“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to see Tony Swan,” Reacher said.
The woman smiled automatically and asked, “May I know your names?”
“Jack Reacher and Frances Neagley. We were good friends of his in the service.”
“Then please take a seat.” The woman picked up her desk phone and Reacher and Neagley stepped away to the leather chairs. Neagley sat down but Reacher stayed on his feet. He watched the dull aluminum reflection of the woman on the phone and heard her say, “Two friends of Tony Swan to see him.” Then she put the phone down and smiled in Reacher’s direction even though he wasn’t looking directly at her. Then the lobby went quiet.
It stayed quiet for about four minutes and then Reacher heard the click of shoes on slate from a corridor that entered the lobby to the side of and behind the desk. A measured stride, no hurry, a person of medium height and medium weight. He watched the mouth of the corridor and saw a woman step into view. About forty years old, slim, brown hair stylishly cut. She was in a tailored black pant suit and a white blouse. She looked swift and efficient and had an open and welcoming expression on her face. She smiled a token thank you to the receptionist and walked straight past her toward Reacher and Neagley. Held out her hand and said, “I’m Margaret Berenson.”
Neagley stood up and she and Reacher said their names and shook hands with her. Up close she had old looping car crash scars under her makeup and the chilly breath of a big-time gum chewer. She was wearing decent jewelry, but no wedding band.
“We’re looking for Tony Swan,” Reacher said.
“I know,” the woman said. “Let’s find somewhere to talk.”
One of the aluminum wall panels was a door that led to a small rectangular conference room directly off the lobby. Clearly it was designed for discussions with visitors who didn’t merit admission into the inner sanctums. It was a cool spare space with a table and four chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave directly onto the parking lot. The front bumper of Neagley’s Mustang was about five feet away.
“I’m Margaret Berenson,” the woman said again. “I’m New Age’s Human Resources director. I’ll get straight to the point, which is that Mr. Swan isn’t with us anymore.”
Reacher asked, “Since when?”
“A little over three weeks ago,” Berenson said.
“What happened?”
“I’d feel more comfortable talking about it if I knew for sure you have a connection with him. Anyone can walk up to a reception counter and claim to be old friends.”
“I’m not sure how we could prove it.”
“What did he look like?”
“About five-nine tall and about five-eight wide.”
Berenson smiled. “If I told you he used a piece of stone as a paperweight, could you tell me where that piece of stone came from?”
“The Berlin Wall,” Reacher said. “He was in Germany when it came down. I saw him there just afterward. He took the train up and got himself a souvenir. And it’s concrete, not stone. There’s a trace of graffiti on it.”
Berenson nodded.
“That’s the story I heard,” she said. “And that’s the object I’ve seen.”
“So what happened?” Reacher asked. “He quit?”
Berenson shook her head.
“Not exactly,” she said. “We had to let him go. Not just him. You have to understand, this is a new company. It was always speculative, and there was always risk. In terms of our business plan, we’re not where we want to be. Not yet, anyway. So we reached the stage where we had to revise our staffing levels. Downward, unfortunately. We operated a last-in-first-out policy, and basically that meant we had to let the whole assistant management level go. I lost my own assistant director. Mr. Swan was Assistant Director of Security, so unfortunately the policy swept him away, too. We were very sorry to see him go, because he was a real asset. If things pick up, we’ll beg him to come back. But I’m sure he’ll have secured another position by then.”
Reacher glanced through the window at the half-empty parking lot. Listened to the quiet of the building. It sounded half-empty, too.
“OK,” he said.
“Not OK,” Neagley said. “I’ve been calling his office over and over for the last three days and every time I was told he had just stepped out for a minute. That doesn’t add up.”
Berenson nodded again. “That’s a professional courtesy that I insist upon. With this caliber of management it would be a disaster for an individual if his personal network of contacts heard the news secondhand. Much better if Mr. Swan can inform people himself, directly. Then he can spin it however he wants. So I insist that the remaining secretarial staff tell little white lies during the readjustment period. I don’t apologize for it, but I do hope you understand. It’s the least I can do for the people we’ve lost. If Mr. Swan can approach a new employer as if it were a voluntary move, he’s in a far better position than if everyone knew he’d been let go from here.”
Neagley thought about it for a moment, and then she nodded.
“OK,” she said. “I can see your point.”
“Especially in Mr. Swan’s case,” Berenson said. “We all liked him very much.”
“What about the ones you didn’t like?”
“There weren’t any. We would never hire people we didn’t believe in.”
Reacher said, “I called Swan and nobody answered at all.”
Berenson nodded again, still patient and professional. “We had to cut the secretarial pool, too. The ones we kept on are covering five or six phones each. Sometimes they can’t get to every call.”
Reacher asked, “So what’s up with your business plan?”
“I really can’t discuss that in detail. But I’m sure you understand. You were in the army.”
“We both were.”
“Then you know how many new weapons systems work straight out of the gate.”
