by Lee Child
They parked right outside Franz’s trashed office and walked back past the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the discount pharmacy. The post office was empty. A sign on the door said that the lobby had been open a half-hour. Clearly whatever initial rush there had been was over.
“We can’t do this when it’s empty,” Reacher said.
“So let’s find the landlord first,” Neagley said.
They asked in the pharmacy. An old man in a short white coat was standing under an old-fashioned security camera behind the dispensing counter. He told them that the guy who owned the dry cleaner’s store was the landlord. He spoke with the kind of guarded hostility that tenants always use about the people who get their rent checks. He outlined a short success story in which his neighbor had come over from Korea and opened the cleaners and used the profits to leverage the whole strip mall. The American dream in action. Reacher and Neagley thanked him and walked past the nail salon and ducked into the cleaner’s and found the right guy immediately. He was rushing around in a crowded work area heavy with the stink of chemicals. Six big drum machines were churning away. Pressing tables were hissing. Racks of bagged clothes were winding around on a motorized conveyor above head height. The guy himself was sweating. Working hard. It looked like he deserved two strip malls. Or three. Maybe he already had them. Or more.
Reacher got straight to the point. Asked, “When did you last see Calvin Franz?”
“I hardly ever saw him,” the guy answered. “I couldn’t see him. He painted over his window, first thing he ever did.” He said it like he had been annoyed about it. Like he had known he was going to have to get busy with a scraper before he could rent the unit again.
Reacher said, “You must have seen him coming and going. I bet nobody here works longer hours than you.”
“I guess I saw him occasionally,” the guy said.
“When do you guess you stopped seeing him occasionally?”
“Three, four weeks ago.”
“Just before the guys came around and asked you for his key?”
“What guys?”
“The guys you gave his key to.”
“They were cops.”
“The second set of guys were cops.”
“So were the first.”
“Did they show you ID?”
“I’m sure they did.”
“I’m sure they didn’t,” Reacher said. “I’m sure they showed you a hundred dollar bill instead. Maybe two or three of them.”
“So what? It’s my key and it’s my building.”
“What did they look like?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because we were Mr. Franz’s friends.”
“Were?”
“He’s dead. Someone threw him out of a helicopter.”
The dry cleaner just shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t remember the guys,” he said.
“They trashed your unit,” Reacher said. “Whatever they paid you for the key won’t cover the damage.”
“Fixing the unit is my problem. It’s my building.”
“Suppose it was your pile of smoldering ashes? Suppose I came back tonight and burned the whole place down?”
“You’d go to prison.”
“I don’t think so. A guy with a memory as bad as yours wouldn’t have anything to tell the police.”
The guy nodded. “They were white men. Two of them. Blue suits. A new car. They looked like everybody else I see.”
“That’s all?”
“Just white men. Not cops. Too clean and too rich.”
“Nothing special about them?”
“I’d tell you if I could. They trashed my place.”
“OK.”
“I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a nice guy.”
“He was,” Reacher said.
14
Reacher and Neagley walked back to the post office. It was a small, dusty place. Government décor. It had gotten moderately busy again. Normal morning business was in full swing. There was one clerk working and a short line of waiting customers. Neagley handed Reacher Franz’s keys and joined the line. Reacher stepped to a shallow waist-high counter in back and took a random form out of a slot. It was a demand for confirmation of delivery. He used a pen on a chain and bent down and pretended to fill out the form. He turned his body sideways and rested his elbow on the counter and kept his hand moving. Glanced at Neagley. She was maybe three minutes from the head of the line. He used the time to survey the rows of mail boxes.
They filled the whole end wall of the lobby. They came in three sizes. Small, medium, large. Six tiers of small, then below them four tiers of medium, then three tiers of large closest to the floor. Altogether one hundred eighty of the small size, ninety-six mediums, and fifty-four large. Total, three hundred thirty boxes.
Which one was Franz’s?
One of the large ones, for sure. Franz had been running a business, and it had been the kind of business that would have generated a fair amount of incoming mail. Some of it would have been in the form of thick legal-sized packages. Credit reports, financial information, court transcripts, eight-by-ten photographs. Large, stiff envelopes. Professional journals. Therefore, a large box.
But which large box?
No way of telling. If Franz had been given a free choice, he would have picked the top row, three up from the floor, right-hand end. Who wants to walk farther than he needs to from the street door and then crouch all the way down on the linoleum? But Franz wouldn’t have been given a free choice. You want a post office box, you take what’s available at the time. Dead men’s shoes. Someone dies or moves away, their box becomes free, you inherit it. Luck of the draw. A lottery. One chance in fifty-four.
Reacher put his left hand in his pocket and fingered Franz’s key. He figured it would take between two and three seconds to test it in each lock. Worst case, almost three minutes of dancing along the array. Very exposed. Worse than worst case, he could be busy trying a box right in front of its legitimate owner who had just stepped in behind him. Questions, complaints, shouts, calls to the postal police, a potential federal case. Reacher had no doubt at all that he could get out of the lobby unharmed, but he didn’t want to get out empty-handed.
