28
Dinner cost Reacher way less than nine hundred bucks. Either out of taste or preference or respect for the context or deference to his economic predicament, the others opted for a noisy hamburger barn on Sunset, just east of the Mondrian Hotel. There was no Norwegian water on offer. Just tap and domestic beer and thick juicy patties and pickles and loud vintage rhythm and blues. Reacher looked right at home, in a fifties kind of a way. The others looked a little out of place. They were at a round table set for four. Conversation stopped and started as the pleasure of being among old friends was overtaken by memories of the others who were missing. Reacher mostly listened. The dynamic of the round table meant that no one person was dominant. The center of attention bounced back and forth randomly. After thirty minutes of reminiscence and catch-up the talk turned back to Franz.
O’Donnell said, “Start at the very beginning. If we believe his wife, he quit everything except routine database mining more than four years ago. So why would he suddenly launch into something this serious?”
Dixon said, “Because someone asked him to.”
“Exactly,” O’Donnell said. “This thing starts with his client. So who was it?”
“Could have been anybody.”
“No,” O’Donnell said. “It was someone special. He went the extra mile here. He broke a four-year habit for this guy. Kind of broke faith with his wife and son, too.”
Neagley said, “It could have been a big payer.”
“Or someone he was obligated to somehow,” Dixon said.
Neagley said, “Or it might have looked routine at the get-go. Maybe he had no idea where it was leading. Maybe the client didn’t, either.”
Reacher listened. It had to be someone special. Someone he was obligated to somehow. He watched as O’Donnell took the floor, then Dixon, then Neagley. The vector bounced around between them and traced a heavy triangle in the air. Something stirred in the back of his mind. Something Dixon had said, hours ago, in the car leaving LAX. He closed his eyes, but he couldn’t get it. He spoke up and the triangle changed to a square, to include him.
“We should ask Angela,” he said. “If he had some kind of a longstanding big-deal client, he might have mentioned him at home.”
“I’d like to meet Charlie,” O’Donnell said.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Reacher said. “Unless the deputies come for me. In which case you can go on ahead without me.”
“Look on the bright side,” Dixon said. “Maybe you gave the guy a concussion. Maybe he doesn’t remember who he is, let alone who you are.”
They walked back to the hotel and split up in the lobby. No appetite for a nightcap. Just an unspoken agreement to get some sleep and start work again bright and early. Reacher and O’Donnell headed up together. Didn’t talk much. Reacher was asleep five seconds after his head hit the pillow.
He woke up again at seven o’clock in the morning. Early sun was coming in the window. David O’Donnell was coming in the door. In a hurry. Fully dressed, a newspaper under his arm, cardboard cups of coffee in both hands.
“I went for a walk,” he said.
“And?”
“You’re in trouble,” he said. “I think.”
“Who?”
“That deputy. He’s parked a hundred yards from here.”
“The same guy?”
“The same guy and the same car. He’s got a metal splint on his face and a garbage bag taped across his window.”
“Did he see you?”
“No.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Just sitting there. Like he’s waiting.”
29
They ordered breakfast in Dixon’s room. First rule, learned a long time ago: Eat when you can, because you never know when the next chance will come. Especially when you’re about to disappear into the system. Reacher shoveled eggs and bacon and toast down his throat and followed it with plenty of coffee. He was calm, but frustrated.
“I should have stayed in Portland,” he said. “I might as well have.”
“How did they find us so fast?” Dixon asked.
“Computers,” Neagley said. “Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. They can search hotel registers anytime they want now. This is a police state.”
“We are the police,” O’Donnell said.
“We used to be.”
“I wish we still were. You’d hardly have to break a sweat anymore.”
“You guys get going,” Reacher said. “I don’t want you to get snarled up in this. We can’t spare the time. So don’t let the deputy see you leave. Go visit with Angela Franz. Chase the client. I’ll get back to you when I can.”
He drained the last of his coffee and headed back to his room. Put his folding toothbrush in his pocket and hid his passport and his ATM card and seven hundred of his remaining eight hundred dollars in O’Donnell’s suit carrier. Because certain things can go missing, after an arrest. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby. Just sat in an armchair and waited. No need to turn the whole thing into a big drama, running up and down hotel corridors. Because, second rule, learned from a lifetime of bad luck and trouble: Maintain a little dignity.
He waited.
Thirty minutes. Sixty. The lobby had three morning papers, and he read them all. Every word. Sports, features, editorials, national, international. And business. There was a story about Homeland Security’s financial impact on the private sector. It quoted the same seven-billion-dollar figure that Neagley had mentioned. A lot of money. Surpassed only, the article said, by the bonanza for the defense contractors. The Pentagon still had more cash than anyone else, and it was still spreading it around like crazy.
Ninety minutes.
Nothing happened.
At the two-hour point Reacher got up and put the papers back on the rack. Stepped to the door and looked outside. Bright sun, blue sky, not much smog. A light wind tossing exotic trees. Waxed cars rolling past, slow and glittering. A fine day. The twenty-fourth day Calvin Franz hadn’t been around to see. Nearly four whole weeks. Same for Tony Swan and Jorge Sanchez and Manuel Orozco, presumably.
