Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Reacher put his heel flat against the small of Lamaison’s back.

Bent his leg.

Let go of Lamaison’s arms.

Straightened his leg, fast and smooth.

Lamaison went over the edge and disappeared into the night.

There was no scream. Or maybe there was. Maybe it was lost in the rotor noise. O’Donnell nudged the pilot and the pilot yawed the craft and reversed the rotation and the door slammed neatly shut. The cabin went quiet. Silent, by comparison. Dixon hugged Reacher hard. O’Donnell said, “You certainly left it until the last minute, didn’t you?”

Reacher said, “I was trying to decide whether to let them throw you out before I saved Karla. Tough decision. Took some time.”

“Where’s Neagley?”

“Working, I hope. The missiles rolled out of the gate in Colorado eight hours ago. And we don’t know where they’re going.”

There was nothing the pilot could do to them without killing himself also, so they left him alone in the cockpit. But not before checking the fuel load. It was low. Much less than an hour’s flying time. There was no cell reception. Reacher told the pilot to lose height and drift south to find a signal. Dixon and O’Donnell latched the rear seat backs upright and sat down. They didn’t strap themselves in. Reacher guessed they were done with confinement. He lay on his back on the floor with his arms and legs flung wide like a snow angel. He was tired and dispirited. Lamaison was gone, but no one had come back.

O’Donnell asked, “Where would you take six hundred and fifty SAMs?”

“The Middle East,” Dixon said. “And I’d send them by sea. The electronics through LA and the tubes through Seattle.”

Reacher raised his head. “Lamaison said they were going to Kashmir.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes and no. I think he was choosing to believe a lie to salve his own conscience. Whatever else he was, he was a citizen. He didn’t want to know the truth.”

“Which is?”

“Terrorism here in the States. Got to be. It’s obvious. Kashmir is a squabble between governments. Governments have purchasing missions. They don’t run around with Samsonite suitcases full of bearer bonds and bank access codes and diamonds.”

Dixon asked, “Is that what you found?”

“Highland Park. Sixty-five million dollars’ worth. Neagley’s got it all. You’re going to have to convert it for us, Karla.”

“If I survive. My plane back to New York might get blown up.”

Reacher nodded. “If not tomorrow, then the next day, or the next.”

“How do we find them? Eight hours at fifty miles an hour is already a radius of four hundred miles. Which is a half-million-square-mile circle.”

“Five hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and twenty,” Reacher said, automatically. “Assuming you use only three decimal places for pi . But that’s the bargain we made. We could stop them when the circle was small, or we could come for you guys.”

“Thanks,” O’Donnell said.

“Hey, I voted to stop the truck. Neagley overruled me.”

“So how do we do this?”

“You ever seen a really great centerfielder play baseball? He never chases the ball. He runs to where the ball is about to arrive. Like Mickey Mantle.”

“You never saw Mantle play.”

“I saw newsreels.”

“The United States is close to four million square miles. That’s bigger than center field at Yankee Stadium.”

“But not much,” Reacher said.

“So where do we run to?”

“Mahmoud isn’t dumb. In fact he strikes me as a very smart and cautious guy. He just spent sixty-five million dollars on what are basically just components. He must have insisted that part of the deal was that someone would show him how to screw the damn things together.”

“Who?”

“What did Neagley’s woman friend tell us? The politician? Diana Bond?”

“Lots of things.”

“She told us that New Age’s engineer does the quality control tests because so far he’s the only guy in the world who knows how Little Wing is supposed to work.”

Dixon said, “And Lamaison had him on a string somehow.”

“He was threatening the guy’s daughter.”

O’Donnell said, “So Lamaison was going to pimp him out. Lamaison was going to take him somewhere. And you threw Lamaison out of the damn helicopter before you asked him.”

Reacher shook his head. “Lamaison talked about the whole thing like it was firmly in the past. He said it was a done deal. There was something in his voice. Lamaison wasn’t taking anyone anywhere.”

“So who?”

“Not who,” Reacher said. “The question is, where?”

Dixon said, “If there’s only one guy, and Lamaison wasn’t planning to take him somewhere, they’ll have to bring the missiles to him.”

“Which is ridiculous,” O’Donnell said. “You can’t bring a semi full of missiles to a garden apartment in Century City or wherever.”

“The guy doesn’t live in Century City,” Reacher said. “He lives way out in the desert. The middle of nowhere. The back of beyond. Where better to bring a semi full of missiles?”

“Cell phones are up,” the pilot called.

Reacher pulled out his Radio Shack pay-as-you-go. Found Neagley’s number. Hit the green button. She answered.

“Dean’s place?” he asked.

“Dean’s place,” she said. “For sure. I’m twenty minutes away.”

The Bell had GPS, but not the kind that drew a road map on a screen. Not like O’Donnell’s rental car. The Bell’s system produced a pair of always-changing latitude and longitude readings instead, pale green numbers, plain script. Reacher told the pilot to get himself somewhere south of Palmdale and wait. The pilot was nervous about fuel. Reacher told him to lose altitude. Helicopters sometimes survived engine failures at a few hundred feet. They rarely survived at a few thousand.

Then Reacher called Neagley back. She had gotten Dean’s address from Margaret Berenson in the Pasadena hotel. But she had no GPS, either. She was adrift in the dark, behind two last-generation headlights made weaker by blue paint on the lenses. And cell coverage was patchy. Reacher lost her twice. Before he lost her a third time he told her to find Dean’s spread and drive in tight circles with her lights on bright.

Reacher took Lamaison’s seat up front and pressed his forehead to the window the same way Lamaison had. Dixon and O’Donnell took side windows in back. Between them they covered a one-eighty panorama. Maybe more. For safety’s sake Reacher had the pilot turn wide circles once in a while, in case what they wanted was way behind them.

They saw nothing.

Nothing at all, except vast featureless blackness and occasional pinpoints of orange light. Gas stations maybe, or tiny parking lots outside small grocery stores. They saw occasional cars on lonely roads, but none of them was Neagley’s Civic. Yellow headlight beams, not blue. Reacher tried his phone again. No service.

“Fuel’s really low,” the pilot said.

“Highway on the left,” Dixon called.

Reacher looked down. Not much of a highway. There were five cars on it within a linear mile, two heading south and three heading north. He closed his eyes and pictured the maps he had looked at.

“We shouldn’t be seeing a north-south highway,” he said. “We’re too far west.”

The Bell tilted and swung away east on a long fast curve and came level again.

The pilot said, “I’m going to have to set down soon.”

“You’ll set down when I tell you,” Reacher said.

North of the mountains the air was better. Some dust, some heat shimmer, but basically it was clear to the horizon. Way far ahead in the distance a tiny grid of lights winked and twinkled. Palmdale, presumably. A nice place, Reacher had heard. Expanding. Desirable. Therefore expensive. Therefore a guy looking for acres and isolation and maximum bang for the buck would stay well away from it.