by Lee Child
Trashed, from top to bottom. Like a bomb blast.
Reacher said, “LA County deputies wouldn’t be this thorough.”
“Not a chance,” Neagley said. “Not even close. This was the bad guys tying up the loose ends. Retrieving whatever Franz had on them. Before the deputies even got here. Probably days before.”
“The deputies saw this and didn’t tell Angela? She didn’t know. She said she had to come over and bring his stuff home.”
“They wouldn’t tell her. Why upset her more?”
Reacher backed away on the sidewalk. Stepped to his left and looked at the neat gold lettering on the door: Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations. He raised his hand and blocked out his old friend’s name and in his mind tried David O’Donnell in its place. Then a pair of names: Sanchez & Orozco. Then: Karla Dixon.
“I wish those guys were answering their damn phones,” he said.
“This thing is not about us as a group,” Neagley said. “It can’t be. It’s more than seventeen days old and nobody has come after me yet.”
“Or me,” Reacher said. “But then, neither did Franz.”
“What do you mean?”
“If Franz was in trouble, who would he call? The rest of us, that’s who. But not you, because you’re way upscale now and probably too busy. And not me, because nobody apart from you could ever find me. But suppose Franz got himself in deep shit and called the other guys? Because they were all more accessible than the two of us? Suppose they all came running out here to help? Suppose they’re all in the same boat now?”
“Including Swan?”
“Swan was the closest. He would have gotten here first.”
“Possible.”
“Likely,” Reacher said. “If Franz really needed someone, who else would he trust?”
“He should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have come.”
“Maybe you were next on the list. Maybe at first he thought six people were enough.”
“But what kind of a thing can disappear six people? Six of our people?”
“I hate to think,” Reacher said, and then he went quiet. In the past he would have put his people up against anyone. Many times, he had. And they had always come through, against worse opponents than you normally find among the civilian population. Worse, because military training tended to enhance a criminal’s repertoire in several important areas.
Neagley said, “No point standing here. We’re wasting time. We’re not going to find anything. I think we can assume they got what they came for.”
Reacher said, “I think we can assume they didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Rule of thumb,” Reacher said. “This place is trashed from top to bottom and side to side. Totally. And normally, when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. But these guys never stopped looking. So if they found what they came for, by chance they found it in the very last place they chose to look. And how likely is that? Not very. So I think they never stopped looking because they never found what they wanted.”
“So where is it?”
“I don’t know. What would it be?”
“Paperwork, a floppy disc, a CD-ROM, something like that.”
“Small,” Reacher said.
“He didn’t take it home. I think he was separating home and work.”
Think like them. Be them. Reacher turned around and put his back to Franz’s door as if he had just stepped out to the sidewalk. He cupped his hand and looked down at his empty palm. He had done plenty of paperwork in his life, but he had never used a computer disc or burned a CD-ROM. But he knew what one was. It was a five-inch round piece of polycarbonate. Often in a thin plastic case. A floppy disc was smaller. Square, about three inches, maybe? Letter-size paperwork would tri-fold down to eight and a half inches by about four.
Small.
But vital.
Where would Calvin Franz hide something small but vital?
Neagley said, “Maybe it was in his car. He drove back and forth, apparently. So if it was a CD, he could have kept it in his auto-changer. Like hiding it in plain sight. You know, maybe the fourth slot, after the John Coltrane stuff.”
“Miles Davis,” Reacher said. “He preferred Miles Davis. He only listened to John Coltrane on Miles Davis albums.”
“He could have made it look like stuff he had downloaded. You know, he could have written Miles Davis on it with a marker pen.”
“They’d have found it,” Reacher said. “Guys this thorough, they’d have checked everything. And I think Franz would have wanted more security than that. Plain sight means it’s right there in front of you all the time. You can’t relax. And I think Franz wanted to relax. I think he wanted to get home to Angela and Charlie and not have things on his mind.”
“So where? A safe deposit box?”
“I don’t see a bank here,” Reacher said. “And I don’t think he would have wanted to take much of a detour. Not with this traffic. Not if there was some kind of urgency. And a bank’s lobby hours don’t necessarily suit a working stiff.”
“There are two keys on the ring,” Neagley said. “Although it’s possible the smaller one was for the desk.”
Reacher turned again and looked through the gloom at the drifts of trash and wreckage. The desk lock was in there somewhere, presumably. A small steel rectangle, torn out of the wood and dumped. He turned back and stepped to the curb. Looked left, looked right. Cupped his hand again and looked down at his empty palm.
First: What would I hide?
