by Lee Child
They waited the same four minutes before they heard the click of Berenson’s heels on the slate. She came out of the corridor and around the corner and didn’t hesitate. Just gave the receptionist a nod of thanks and passed her by and headed on out. She gave up two types of smiles, one kind to Reacher and Neagley because she had met them before, and another kind to O’Donnell and Dixon because she hadn’t. She shook hands all around. Same scars under the makeup, same icy breath. She opened the aluminum door and stood still until everyone had filed past her into the conference room.
With five people in it the room was short one chair, so Berenson stood by the window. Polite, but also psychologically dominating. It made her visitors look upward at her and it made them squint against the light behind her. She said, “How may I help you today?” There was a little condescension in her voice. A little irritation. A slight emphasis on today.
“Tony Swan is missing,” Reacher said.
“Missing?”
“As in, we can’t find him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not a difficult concept to grasp.”
“But he could be anywhere. A new job, out of state. Or a long-delayed vacation. Somewhere he always wanted to go. People sometimes do that, in Mr. Swan’s circumstances. Like a silver lining.”
O’Donnell said, “His dog died of thirst, trapped inside his house. No silver lining there. All cloud. Swan didn’t go anywhere he planned to go.”
“His dog? How awful.”
“Roger that,” Dixon said.
“Her name was Maisi,” Neagley said.
“I don’t see how I can help,” Berenson said. “Mr. Swan left here more than three weeks ago. Isn’t this a matter for the police?”
“They’re working on it,” Reacher said. “We’re working on it, too.”
“I don’t see how I can help.”
“We’d like to see his desk. And his computer. And his diary. There might be notes. Or information, or appointments.”
“Notes about what?”
“About whatever has caused him to be missing.”
“He’s not missing because of New Age.”
“Maybe not. But people have been known to conduct private business during office hours. People have been known to jot down notes about things from their outside lives.”
“Not here.”
“Why not? You’re all business all the time?”
“There are no notes here. No paper at all. No pens or pencils. Basic security. This is a completely paperless environment. Much safer. It’s a rule. Anyone even thinks about breaking it, they get fired. Everything is done on computers here. We have an in-house network with secure firewalls and automatic random data monitoring.”
“Can we see his computer, then?” Neagley asked.
“I guess you could see it,” Berenson said. “But it won’t do you any good. Someone leaves here, within thirty minutes their desktop hard drive is taken out and destroyed. Smashed. Physically. With hammers. It’s another security rule.”
“With hammers?” Reacher said.
“It’s the only definitive method. Data can be recovered otherwise.”
“So there’s no trace of him left?”
“None at all, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve got some pretty heavy rules here.”
“I know. Mr. Swan designed them himself. In his first week. They were his first major contribution.”
“Did he talk to anybody?” Dixon asked. “Water cooler buddies? Is there anyone he would have shared a concern with?”
“Personal issues?” Berenson said. “I doubt it. The dynamic wouldn’t have been appropriate. He had to play a cop’s role here. He had to keep himself a little unapproachable, to be effective.”
“What about his boss?” O’Donnell said. “They might have shared. They were in the same boat, professionally.”
“I’ll certainly ask him,” Berenson said.
“What’s his name?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You’re very discreet.”
“Mr. Swan insisted on it.”
“Can we meet with the guy?”
“He’s out of town right now.”
“So who’s minding the store?”
“Mr. Swan is, in a way. His procedures are all still in place.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“About personal things? No, he really didn’t.”
“Was he upset or worried the week he left?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Was he making a lot of phone calls?”
“I’m sure he was. We all do.”
“What do you think might have happened to him?”
“Me?” Berenson said. “I really have no idea. I walked him to his car, and I said when things pick up again I’ll be on the phone begging him to come back, and he said he’d look forward to my call. That was the last I saw of him.”
They got back in Dixon’s car and reversed away from the mirror glass. Reacher watched the Ford’s reflection get smaller and smaller.
