The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  Three hands went up.

  “You’ll regret this,” Reacher said. “I’ll make you regret it.”

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.

  “Same as ever,” he said. “We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

  25

  The Chateau Marmont was a bohemian old pile on Sunset, near the foot of Laurel Canyon. All kinds of movie stars and rock stars had stayed there. There were plenty of photographs on the walls. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, James Dean, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane had booked in there. John Belushi had died in there, after speedballing enough heroin and cocaine to take down every guest in the hotel. There were no photographs of him.

  The desk clerk wanted IDs along with Neagley’s platinum card, so they all checked in under their real names. No choice. Then the guy told them there were only three rooms available. Neagley had to be alone, so Reacher and O’Donnell bunked together and let the women have a room each. Then O’Donnell drove Neagley back to the Beverly Wilshire in Dixon’s car to pick up their bags and check out. Then Neagley would take the Mustang back to LAX and O’Donnell would follow her in convoy to bring her back. It would be a three-hour hiatus. Reacher and Dixon would stay behind and spend the three hours working on the numbers.

  They set up in Dixon’s room. According to the desk guy, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in there once, but there was no remaining sign of him. Reacher laid the seven spreadsheets side by side on the bed and watched as Dixon bent down and scanned them, the same way some people read music or poetry.

  “Two key issues,” she said immediately. “There are no hundred percent scores. No ten out of ten, no nine out of nine.”

  “And?”

  “The first three sheets have twenty-six numbers, the fourth has twenty-seven, and the last three all have twenty-six again.”

  “Which means what?”

  “I don’t know. But none of the sheets is full. Therefore the twenty-six thing and the twenty-seven thing must mean something. It’s deliberate, not accidental. It’s not just a continuous list of numbers with page breaks. If it was, Franz could have gotten them onto six sheets, not seven. So it’s seven separate categories of something.”

  “Separate but similar,” Reacher said. “It’s a descriptive sequence.”

  “The scores get worse,” Dixon said.

  “Radically.”

  “And quite suddenly. They’re OK, and then they fall off a cliff.”

  “But what are they?”

  “No idea.”

  Reacher asked, “What can be measured like that, repetitively?”

  “Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse.”

  “What are the categories? What are we looking at? Seven of what?”

  Dixon nodded. “That’s the key. We need to understand that first.”

  “Can’t be medical tests. Can’t be any kind of tests. Why stick twenty-seven questions in the middle of a sequence where everything else is twenty-six questions? That would destroy consistency.”

  Dixon shrugged and stood up straight. She took off her jacket and dumped it on a chair. Walked to the window and pulled a faded drape aside and looked out and down. Then up at the hills.

  “I like LA,” she said.

  “Me too, I guess,” Reacher said.

  “I like New York better.”

  “Me too, probably.”

  “But the contrast is nice.”

  “I guess.”

  “Shitty circumstances, but it’s great to see you again, Reacher. Really great.”

  Reacher nodded. “Likewise. We thought we’d lost you. Didn’t feel good.”

  “Can I hug you?”

  “You want to hug me?”

  “I wanted to hug all of you at the Hertz office. But I didn’t, because Neagley wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “She shook Angela Franz’s hand. And the dragon lady’s, at New Age.”

  “That’s progress,” Dixon said.

  “A little,” Reacher said.

  “She was abused, way back. That was always my guess.”

  “She’ll never talk about it,” Reacher said.

  “It’s sad.”

  “You bet.”

  Karla Dixon turned to him and Reacher took her in his arms and hugged her hard. She was fragrant. Her hair smelled of shampoo. He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, a complete slow circle. She felt light and thin and fragile. Her back was narrow. She was wearing a black silk shirt, and her skin felt warm underneath it. He set her back on her feet and she stretched up tall and kissed his cheek.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed you all, I mean.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much.”

  “You like life after the army?” she asked.

  “Yes, I like it fine.”

  “I don’t. But maybe you’re reacting better than me.”

  “I don’t know how I’m reacting. I don’t know whether I’m reacting at all. I look at you people and I feel like I’m just treading water. Or drowning. You all are swimming.”

  “Are you really broke?”

  “Almost penniless.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I earn three hundred grand a year and I’m on the breadline. That’s life. You’re well out of it.”

  “I feel that way, usually. Until I have to get back in it. Neagley put a thousand and thirty bucks in my bank account.”

  “Like a ten-thirty radio code? Smart girl.”

  “And for my airfare. Without that I’d still be on my way down here, hitch-hiking.”

  “You’d be walking. Nobody in their right mind would pick you up.”

  Reacher glanced at himself in an old spotted mirror. Six-five, two-fifty, hands as big as frozen turkeys, hair all over the place, unshaven, torn shirtcuffs up on his forearms like Frankenstein’s monster.

  A bum.

  From the big green machine to this.

