Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

“I don’t. But maybe you’re reacting better than me.”

“I don’t know how I’m reacting. I don’t know whether I’m reacting at all. I look at you people and I feel like I’m just treading water. Or drowning. You all are swimming.”

“Are you really broke?”

“Almost penniless.”

“Me too,” she said. “I earn three hundred grand a year and I’m on the breadline. That’s life. You’re well out of it.”

“I feel that way, usually. Until I have to get back in it. Neagley put a thousand and thirty bucks in my bank account.”

“Like a ten-thirty radio code? Smart girl.”

“And for my airfare. Without that I’d still be on my way down here, hitch-hiking.”

“You’d be walking. Nobody in their right mind would pick you up.”

Reacher glanced at himself in an old spotted mirror. Six-five, two-fifty, hands as big as frozen turkeys, hair all over the place, unshaven, torn shirtcuffs up on his forearms like Frankenstein’s monster.

A bum.

From the big green machine to this.

Dixon said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“I always wished we had done more than just work together.”

“Who?”

“You and me.”

“That was a statement, not a question.”

“Did you feel the same way?”

“Honestly?”

“Please.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So why didn’t we do more?”

“Wouldn’t have been right.”

“We ignored all kinds of other regulations.”

“It would have wrecked the unit. The others would have been jealous.”

“Including Neagley?”

“In her way.”

“We could have kept it a secret.”

Reacher said, “Dream on.”

“We could keep it a secret now. We’ve got three hours.”

Reacher said nothing.

Dixon said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that all of this bad stuff makes me feel that life is so short.”

Reacher said, “And the unit is wrecked now anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t you have a boyfriend back East?”

“Not right now.”

Reacher stepped back to the bed. Karla Dixon came over and stood right next to him, her hip against his thigh. The seven sheets of paper were still laid out in a line.

“Want to look at these some more?” Reacher asked.

“Not right now,” Dixon said.

“Me either.” He gathered them up and butted them together. Placed them on the nightstand and trapped them under the phone. Asked, “You sure about this?”

“I’ve been sure for thirteen years.”

“Me too. But it has to stay a secret.”

“Agreed.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her mouth. The shape of her teeth was new to his tongue. The buttons on her shirt were small and awkward.

Afterward they lay in bed together and Dixon said, “We need to get back to work.” Reacher rolled over to take the stack of papers off the nightstand, but Dixon said, “No, let’s do it in our heads. We’ll see more that way.”

“Will we?”

“Total of one hundred and eighty-three numbers,” she said. “Tell me about one hundred and eighty-three, as a number.”

“Not prime,” Reacher said. “It’s divisible by three and sixty-one.”

“I don’t care whether it’s prime or not.”

“Multiply it by two and you get three hundred and sixty-six, which is the number of days in a leap year.”

“So is this half a leap year?”

“Not with seven lists,” Reacher said. “Half of any kind of a year would be six months and six lists.”

Dixon went quiet.

Reacher thought: Half a year .

Half.

More than one way to skin a cat.

Twenty-six, twenty-seven.

He said, “How many days are there in half a year?”

“A regular year? Depends which half. Either one hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

“How do you make half?”

“Divide by two.”

“Suppose you multiplied by seven over twelve?”

“That’s more than half.”

“Then again by six over seven?”

“That would bring it back to exactly half. Forty-two over eighty-four.”

“There you go.”

“I don’t follow.”

“How many weeks in a year?”

“Fifty-two.”

“How many working days?”

“Two hundred sixty for five-day weeks, three hundred twelve for six-day weeks.”

“So how many days would there be in seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks?”

Dixon thought for a second. “Depends on which seven months you pick. Depends on where the Sundays fall. Depends on what day of the week January first is. Depends on whether you’re looking at a continuous run of months or cherry-picking.”

“Run the numbers, Karla. There are only two possible answers.”

Dixon paused a beat. “One hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Those seven sheets are seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks. One of the long months only had four Sundays. Hence the twenty-seven-day anomaly.”

Dixon slid out from under the sheet and walked naked to where she had left her briefcase and came back with a leather Filofax diary. She opened it and put it on the bed and took the papers off the nightstand and arranged them in a line below the diary. Her eyes flicked back and forth, seven times.

“It’s this year,” she said. “It’s the last seven calendar months. Right up to the end of last month. Take out the Sundays, you get three twenty-six-day months, then one twenty-seven-day month, and then three more twenty-six-day months.”

“There you go,” Reacher said. “Some kind of six-day-a-week figures got worse and worse over the last seven months. Some kind of results. We’re halfway there.”

“The easy half,” Dixon said. “Now tell me what the figures mean.”

“Something was supposed to happen nine or ten or twelve or thirteen times a day Monday through Saturday and didn’t always come out right.”

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. What kind of a thing happens ten or twelve times a day?”

“Not Model-T Ford production, that’s for sure. It’s got to be something small scale. Or professional. Like a dentist’s appointments. Or a lawyer’s. Or a hairdresser’s.”

“There was a nail salon near Franz’s office.”

“They do more than that in a day. And how would nails relate to four people disappearing and a Syrian with four aliases?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

“Me either,” Dixon said.

“We should shower and get dressed.”

“After.”

“After what?”

Dixon didn’t answer. Just walked back to the bed and pinned him to the pillow and kissed him again.

Two thousand horizontal and seven vertical miles away from them the dark-haired forty-year-old currently calling himself Alan Mason was in the front cabin of a United Airlines Boeing 757, en route from LaGuardia, New York, to Denver, Colorado. He was in seat 3A, with a glass of sparkling mineral water beside him on the armrest tray and a newspaper open on his lap. But he wasn’t reading it. He was gazing out the window instead, at the bright white clouds below.

And eight miles south of them the man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler was tailing O’Donnell and Neagley back from the LAX Hertz lot. He had picked them up leaving the Beverly Wilshire. He had guessed they were flying out, so he had positioned himself to follow them to the airport terminals. When O’Donnell had swung back north on Sepulveda he had needed to scramble fast to get behind them. As a result he was ten cars back all the way. Which was good, he figured, in terms of inconspicuous surveillance.