here, we’ve got sixty years in uniform. How many have you got?”
“None.”
“How many has your boss got?”
“None.”
“Then shut up about patriotism and national security, OK? You’re not qualified.”
“Why on earth do you need to know about Little Wing?”
“We had a friend who worked for New Age. We’re trying to complete his obituary.”
“He’s dead?”
“Probably.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“But again, I would appeal to you not to press this.”
“No deal.”
Diana Bond paused a long moment. Then she nodded.
“I’ll trade,” she said. “I’ll give you outline details, and in return you swear on those sixty years in uniform that they’ll go no further.”
“Deal.”
“And after I talk to you this one time, I never hear from you again.”
“Deal.”
Another long pause. Like Bond was wrestling with her conscience.
“Little Wing is a new type of torpedo,” she said. “For the Navy’s Pacific submarine fleet. It’s fairly conventional apart from an enhanced control capability because of new electronics.”
Reacher smiled.
“Good try,” he said. “But we don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“We were never going to believe your first answer. Obviously you were going to try to blow us off. Plus, most of those sixty years we mentioned were spent listening to liars, so we know one when we see one. Plus, some of those sixty years were spent reading all kinds of Pentagon bullshit, so we know how they use words. A new torpedo would more likely be called ‘Little Fish.’ Plus, New Age was a clean-sheet start-up with a free choice of where to build, and if they were working for the Navy they’d have chosen San Diego or Connecticut or Newport News, Virginia. But they didn’t. They chose East LA instead. And the closest places to East LA are Air Force places, including Edwards, where you just came from, and the name is Little Wing, so it’s an airborne device.”
Diana Bond shrugged.
“I had to try,” she said.
Reacher said, “Try again.”
Another pause.
“It’s an infantry weapon,” she said. “Army, not Air Force. New Age is in East LA to be near Fort Irwin, not Edwards. But you’re right, it’s airborne.”
“Specifically?”
“It’s a man-portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. The next generation.”
“What does it do?”
Diana Bond shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“You’ll have to. Or your boss goes down.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Compared to what?”
“All I’ll say is that it’s a revolutionary advance.”
“We’ve heard that kind of thing before. It means it’ll be out-of-date a year from now, rather than the usual six months.”
“We think two years, actually.”
“What does it do?”
“You’re not going to call the newspapers. You’d be selling out your country.”
“Try us.”
“Are you serious?”
“As lung cancer.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Suck it up. Or your boss needs a new job tomorrow. As far as that goes, we’d be doing our country a favor.”
“You don’t like him.”
“Does anyone?”
“The newspapers wouldn’t publish.”
“Dream on.”
Bond was quiet for a minute more.
“Promise it will go no further,” she said.
“I already have,” Reacher said.
“It’s complicated.”
“Like rocket science?”
“You know the Stinger?” Bond asked. “The current generation?”
Reacher nodded. “I’ve seen them in action. We all have.”
“What do they do?”
“They chase the
heat signature of jet exhaust.”
“But from below,” Bond said. “Which is a key weakness. They have to climb and maneuver at the same time. Which makes them relatively slow and relatively cumbersome. They show up on downward-looking radar. It’s possible for a pilot to outmaneuver them. And they’re vulnerable to countermeasures, like decoy flares.”
“But?”
“Little Wing is revolutionary. Like most great ideas, it starts with a very simple premise. It completely ignores its target on the way up. It does all its work on the way down.”
“I see,” Reacher said.
Bond nodded. “Going up, it’s just a dumb rocket. Very, very fast. It reaches about eighty thousand feet and then it slows and stops and topples. Starts to fall back down again. Then the electronics switch on and it starts hunting its target. It has boosters to maneuver with, and control surfaces, and because gravity is doing most of the work, the maneuvering can be incredibly precise.”
“It falls on its prey from above,” Reacher said. “Like a hawk.”
Bond nodded again.
“At unbelievable speed,” she said. “Way supersonic. It can’t miss. And it can’t be stopped. Airborne missile defense radar always looks downward. Decoy flares always launch downward. The way things have been until now, planes are very vulnerable from above. They could afford to be. Because very little came at them from above. But it’s different now. That’s why this is so sensitive. We’ve got about a two-year window in which our surface-to-air capability will be completely unbeatable. For about two years anyone using Little Wing will be able to shoot down anything that flies. Maybe longer. It depends how fast people are with new countermeasures.”
Reacher said, “The speed will make countermeasures difficult.”
“Almost impossible,” Bond said. “Human reaction times will be too slow. So defenses will have to be automated. Which means we’ll have to trust computers to tell the difference between a bird a hundred yards up and Little Wing a mile up and a satellite fifty miles up. Potentially it will be chaos. Civilian airlines will want protection, obviously, because of terrorism worries. But the skies above civilian airports are thick with stacked planes. False deployment would be the norm, not the exception. So they’d have to turn off their protection for takeoff and landing, which makes them totally vulnerable just when they can’t afford to be.”
“A can of worms,” Dixon said.
“But a theoretical can of worms,” O’Donnell said. “We understand Little Wing isn’t working very well.”
“This can go no further,” Bond said.
“We already agreed.”
“Because these are commercial secrets now.”
“Much more important than defense secrets.”
“The prototypes were fine,” Bond said. “The beta testing was excellent. But they ran into problems with production.”
“Rockets or electronics or both?”
“Electronics,” Bond said. “The rocket technology is more than forty years old. They can do the rocket production in their sleep. That happens up in Denver, Colorado. It’s the electronics packs that are giving them the problems. Down here in LA. They haven’t even started mass production yet. They’re still doing bench assembly. Now even that is screwed up.”