There are dead men walking, as of right now. You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.
Reacher stepped outside. Stood for a second, exposed, like he was expecting sniper fire. Certainly there had been time to get whole SWAT teams into position. But the sidewalk was quiet. No parked vehicles. No innocuous florists’ trucks. No bogus telephone linemen. No surveillance. He turned left on Sunset. Left again on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Walked slow and kept close to hedges and plantings. Turned left again on the winding canyon road that ran behind the hotel.
The tan Crown Vic was dead ahead.
It was parked at the far curb, alone, isolated, a hundred yards away. Still, inert, engine off. Like O’Donnell had said, its broken front passenger window was taped over with a black garbage bag, pulled taut. The driver was in the seat. Just sitting there. Not moving, except for regular turns of his head. Rearview mirror, straight ahead, door mirror. The guy had a real rhythm going. Hypnotic. Rearview mirror, straight ahead, door mirror. Reacher caught a flash of an aluminum splint fixed across his nose.
The car looked low and cold, like it hadn’t been run for many hours.
The guy was on his own, just watching and waiting.
But for what?
Reacher turned around and backtracked the way he had come. Made it back to the lobby and back to his chair. Sat down again, with the seed of a germ of a new theory in his mind.
His wife called me, Neagley had said.
What did she want you to do?
Nothing, Neagley had said. She was just telling me.
Just telling me.
And then: Charlie swinging on the door handle. Reacher had asked: Is it OK to be opening the door all by yourself? And the little boy had said: Yes, it’s OK.
And then: Charlie, you should go out and play.
And then: I think there’s something yo
u’re not telling us.
The cost of doing business.
Reacher sat in the Chateau Marmont’s velvet lobby armchair, thinking, waiting to be proved right or wrong by whoever came through the street door first, his old unit or a bunch of fired-up LA County deputies.
30
His old unit came through the door first. What was left of it, anyway. The remnant. O’Donnell and Neagley and Dixon, all of them fast and anxious. They stopped dead in surprise when they saw him and he raised a hand in greeting.
“You’re still here,” O’Donnell said.
“No, I’m an optical illusion.”
“Outstanding.”
“What did Angela say?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t know anything about his clients.”
“How was she?”
“Like a woman whose husband just died.”
“What did you think of Charlie?”
“Nice kid. Like his dad. Franz lives on, in a way.”
Dixon said, “Why are you still here?”
“That’s a very good question,” Reacher said.
“What’s the answer?”
“Is the deputy still out there?”
Dixon nodded. “We saw him from the end of the street.”
“Let’s go upstairs.”
They used the room that Reacher and O’Donnell were in. It was a little bigger than Dixon’s, because it was a double. The first thing Reacher did was retrieve his money and his passport and his ATM card from O’Donnell’s bag.
O’Donnell said, “Looks like you think you’re sticking around.”
“I think I am,” Reacher said.
“Why?”
“Because Charlie opened the door all by himself.”
“Which means?”
“Seems to me that Angela is a pretty good mom. Normal, at worst. Charlie was clean, well fed, well dressed, well balanced, well cared for, well looked after. So we can conclude that Angela is doing a conscientious job with the parenting thing. Yet she let the kid open the door to a couple of complete strangers.”
Dixon said, “Her husband was just killed. Maybe she was distracted.”
“More likely the opposite. Her husband was killed more than three weeks ago. My guess is she’s over whatever initial reaction she had. Now she’s clinging to Charlie more than ever because he’s all she’s got left. Yet she let the kid get the door. Then she told him to go out to play. She didn’t say to go play in his room. She said, Go out. In Santa Monica? In a yard on a busy street full of passersby? Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because she knew it was safe.”
“How?”
“Because she knew that deputy was watching the house.”
“You think?”
“Why did she wait fourteen days before calling Neagley?”
“She was distracted,” Dixon said again.
“Possibly,” Reacher said. “But maybe there’s another reason. Maybe she wasn’t going to call us at all. We were ancient history. She liked Franz’s current life better. Naturally, because she was Franz’s current life. We represented the bad old days, rough, dangerous, uncouth. I think she was disapproving. Or if not, then a little jealous.”
“I agree,” Neagley said. “That’s the impression I got.”
“So why did she call you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it from the deputies’ point of view. Small department, limited resources. They find a dead guy in the desert, they ID him, they set the wheels in motion. They do it by the book. First thing they do is profile the victim. Along the way they find out that he used to be a part of a shit-hot investigative team in the military. And they find out that all but one of his old buddies are supposedly still around somewhere.”
“And they suspect us?”
“No, I think they dismiss us as suspects and they move right along. But they get nowhere. No clues, no leads, no breaks. They’re stuck.”
“So?”
“So after two weeks of frustration they get an idea. Angela has told them all about the unit and the loyalty and the old slogan, and they see an opportunity. Effectively they’ve got a freelance investigative team waiting in the wings. One that’s smart and experienced and above all one that’s going to be very highly motivated. So they prompt Angela to call us. Just to tell us, nothing more. Because they know that’s the exact same thing as winding up the Energizer Bunny. They know we’re going to get down here pretty damn fast. They know we’re going to look for answers. They know they can just stay in the shadows and watch us and piggy-back on whatever we do.”
