Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Reacher kept on the surface streets and stayed off the freeway. He had noticed that the freeways were thick with cops at night, and he hadn’t seen any anywhere else. So he erred on the side of caution. He got lost near Dodger Stadium and ended up driving an aimless circle that took him right past the LA Police Academy. He stopped in Echo Park and checked in with the others by phone. They were nearly home, streaming west at circumspect speeds like bombers returning from a night raid.

They regrouped in O’Donnell’s room dead-on three o’clock in the morning. The captured paperwork was laid out on the bed in three neat piles. Reacher unrolled Swan’s stuff from his pocket and added it to the line. It wasn’t very interesting. Most of it was a memorandum about future overtime requirements for his secretarial staff. The rest of it was a justification for the overtime they had already worked.

O’Donnell’s collection wasn’t very interesting either, but it was instructive in a negative way. It proved that the glass cube was purely an administrative center. It had been relatively unsecured because it contained very little worth stealing. Some minor design work happened there, and some component sourcing, but most of the square footage was given over to management functions. Personnel stuff, corporate finance stuff, routine transport, and maintenance and bureaucracy. Nothing inherently valuable.

Which made it all the more important to find the plant location.

Which was where Dixon’s stuff made all the difference. She had dug through the wreckage of the reception area and crawled under the crashed Chrysler and in about fifty seconds flat she had come up with solid gold. In the shattered remains of a locked drawer she had found New Age’s internal phone directory. Now it was right there on the bed, a thick wad of loose-leaf pages punched into a white three-ring binder, a little battered and covered in dust. The cover was printed with New Age’s corporate logo and most of the pages were printed with names that meant nothing, with matching four-digit telephone extensions. But right at the front of the book was a block diagram detailing the company’s various divisions. Names were printed in boxes, and lines connected the boxes downward through all the various hierarchies. The Security Division was headed by a guy called Allen Lamaison. His number two had been Tony Swan. Below Swan two lines led to two other guys, and below them five more lines fanned out to five more guys, one of which had the name Saropian, and who was as dead as Tony Swan, in a Vegas hotel foundation. A total staff of nine, two down, seven survivors.

“Turn to the back,” Dixon said.

The last section had account numbers for FedEx and UPS and DHL. Plus full street addresses and landline phone numbers for two of New Age’s operations, which was what courier services needed. The East LA glass cube, the contracting office up in Colorado.

And then, bizarrely, a third address, with a note printed in bold and underlined: No deliveries to this location .

The third address was for the electronics manufacturing plant.

It was in Highland Park, halfway between Glendale and South Pasadena. Six and a half miles north and east of downtown, nine miles east of where they were standing.

Close enough to taste.

“Now turn back a few pages,” Dixon said.

Reacher leafed backward. There was a whole section showing remote telephone extensions out there in the manufacturing plant.

“Check under P ,” Dixon said.

The P section started with a guy called Pascoe and finished with a guy called Purcell. Halfway through the list was Pilot’s office .

Dixon said, “We found the helicopter.”

Reacher nodded. Then he smiled at her. Pictured her running in with her flashlight, running out fifty seconds later covered in dust. His old team. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe .

Neagley had personnel files on the whole Security Division. Nine green file folders. One was Saropian’s, one was Tony Swan’s. Reacher didn’t look at either of those. No point. He started with the top boy, Allen Lamaison. There was a Polaroid photograph clipped to the first sheet inside. Lamaison was a bulky thick-necked man with dark blank eyes and a mouth too small for his jaw. His personal information was on the next sheet and showed he had done twenty years inside the LAPD, the last twelve in Robbery-Homicide. He was forty-nine years old.

Next up were the two guys sharing the third spot in the hierarchy. The first of them was called Lennox. Forty-one years old, ex-LAPD, gray buzz cut, heavy build, meaty red face.

The second was the guy in the raincoat. His name was Parker. Forty-two years old, ex-LAPD, tall, slim, a pale hard face disfigured by a broken nose.

“They’re all ex-LAPD,” Neagley said. “According to the data, they all quit around the same time.”

“After a scandal?”

“There are always scandals. It’s statistically difficult to quit the LAPD any other way.”

“Could your guy in Chicago get their histories?”

Neagley shrugged. “We might be able to get into their computer. And we know some people. We might get some word of mouth.”

“What was on Berenson’s office floor?”

“A new Oriental rug. Persian style, but almost certainly a copy from Pakistan.”

Reacher nodded. “Swan’s place, too. They must have done the whole executive floor.”

Neagley dialed her cell for the call to her Chicago guy’s voice mail and Reacher put Parker’s details on one side and checked the photographs of the four remaining foot soldiers. Then he closed their files and butted them together into a neat stack and piled it on top of Parker’s jacket, like a category.

“I saw these five tonight,” he said.

“What were they like?” O’Donnell asked.

“Lousy. Really slow and stupid.”

“Where were the other two?”

“Highland Park, presumably. That’s where the good stuff is.”

O’Donnell slid the five separated files toward him and asked, “How did we lose four guys to the Keystone Kops?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

Eventually, as he knew he would, Reacher opened Tony Swan’s New Age personnel file. He didn’t get past the Polaroid photograph. It was a year old and not remotely close to studio quality but it was much clearer than Curtis Mauney’s video surveillance still. Ten years after the army Swan’s hair had been shorter than when he was in. Back then the craze for shaved heads had already started among enlisted men but hadn’t spread upward to officers. Swan had worn a regular style, parted and brushed. But over the years it must have thinned and he had changed to an all-over half-inch Caesar. In the army it had been a chestnut brown. Now it was a dusty gray. His eyes were pouched and he had grown balls of fat and muscle at the hinges of his jaw. His neck was wider than ever. Reacher was amazed that anyone made shirts with collars that size. Like automobile tires.

“What next?” Dixon asked, in the silence. Reacher knew it wasn’t a genuine inquiry. She was just trying to stop him reading. Trying to spare his feelings. He closed the file. Dropped it on the bed well away from the other files, in a category all its own. Swan deserved better than to be associated with his recent colleagues, even on paper.

“Who knew, and who flew,” Reacher said. “That’s what we need. Anyone else can live a little longer.”

“When will we know?”

“Later today. You and Dave can go scope out Highland Park. Neagley and I are going back to East LA. In an hour. So take a nap, and make it count.”

Reacher and Neagley left the motel at five in the morning, in separate Hondas, driving one-handed and talking to each other on the phone like commuters everywhere. Reacher said he guessed that when the alarm call came in, Lamaison and Lennox had headed straight for Highland Park. Standard emergency protocol, he figured, because Highland Park was the more sensitive location. The attack in East LA might have been nothing more than a decoy. But an uneventful night would allay those fears and they would head to the scene of the real crime around dawn. They would declare the glass cube unusable for normal operations and give everyone the day off. Except for department heads, who would be called in to inventory the damage and list what was missing.