Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Sound came back to the lobby.

Reacher heard Neagley say, “Thank you very much for your help.” He heard her footsteps on the tile. Heard the line behind her move up. Sensed people refocusing on their chances of getting their business done before they grew old and died. He slid his hand into the box and raked the contents forward. Butted everything together into a steady stack and clamped it between his palms and stood up. Jammed the stack under his arm and relocked the box and pocketed the key and walked away like the most natural thing in the world.

Neagley was waiting in the Mustang, three doors down. Reacher leaned in and dumped the stack of mail on the center console and then followed it inside. Sorted through the stack and pulled out four small padded envelopes self-addressed in Franz’s own familiar handwriting.

“Too small for CDs,” he said.

He arranged them in date order according to the postmarks. The most recent had been stamped the same morning that Franz had disappeared.

“But mailed the night before,” he said.

He opened the envelope and shook out a small silver object. Metal, flat, two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, thin, capped with plastic. Like something that would go on a keyring. It had 128 MB printed on it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Flash memory,” Neagley said. “The new version of floppy discs. No moving parts and a hundred times the storage capacity.”

“What do we do with it?”

“We plug it into one of my computers and we see what’s on it.”

“Just like that?”

“Unless it’s password-protected. Which it probably will be.”

“Isn’t there software to help with that?”

“There used to be. But not anymore. Things get better all the time. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”

“So what do we do?”

“We spend the drive time making mental lists. Likely choices for his password. The old-fashioned way. My guess is we’ll get three tries before the files erase themselves.”

She started the motor and eased away from the curb. Pulled a neat U-turn in the strip mall’s fire lane and headed back north to La Cienega.

The man in the dark blue suit watched them go. He was low down behind the wheel of his dark blue Chrysler sedan, forty yards away, in a slot that belonged to the pharmacy. He opened his cell phone and dialed his boss.

“This time they ignored Franz’s place completely,” he said. “They talked to the landlord instead. Then they were in the post office a long time. I think Franz must have been mailing the stuff to himself. That’s why we couldn’t find it. And they’ve probably got it now.”

Neagley plugged the flash memory into a socket on the side of her laptop computer. Reacher watched the screen. Nothing happened for a second and then an icon appeared. It looked like a stylized picture of the physical object she had just attached. It was labeled No Name . Neagley ran her forefinger over the touch pad and then tapped it twice.

The icon blossomed into a full-screen demand for a password.

“Damn,” she said.

“Inevitable,” he said.

“Ideas?”

Reacher had busted computer passwords many times before, back in the day. As always, the technique was to consider the person and think like them. Be them. Serious paranoids used long complex mixes of lower-case and upper-case letters and numbers that meant nothing to anyone, including themselves. Those passwords were effectively unbreakable. But Franz had never been paranoid. He had been a relaxed guy, serious about but simultaneously a little amused by security demands. And he was a words guy, not a numbers guy. He was a man of interests and enthusiasms. Full of affections and loyalties. Middlebrow tastes. A memory like an elephant.

Reacher said, “Angela, Charlie, Miles Davis, Dodgers, Koufax, Panama, Pfeiffer, M*A*S*H, Brooklyn, Heidi, or Jennifer.”

Neagley wrote them all down on a new page in her spiral-bound notebook.

“Why those?” she asked.

“Angela and Charlie are obvious. His family.”

“Too obvious.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Miles Davis was his favorite music, the Dodgers were his favorite team, and Sandy Koufax was his favorite player.”

“Possibilities. What’s Panama?”

“Where he was deployed at the end of 1989. I think that was the place he had the most professional satisfaction. He’ll have remembered it.”

“Pfeiffer as in Michelle Pfeiffer?”

“His favorite actress.”

“Angela looks a little like her, doesn’t she?”

“There you go.”

“M*A*S*H?”

“His all-time favorite movie,” Reacher said.

“More than ten years ago, when you knew him,” Neagley said. “There have been a lot of good movies since then.”

“Passwords come from down deep.”

“It’s too short. Most software asks for a minimum of six characters now.”

“OK, scratch M*A*S*H.”

“Brooklyn?”

“Where he was born.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not many people did. They moved west when he was little. That’s what would make it a good password.”

“Heidi?”

“His first serious girlfriend. Hot as hell, apparently. Terrific in the sack. He was crazy about her.”

“I didn’t know anything about that. Clearly I was excluded from the guy talk.”

“Clearly,” Reacher said. “Karla Dixon was, too. We didn’t want to look emotional.”

“I’m crossing Heidi off the list. Only five letters, and he was too much into Angela now anyway. He wouldn’t have felt right using an old girlfriend’s name for a password, however hot and terrific she was. I’m crossing Pfeiffer off for the same reason. And who was Jennifer? His second girlfriend? Was she hot, too?”

“Jennifer was his dog,” Reacher said. “When he was a kid. A little black mutt. Lived for eighteen years. Broke him up when it died.”

“Possibility, then. But that’s six. We’ve only got three tries.”

“We’ve got twelve tries,” Reacher said. “Four envelopes, four flash memories. If we start with the earliest postmark we can afford to burn the first three. That information is old anyway.”

Neagley laid the four flash memories on the hotel desk in strict date order. “You sure he wouldn’t have changed his password daily?”

“Franz?” Reacher said. “Are you kidding? A guy like Franz latches onto a word that means something to him and he sticks with it forever.”

Neagley clicked the oldest memory unit into the port and waited until the corresponding icon appeared on the screen. She clicked on it and tabbed the cursor straight to the password box.

“OK,” she said. “You want to nominate a priority order?”

“Do the people names first. Then the place names. I think that’s how it would have worked for him.”

“Is Dodgers a people name?”

“Of course it is. Baseball is played by people.”

“OK. But we’ll start with music.” She typed MilesDavis and hit enter . There was a short pause and then the screen redrew and came back with the dialog box again and a note in red: Your first attempt was incorrect .

“One down,” she said. “Now sports.”

She tried Dodgers .

Incorrect.

“Two down.” She typed Koufax .

The hard drive inside her laptop chattered and the screen went blank.

“What’s happening?” Reacher asked.

“It’s dumping the data,” she said. “Erasing it. It wasn’t Koufax . Three down.”

She pulled the flash memory out of the port and tossed it through a long silver arc into the trash can. Inserted the second unit in its place. Typed Jennifer .