“Not many.”
“Not any. Ours is taking a little longer than we hoped.”
“What kind of a weapon is it?”
“I really can’t discuss that.”
“Where is it made?”
“Right here.”
Reacher shook his head. “No, it isn’t. You’ve got a fence a three-year-old could walk through and no guard shack at the gate and an unsecured lobby. Tony Swan wouldn’t have let you get away with that if anything sensitive was happening here.”
“I really can’t comment on our procedures.”
“Who was Swan’s boss?”
“Our Director of Security? He’s a retired LAPD lieutenant.”
“And you kept him and let Swan go? Your last-in-first-out policy didn’t do you any favors there.”
“They’re all great people, the ones who stayed and the ones who went. We hated making the cut. But it was an absolute necessity.”
Two minutes later Reacher and Neagley were back in the Mustang, sitting in New Age’s parking lot, engine idling to run the air, with the full scope of the disaster plain to both of them.
“Really bad timing,” Reacher said. “Suddenly Swan is at loose ends, Franz calls him with a problem, what else is Swan going to do? He’s going to run right over there. It’s twenty minutes down the road.”
“He’d have gone anyway, unemployed or not.”
“They all would. And I guess they all did.”
“So are they all dead now?”
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
“You got what you wanted, Reacher. It’s just the two of us.”
“I didn’t want it for these reasons.”
“I just can’t believe it. All of them?”
“Someone’s going to pay.”
“You think? We’ve got nothing. We’ve got one last chance with a password. Which by definition we’ll be too nervous to take.”
“This is no kind of a time to be getting nervous.”
“So tell me what to type.”
Reacher said no
thing.
They retraced their route through the surface streets. Neagley drove in silence and Reacher pictured Tony Swan making the same drive more than three weeks earlier. Maybe with the contents of his New Age desk boxed up in his trunk, his pens and pencils and his chip of Soviet concrete. On his way to help his old buddy. Other old buddies pouring in down spokes of an invisible wheel. Sanchez and Orozco hustling over from Vegas on the 15. O’Donnell and Dixon coming in on planes from the East Coast, toting luggage, taking taxis, assembling.
Meeting and greeting.
Running into some kind of a brick wall.
Then their images faded away and he was alone again with Neagley in the car. Just the two of us. Facts were to be faced, not fought.
Neagley left the car with the Beverly Wilshire valets and they entered the lobby from the rear through the crooked corridor. They rode up in the elevator in silence. Neagley used her key and pushed open her door.
Then she stopped dead.
Because sitting in her chair by the window, reading Calvin Franz’s autopsy report, was a man in a suit.
Tall, fair, aristocratic, relaxed.
David O’Donnell.
17
O’Donnell looked up, somber. “I was going to inquire as to the meaning of all those rude and abusive messages on my answering machine.” Then he raised the autopsy report, an explanatory gesture. “But now I understand.”
Neagley asked, “How did you get in here?”
O’Donnell just said, “Oh, please.”
“Where the hell were you?” Reacher asked.
“I was in New Jersey,” O’Donnell said. “My sister was sick.”
“How sick?”
“Very sick.”
“Did she die?”
“No, she recovered.”
“Then you should have been here days ago.”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“We were worried,” Neagley said. “We thought they got you, too.”
O’Donnell nodded. “You should be worried. You should stay worried. It’s a worrying situation. I had to wait four hours for a flight. I used the time making calls. No answer from Franz, obviously. Now I know why, of course. No answer from Swan or Dixon or Orozco or Sanchez, either. My conclusion was that one of them had gotten all the others together and they had run into a problem. Not you or Reacher, because you’re too busy in Chicago and who the hell could ever find Reacher? And not me, because I was temporarily off the grid in New Jersey.”
“I wasn’t too busy,” Neagley said. “How could anyone think that? I’d have dropped everything and come running.”
O’Donnell nodded again. “At first that was the only thing that gave me hope. I figured they would have called you.”
“So why didn’t they? Don’t they like me?”
“If they hated you they’d still have called you. Without you it would have been like fighting with one hand behind their backs. Who would do that voluntarily? But in the end it’s perception that counts, not reality. You’re very high grade now compared to the rest of us. I think they might have hesitated with you. Maybe until it was too late.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that one of them, and now I see that it would have been Franz, was in trouble, and he called all of us that he perceived as readily available. Which excluded you and Reacher by definition, and me also, by bad luck, because I wasn’t where I normally am.”
“That’s how we saw it, too. Except you’re a bonus. Your sister being sick was a stroke of luck for us. And for you, maybe.”
“But not for her.”
“Stop whining,” Reacher said. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”
“Nice to see you, too,” O’Donnell said. “After all these years.”
“How did you get in here?” Neagley asked.
O’Donnell shifted in his seat and took a switchblade from one coat pocket and a set of brass knuckles from the other. “A guy who can get these through airport security can get into a hotel room, believe me.”
