“Initials are all the same,” O’Donnell said. “Top one is Arab, anywhere from Morocco to Pakistan.”
“Syrian,” Neagley said. “That would be my guess.”
“Last four names feel British,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? Rather than American? English or Scottish.”
“Significance?” O’Donnell asked.
Reacher said, “At first glance I would say one of Franz’s background checks came up with a Syrian guy with four known aliases. Because of the five sets of common initials. Clumsy, but indicative. Maybe he’s got monogrammed shirts. And maybe the phony names are British because the paperwork is British, which would get around the kind of scrutiny that American paperwork would invite over here.”
“Possible,” O’Donnell said.
Reacher said, “Show me the numbers.”
Neagley closed the word processor document and opened the first of seven spreadsheets. It was nothing more than a page-long vertical list of fractions. At the top was 10/12. At the bottom was 11/12. In between were twenty-some similar numbers, including a repeated 10/12 and a 12/13 and a 9/10.
“Next,” Reacher said.
The next spreadsheet was essentially identical. A long vertical column, starting with 13/14 and ending with 8/9. Twenty-some similar numbers in between.
“Next,” Reacher said.
The third spreadsheet showed more or less exactly the same thing.
“Are they dates?” O’Donnell said.
“No,” Reacher said. “Thirteen-fourteen isn’t a date whether it’s month-day or day-month.”
“So what are they? Just fractions?”
“Not really. Ten-over-twelve would be written five-over-six if it was a regular fraction.”
“They’re like box scores, then.”
“For the game from hell. Thirteen for fourteen and twelve for thirteen would imply lots of extra innings and a three-figure final score, probably.”
“So what are they?”
“Show me the next one.”
The fourth spreadsheet showed the same long vertical list of fractions. The denominators were pretty much the same as in the first three, twelves and tens and thirteens. But the numerators were generally smaller. There was a 9/12, and an 8/13. Even a 5/14.
O’Donnell said, “If these are box scores, someone’s slumping.”
“Next,” Reacher said.
The trend continued. The fifth sheet had a 3/12, and a 4/13. The best was a 6/11.
“Someone’s heading back to the minor leagues,” O’Donnell said.
The sixth list had 5/13 as its best score and 3/13 as its worst. The seventh and last was about the same, varying between 4/11 and 3/12.
Neagley looked up at Reacher and said, “You figure it out. You’re the numbers guy. And Franz addressed all of this to you, after all.”
“I was his password,” Reacher said. “That’s all. He didn’t address anything to anyone. These aren’t messages. He’d have made it clearer if he was trying to communicate. These are working notes.”
“Very cryptic working notes.”
“Can you print them out for me? I can’t think without seeing them on paper.”
“I can print them in the business center downstairs. That’s why I stay in places like this now.”
O’Donnell asked, “Why would they trash an office to look for a list of numbers?”
“Maybe they didn’t,” Reacher said. “Maybe they were looking for the list of names.”
Neagley shut down the spreadsheets and reopened the word processor document. Azhari Mahmoud, Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, Anthony Matthews.
“So who is this guy?” Reacher said.
Three time zones away in New York City it was three hours later in the day and the dark-haired forty-year-old man who could have been Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or Israeli, or Italian was crouching on a bathroom floor inside an expensive Madison Avenue hotel room. The door was closed. There was no smoke detector in the bathroom, but there was an extractor fan. The British passport issued to Adrian Mount was burning in the toilet pan. As always the inside pages went up easily. The stiff red covers burned slower. Page 31 was the laminated ID page. It burned slowest of all. The plastic curled and twisted and melted. The man used the hairdryer from the bathroom wall at a distance to fan the flames. Then he used the butt-end of his toothbrush to stir the ashes and the unburned flakes of paper. He lit another match and went after anything that was still recognizable.
Five minutes later Adrian Mount was flushed away and Alan Mason was on his way down to the street in the elevator.
19
Neagley detoured to the Beverly Wilshire’s basement business center and printed out all eight of Franz’s secret files. Then she joined O’Donnell and Reacher for lunch in the lobby restaurant. She sat between the two of them with the kind of look on her face that made Reacher think she was reliving a hundred similar meals.
And Reacher was doing the same thing himself. But back in the day they had been in creased BDUs and they had eaten in O Clubs or grimy off-post diners or they had shared sandwiches and pizza around battered metal desks. Now the déjà vu was corrupted by the new context. The room was dim and tall and stylish and full of people who could have been movie agents or executives. Actors, even. Neagley and O’Donnell looked right at home. Neagley was wearing baggy black high-waisted pants and a cotton T-shirt that fitted her like a second skin. Her face was tan and flawless and her makeup was so subtle it was like she was wearing none at all. O’Donnell’s suit was gray with a slight sheen to it and his shirt was white and crisp and immaculate even though he must have put it on three thousand miles away. His tie was striped and regimental and perfectly knotted.
Reacher was in a shirt a size too small with a tear in the sleeve and a stain on the front. His hair was long and his jeans were cheap and his shoes were scuffed and he couldn’t afford to pay for the dish he had ordered. He couldn’t even afford to pay for the Norwegian water he was drinking.