Reacher nodded and said nothing. He stared out the window for a moment and then took a stack of napkins out of the dispenser and fanned them out and then butted them back together into a neat pile. Weighted them down with the sugar container. The restaurant had pretty much emptied out. There were two guys alone in separate booths at the far end of the room. Landscape workers, tired and hunched. Apart from them, no business. Outside on the street the afternoon light was fading. The red and yellow neon from the restaurant’s huge sign was becoming comparatively brighter and brighter. Some passing cars on the boulevard already had their headlights on.
“So Little Wing is the same old same old, really,” O’Donnell said, in the silence. “A Pentagon pipe dream that does nothing but burn dollars.”
Diana Bond said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”
“It never is.”
“It’s not a total failure. Some of the units work.”
“They said the same thing about the M16 rifle. Which was a real comfort when you were out on patrol with one.”
“But the M16 was perfected eventually. Little Wing will be, too. And it will be worth waiting for. You know which is the world’s best-protected airplane?”
Dixon said, “Air Force One, probably. Politicians’ asses always come first.”
Bond said, “Little Wing could take it out without breaking a sweat.”
“Bring it on,” O’Donnell said. “Easier than voting.”
“You should read the Patriot Act. You could be arrested for even thinking that.”
“Jails aren’t big enough,” O’Donnell said.
Their waitress came back and hovered. Clearly she was hoping for something more lucrative from such a big table than five bottomless cups of coffee. Dixon and Neagley took the hint and ordered ice cream sundaes. Diana Bond passed. O’Donnell ordered a hamburger. The waitress stood and looked pointedly at Reacher. He wasn’t seeing her. He was still playing with his pile of napkins. Weighting it down with the sugar canister, lifting the sugar off, putting it back.
“Sir?” the waitress said.
Reacher looked up.
“Apple pie,” he said. “With ice cream. And more coffee.”
The waitress went away and Reacher went back to his pile of napkins. Diana Bond retrieved her purse from the floor and made a big show of dusting it off.
“I should get back,” she said.
“OK,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much for coming.”
55
Diana Bond left for the long drive back to Edwards and Reacher neatened his stack of napkins and placed the sugar container back on top of it, exactly centered. The desserts arrived and more coffee was poured and O’Donnell’s burger was served. Reacher got halfway through his pie and then he stopped eating. He sat in silence for a moment, staring out the window again. Then he moved suddenly and pointed at the sugar container and looked straight at Neagley and asked, “You know what that is?”
“Sugar,” she said.
“No, it’s a paperweight,” he said.
“So?”
“Who carries a gun with the chamber empty?”
“Someone trained that way.”
“Like a cop. Or an ex-cop. Ex-LAPD, maybe.”
“So?”
“The dragon lady at New Age lied to us. People take notes. They doodle. They work better with pencil and paper. There are no completely paperless environments.”
O’Donnell said, “Things might have changed since you last held a job.”
“The first time we talked she told us that Swan used his piece of the Berlin Wall as a paperweight. It’s kind of hard to use a paperweight in a completely paperless environment, isn’t it?”
O’Donnell said, “It could have been a figure of speech. Paperweight, souvenir, desk ornament, is there a difference?”
“First time we were there, we had to wait to get in the lot. Remember?”
Neagley nodded. “There was a truck coming out the gate.”
“What kind of a truck?”
“A photocopier truck. Repair or delivery.”
“Kind of hard to use a photocopier in a completely paperless environment, right?”
Neagley said nothing.
Reacher said, “If she lied about that, she could have lied about a whole bunch of stuff.”
Nobody spoke.
Reacher said, “New Age’s Director of Security is ex-LAPD. I bet most of his foot soldiers are, too. Safeties on, chambers empty. Basic training.”
Nobody spoke.
Reacher said, “Call Diana Bond again. Get her back here, right now.”
“She only just left,” Neagley said.
“Then she hasn’t got far. She can turn around. I’m sure her car
has a steering wheel.”
“She won’t want to.”
“She’ll have to. Tell her if she doesn’t there’ll be a whole lot more than her boss’s name in the newspaper.”
It took a little more than thirty-five minutes for Diana Bond to get back. Slow traffic, inconvenient highway exits. They saw her car pull into the lot. A minute later she was back at the table. Standing beside it, not sitting at it. Angry.
“We had a deal,” she said. “I talk to you one time, you leave me alone.”
“Six more questions,” Reacher said. “Then we leave you alone.”
“Go to hell.”
“This is important.”
“Not to me.”
“You came back. You could have kept on driving. You could have called the DIA. But you didn’t. So quit pretending. You’re going to answer.”
Silence in the room. No sound, except tires on the boulevard and a distant hum from the kitchen. A dishwasher, maybe.
“Six questions?” Bond said. “OK, but I’ll be counting carefully.”
“Sit down,” Reacher said. “Order dessert.”
“I don’t want dessert,” she said. “Not here.” But she sat down, in the same chair she had used before.
“First question,” Reacher said. “Does New Age have a rival? A competitor somewhere with similar technology?”
Diana Bond said, “No.”
“Nobody all bitter and frustrated because they were outbid?”
“No,” Bond said again. “New Age’s proposition was unique.”
“OK, second question. Does the government really want Little Wing to work?”
“Why the hell wouldn’t it?”
“Because governments can get nervous about developing new attack capabilities without having appropriate defense capabilities already in place.”
“That’s a concern I’ve never heard mentioned.”
“Really? Suppose Little Wing is captured and copied? The Pentagon knows how much damage it can do. Are we happy to face having the thing turned around against us?”