“How did you get those through an airport?”
“My secret,” O’Donnell said.
“Ceramic,” Reacher said. “They don’t make them anymore. Because they don’t set the metal detector off.”
“Correct,” O’Donnell said. “No metal at all, apart from the switchblade spring, which is still steel. But that’s very small.”
“It’s good to see you again, David,” Reacher said.
“Likewise. But I wish it were under happier circumstances.”
“The circumstances just got fifty percent happier. We thought it was just the two of us. Now it’s the three of us.”
“What have we got?”
“Very little. You’ve seen what’s in his autopsy report. Apart from that we’ve got two generic white men who tossed his office. Didn’t find anything, because he was mailing stuff to himself in a permanent loop. We found his mail box and picked up four flash memories and we’re down to the last try at a password.”
“So start thinking about computer security,” Neagley said.
O’Donnell took a deep breath and held it longer than seemed humanly possible. Then he exhaled, gently. It was an old habit.
“Tell me what words you’ve tried so far,” he said.
Neagley opened her notebook to the relevant page and handed it over. O’Donnell put a finger to his lips and read. Reacher watched him. He hadn’t seen him in eleven years, but he hadn’t changed much. He had the kind of corn-colored hair that would never show gray. He had the kind of greyhound’s body that would never show fat. His suit was beautifully cut. In the same way as Neagley, he looked settled and prosperous and successful. Like he was making it.
“Koufax didn’t work?” he asked.
Neagley shook her head. “That was our third try.”
“Should have been your first, out of this list. Franz related to icons, gods, people he admired, performances he idolized. Koufax is the only one of these that really fits the bill. The others are merely sentimental. Miles Davis perhaps, because he loved music, but ultimately he thought music was inessential.”
“Music is inessential and baseball isn’t?”
“Baseball is a metaphor,” O’Donnell said. “An ace pitcher like Sandy Koufax, a man of great integrity, all alone on the mound, the World Series, stakes high, that’s how Franz wanted to see himself. He probably wouldn’t have articulated it exactly that way, but I can tell you his password would have to be a worthy repository for his devotion. And it would be expressed in a brusque, masculine fashion, which would mean a surname only.”
“So what would you vote for?”
“It’s tough, with only one try left. I’d look like a real fool if I were wrong. What are we going to find on there anyway?”
“Something he felt was worth hiding.”
Reacher said, “Something he got his legs broken for. He didn’t give up anything. He drove them into a fury. His office looks like a tornado hit it.”
“What’s our ultimate aim here?”
“Seek and destroy. Is that good enough for you?”
O’Donnell shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I want to kill their families and piss on their ancestors’ graves.”
“You haven’t changed.”
“I’ve gotten worse. Have you changed?”
“If I have I’m ready to change back.”
O’Donnell smiled, briefly. “Neagley, what don’t you do?”
Neagley said, “You don’t mess with the special investigators.”
“Correct,” O’Donnell said. “You do not. Can we get some room service coffee?”
They drank thick strong coffee out of the kind of battered electro-plated jugs found only in old hotels. They kept pretty quiet, but each of them knew the others were tracing the same mental circles, shying away from the last attempt at the password, examining the vector, trying to find another avenue forward, failing to, and starting all over again. Finally O’
Donnell put his cup down and said, “Time to shit or get off the pot. Or fish or cut bait. Or however else you want to express it. Let’s hear your ideas.”
Neagley said, “I don’t have any.”
Reacher said, “You do it, Dave. You’ve got something in mind. I can tell.”
“Do you trust me?”
“As far as I could throw you. Which would be pretty damn far, as skinny as you are. Exactly how far, you’ll find out if you screw up.”
O’Donnell got out of his chair and flexed his fingers and stepped over to the laptop on the desk. Put the cursor in the box on the screen and typed seven letters.
Took a breath and held it.
Paused.
Waited.
Hit enter.
The laptop screen redrew.
A file directory appeared. A table of contents. Big, bold, clear and obvious.
O’Donnell breathed out.
He had typed: Reacher.
18
Reacher spun away from the computer like he had been slapped and said, “Ah, man, that ain’t fair.”
“He liked you,” O’Donnell said. “He admired you.”
“It’s like a voice from the grave. Like a call.”
“You were here anyway.”
“It doubles everything. Now I can’t let him down.”
“You weren’t going to in the first place.”
“Too much pressure.”
“No such thing as too much pressure. We like pressure. We thrive on pressure.”
Neagley was at the desk, fingers on the laptop’s keyboard, staring at the screen.
“Eight separate files,” she said. “Seven of them are a bunch of numbers and the eighth is a list of names.”
“Show me the names,” O’Donnell said.
Neagley clicked on an icon and a word processor page opened. It contained a vertical list of five names. At the top, typed in bold and underlined, was Azhari Mahmoud. Then came four Western names: Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, and Anthony Matthews.
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