Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

“Can you?”

“This year alone there’s seven billion dollars of Homeland Security money washing around the private system. Some of it comes our way in Chicago and I own half of whatever part of it sticks in our books.”

“So are you rich?”

“Richer than I was when I was a sergeant.”

“We’ll get it back anyway,” O’Donnell said. “People get killed for love or money, and our guys sure as hell didn’t get killed for love. So there’s money in this somewhere.”

“So are we agreed on Neagley staking the budget?” Dixon asked.

“What is this, a democracy?” Reacher said.

“Temporarily. Are we agreed?”

Four raised hands. Two majors and a captain, letting a sergeant pick up the tab.

“OK, the plan,” Dixon said.

“Command structure first,” O’Donnell said. “Can’t put the cart before the horse.”

“OK,” Dixon said. “I nominate Reacher for CO.”

“Me too,” O’Donnell said.

“Me three,” Neagley said. “Like it always was.”

“Can’t do it,” Reacher said. “I hit that cop. If it comes to it, I’m going to have to put my hands up for it and leave the rest of you to carry on without me. Can’t have a CO in that position.”

Dixon said, “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“We’re coming to it,” Reacher said. “For sure. Tomorrow or the next day at the latest.”

“Maybe they’ll let it go.”

“Dream on. Would we have let it go?”

“Maybe he’ll be too shamefaced to report it.”

“He doesn’t have to report it. People will notice. He’s got a busted window and a busted nose.”

“Does he even know who you are?”

“He put Neagley’s name in the machine. He was tailing us. He knows who we are.”

“You can’t put your hands up for it,” O’Donnell said. “You’ll go to jail. If it comes to it, you’ll have to get out of town.”

“Can’t do that. If they don’t get me, they’ll come after you and Neagley as accessories. We don’t want that. We need boots on the ground here.”

“We’ll get you a lawyer. A cheap one.”

“No, a good one,” Dixon said.

“Whatever, I’ll still be preoccupied,” Reacher said.

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “Neagley should be CO.”

“I decline,” Neagley said.

“You can’t decline. It’s an order.”

“It can’t be an order until you’re CO.”

“Dixon, then.”

“Declined,” Dixon said.

“OK, O’Donnell.”

“Pass.”

Dixon said, “Reacher until he goes to jail. Then Neagley. All in favor?”

Three hands went up.

“You’ll regret this,” Reacher said. “I’ll make you regret it.”

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.

“Same as ever,” he said. “We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

The Chateau Marmont was a bohemian old pile on Sunset, near the foot of Laurel Canyon. All kinds of movie stars and rock stars had stayed there. There were plenty of photographs on the walls. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, James Dean, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane had booked in there. John Belushi had died in there, after speedballing enough heroin and cocaine to take down every guest in the hotel. There were no photographs of him.

The desk clerk wanted IDs along with Neagley’s platinum card, so they all checked in under their real names. No choice. Then the guy told them there were only three rooms available. Neagley had to be alone, so Reacher and O’Donnell bunked together and let the women have a room each. Then O’Donnell drove Neagley back to the Beverly Wilshire in Dixon’s car to pick up their bags and check out. Then Neagley would take the Mustang back to LAX and O’Donnell would follow her in convoy to bring her back. It would be a three-hour hiatus. Reacher and Dixon would stay behind and spend the three hours working on the numbers.

They set up in Dixon’s room. According to the desk guy, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in there once, but there was no remaining sign of him. Reacher laid the seven spreadsheets side by side on the bed and watched as Dixon bent down and scanned them, the same way some people read music or poetry.

“Two key issues,” she said immediately. “There are no hundred percent scores. No ten out of ten, no nine out of nine.”

“And?”

“The first three sheets have twenty-six numbers, the fourth has twenty-seven, and the last three all have twenty-six again.”

“Which means what?”

“I don’t know. But none of the sheets is full. Therefore the twenty-six thing and the twenty-seven thing must mean something. It’s deliberate, not accidental. It’s not just a continuous list of numbers with page breaks. If it was, Franz could have gotten them onto six sheets, not seven. So it’s seven separate categories of something.”

“Separate but similar,” Reacher said. “It’s a descriptive sequence.”

“The scores get worse,” Dixon said.

“Radically.”

“And quite suddenly. They’re OK, and then they fall off a cliff.”

“But what are they?”

“No idea.”

Reacher asked, “What can be measured like that, repetitively?”

“Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse.”

“What are the categories? What are we looking at? Seven of what?”

Dixon nodded. “That’s the key. We need to understand that first.”

“Can’t be medical tests. Can’t be any kind of tests. Why stick twenty-seven questions in the middle of a sequence where everything else is twenty-six questions? That would destroy consistency.”

Dixon shrugged and stood up straight. She took off her jacket and dumped it on a chair. Walked to the window and pulled a faded drape aside and looked out and down. Then up at the hills.

“I like LA,” she said.

“Me too, I guess,” Reacher said.

“I like New York better.”

“Me too, probably.”

“But the contrast is nice.”

“I guess.”

“Shitty circumstances, but it’s great to see you again, Reacher. Really great.”

Reacher nodded. “Likewise. We thought we’d lost you. Didn’t feel good.”

“Can I hug you?”

“You want to hug me?”

“I wanted to hug all of you at the Hertz office. But I didn’t, because Neagley wouldn’t have liked it.”

“She shook Angela Franz’s hand. And the dragon lady’s, at New Age.”

“That’s progress,” Dixon said.

“A little,” Reacher said.

“She was abused, way back. That was always my guess.”

“She’ll never talk about it,” Reacher said.

“It’s sad.”

“You bet.”

Karla Dixon turned to him and Reacher took her in his arms and hugged her hard. She was fragrant. Her hair smelled of shampoo. He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, a complete slow circle. She felt light and thin and fragile. Her back was narrow. She was wearing a black silk shirt, and her skin felt warm underneath it. He set her back on her feet and she stretched up tall and kissed his cheek.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed you all, I mean.”

“Me too,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much.”

“You like life after the army?” she asked.

“Yes, I like it fine.”