  Dixon said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I always wished we had done more than just work together.”

  “Who?”

  “You and me.”

  “That was a statement, not a question.”

  “Did you feel the same way?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Please.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So why didn’t we do more?”

  “Wouldn’t have been right.”

  “We ignored all kinds of other regulations.”

  “It would have wrecked the unit. The others would have been jealous.”

  “Including Neagley?”

  “In her way.”

  “We could have kept it a secret.”

  Reacher said, “Dream on.”

  “We could keep it a secret now. We’ve got three hours.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Dixon said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that all of this bad stuff makes me feel that life is so short.”

  Reacher said, “And the unit is wrecked now anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Don’t you have a boyfriend back East?”

  “Not right now.”

  Reacher stepped back to the bed. Karla Dixon came over and stood right next to him, her hip against his thigh. The seven sheets of paper were still laid out in a line.

  “Want to look at these some more?” Reacher asked.

  “Not right now,” Dixon said.

  “Me either.” He gathered them up and butted them together. Placed them on the nightstand and trapped them under the phone. Asked, “You sure about this?”
r />   “I’ve been sure for thirteen years.”

  “Me too. But it has to stay a secret.”

  “Agreed.”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her mouth. The shape of her teeth was new to his tongue. The buttons on her shirt were small and awkward.

  26

  Afterward they lay in bed together and Dixon said, “We need to get back to work.” Reacher rolled over to take the stack of papers off the nightstand, but Dixon said, “No, let’s do it in our heads. We’ll see more that way.”

  “Will we?”

  “Total of one hundred and eighty-three numbers,” she said. “Tell me about one hundred and eighty-three, as a number.”

  “Not prime,” Reacher said. “It’s divisible by three and sixty-one.”

  “I don’t care whether it’s prime or not.”

  “Multiply it by two and you get three hundred and sixty-six, which is the number of days in a leap year.”

  “So is this half a leap year?”

  “Not with seven lists,” Reacher said. “Half of any kind of a year would be six months and six lists.”

  Dixon went quiet.

  Reacher thought: Half a year.

  Half.

  More than one way to skin a cat.

  Twenty-six, twenty-seven.

  He said, “How many days are there in half a year?”

  “A regular year? Depends which half. Either one hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

  “How do you make half?”

  “Divide by two.”

  “Suppose you multiplied by seven over twelve?”

  “That’s more than half.”

  “Then again by six over seven?”

  “That would bring it back to exactly half. Forty-two over eighty-four.”

  “There you go.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “How many weeks in a year?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “How many working days?”

  “Two hundred sixty for five-day weeks, three hundred twelve for six-day weeks.”

  “So how many days would there be in seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks?”

  Dixon thought for a second. “Depends on which seven months you pick. Depends on where the Sundays fall. Depends on what day of the week January first is. Depends on whether you’re looking at a continuous run of months or cherry-picking.”

  “Run the numbers, Karla. There are only two possible answers.”

  Dixon paused a beat. “One hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

  “Exactly,” Reacher said. “Those seven sheets are seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks. One of the long months only had four Sundays. Hence the twenty-seven-day anomaly.”

  Dixon slid out from under the sheet and walked naked to where she had left her briefcase and came back with a leather Filofax diary. She opened it and put it on the bed and took the papers off the nightstand and arranged them in a line below the diary. Her eyes flicked back and forth, seven times.

  “It’s this year,” she said. “It’s the last seven calendar months. Right up to the end of last month. Take out the Sundays, you get three twenty-six-day months, then one twenty-seven-day month, and then three more twenty-six-day months.”

  “There you go,” Reacher said. “Some kind of six-day-a-week figures got worse and worse over the last seven months. Some kind of results. We’re halfway there.”

  “The easy half,” Dixon said. “Now tell me what the figures mean.”

  “Something was supposed to happen nine or ten or twelve or thirteen times a day Monday through Saturday and didn’t always come out right.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I don’t know. What kind of a thing happens ten or twelve times a day?”

  “Not Model-T Ford production, that’s for sure. It’s got to be something small scale. Or professional. Like a dentist’s appointments. Or a lawyer’s. Or a hairdresser’s.”

  “There was a nail salon near Franz’s office.”

  “They do more than that in a day. And how would nails relate to four people disappearing and a Syrian with four aliases?”

  “I don’t know,” Reacher said.

  “Me either,” Dixon said.

  “We should shower and get dressed.”

  “After.”

  “After what?”

  Dixon didn’t answer. Just walked back to the bed and pinned him to the pillow and kissed him again.

  Two thousand horizontal and seven vertical miles away from them the dark-haired forty-year-old currently calling himself Alan Mason was in the front cabin of a United Airlines Boeing 757, en route from LaGuardia, New York, to Denver, Colorado. He was in seat 3A, with a glass of sparkling mineral water beside him on the armrest tray and a newspaper open on his lap. But he wasn’t reading it. He was gazing out the window instead, at the bright white clouds below.

