Neagley agreed with his analysis. And she grasped the next part of the plan without having to ask, which was one of the reasons why Reacher liked her so much.
They parked a hundred yards apart on different streets, hiding in plain sight. The sun was over the horizon and the dawn was gray. Reacher was fifty yards from New Age’s building and could see his car reflected in the mirror glass, tiny and distant and anonymous, one of hundreds dumped all around. There was a flatbed truck backed up to the wrecked reception area. A steel cable snaked inside into the gloom. The guy called Parker was still there in his raincoat. He was directing operations. He had one foot soldier with him. Reacher guessed the other three had been sent up to Highland Park to relieve Lamaison and Lennox.
The flatbed’s cable jerked and tightened and started hauling. The blue Chrysler came out of the lobby backward, a lot slower than it had gone in. It had scars on the paint and some front-end damage. The windshield was starred and a little concave. But overall the car was in excellent shape. As subtle as a hammer, as vulnerable as a hammer. It came to rest on the flatbed and the driver strapped the wheels down and drove it away. As soon as it was out of the lot its undamaged twin drove in. Another blue 300C, fast and confident. It stopped just inside and Allen Lamaison climbed out to inspect the smashed gate.
Reacher recognized him instantly from his file photograph. In the flesh he was about six feet tall and could have been two hundred and forty pounds. Big shoulders, small hips, thin legs. He looked fast and agile. He was dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and a red necktie. He was holding the necktie flat against his chest with one hand, even though the weather wasn’t windy. He took a brief look at the gate and climbed back in his car and drove on through the lot. He got out again just short of the shattered doors and Parker came over in his raincoat and they started talking.
Just to be sure, Reacher took out the phone he had brought back from Vegas and redialed. Fifty yards away Lamaison’s hand went straight to his pocket and came out with a phone. He glanced at the caller ID on the screen and froze.
Got you, Reacher thought.
He wasn’t expecting an answer. But Lamaison picked up. He flicked the phone open and brought it up to his face and said, “What?”
“How’s your day going?” Reacher asked.
“It only just started,” Lamaison said.
“How was your night?”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Plenty of folks have tried,” Reacher said. “I’m still here. They aren’t.”
“Where are you?”
“We got out of town. Safer that way. But we’ll be back. Maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe next year. You better get used to looking over your shoulder. That’s something you’re going to be doing a lot of.”
“I’m not scared of you.”
“Then you’re a fool,” Reacher said, and clicked off. He saw Lamaison stare at his phone, and then dial a number. Not a call back. Reacher waited, but his phone stayed silent, and Lamaison started talking, evidently to someone else.
Ten minutes later Lennox showed up in another blue 300C. Black suit, gray buzz cut, heavy build, meaty red face. The other number three, Swan’s junior, Parker’s equal. He was carrying a cardboard tray of coffee and disappeared into the building. Fifty minutes after that Margaret Berenson showed up. The dragon lady. Human Resources. Seven o’clock in the morning. She was in a mid-sized silver Toyota. She made a right off the roadway and drove through the lot and parked neatly in a slot close to the door. Then she picked her way inside through the wreckage. Lamaison came out briefly and dispatched the remaining foot soldier to the gate, for sentry duty. Parker made a second line of defense at the door. He was still in his raincoat. Two more managers showed up. Probably financial and the building super, Reacher figured. The sentry waved them through the absent gate and Parker checked them in at the door. Then some kind of a CEO showed up. An old guy, a Jaguar sedan, deference at the gate, a ramrod posture from Parker. The old guy conferred with Parker through the Jaguar’s window and went away again. Clearly he had a hands-off management style.
Then the scene went quiet, and it stayed quiet for more than two hours.
Halfway through the wait Dixon called in from Highland Park. She and O’Donnell had been on station since before six in the morning. They had seen the three foot soldiers show up. They had seen Lamaison and Lennox leave. They had seen workers show up. They had driven all around the plant on a two-block radius, for a fuller picture.
“It’s the real deal,” Dixon said. “Multiple buildings, serious fence, excellent security. And it’s got a helipad out back. With a helicopter on it. A white Bell 222.”
At half past nine in the morning the dragon lady left. She picked her way through the mess and stood on the shallow step outside the reception area for a moment and then headed back toward her Toyota. Reacher’s cell phone rang. The Radio Shack pay-as-you-go, not the Vegas guy’s. It was Neagley.
“Both of us go?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” Reacher said. “You close, me deep. Time to rock and roll.”
He pulled his gloves on and started his Honda at the same time that Berenson started her Toyota. She had made a right coming in, and therefore she would make a left going out. Reacher eased off the curb and drove twenty yards and U-turned in the mouth of the next side street. He was stiff from sitting still so long. He came back slowly, along New Age’s fence. Berenson was hustling through the lot. A block away he could see Neagley’s Honda, riding low, trailing a cloud of white vapor. Berenson reached the wrecked gate and swept through without pausing. Made the left. Neagley made a parallel left and fell in twenty yards behind her. Reacher slowed and waited and then made his own turn and tucked in about seventy yards behind Neagley and ninety behind Berenson.
