Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell hurried across the lot, getting surer with every step. By the time they were ten feet from the office windows they were absolutely certain. It was Karla Dixon. She was unmistakable. Dark and comparatively small, a happy woman who thought the worst of people . She was right there, now third in line. Her body language said she was simultaneously impatient with and resigned to the wait. As always she looked relaxed but never quite still, always burning energy, always giving the impression that twenty-four hours in the day were not enough for her. She was thinner than Reacher remembered. She was dressed in tight black jeans and a black leather jacket. Her thick black hair was cut short. She had a black leather Tumi roll-on next to her and a black leather briefcase slung across her shoulder.

Then as if she felt their gazes on her back she turned around and looked straight at them, nothing much in her face, as if she had last seen them minutes ago instead of years ago. She smiled a brief smile. The smile was a little sad, as if she already knew what was happening. Then she jerked her head at the clerks behind the counter as if to say, I’ll be right there but you know how it is with civilians . Reacher pointed at himself and Neagley and O’Donnell and held up four fingers and mouthed, Get a four-seat car . Dixon nodded again and turned back to wait.

Neagley said, “This is kind of biblical. People keep coming back to life.”

“Nothing biblical about it,” Reacher said. “Our assumptions were wrong, is all.”

A fourth clerk came out of a back office and took up station behind the counter. Dixon went from being third in line to being served within about thirty seconds. Reacher saw the pink flash of a New York driver’s license and the platinum flash of a credit card changing hands. The clerk typed and Dixon signed a bunch of stuff and then received a fat yellow packet and a key. She hoisted her briefcase and grabbed her roll-on and headed for the exit. She stepped out to the sidewalk. She stood in front of Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell and looked at each of them in turn with a level, serious gaze. Said, “Sorry I’m late to the party. But then, it’s not really much of a party, is it?”

“What do you know so far?” Reacher asked her.

Dixon said, “I only just got your messages. I didn’t want to wait around in New York for a direct flight. I wanted to be on the move. First flight out was through Las Vegas. I had a two-hour layover there. So I made some calls and did some running around. Some checking. And I found out that Sanchez and Orozco are missing. It seems that about three weeks ago they just vanished off the face of the earth.”

Hertz had given Dixon a Ford 500, which was a decent-sized four-seat sedan. She put her bags in the trunk and climbed in the driver’s seat. Neagley sat next to her in the front and Reacher and O’Donnell squeezed in the back. Dixon started up and left the airport heading north on Sepulveda. She talked for the first five minutes. She had been working undercover as a new hire at a Wall Street brokerage house. Her client was a major institutional investor worried about illegalities. Like all undercover operatives who want to survive, she had stuck religiously to her cover, which meant she could afford no contact with her regular life. She couldn’t call her office on her brokerage-supplied cell or on her brokerage-supplied landline from her brokerage-supplied corporate apartment, or get her e-mail on her brokerage-supplied BlackBerry. Eventually she had checked in clandestinely from a Port Authority pay phone and found the long string of increasingly desperate 10-30s on her machine. So she had ditched her job and her client and headed straight for JFK and jumped on America West. From the Vegas airport she had called Sanchez and Orozco and gotten no reply. Worse, their voice mail was full, which was a bad sign. So she had cabbed over to their offices and found them deserted with three weeks’ worth of mail backed up behind the door. Their neighbors hadn’t seen them in a long time.

“So that’s it,” Reacher said. “Now we know for sure. It’s just 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.”