“That’s ridiculous,” O’Donnell said.
“But I think it’s exactly what happened,” Reacher said. “Angela told them it was Neagley she had gotten on the phone, they put Neagley’s name on a watch list, they picked her up when she got to town, they tailed her and lay back in the weeds and watched the rest of us show up one by one. And they’ve been watching everything we’ve been doing ever since. Police work by proxy. That’s what Angela wasn’t telling us. The deputies asked her to set us up as stalking horses and she agreed. And that’s why I’m still here. There’s no other explanation. They figure a busted nose is the price of doing business.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Only one way to find out. Take a walk around the block and talk to the deputy.”
“You think?”
“Dixon should go. She wasn’t with us in Santa Ana. So if I’m wrong the guy probably won’t shoot her.”
31
Dixon went. She left the room without a word. O’Donnell said, “I don’t think Angela was hiding anything today. So I don’t think Franz had a client at all.”
“How hard did you press her?” Reacher asked.
“We didn’t need to press her. It was all right out there. She had nothing to tell us. It’s inconceivable that Franz would have gotten into a thing like this for anyone except a big-deal regular customer who went back years, and it’s inconceivable he could have had such a guy without Angela at least hearing a name.”
Reacher nodded. Then he smiled, briefly. He liked his old team. He could rely on them, absolutely. No second-guessing. If Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell went out with questions, they came back with answers. Always, whatever the issue, whatever it took. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.
Neagley asked, “What next?”
“Let’s talk to the deputies first,” Reacher said. “Specifically let’s see if they went out to Vegas.”
“To Sanchez and Orozco’s office? Dixon was just there. It hadn’t been disturbed.”
“She didn’t check their homes.”
Dixon came back thirty minutes later. Said, “He didn’t shoot me.”
“That’s good,” Reacher said.
“I certainly thought so.”
“Did he ‘fess up to anything?”
“He didn’t confirm or deny.”
“Is he mad about his face?”
“Livid.”
“So what’s the story?”
“He called his boss. They want to meet with us. Here, an hour from now.”
“Who’s his boss?”
“A guy called Curtis Mauney. LA County Sheriff’s Department.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “We can do that. We’ll see what the guy has got. We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give.”
They waited the hour downstairs in the lobby. No stress, no strain. Military service teaches a person how to wait. O’Donnell sprawled on a sofa and cleaned his fingernails with his switchblade. Dixon read the seven spreadsheets over and over and then put them away and closed her eyes. Neagley sat alone in a chair against a wall. Reacher sat under an old framed photograph of Raquel Welch. The picture had been taken outside the hotel late in the afternoon and the light was as golden as her skin. The magic hour, photographers called it. Brief, glowing, lovely. Like fame itself, Reacher figu
red.
The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was waiting, too. He was waiting to take a clandestine meeting in his room in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. He was uncharacteristically nervous and out of sorts. Three reasons. First, his room was dim and shabby. Not at all what he had been expecting. Second, he had a suitcase stacked against the wall. It was a dark gray hard-shell Samsonite, carefully selected like all his accessories, expensive enough to blend with his air of affluence but not ostentatious enough to attract undue attention. Inside it were bearer bonds and cut diamonds and Swiss bank access codes worth a lot of money. Sixty-five million U.S. dollars, to be exact, and the people he was going to be meeting with were not the kind of people a prudent person would trust around portable and untraceable assets.
And third, he hadn’t slept well. The night air had been full of an unpleasant smell. He had run through a mental checklist until he had identified it as dog food. Clearly there was a factory nearby and the wind was blowing in an unfortunate direction. Then he had lain awake and worried about the dog food’s ingredients. Meat, obviously. But he knew that smell was a physical mechanism that depended on the impact of actual molecules on the nasal lining. Therefore, technically, actual fragments of meat were entering his nostrils. They were in contact with his body. And there were certain meats that Azhari Mahmoud should not be in contact with, ever, under any circumstances.
He stepped to the bathroom. Washed his face for the fifth time that day. Looked at himself in the mirror. Clamped his jaw. He wasn’t Azhari Mahmoud. Not right then. He was Alan Mason, a Westerner, and there was a job to be done.
First in through the Chateau Marmont’s lobby door was the banged-up deputy himself, Thomas Brant. He had a vivid bruise on the side of his forehead and the sculptured metal splint on his face was taped to his cheekbones so tight that the skin around his eyes was distorted. He was walking like he hurt. He looked about one-third mad as hell that he had been taken down and one-third sheepish that he had let it happen and one-third pissed that he had to swallow his feelings for the sake of the job. He was followed in by an older guy that had to be his boss, Curtis Mauney. Mauney looked to be approaching fifty. He was short and solid and had the kind of worn look a guy gets when he has been in the same line of work too long. His hair was dyed a dull black that didn’t match his eyebrows. He was carrying a battered leather briefcase. He asked, “Which one of you assholes hit my guy?”
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