by Lee Child
“Weird,” Neagley said. “I think we can be sure Franz wouldn’t do anything like that. Probably nobody else in the world would do anything like that.”
“Therefore it would be a good password.”
“What was his first car?”
“Some piece of shit, probably.”
“But guys like cars, right? What was his favorite car?”
“I don’t like cars.”
“Think like him, Reacher. Did he like cars?”
“He always wanted a red Jaguar XKE.”
“Would that be worth a try?”
A man of interests and enthusiasms. Full of affections and loyalties.
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “It’s certainly going to be something special to him. Something talismanic, something that would give him a feeling of warmth just recalling the word. Either an early role model or a longstanding object of desire or affection. So the XKE might work.”
“Should I try it? We’ve only got six left.”
“I’d try it for sure if we had six hundred left.”
“Wait a minute,” Neagley said. “What about what Angela told us? The way he kept on saying you do not mess with the special investigators?”
“That would make a hell of a long password.”
“So break it down. Either special investigators, or do not mess.”
A memory like an elephant. Reacher nodded. “We had a good time back then, basically, didn’t we? So remembering the old days might have given him a warm feeling. Especially stuck out there in Culver City, busy doing nothing much. People enjoy nostalgia, don’t they? Like that song, ‘The Way We Were.’ ”
“It was a movie, too.”
“There you go. It’s a universal feeling.”
“Which should we try first?”
Reacher heard Charlie in his mind, the little boy’s piping treble: You do not mess.
“Do not mess,” he said. “Nine letters.”
Neagley typed donotmess.
Hit enter.
Incorrect.
“Shit,” she said.
She typed specialinvestigators. Held her finger over the enter key.
“That’s very long,” Reacher said.
“Yes or no?”
“Try it.”
Incorrect.
Neagley said, “Damn,” and went quiet.
Charlie was still in Reacher’s mind. And his tiny chair, with the neat branded name at the top. He could see Franz’s steady hand at work. He could smell the smoking wood. A gift, father to son. Probably intended to be the first of many. Love, pride, commitment.
“I like Charlie,” he said.
“Me too,” Neagley said. “He’s a cute kid.”
“No, for the password.”
“Too obvious.”
“He didn’t take this kind of stuff very seriously. He was going through the motions. Easier to put in any old thing than to reprogram the software to get around it.”
“Still too obvious. And he had to be taking it seriously. At least this time. He was in big trouble and he was mailing stuff to himself.”
“So it could be a double bluff. It’s obvious but it’s the last thing anyone would think of trying. That makes for a very effective password.”
“Possible but unlikely.”
“What are we going to find on there anyway?”
“Something we really need to see.”
“Try Charlie for me.”
Neagley shrugged and typed Charlie.
Hit enter.
Incorrect.
The hard disc spun up and the memory unit erased itself.
“Nine down,” Neagley said. She pitched the third unit into the trash and plugged the fourth one in. The last one. “Three to go.”
Reacher asked, “Who did he love before Charlie?”
“Angela,” Neagley said. “Way too obvious.”
“Try it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a gambler.”
“We’re down to our last three chances.”
“Try it,” he said again.
She typed Angela.
Hit enter.
Incorrect.
“Ten down,” she said. “Two to go.”
“What about Angela Franz?”
“That’s even worse.”
“What about her unmarried name?”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“Call her and ask.”
“Are you serious?”
“At least let’s find out.”
So Neagley thumbed through her notebook and found the number and fired up her cell phone. Introduced herself again. Small-talked for a moment. Then Reacher heard her ask the question. He didn’t hear Angela’s answer. But he saw Neagley’s eyes widen a fraction, which for her was about the same thing as falling on the floor with shock.
She hung up.
“It was Pfeiffer,” she said.
“Interesting.”
“Very.”
“Are they related?”
“She didn’t say.”
“So try it. It’s a perfect twofer. He feels good twice over and doesn’t have to feel disloyal at all.”
Neagley typed Pfeiffer.
Hit enter.
Incorrect.
16
The room was hot and stuffy. No air in it. And it seemed to have gotten smaller. Neagley said, “Eleven down. One to go. Do or die. Last chance.”
Reacher asked, “What happens if we don’t do anything?”
“Then we don’t get to see what’s on the file.”
“No, I mean do we have to do it right now? Or can it keep?”
“It’s not going anywhere.”
“So we should take a break. Come back to it later. One to go, we’ve got to pay attention.”
“Weren’t we already?”
“Clearly not the right kind of attention. We’ll go out to East LA and look for Swan. If we find him, he might have ideas. If not, then at least we’ll come back to this fresh.”
Neagley called down to the valet station again and ten minutes later they were in the Mustang heading east on Wilshire. Through Wilshire Center, through Westlake, through a dogleg south that took them straight through MacArthur Park. Then north and east on the Pasadena Freeway, past the concrete bulk of Dodger Stadium all alone in acres of empty parking. Then deep into a rat’s nest of surface streets bounded by Boyle Heights, Monterey Park, Alhambra, and South Pasadena. There were science parks and business parks and strip malls and old housing and new housing. The curbs were thick with parked cars and there was traffic everywhere, moving slow. A brown sky. Neagley had an austere Rand McNally map in the glove box. Looking at it was like looking at the surface of the earth from fifty miles up. Reacher squinted and followed the faint gray lines. Matched the street names on signposts to the street names on the map and pinpointed specific junctions about thirty seconds after they blew through them. He had his thumb on New Age’s location and steered Neagley toward it in a wide ragged spiral.
When they got there they found a low sign of chiseled granite and a big prosperous mirror-glass cube set behind a tall hurricane fence topped with coils of razor wire. The fence was impressive at first sight, but only semi-serious, in that ten seconds and a pair of bolt cutters would get a person through it unscathed. The building itself was surrounded by a wide parking lot studded with specimen trees. The way the mirror glass reflected the trees and the sky made the building look like it was there and not there simultaneously.
The main gate was lightweight and standing wide open and there was no sentry post next to it. It was just a gate. Beyond it the lot was about half-full of parked cars. Neagley paused to let a photocopier truck out and then drove in and put the Mustang in a visitor slot near the entrance lobby. She and Reacher got out and stood for a moment. It was the middle of the morning and the air was warm and heavy. The neighborhood was quiet. It sounded like a whole lot of people were concentrating very hard, or else no one was doing very much of a
nything.
The reception entrance had a shallow step up to double glass doors that opened for them automatically and admitted them to a large square lobby that had a slate floor and aluminum walls. There were leather chairs and a long reception counter in back. Behind the counter was a blonde woman of about thirty. She was wearing a corporate polo shirt with New Age Defense Systems embroidered above her small left breast. Clearly she had heard the doors open but she waited until Reacher and Neagley were halfway across the floor before she looked up.
“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 nothing.
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.”