“It’s a computer file,” he said. “Got to be. Because they knew to look for it. Any kind of handwritten paperwork, Franz wouldn’t have told them anything about it. But probably they took his computers first and found some kind of traces that told them he’d been copying files. That happens, right? Computers leave traces of everything. But Franz wouldn’t tell them where the copies were. Maybe that’s why they broke his legs. But he kept quiet, which is why they had to come out here on this wild-assed search.”
“So where is it?”
Reacher looked down at his hand again.
Where would I hide something small and vital?
“Not under any old rock,” he said. “I would want somewhere structured. Maybe somewhere kind of custodial. I would want someone to be responsible.”
“A safe deposit box,” Neagley said again. “In a bank. The small key has no markings. Banks do that.”
“I don’t like banks,” Reacher said. “I don’t like the hours and I don’t like the detour. Once, maybe, but not often. Which is the issue. Because there’s some kind of regularity involved here. Isn’t there? Isn’t that what people do with computers? They back stuff up every night. So this wouldn’t be a one-time thing. It would be a matter of routine. Which changes things somewhat. A one-time thing, you might go to extraordinary lengths. Every night, you need something safe but easy. And permanently available.”
“I e-mail stuff to myself,” Neagley said.
Reacher paused a beat. Smiled.
“There you go,” he said.
“You think that’s what Franz did?”
“Not a chance,” Reacher said. “E-mail would have come straight back to his computer, which the bad guys had. They’d have spent their time trying to break down his password instead of busting up his building.”
“So what did he do?”
Reacher turned and glanced along the row of stores. The dry cleaner, the nail salon, the pharmacy.
The post office.
“Not e-mail,” he said. “Regular mail. That’s what he did. He backed up his stuff onto some kind of a disc and every night he put it in an envelope and dropped it in the mail. Addressed to himself. To his post office box. Because that’s where he got his mail. In the post office. There’s no slot in his door. Once the envelope was out of his hand it was safe. It was in the system. With a whole bunch of custodians looking after it all day and all night.”
“Slow,” Neagley said.
; Reacher nodded. “He must have had three or four discs in rotation. Any particular day, two or three of them would be somewhere in the mail. But he went home every night knowing his latest stuff was safe. It’s not easy to rob a mail box or make a clerk give you something that doesn’t belong to you. USPS bureaucracy is about as safe as a Swiss bank.”
“The small key,” Neagley said. “Not his desk. Not a safe deposit box.”
Reacher nodded again.
“His post office box,” he said.
12
But United States Postal Service bureaucracy cut two ways. It was late in the afternoon. The dry cleaner’s was still open. The nail salon was open. The pharmacy was open. But the post office was closed. Lobby hours had ended at four o’clock.
“Tomorrow,” Neagley said. “We’re going to be in the car all day. We have to get to Swan’s place, too. Unless we separate.”
“It’s going to take two of us here,” Reacher said. “But maybe one of the others will show up and do some work.”
“I wish they would. And not because I’m lazy.” For form’s sake, like a little ritual, she pulled out her cell phone and checked the tiny screen.
No messages.
There were no messages at the hotel desk, either. No messages on the hotel voice mail. No e-mails on either one of Neagley’s laptop computers.
Nothing.
“They can’t just be ignoring us,” she said.
“No,” Reacher said. “They wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m getting a real bad feeling.”
“I’ve had a real bad feeling ever since I went to that ATM in Portland. I spent all my money taking someone to dinner. Twice. Now I wish we had stayed in and ordered pizza. She might have paid. I wouldn’t know about any of this yet.”
“She?”
“Someone I met.”
“Cute?”
“As a button.”
“Cuter than Karla Dixon?”
“Comparable.”
“Cuter than me?”
“Is that even possible?”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Who?”
“The woman in Portland.”
“Why do you want to know that?”
Neagley didn’t answer. She just shuffled the five sheets of contact information like a card player and dealt Reacher two and kept three for herself. Reacher got Tony Swan and Karla Dixon. He used the landline on the credenza and tried Swan first. Thirty, forty rings, no answer. He dabbed the cradle and tried Dixon’s number. A 212 area code, for New York City. No answer. Six rings, and straight to a machine. He listened to Dixon’s familiar voice and waited for the beep and left her the same message he had left earlier: “This is Jack Reacher with a ten-thirty from Frances Neagley at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Get off your ass and call her back.” Then he paused a beat and added: “Please, Karla. We really need to hear from you.” Then he hung up. Neagley was closing her cell phone and shaking her head.
“Not good,” she said.
“They could all be on vacation.”
“At the same time?”
“They could all be in jail. We were a pretty rough bunch.”
“First thing I checked. They’re not in jail.”
Reacher said nothing.
Neagley said, “You really liked Karla, didn’t you? You sounded positively tender there, on the phone.”
“I liked all of you.”
“But her especially. Did you ever sleep with her?”
Reacher said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“I recruited her. I was her CO. Wouldn’t have been right.”