Neagley said, “Wasted trip. I told you we should have called.”
Dixon said, “I wanted to see where he worked.”
O’Donnell said, “Worked is the wrong word. They were using him there, that’s all. They picked his brains for a year and then kicked him out. They were buying his ideas, not giving him a job.”
“Sure looks that way,” Neagley said.
“They’re not making anything there. It’s an unsecured building.”
“Obviously. They must have a third place somewhere. A remote plant for manufacturing.”
“So why didn’t UPS get that address, too?”
“Maybe it’s secret. Maybe they don’t get mail there.”
“I’d like to know what they make.”
“Why?” Dixon asked.
“Just curious. The more we know, the luckier we get.”
Reacher said, “So go ahead and find out.”
“I don’t know anyone to ask.”
“I do,” Neagley said. “I know a guy in Pentagon procurement.”
Reacher said, “Call him.”
In his room in his Denver hotel the dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was concluding his meeting. His guest had shown up exactly on time and had been accompanied by a single bodyguard. Mason had taken both of those facts as positive signs. He appreciated punctuality in business. And being outnumbered only two-to-one was a luxury. Often he was alone with as many as six or ten on the other side of the deal.
So, a good start. It had been followed by substantive progress. No lame excuses about late delivery or lowered numbers or other difficulties. No bait and switch. No attempt to renegotiate. No jacked-up prices. Just the sale as previously discussed, six hundred and fifty units at a hundred thousand dollars each.
Mason had opened his suitcase and his client had started the long process of totaling the consideration inside. The Swiss bank balances and the bearer bonds were uncontroversial. They had reliable face values. The diamonds were more subjective. Carat weight was a given, of course, but much depended on cut and clarity. Mason’s people had in fact underestimated in order to build in a horse-trading margin. Mason’s guest quickly understood. He pronounced himself entirely satisfied and agreed that the suitcase did indeed contain sixty-five million dollars.
At which point it became his suitcase.
In exchange Mason received a key and a piece of paper.
The key was small, old, scratched and worn, plain and unlabeled. It looked like the kind of thing a hardware store cuts while a person waits. Mason was told it was the key to a padlock currently securing a shipping container waiting at the Los Angeles docks.
The piece of paper was a bill of lading, describing the shipping container’s contents as six hundred and fifty DVD players.
Mason’s guest and his bodyguard left, and Mason stepped into the bathroom and set fire to his passport in the toilet pan. A half-hour
later Andrew MacBride left the hotel and headed back to the airport. He was surprised to realize that he was looking forward to hearing the jug-band music again.
Frances Neagley called Chicago from the back of Dixon’s car. She told her assistant to e-mail her contact at the Pentagon and explain that she was out of the office, in California, away from a secure phone, and that she had an inquiry about New Age’s product. She knew her guy would feel better about responding by e-mail than talking on an unsecured cell network.
O’Donnell said, “You have secure phones in your office?”
“Sure.”
“Outstanding. Who’s the guy?”
“Just a guy,” Neagley said. “Who owes me big.”
“Big enough to deliver?”
“Always.”
Dixon came off the 101 at Sunset and headed west to the hotel. The traffic was slow. Less than three miles, but a jogger could have covered them faster. When they eventually arrived they found a Crown Vic waiting out front. An unmarked cop car. Not Thomas Brant’s. This one was newer and intact and a different color.
It was Curtis Mauney’s car.
He climbed out as soon as Dixon got parked. He walked over, short, solid, worn, tired. He stopped directly in front of Reacher and paused a beat. Then he asked, “Did one of your friends have a tattoo on his back?”
A gentle tone of voice.
Quiet.
Sympathetic.
Reacher said, “Ah, Christ.”
