Bad Luck and Trouble

by Lee Child

  Mauney asked, “Do you recognize him?”

  “Not really,” Reacher said.

  “Check the tattoo.”

  Reacher just stood there.

  Mauney said, “Want me to call an orderly?”

  Reacher shook his head and put a hand under the corpse’s icy shoulder. Lifted. The body rolled awkwardly, all of a piece, stiff, like a log or a stump. It settled facedown, the arms flung upward, tied and contorted as if the desperate struggle for freedom had continued until the very last.

  Which it undoubtedly had, Reacher thought.

  The tattoo was a little folded and creased and wrinkled by the sloughing looseness of the skin and the unnatural inward pressure of the upper arms.

  It was a little faded by time.

  But it was unmistakable.

  It said: Orozco, M.

  Under it was a nine-digit service number.

  “It’s him,” Reacher said. “It’s Manuel Orozco.”

  Mauney said, “I’m very sorry.”

  There was silence for a moment. Nothing to hear, except cooled air forcing its way through aluminum vents. Reacher asked, “Are you still searching the area?”

  “For the others?” Mauney said. “Not actively. It’s not like we’ve got a missing child.”

  “Is Franz in here, too? In one of these damn drawers?”

  “You want to see him?” Mauney asked.

  “No,” Reacher said. Then he looked back at Orozco and asked, “When is the autopsy?”

  “Soon.”

  “Is the string going to tell us anything?”

  “It’s probably too common.”

  “Do we have an estimate on when he died?”

  Mauney half-smiled, cop to cop. “When he hit the ground.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Three, four weeks ago. Before Franz, we think. But we may never know for sure.”

  “We will,” Reacher said.

  “How?” Mauney asked.

  “I’ll ask whoever did it. And he’ll tell me. By that point he’ll be begging to.”

  “No independent action, remember?”

  “In your dreams.”

  Mauney stayed to process paperwork and Reacher and Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell took the elevator back down to warmth and sunlight. They stood in the lot, saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just crackling and trembling and twitching with suppressed rage. It was a given that soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. Some of them even want it. But deep down they want it to be fair. Me against him, may the best man win. They want it to be noble. Win or lose, they want it to arrive with significance.

  A soldier dead with his arms tied behind him was the worst kind of outrage. It was about helplessness and submission and abuse. It was about powerlessness.

  It took away all the illusions.

  “Let’s go,” Dixon said. “We’re wasting time.”

  37

  At the hotel Reacher sat for a moment with the photograph Mauney had given him. The video surveillance frame. The pharmacy. Four men in front of the counter. Manuel Orozco on the left, glancing right, restless. Then Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then Tony Swan, looking straight ahead. Then Jorge Sanchez, on the right, his finger hooked under his collar.

  Four friends.

  Two down for sure.

  Presumably all four down.

  “Shit happens,” O’Donnell said.

  Reacher nodded. “And we get over it.”

  “Do we?” Neagley said. “Will we this time?”

  “We always have before.”

  “This never happened before.”

  “My brother died.”

  “I know. But this is worse.”

  Reacher nodded again. “Yes, it is.”

  “I was hoping the other three were still OK somehow.”

  “We all were.”

  “But they’re not. They’re all gone.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “We need to work,” Dixon said. “That’s all we’ve got now.”

  They went up to Dixon’s room, but work was a relative term. They were dead-ended. They had nothing to go on. Those feelings didn’t improve any when they transferred to Neagley’s room and found an e-mail response from her Pentagon contact: Sorry, no way. New Age is classified. Just seven words, blank and dismissive.

  “Seems he doesn’t owe you all that big,” O’Donnell said.

  “He does,” Neagley said. “Bigger than you could imagine. This says more about New Age than him and me.”

  She scrolled on through her inbox. Then she stopped. There was another message from the same guy. Different version of his name, different e-mail address.

  “Disposable,” Neagley said. “That’s a one-time free account.”

  She clicked on the message. It said: Frances, great to hear from you. We should get together. Dinner and a movie? And I need to return your Hendrix CDs. Thanks so much for the loan. I loved them all. The sixth track on the second album is dynamically brilliant. Let me know when you’re next in Washington. Please call soonest.

  Reacher said, “You own CDs?”

  “No,” Neagley said. “I especially don’t own Jimi Hendrix CDs. I don’t like him.”

  O’Donnell said, “You’ve been to movies and dinner with this guy?”

  “Never,” Neagley said.

  “So he’s confusing you with some other woman.”

  “Unlikely,” Reacher said.

  “It’s coded,” Neagley said. “That’s what it is. It’s the answer to my question. Got to be. A kosher reply from his official address, and then a coded follow-up from an unofficial address. His ass is covered both ways.”

  Dixon asked, “What’s the code?”

  “Something to do with the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”

  Reacher said, “What was the second Hendrix album?”

  O’Donnell said, “Electric Ladyland?”

  “That was later,” Dixon said. “The first was Are You Experienced?”

  “Which one had the naked women on the cover?”

  “That was Electric Ladyland.”

  “I loved that cover.”

  “You’re disgusting. You were eight years old.”

  “Nearly nine.”