He heard Neagley say: “Good morning.”
He glanced left and saw her at the head of the counter line. Saw her leaning forward, commanding attention. Saw the counter clerk’s eyes lock in on hers. He dropped the pen and took the key from his pocket. Stepped unobtrusively to the wall of boxes and tried the first lock on the left, three up from the floor.
Failure.
He rocked the key clockwise and counterclockwise. No movement. He pulled it out and tried the lock below. Failure. The one below that. Failure.
Neagley was asking a long complicated question about air mail rates. Her elbows were on the counter. She was making the clerk feel like the most important guy in the world. Reacher shuffled right and tried again, one box over, three up from the floor.
Failure.
Four down, fifty to go. Twelve seconds consumed, odds now improved from one-point-eight-five chances in a hundred to two chances in a hundred. He tried the next box down. Failure. He crouched, and tried the box nearest to the floor.
Failure.
He stayed in a crouch and shuffled right. Started the next column from the bottom up. No luck with the lowest. No luck with the one above. No luck with the third up. Nine down, twenty-five seconds elapsed. Neagley was still talking. Then Reacher was aware of a woman squeezing in on his left. Opening her box, high up. Raking out a dense mass of curled junk. Sorting it, as she stood there. Move, he begged her. Step away to the trash receptacle. She backed away. He stepped to his right and tried the fourth row. Neagley was still talking. The clerk was still listening. The key didn’t fit the top box. It didn’t fit the middle box. It didn’t fit the bottom box.
Twelve down. Odds now one in forty-two. Better, but not good. The key didn’t fit anything i
n the fifth row. Nor the sixth. Eighteen down. One-third gone. Odds improving all the time. Look on the bright side. Neagley was still talking. He could hear her. He knew that behind her people in the line would be getting impatient. They would be shuffling their feet. They would be looking around, bored and inquisitive.
He started on the seventh row, at the top. Rocked the key. It didn’t move. No go with the middle box. Nor the lowest. He shuffled right. Neagley had stopped talking. The clerk was explaining something. She was pretending not to understand. Reacher moved right again. The eighth row. The key didn’t fit the top box. The lobby was going quiet. Reacher could feel eyes on his back. He dropped his hand and tried the middle box in the eighth row.
Rocked the key. The small metallic sound was very loud.
Failure.
The lobby was silent.
Reacher tried the lowest box in the eighth row.
Rocked the key.
It moved.
The lock opened.
Reacher stepped back a foot and swung the little door all the way open and crouched down. The box was stuffed. Padded envelopes, big brown envelopes, big white envelopes, letters, catalogs, magazines wrapped in plastic, postcards.
Sound came back to the lobby.
Reacher heard Neagley say, “Thank you very much for your help.” He heard her footsteps on the tile. Heard the line behind her move up. Sensed people refocusing on their chances of getting their business done before they grew old and died. He slid his hand into the box and raked the contents forward. Butted everything together into a steady stack and clamped it between his palms and stood up. Jammed the stack under his arm and relocked the box and pocketed the key and walked away like the most natural thing in the world.
Neagley was waiting in the Mustang, three doors down. Reacher leaned in and dumped the stack of mail on the center console and then followed it inside. Sorted through the stack and pulled out four small padded envelopes self-addressed in Franz’s own familiar handwriting.
“Too small for CDs,” he said.
He arranged them in date order according to the postmarks. The most recent had been stamped the same morning that Franz had disappeared.
“But mailed the night before,” he said.
He opened the envelope and shook out a small silver object. Metal, flat, two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, thin, capped with plastic. Like something that would go on a keyring. It had 128 MB printed on it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Flash memory,” Neagley said. “The new version of floppy discs. No moving parts and a hundred times the storage capacity.”
“What do we do with it?”
“We plug it into one of my computers and we see what’s on it.”
“Just like that?”
“Unless it’s password-protected. Which it probably will be.”
“Isn’t there software to help with that?”
“There used to be. But not anymore. Things get better all the time. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”
“So what do we do?”
“We spend the drive time making mental lists. Likely choices for his password. The old-fashioned way. My guess is we’ll get three tries before the files erase themselves.”
She started the motor and eased away from the curb. Pulled a neat U-turn in the strip mall’s fire lane and headed back north to La Cienega.
The man in the dark blue suit watched them go. He was low down behind the wheel of his dark blue Chrysler sedan, forty yards away, in a slot that belonged to the pharmacy. He opened his cell phone and dialed his boss.
“This time they ignored Franz’s place completely,” he said. “They talked to the landlord instead. Then they were in the post office a long time. I think Franz must have been mailing the stuff to himself. That’s why we couldn’t find it. And they’ve probably got it now.”
15
Neagley plugged the flash memory into a socket on the side of her laptop computer. Reacher watched the screen. Nothing happened for a second and then an icon appeared. It looked like a stylized picture of the physical object she had just attached. It was labeled No Name. Neagley ran her forefinger over the touch pad and then tapped it twice.
The icon blossomed into a full-screen demand for a password.
