Lee Child: Bad Luck and Trouble

111,822.18.

Dixon, obviously. The spoils of war.

At first he was disappointed. Not with the amount. It was more money than he had seen in a long time. He was disappointed with himself, because he couldn’t perceive any message in the number. He was sure Dixon would have adjusted the total by a few dollars or cents one way or the other to give him a wry smile. But he couldn’t get it. It wasn’t prime. No even number greater than two could be prime. It had hundreds of factors. Its reciprocal was boring. Its square root was a long messy string of digits. Its cube root was worse.

111,822.18.

Then he grew disappointed with Dixon. Because the more he thought about it, the more he analyzed it, the more he was sure it really was a boring number.

Dixon’s head wasn’t in the game.

She had let him down.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

He pressed the button for the mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. Faint gray printing, the last five transactions against his account. Neagley’s original deposit from Chicago was still there, first on the list. Then second, his fifty-dollar withdrawal at the Portland bus depot, up in Oregon. Then third, his airfare from Portland to LAX, way back at the beginning.

Then fourth, a new deposit in the sum of one hundred and one thousand, eight hundred ten dollars, and eighteen cents.

Then fifth, on the same day, another deposit, in the sum of ten thousand and twelve dollars exactly.

101810.18.

10012.

He smiled. Dixon’s head was in the game after all. Totally, completely in the game. The first deposit was 10-18, repeated for emphasis. Military police radio code for mission accomplished , twice over. 10-18, 10-18. Herself and O’Donnell, rescued. Or Lamaison and Mahmoud, beaten. Or both things.

Nice, Karla , he thought.

The second deposit was her zip code: 10012. Greenwich Village. Where she lived. A geographic reference.

A hint.

She had asked: Feel like dropping by New York afterward ?

He smiled again and balled up the slip of thin paper and dropped it in the trash. Took a hundred dollars from the machine and headed on inside the depot and bought a ticket for the first bus he saw. He had no idea where it was going.

He had answered: I don’t make plans, Karla .

LEE CHILD is the author of eleven Jack Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot , which has been optioned for a major motion picture by Paramount Pictures, and The Hard Way . His debut, Killing Floor , won both the Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First Mystery. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in forty territories. Child, a native of England and a former television writer, lives in New York City, where he is at work on his twelfth Jack Reacher thriller, Play Dirty .