  “That’s still disgusting.”

  Reacher said, “Axis: Bold as Love. That was the second album.”

  “What was the sixth track?” Dixon asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  O’Donnell said, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

  They walked a long way east on Sunset, until they found a record store. They went inside and found cool air and young people and loud music and the H section in the Rock/Pop aisles. There was a dense foot-and-a-half of Jimi Hendrix albums. Four old titles that Reacher recognized, plus a bunch of posthumous stuff. Axis: Bold as Love was right there, three copies. Reacher pulled one and flipped it. It was wrapped in plastic and the store’s barcode label was stuck over the second half of the track listings.

  Same for the second copy.

  Same for the third.

  “Rip it off,” O’Donnell said.

  “Steal it?”

  “No, rip the plastic off.”

  “Can’t do that. It’s not ours.”

  “You smack cops around but you won’t damage a store’s wrapper?”

  “It’s different.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to buy it. We can play it in the car. Cars have CD players, right?”

  “For the last hundred years,” Dixon said.

  Reacher took the CD and lined up behind a girl with more metal punched through her face than a grenade victim. He made it to the register and peeled off thirteen of his remaining eight hundred dollars and for the first time in his life became the owner of a digital product.

  “Unwrap it,” O’Donnell said.

  It was wrapped tight. Reacher used his fi
ngernails to scrape up a corner and then his teeth to tear the plastic. When he got it all off he turned the CD over and ran his finger down the track list.

  “‘Little Wing,’” he said.

  O’Donnell shrugged. Neagley looked blank.

  “Doesn’t help,” Dixon said.

  “I know the song,” Reacher said.

  “Please don’t sing it,” Neagley said.

  “So what does it mean?” O’Donnell said.

  Reacher said, “It means New Age makes a weapons system called ‘Little Wing.’”

  “Obviously. But that doesn’t help us if we don’t know what Little Wing is.”

  “Sounds aeronautical. Like a drone plane or something.”

  “Nobody heard of it?” Dixon asked. “Anybody?”

  O’Donnell shook his head.

  “Not me,” Neagley said.

  “So it really is supersecret,” Dixon said. “No loose lips in D.C. or on Wall Street or among all of Neagley’s connections.”

  Reacher tried to open the CD box but found it taped shut with a title label that ran all the way across the top seam. He picked at it with his nails and it came off in small sticky fragments.

  “No wonder the record business is in trouble,” he said. “They don’t make these things very easy to enjoy.”

  Dixon asked, “What are we going to do?”

  “What did the e-mail say?”

  “You know what it said.”

  “But do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did it say?”

  “Find the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.”

  “No, it said “‘Please call soonest.’”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Neagley said. “If he won’t tell me by e-mail, why would he tell me on the phone?”

  “It didn’t say, ‘Please call me.’ A coded note like that, every word counts.”

  “So who am I supposed to call?”

  “There must be somebody. He knows you know somebody that can help.”

  “Who’s going to help with a thing like this? If he won’t?”

  “Who does he know you know? Maybe from Washington, since he used that word, and every word counts?”

  Neagley opened her mouth to say Nobody. Reacher saw the denial forming in her throat. But then she paused.

  “There’s a woman,” she said. “She’s called Diana Bond. We both know her. She’s a staffer for a guy on the Hill. The guy is on the House Defense Committee.”

  “There you go. Who’s the guy?”

  Neagley said a familiar but unloved name.

  “You’ve got a friend who works for that asshole?”

  “Not exactly a friend.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “Everyone needs a job, Reacher. Except you, apparently.”

  “Whatever, her boss is signing the checks, so he’ll have been briefed. He’ll know what Little Wing is. Therefore she will, too.”

  “Not if it’s secret.”

  “That guy can’t spell his own name without help. Believe me, if he knows, she knows, too.”

  “She’s not going to tell me.”

  “She is. Because you’re going to play hardball. You’re going to call her and tell her that Little Wing’s name is out there, and you’re about to tell the papers that the leak came from her boss’s office, and the price for your silence is everything she knows about it.”

  “That’s dirty.”

  “That’s politics. She can’t be exactly unfamiliar with the process, working for that guy.”

  “Do we really need to do this? Is it relevant?”

  “The more we know the luckier we get.”

  “I don’t want to involve her.”

  “Your Pentagon buddy wants you to,” O’Donnell said.

  “That’s just Reacher’s guess.”

  “No, it’s more than that. Think about the e-mail. He said the sixth track was dynamically brilliant. That’s a weird phrase. He could have just said it was great. Or amazing. Or brilliant on its own. But he said dynamically brilliant, which is the letters d and b. Like this Diana Bond woman’s initials.”

  38

  Neagley insisted on making the call to Diana Bond alone. When they got back to the hotel she parked herself in a far corner of the lobby and did a whole lot of dialing and redialing. Then some serious talking. She came back a long twenty minutes later. Slight distaste on her face. Slight discomfort in her body language. But a measure of excitement, too.

  “Took me some time to track her down,” she said. “Turns out she’s not far away. She’s up at Edwards Air Force Base for a few days. Some big presentation.”

  O’Donnell said, “That’s why your guy said call her soonest. He