66
The Prelude was a low-slung coupe and therefore Reacher didn’t have the best angle in the world, but most of the time he got a decent view of the silver Toyota up ahead. Berenson was driving well under the speed limit. Maybe she had points on her license. Or things on her mind. Or maybe the car-crash scars were more vivid in her memory than they were on her face. She made a right onto a road called Huntington Drive, which Reacher was pretty sure had been a part of the old Route 66. She headed north and east on it. Reacher started singing to himself, about getting his kicks. Then he stopped. Berenson was slowing and her turn signal was flashing. She was getting ready to make a left. She was heading for South Pasadena.
His phone rang. Neagley.
“I’ve been behind her too long,” she said. “I’m taking three sides of the next block. You move up for a spell.”
He kept the line open and accelerated. Berenson had turned into a road called Van Horne Avenue. He turned into it about fifty yards behind her. He couldn’t see her. The road curved too much. He accelerated again and eased off and came around a final curve and spotted her about forty yards ahead. He cruised on and in his mirror he saw Neagley swing back on the road behind him.
Monterey Hills gave way to South Pasadena and at the municipal line the road changed its name to Via Del Rey. A pretty name, and a pretty place. The California dream. Low hills, curving streets, trees, perpetual spring, perpetual blossom. Reacher had grown up on grim military bases in Europe and the Pacific and people had given him picture books to show him what home was all about. Most of the pictures had looked exactly like South Pasadena.
Berenson made a left and then a right and pulled into a quiet residential cul-de-sac. Reacher glimpsed small smug houses basking in the morning sun. He didn’t follow Berenson. The slammed Honda was pretty anonymous in most of LA, but not in a street like that. He braked and came to a stop thirty yards farther on. Neagley pulled in behind him.
“Now?” she asked, on the phone.
There were two main ways to engineer a visit with someone returning to their home. Either you let them settle and then gave them a compelling reason why they should let you in later, or you followed hard on the
ir heels and rushed them while they still had their keys out or their door open.
“Now,” Reacher said.
They slid out and locked up and ran. Safe enough. A lone man running could look suspicious. A lone woman rarely did. A man and a woman running together were usually taken as jogging buddies, or a couple just out having fun.
They made it into the cul-de-sac and saw nothing at first. There was a rise, and then a curve. They made it through the curve in time to see a garage door opening next to a house about a third of the way down the street, on the right. Berenson’s silver Toyota was waiting on a blacktop driveway. The house was small and neat. Faced with brick. Painted trim. The front yard was full of rocks and gravel and all kinds of colorful blooms. There was a basketball hoop over the garage. The rising door was letting in enough light to show a tangle of kid stuff stacked against a wall inside. A bike, a skateboard, a Little League bat, knee pads, helmets, gloves.
The Toyota’s brake lights went off and it crept forward. Neagley sprinted. She was much faster than Reacher. She made it inside the garage just as the door started back down. Reacher arrived about ten seconds after her and used his foot to trip the safety mechanism. He waited until the door rose again to waist height and then he ducked under it and stepped inside.
Margaret Berenson was already out of her car. Neagley had one gloved hand in her hair and the other clamped around both of her wrists from behind. Berenson was struggling, but not much. She stopped altogether after Neagley forced her face down and tapped it twice against the Toyota’s hood. At that point she went limp and started yelling. She stopped yelling exactly a second later after Neagley straightened her up again and turned her toward Reacher and Reacher popped her in the solar plexus, once, gently, just enough to drive the air out of her lungs.
Then Reacher stepped away and hit the button and the door started down again. There was a weak bulb in the opener on the ceiling and as the sunlight cut off it was replaced by a dim yellow glow. At the right rear of the garage there was a door to the outside, and another on the left that would lead to the interior of the house. There was an alarm pad next to it.
“Is it set?” Reacher asked.
“Yes,” Berenson said, breathlessly.
“No,” Neagley said. She nodded toward the bike and the skateboard. “The kid is about twelve years old. Mom was out early this morning. The kid made the school bus on his own for once. Probably unusual. Setting the alarm won’t be a part of his normal routine.”
“Maybe Dad set it.”
“Dad is long gone. Mom isn’t wearing a ring.”
“Boyfriend?”
“You must be kidding.”
Reacher tried the door. It was locked. He pulled the keys out of the Toyota’s ignition and thumbed through the ring and found a house key. It fit the lock and turned. The door opened. No warning beeps. Thirty seconds later, no lights, no siren.
“You tell a lot of lies, Ms. Berenson,” he said.
Berenson said nothing.
Neagley said, “She’s Human Resources. It’s what they do.”
Reacher held the door and Neagley bundled Berenson through a laundry room and into a kitchen. The house had been built before developers started making kitchens as big as aircraft hangars, so it was just a small square room full of cabinets and appliances a few years off the pace. There was a table and two chairs. Neagley forced Berenson down into one and Reacher headed back to the garage and rooted around until he found a half-used roll of duct tape on a shelf. With gloves on he couldn’t unpick the end so he stepped back to the kitchen and used a knife from a maple block. He taped Berenson tight to the chair, torso, arms, legs, fast and efficient.