Sad, he had said about Franz, when he had seen the strip mall office. From the big green machine to this?
What were Neagley and O’Donnell thinking about him?
“Show me the pages with the numbers,” he said.
Neagley passed seven sheets of paper across the table. She had marked them in pencil, top right-hand corner, to indicate their order. He scanned them all, one through seven, quickly, looking for overall impressions. A total of 183 proper fractions, not canceled. Proper, in that the numerator, the top number, was always smaller than the denominator, the bottom number. Not canceled, in that 10/12 and 8/10 were not expressed as 5/6 and 4/5, which they would have been if the arithmetic convention had been properly followed.
Therefore, they were not really fractions at all. They were scores, or results, or performance assessments. They were saying ten times out of twelve or eight times out of ten, something happened.
Or didn’t happen.
There were consistently twenty-six scores on each page, except for the fourth sheet, where there were twenty-seven.
The scores or the results or the ratios or whatever they were on the first three sheets looked pretty healthy. Expressed like a batting average or a win percentage, they hovered between a fine .870 and an excellent .907. Then there was a dramatic fall on the fourth sheet, where the overall average looked like a .574. The fifth, sixth, and seventh sheets got progressively more and more dismal, with a .368, a .308, and a .307.
“Got it yet?” Neagley asked.
“No clue,” Reacher said. “I wish Franz was here to explain it.”
“If he was here, we wouldn’t be here.”
“We could have been. We could have all gotten together from time to time.”
“Like a class reunion?”
“It might have been fun.”
O’Donnell raised his glass and said, “Absent friends.”
Neagley raised her glass. Reacher raised his. They drank
water that had frozen at the top of a Scandinavian glacier ten thousand years ago and then inched downward over centuries, before melting into mountain springs and streams, to the memory of four friends, five including Stan Lowrey, who they assumed they would never see again.
But they assumed wrong. One of their friends had just gotten on a plane in Las Vegas.
20
A waiter brought their food. Salmon for Neagley, chicken for Reacher, tuna for O’Donnell, who said, “I assume you’ve been to Franz’s house.”
“Yesterday,” Neagley said. “Santa Monica.”
“Anything there?”
“A widow and a fatherless child.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing that meant anything.”
“We should go to all the houses. Swan’s first, because it’ll be the closest.”
“We don’t have his address.”
“Didn’t you ask the New Age lady?”
“Not worth it. She wouldn’t have told us. She was very correct.”
“You could have broken her leg.”
“Those were the days.”
Reacher asked, “Was Swan married?”
“I don’t think so,” Neagley said.
“Too ugly,” O’Donnell said.
“Are you married?” Neagley asked him.
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“But for the opposite reason. It would upset too many other innocent parties.”
Reacher said, “We could try that UPS thing again. Swan probably got packages at home. If he wasn’t married he probably furnished his place from catalogs. I can’t see him shopping for chairs or tables or knives and forks.”
“OK,” Neagley said. She used her cell to call Chicago, right there at the table, and looked more like a movie executive than ever. O’Donnell leaned forward and looked across her to Reacher and said, “Go over the time line for me.”
“The dragon lady at New Age said Swan got fired more than three weeks ago. Call it twenty-four or twenty-five days. Twenty-three days ago Franz went out and never came back. His wife called Neagley fourteen days after the body was found.”
“For what reason?”
“Notification, pure and simple. She’s relying on the deputies from up where it happened.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s a civilian. She looks like Michelle Pfeiffer. She’s halfway resentful of us for having been such good friends with her husband. Their son looks just like him.”
“Poor kid.”
Neagley covered her phone with her hand and said, “We got cell numbers for Sanchez, Orozco, and Swan.” She fumbled one-handed and took paper and pen from her purse. Wrote three numbers, ten digits each.
“Use them to get addresses,” Reacher said.
Neagley shook her head. “They don’t help. Sanchez’s and Orozco’s are corporate and Swan’s comes back to New Age.” She clicked off with her guy in Chicago and dialed the numbers she had listed, one after another.
“Straight to voice mail,” she said. “Switched off, all of them.”
“Inevitable,” Reacher said. “All the batteries ran out three weeks ago.”
“I really hate hearing their voices,” she said. “You know, you record your mail-box greeting, you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to you.”
“A little bit of immortality,” O’Donnell said.
A busboy took their plates away. Their waiter came back with dessert menus. Reacher scanned a list of confections priced higher than a night in a motel in most parts of the United States.
“Nothing for me,” he said. He thought Neagley was going to press him, but her cell phone rang. She answered it and listened and wrote some more on her slip of paper.
“Swan’s address,” she said. “Santa Ana, near the zoo.”
O’Donnell said, “Let’s hit the road.”
They used his car, a Hertz four-door with GPS navigation, and started the slow crawl south and east to the 5.
The man called Thomas Brant watched them go. His Crown Vic was parked a block away and he was sitting on a bench in the mouth of Rodeo Drive, surrounded by two hundred tourists. He used his cell and called Curtis Mauney, his boss. Said, “There are three of them now. It’s working like a charm. It’s like the gathering of the clans.”