36
Manuel Orozco had gone through four years of college on army money and had assumed he would wind up a combat infantry officer. His baby sister had gone through a major irrational panic and had assumed he would wind up KIA with serious disfiguring facial wounds such that his body would not be identified on recovery. She would never know what had happened to him. He told her about dog tags. She said they might get blown off or lost. He told her about fingerprints. She said he might lose limbs. He told her about dental identification. She said his whole jaw might get exploded. Later he realized she was worrying on a deeper level but at the time he thought the answer to her fears was to get a big tattoo across his upper back that said Orozco, M. in large black letters, with his service number equally large below. He had gotten home and peeled off his shirt in triumph and had been mystified when the kid had cried even harder.
Ultimately he had avoided the infantry and ended up a key part of the 110th MP, where Reacher had immediately rechristened him Kit Bag because his broad olive back looked like a GI duffel with its name-and-number stencil. Now fifteen years later Reacher stood in the Chateau Marmont’s sunblasted parking lot and said, “You found another body.”
“I’m afraid we did,” Mauney said.
“Where?”
“Same general area. In a gully.”
“Helicopter?”
“Probably.”
“Orozco,” Reacher said.
“That’s the name on his back,” Mauney said.
“So why ask?”
“We have to be sure.”
“All corpses should be so convenient.”
“Who’s the next of kin?”
“He has a sister somewhere. Younger.”
“So you should make the formal ID. If you would. This really isn’t the kind of thing a younger sister should see.”
“How long was he in the gully?”
“A long time.”
They got back in the car and Dixon followed Mauney all the way to a county facility north of Glendale. Nobody spoke. Reacher sat in the back next to O’Donnell and did what he was pretty sure O’Donnell was doing too, which was to run through a long involuntary sequence of remembered Orozco moments. The guy had been a comedian, part on purpose, part unwittingly. He had been of Mexican descent, born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, but for many years had pretended to be a white Australian. He had called everyone mate. As an officer his command skills had been first rate, but he had never really issued orders. He would wait until a junior officer or a grunt had grasped the general consensus and then he would say, If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please. It had become a group catchphrase every bit as ubiquitous as You do not mess.
Coffee?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
Cigarette?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
Want me to shoot this mother?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
O’Donnell said, “We knew already. This is not a surprise.”
Nobody answered him.
The county facility turned out to be a brand-new medical center with a hospital on one side of a wide new street. On the other side was a state-of-the-art receiving station for townships without morgues of their own. It was a white concrete cube set on stilts a story high. Meat wagons could roll right under the bulk of the building to hidden elevator doors. Neat, clean, discreet. Californian. Mauney parked in a line of visitor slots near some trees. Dixon parked right next to him. Everyone got out and stood for a moment, stretching, looking around, wasting time.
Nobody’s favorite trip.
Mauney led the way. There was a personnel elevator opening off a cross-hatched walkway. Mauney hit the call button and the elevator door slid back and cold chemical air spilled out. Mauney stepped on, then Reacher, then O’Donnell, then Dixon, then Neagley.
Mauney pressed 4.
The fourth floor was as cold as a meat locker. There was a miserable public viewing area with a wide internal window backed by a venetian blind. Mauney passed it by and headed through a door to a storage area. Three walls showed the fronts of refrigerated drawers. Dozens of them. The air was bitter with cold and heavy with smells and noisy from reflections off stainless steel. Mauney pulled a drawer. It came out easily on ball bearing runners. Full length. It smacked all the way open against end stops made of rubber.
Inside was a refrigerated corpse. Male. Hispanic. The wrists and the ankles were tied with rough twine that had bitten deep. The arms were behind the back. The head and the shoulders were grievously damaged. Almost unrecognizable as human.
“He fell head first,” Reacher said, softly. “He would, I guess, tied up like that. If you’re right about the helicopter.”
“No tracks to or from,” Mauney said.
Further medical details were hard to discern. Decomposition was well advanced, but due to the desert heat and dryness it looked more like mummification. The body was shrunken, diminished, collapsed, leathery. It looked empty. There was some animal damage, but not much. Contact with the gully’s walls had prevented more.