“Damn,” she said.
“Inevitable,” he said.
“Ideas?”
Reacher had busted computer passwords many times before, back in the day. As always, the technique was to consider the person and think like them. Be them. Serious paranoids used long complex mixes of lower-case and upper-case letters and numbers that meant nothing to anyone, including themselves. Those passwords were effectively unbreakable. But Franz had never been paranoid. He had been a relaxed guy, serious about but simultaneously a little amused by security demands. And he was a words guy, not a numbers guy. He was a man of interests and enthusiasms. Full of affections and loyalties. Middlebrow tastes. A memory like an elephant.
Reacher said, “Angela, Charlie, Miles Davis, Dodgers, Koufax, Panama, Pfeiffer, M*A*S*H, Brooklyn, Heidi, or Jennifer.”
Neagley wrote them all down on a new page in her spiral-bound notebook.
“Why those?” she asked.
“Angela and Charlie are obvious. His family.”
“Too obvious.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Miles Davis was his favorite music, the Dodgers were his favorite team, and Sandy Koufax was his favorite player.”
“Possibilities. What’s Panama?”
“Where he was deployed at the end of 1989. I think that was the place he had the most professional satisfaction. He’ll have remembered it.”
“Pfeiffer as in Michelle Pfeiffer?”
“His favorite actress.”
“Angela looks a little like her, doesn’t she?”
“There you go.”
“M*A*S*H?”
“His all-time favorite movie,” Reacher said.
“More than ten years ago, when you knew him,” Neagley said. “There have been a lot of good movies since then.”
“Passwords come from down deep.”
“It’s too short. Most software asks for a minimum of six characters now.”
“OK, scratch M*A*S*H.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Where he was born.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people did. They moved west when he was little. That’s what would make it a good password.”
“Heidi?”
“His first serious girlfriend. Hot as hell, apparently. Terrific in the sack. He was crazy about her.”
“I didn’t know anything about that. Clearly I was excluded from the guy talk.”
“Clearly,” Reacher said. “Karla Dixon was, too. We didn’t want to look emotional.”
“I’m crossing Heidi off the list. Only five letters, and he was too much into Angela now anyway. He wouldn’t have felt right using an old girlfriend’s name for a password, however hot and terrific she was. I’m crossing Pfeiffer off for the same reason. And who was Jennifer? His second girlfriend? Was she hot, too?”
“Jennifer was his dog,” Reacher said. “When he was a kid. A little black mutt. Lived for eighteen years. Broke him up when it died.”
“Possibility, then. But that’s six. We’ve only got three tries.”
“We’ve got twelve tries,” Reacher said. “Four envelopes, four flash memories. If we start with the earliest postmark we can afford to burn the first three. That information is old anyway.”
Neagley laid the four flash memories on the hotel desk in strict date order. “You sure he wouldn’t have changed his password daily?”
“Franz?” Reacher said. “Are you kidding? A guy like Franz latches onto a word that means something to him and he sticks with it forever.”
Neagley clicked the oldest memory unit into the port and waited until the corresponding icon appeared on the screen. She clicked on it and tabbed the cursor straight to the password bo
x.
“OK,” she said. “You want to nominate a priority order?”
“Do the people names first. Then the place names. I think that’s how it would have worked for him.”
“Is Dodgers a people name?”
“Of course it is. Baseball is played by people.”
“OK. But we’ll start with music.” She typed MilesDavis and hit enter. There was a short pause and then the screen redrew and came back with the dialog box again and a note in red: Your first attempt was incorrect.
“One down,” she said. “Now sports.”
She tried Dodgers.
Incorrect.
“Two down.” She typed Koufax.
The hard drive inside her laptop chattered and the screen went blank.
“What’s happening?” Reacher asked.
“It’s dumping the data,” she said. “Erasing it. It wasn’t Koufax. Three down.”
She pulled the flash memory out of the port and tossed it through a long silver arc into the trash can. Inserted the second unit in its place. Typed Jennifer.
Incorrect.
“Four down,” she said. “Not his puppy.”
She tried Panama.
Incorrect.
“Five down.” She tried Brooklyn.
The screen went blank and the hard drive chattered.
“Six down,” she said. “Not his old hood. You’re zip for six, Reacher.”
The second unit clattered into the trash and she plugged in the third.
“Ideas?”
“Your turn. I seem to have lost my touch.”
“What about his old service number?”
“I doubt it. He was a words guy, not a numbers guy. And for me anyway my number was the same as my Social Security number. Same for him, probably, which would make it too obvious.”
“What would you use?”
“Me? I am a numbers guy. Top row of the keyboard, all in a line, easy to get to. No typing skills required.”
“What number would you use?”
“Six characters? I’d probably write out my birthday, month, day, year, and find the nearest prime number.” Then he thought for a second and said, “Actually, that would be a problem, because there would be two equally close, one exactly seven less and one exactly seven more. So I guess I’d use the square root instead, rounded to three decimal places. Ignore the decimal point, that would give me six numbers, all different.”