  And eight miles south of them the man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler was tailing O’Donnell and Neagley back from the LAX Hertz lot. He had picked them up leaving the Beverly Wilshire. He had guessed they were flying out, so he had positioned himself to follow them to the airport terminals. When O’Donnell had swung back north on Sepulveda he had needed to scramble fast to get behind them. As a result he was ten cars back all the way. Which was good, he figured, in terms of inconspicuous surveillance.

  27

  O’Donnell said, “We’re nowhere at all,” and Neagley said, “We need to face facts. The trail is stone cold and we have virtually no useful data.”

  They were in Karla Dixon’s bedroom. Leonardo DiCaprio’s old crib. The bed was made. Reacher and Dixon were showered and dressed and their hair was dry. They were standing well apart from each other. The seven spreadsheets were laid out on the dresser with the diary next to them. No one disputed that they represented the last seven calendar months. But no one saw how that information helped them, either.

  Dixon looked at Reacher and asked, “What do you want to do, boss?”

  “Take a break,” Reacher said. “We’re missing something. We’re not thinking straight. We should take a break and come back to it.”

  “We never used to take breaks.”

  “We used to have five more pairs of eyes.”

  The man in the dark blue suit called it in: “They moved to the Chateau Marmont. And there’s four of them now. Karla Dixon showed up. So they’re all present and correct and accounted for.” Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his tie over the front of his shirt.

  Reacher went for a walk west on Sunset, alone. Solitude was still his natural condition. He took his money out of his pocket and counted it. Not much left. He ducked into a souvenir store and found a rail of discounted shirts. Last year’s styles. Or the last decade’s. On one end of the rail was a bunch of blue items with white patterns, shiny, some kind of a man-made material. Spread collars, short sleeves, square hems. He picked one out. It was like something his father might have worn to go bowling in the 1950s. Except three sizes larger. Reacher was much bigger than his father had been. He found a mirror and jammed the hanger up under his chin. The shirt looked like it might fit him. It was probably wide enough in the shoulders. The short sleeves would solve the problem of trying to find something to accommodate the length of his arms. His arms were like a gorilla’s, only longer and thicker.

  With tax, the garment cost nearly twenty-one dollars. Reacher paid the guy at the register and then bit off the tags and stripped off his old shirt and put the new one on right there and then. Left it untucked. Tugged it down at the bottom and rolled his shoulders. With the top button open it fit pretty well. The sleeves were tight around his biceps but not so bad that his blood flow was imperiled.

  “Got a trash can?” he asked.

  The guy ducked down and came back with a round metal canister lined with a white plastic bag. Reacher balled up his old shirt and tossed it in.

  “Barbershop n
ear here?” he asked.

  “Two blocks north,” the guy said. “Up the hill. Shoeshines and haircuts in the corner of the grocery store.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Laurel Canyon,” the guy said, like an explanation.

  The grocery store sold beer out of ice chests and coffee out of press-top flasks. Reacher took a medium cup of house blend, black, and headed for the barber’s chair. It was an old-fashioned thing covered in red speckled vinyl. There were straight razors on the sink and a shoeshine chair nearby. A thin guy in a white wife-beater was sitting in it. He had needle tracks up and down his arms. He looked up and concentrated, like he was assessing the size of the task ahead of him.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Shave and a haircut?”

  “Two bits?” Reacher said.

  “Eight dollars,” the guy said.

  Reacher checked his pocket again.

  “Ten,” he said. “To include a shoeshine and the coffee.”

  “That all would be twelve.”

  “Ten is what I’ve got.”

  The guy shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

  Laurel Canyon, Reacher thought. Thirty minutes later he was down to his last dollar but his shoes were clean and his face was as smooth as it had ever been. His head was shaved almost as close. He had asked for a standard army buzz cut but the guy had given him something a whole lot closer to the Marine Corps version. Clearly not a veteran. Reacher paused a beat and checked the guy’s arms again.

  He asked, “Where can a person score around here?”

  “You’re not a user,” the guy said.

  “For a friend.”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I can get some.”

  The guy in the wife-beater shrugged and said, “There’s usually a crew behind the wax museum.”

  Reacher walked back to the hotel by staying in the low canyon streets for two blocks and then coming on it from the rear. Along the way he passed a dark blue Chrysler 300C parked on the curb. A guy in a dark blue suit was behind the wheel. The suit matched the sheet metal, more or less exactly. The engine was off and the guy was just waiting. Reacher assumed it was a livery car. A limo. He figured some enterprising car service owner had gotten a better price from the Chrysler dealership than the Lincoln dealership and had switched away from Town Cars. Figured he had dressed the drivers in matching suits, looking for an edge. Reacher knew that LA was a tough market, in the limousine business. He had read about it somewhere.