“Was that the only reason?”
“Probably.”
“OK.”
Reacher asked, “What do you know about their businesses? Is there any good reason why they should all be out of contact for days at a time?”
“I guess O’Donnell could have to travel overseas,” Neagley said. “His practice is pretty general. Marital stuff could take him to hotels down in the islands, I guess. Or anyplace, if he’s chasing unpaid alimony. Child abductions or custody issues could take him anywhere. People looking to adopt sometimes send detectives to Eastern Europe or China or wherever to make sure things are kosher. There are lots of possible reasons.”
“But?”
“I’d have to talk myself into really believing one of them.”
“What about Karla?”
“She could be down in the Caymans looking for someone’s money, I guess. But I imagine she’d do that on-line from her office. It’s not like the money is actually there.”
“So where is it?”
“It’s notional. It’s electricity in a computer.”
“What about Sanchez and Orozco?”
“They’re in a closed world. I don’t see why they would ever have to leave Vegas. Not professionally.”
“What do we know about Swan’s company?”
“It exists. It does business. It files. It has an address. Apart from that, not much.”
“Presumably it has security issues, or Swan wouldn’t have gotten hired.”
“All defense contractors have security issues. Or they think they ought to have, because they want to think what they do is important.”
Reacher said nothing to that. Just sat and stared out the window. It was getting dark. A long day, nearly over. He said, “Franz didn’t go to his office the morning he disappeared.”
“You think?”
“We know. Angela had his set of keys. He left them home. He was going somewhere else that day.”
Neagley said nothing.
“And the landlord at the strip mall saw the bad guys,” Reacher said. “Franz’s lock wasn’t broken. They didn’t take Franz’s key from him, because he didn’t have it in his pocket. Therefore they scammed one or bought one from the owner. Therefore the owner saw them. Therefore we need to find him tomorrow, along with everything else.”
“Franz should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have dropped everything.”
“I wish he had called you,” Reacher said. “If you had been there, none of this bad stuff would have happened.”
Reacher and Neagley ate dinner in the downstairs restaurant, front corner of the lobby, where a bottle of still water from Norway cost eight dollars. Then they said goodnight and split up and headed for their separate rooms. Reacher’s was a chintzy cube two floors below Neagley’s suite. He stripped and showered and folded his clothes and put them under the mattress to press. He got into bed and folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Thought about Calvin Franz for a minute, in random flashing images, the same way a political candidate’s biography is squeezed into a thirty second television commercial. His memory made some of the pictures sepia and some of them washed out, but in all of them Franz was moving, talking, laughing, full of drive and energy. Then Karla Dixon joined the parade, petite, dark, sardonic, laughing with Franz. Dave O’Donnell was there, tall, fair, handsome, like a stockbroker with a switchblade. And Jorge Sanchez, durable, eyes narrowed, with a hint of a smile that showed a gold tooth and was as close as he ever came to showing contentment. And Tony Swan, as wide as he was high. And Manuel Orozco, opening and closing a Zippo lighter because he liked the sound so much. Even Stan Lowrey was there, shaking his head, drumming his fingers on a table to a rhythm only he could hear.
Then Reacher blinked all the pictures away and closed his eyes and fell asleep, ten-thirty in the evening, a long day, over.
Ten-thirty in the evening in Los Angeles was one-thirty the next morning in New York, and the last British Airways flight from London, delayed, had just landed at JFK. The delay meant that the last immigration watch in British Airways’ own terminal had already gone off duty, so the plane taxied to Terminal Four and fed its passengers through the giant arrivals hall there. Third in the visitors’ line was a first-class passenger who had napped in seat 2K for most of the trip. He was medium height, medium
weight, expensively dressed, and he radiated the kind of expansive self-confident courtesy typical of people who know how lucky they are to have been rich all their lives. He was perhaps forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian. His passport was British, and it passed the Immigration agent’s scrutiny with no trouble at all, as did its owner’s manicured forefingers on the electronic fingerprint pad. Seventeen minutes after unclipping his seat belt the guy was out in the shiny New York night, walking briskly to the head of the cab line.
13
At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out somewhere for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.
They ordered room service breakfast and spent the waiting time on another fruitless round of phone calls. No answer from East LA, none from Nevada, none from New York, none from Washington D.C. They didn’t leave messages. They didn’t redial or try again. And when they hung up, they didn’t talk about it. They just sat in silence until the waiter showed up and then they ate eggs and pancakes and bacon and drank coffee. Then Neagley called down to the valet station and ordered her car.
“Franz’s place first?” she asked.
Reacher nodded. “Franz is the focus here.”
So they rode the elevator down and got in the Mustang together and crawled south on La Cienega to the post office at the tip of Culver City.