“We were in the army,” he said to her. “We mentioned that, right? When we needed information, our first port of call was the company clerk. That’s you. So start talking.”
“You’re crazy,” Berenson said back.
“Tell me about the car wreck.”
“The what?”
“Your scars.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Was it bad?”
“Awful.”
“This could be much worse.” Reacher put the kitchen knife on the table and followed it with the Glock from one pocket and Tony Swan’s lump of concrete from the other. “Stab wounds, gunshot wounds, blunt trauma. I’ll let you choose.”
Berenson started to cry. Hopeless, helpless sobs and wails. Her shoulders shook and her head dropped and tears dripped into her lap.
“Not helping,” Reacher said. “You’re crying at the wrong guy.”
Berenson lifted her head and turned and looked at Neagley. Neagley’s face was about as expressive as Swan’s lump of concrete.
“Start talking,” Reacher said.
“I can’t,” Berenson said. “He’ll hurt my son.”
“Who will?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Lamaison?”
“I can’t say.”
“It’s time to make up your mind, Margaret. We want to know who knew and who flew. Right now we’re including you in. You want us to include you out, you’ve got some serious talking to do.”
“He’ll hurt my son.”
“Lamaison will?”
“I can’t say who.”
“Look at it from our side, Margaret. If in doubt, we’ll take you out.”
Berenson said nothing.
“Be smart, Margaret,” Reacher said. “Whoever is threatening your son, you make a good case against him, he’ll be dead. He won’t be able to hurt anyone.”
“I can’t rely on that.”
“Just shoot her,” Neagley said. “She’s wasting our time.”
Reacher stepped to the refrigerator and opened it. Took out a plastic bottle of Evian water. Flat, French, gallon for gallon three times as expensive as gasoline. He unscrewed the top and took a long drink. Offered the bottle to Neagley. She shook her head. He emptied the rest of the water in the sink and stepped back to the table and used the kitchen knife to saw an oval hole in the bottom of the bottle. He fitted it over the Glock’s muzzle. Adjusted it neatly so that the screw neck lined up exactly with the barrel.
“A home-made silencer,” he said. “The neighbors won’t hear a thing. It only works once, but once is all it has to.”
He held the gun a foot and a half from Berenson’s face and aimed it so that she was staring straight into the bottle with her right eye.
Berenson started talking.
67
In retrospect it was a tale that Reacher could have scripted in advance. The original development engineer up at the Highland Park plant was now the quality control manager and he had started showing signs of severe stress. His name was Edward Dean and he lived way to the north, beyond the mountains. By chance his annual performance review was scheduled three weeks after he started his weird behavior. Being a trained professional, Margaret Berenson noticed his distress, and she pursued the matter.
At first Dean claimed his move north was the root of his problem. He had wanted a relaxed lifestyle and had bought acres of land out in the desert some ways south of Palmdale. The commute was killing him. Berenson didn’t buy that. All Angelinos had the commute from hell. So then Dean said his neighbors were problematical. There were outlaw bikers and meth labs close by. Berenson was readier to believe that. Stories about the badlands were legion. But a pained echo in a chance remark about Dean’s daughter led her to believe that the kid was in some way the problem. She was fourteen years old. Berenson put two and two together and made five. She figured maybe the kid was hanging with the bikers or experimenting with crystal and causing big problems at home.
Then she revised her opinion. The quality problems up at Highland Park became common knowledge inside the company. Berenson knew that Dean had a difficult split responsibility. As a director of the corporation he had a fiduciary duty to see it do well. But he also had a parallel responsibility to the Pentagon to make sure New Age sold it only the good stuff.
Berenson figured the conflict in his mind was causing his stress. But overall he was doing the right thing according to the law, so she shelved her concerns.
Then Tony Swan disappeared.
He just vanished. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t. Being a trained professional, Margaret Berenson noticed his absence. She followed up. She had split responsibilities of her own. Swan had classified knowledge. There were national security implications. She got into it like a dog with a bone. She asked all kinds of questions of all kinds of people.
Then one day she got home and found Allen Lamaison on her driveway, playing one-on-one basketball with her son.
Berenson was afraid of Lamaison. Always had been. How much, she hadn’t really realized until she saw him tousle her twelve-year-old’s hair with a hand big enough to crush the child’s skull. He suggested the kid stay outside and practice his foul throws while he went inside for an important chat with Mom.
The chat started with a confession. Lamaison told Berenson exactly what had happened to Swan. Every detail. And he hinted as to the reason. This time Berenson put two and two together and made four. She recalled Dean’s stress. By and by Lamaison revealed that Dean was cooperating with a special project, because if he didn’t his daughter would disappear and be found weeks later with blood running down to her ankles amid a happy band of bikers.
Or on the other hand, maybe she would never be found at all.
Then Lamaison said the exact same thing could happen to Berenson’s son. He said a lot of outlaw bikers were happy to swing both ways. Most of them had been in prison, and prison distorted a person’s tastes.
He issued a warning, and two instructions. The warning was that sooner or later two men and two women would show up and start asking questions. Old friends from Swan’s service days. The first instruction was that they were to be deflected, firmly, politely, and definitively. The second instruction was that nothing of this current conversation was ever to be revealed.
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