Forty yards west, the man in the blue suit watched them go, too. He was slumped low in his blue Chrysler in a hairdresser’s lot on Wilshire. He dialed his boss and said, “There are three of them now. I think the new one must be O’Donnell. Therefore the bum is Reacher. They look like they’ve got the bit between their teeth.”
And three thousand miles away in New York City the dark-haired forty-year-old was in the shared airline offices at Park and 42nd. He was buying an open round-trip ticket from LaGuardia to Denver, Colorado. He was paying for it with a Visa Platinum card in the name of Alan Mason.
21
Santa Ana was way south and east, past Anaheim, down in Orange County. The township itself was twenty miles west of the Santa Ana Mountains, where the infamous winds came from. Time to time they blew in, dry, warm, steady, and they sent the whole of LA crazy. Reacher had seen their effects a couple of times. Once he had been in town after liaising with the jarheads at Camp Pendleton. Once he had been on a weekend pass from Fort Irwin. He had seen minor barroom brawls end up as multiple first-degree homicides. He had seen burnt toast end up in wife-beating and prison and divorce. He had seen a guy get bludgeoned to the ground for walking too slow on the sidewalk.
But the winds weren’t blowing that day. The air was hot and still and brown and heavy. O’Donnell’s rented GPS had a polite insistent female voice that took them off the 5 south of the zoo, opposite Tustin. Then it led them through the spacious grid of streets toward the Orange County Museum of Art. Before they got there it turned them left and right and left again and told them they were approaching their destination. Then it told them they had arrived.
Which they clearly had.
O’Donnell coasted to a stop next to a curbside mail box tricked out to look like a swan. The box was a standard USPS-approved metal item set on a post and painted bright white. Along the spine at the top was attached a vertical shape jigsawed from a wooden board. The shape had a long graceful neck and a scalloped back and a kicked-up tail. It was painted white too, except for the beak, which was dark orange, and the eye, which was black. With the bulk of the box suggesting the swell of the bird’s body it was a pretty good representation.
O’Donnell said, “Tell me Swan didn’t make that.”
“Nephew or niece,” Neagley said. “Probably a housewarming gift.”
“Which he had to use in case they visited.”
“I think it’s nice.”
Behind the box a cast concrete driveway led to a double gate in a four-foot fence. Parallel to the driveway was a narrower concrete walkway that led to a single gate. The fence was made of green plastic-coated wire. All four gateposts were topped with tiny alloy pineapples. Both gates were closed. Both had store-bought Beware of the Dog signs on them. The driveway led to an attached one-car garage. The walkway led to the front door of a small plain stucco bungalow painted a sun-baked tan. The windows had corrugated metal awnings over them, like eyebrows. The door had a similar thing, narrower, set high. As a whole the place was serious, severe, adequate, unfrivolous. Masculine.
And quiet, and still.
“Feels empty,” Neagley said. “Like there’s nobody home.”
Reacher nodded. The front yard was grass only. No plantings. No flowers. No shrubs. The grass looked dry and slightly long, like a meticulous owner had stopped watering it and mowing it about three weeks ago.
There was no visible alarm system.
“Let’s check it out,” Reacher said.
They got out of the car and walked to the single gate. It wasn’t locked or chained. They walked to the door. Reacher pushed the bell. Waited. No response. There was a slab path around the perimeter of
the building. They followed it counterclockwise. There was a personnel door in the side of the garage. It was locked. There was a kitchen door in the back wall of the house. It was locked, too. The top half of it was a single glass panel. Through it was visible a small kitchen, old-fashioned, unrenovated in maybe forty years, but clean and efficient. No mess. No dirty dishes. Appliances in speckled green enamel. A small table and two chairs. Empty dog bowls neatly side by side on a green linoleum floor.
Beyond the kitchen door was a slider with a step down to a small concrete patio. The patio was empty. The slider was locked. Behind it, drapes were partially drawn. A bedroom, maybe used as a den.
The neighborhood was quiet. The house was still and silent, except for a tiny subliminal hum that raised the hairs on Reacher’s arms and sounded a faint alarm in the back of his mind.
“Kitchen door?” O’Donnell asked.
Reacher nodded. O’Donnell put his hand in his pocket and came out with his brass knuckles. Ceramic knuckles, technically. But they didn’t have much in common with cups and saucers. They were made from some kind of a complex mineral powder, molded under tremendous pressure and bound with epoxy adhesives. They were probably stronger than steel and certainly they were harder than brass. And the molding process allowed wicked shapes in the striking surfaces. Being hit by a set wielded by a guy as big as David O’Donnell would be like being hit by a bowling ball studded with sharks’ teeth.
O’Donnell fitted them to his hand and balled his fist. He stepped to the kitchen door and tapped the glass backhand, quite gently, like he was trying to attract an occupant’s attention without startling him. The glass broke and a triangular shard fell backward into the kitchen. O’Donnell’s coordination was so good that his real knuckles stopped before they reached the jagged edges. He tapped twice more and cleared a hole big enough to get a hand through. Then he slipped the knuckles off and pushed his sleeve up on his forearm and threaded his hand through and turned the inside handle.
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