by Lee Child
In his room in his Denver hotel the dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was concluding his meeting. His guest had shown up exactly on time and had been accompanied by a single bodyguard. Mason had taken both of those facts as positive signs. He appreciated punctuality in business. And being outnumbered only two-to-one was a luxury. Often he was alone with as many as six or ten on the other side of the deal.
So, a good start. It had been followed by substantive progress. No lame excuses about late delivery or lowered numbers or other difficulties. No bait and switch. No attempt to renegotiate. No jacked-up prices. Just the sale as previously discussed, six hundred and fifty units at a hundred thousand dollars each.
Mason had opened his suitcase and his client had started the long process of totaling the consideration inside. The Swiss bank balances and the bearer bonds were uncontroversial. They had reliable face values. The diamonds were more subjective. Carat weight was a given, of course, but much depended on cut and clarity. Mason’s people had in fact underestimated in order to build in a horse-trading margin. Mason’s guest quickly understood. He pronounced himself entirely satisfied and agreed that the suitcase did indeed contain sixty-five million dollars.
At which point it became his suitcase.
In exchange Mason received a key and a piece of paper.
The key was small, old, scratched and worn, plain and unlabeled. It looked like the kind of thing a hardware store cuts while a person waits. Mason was told it was the key to a padlock currently securing a shipping container waiting at the Los Angeles docks.
The piece of paper was a bill of lading, describing the shipping container’s contents as six hundred and fifty DVD players.
Mason’s guest and his bodyguard left, and Mason stepped into the bathroom and set fire to his passport in the toilet pan. A half-hour later Andrew MacBride left the hotel and headed back to the airport. He was surprised to realize that he was looking forward to hearing the jug-band music again.
Frances Neagley called Chicago from the back of Dixon’s car. She told her assistant to e-mail her contact at the Pentagon and explain that she was out of the office, in California, away from a secure phone, and that she had an inquiry about New Age’s product. She knew her guy would feel better about responding by e-mail than talking on an unsecured cell network.
O’Donnell said, “You have secure phones in your office?”
“Sure.”
“Outstanding. Who’s the guy?”
“Just a guy,” Neagley said. “Who owes me big.”
“Big enough to deliver?”
“Always.”
Dixon came off the 101 at Sunset and headed west to the hotel. The traffic was slow. Less than three miles, but a jogger could have covered them faster. When they eventually arrived they found a Crown Vic waiting out front. An unmarked cop car. Not Thomas Brant’s. This one was newer and intact and a different color.
It was Curtis Mauney’s car.
He climbed out as soon as Dixon got parked. He walked over, short, solid, worn, tired. He stopped directly in front of Reacher and paused a beat. Then he asked, “Did one of your friends have a tattoo on his back?”
A gentle tone of voice.
Quiet.
Sympathetic.
Reacher said, “Ah, Christ.”
36
Manuel Orozco had gone through four years of college on army money and had assumed he would wind up a combat infantry officer. His baby sister had gone through a major irrational panic and had assumed he would wind up KIA with serious disfiguring facial wounds such that his body would not be identified on recovery. She would never know what had happened to him. He told her about dog tags. She said they might get blown off or lost. He told her about fingerprints. She said he might lose limbs. He told her about dental identification. She said his whole jaw might get exploded. Later he realized she was worrying on a deeper level but at the time he thought the answer to her fears was to get a big tattoo across his upper back that said Orozco, M. in large black letters, with his service number equally large below. He had gotten home and peeled off his shirt in triumph and had been mystified when the kid had cried even harder.
Ultimately he had avoided the infantry and ended up a key part of the 110th MP, where Reacher had immediately rechristened him Kit Bag because his broad olive back looked like a GI duffel with its name-and-number stencil. Now fifteen years later Reacher stood in the Chateau Marmont’s sunblasted parking lot and said, “You found another body.”
“I’m afraid we did,” Mauney said.
“Where?”
“Same general area. In a gully.”
“Helicopter?”
“Probably.”
“Orozco,” Reacher said.
“That’s the name on his back,” Mauney said.
“So why ask?”
“We have to be sure.”
“All corpses should be so convenient.”
“Who’s the next of kin?”
“He has a sister somewhere. Younger.”
“So you should make the formal ID. If you would. This really isn’t the kind of thing a younger sister should see.”
“How long was he in the gully?”
“A long time.”
They got back in the car and Dixon followed Mauney all the way to a county facility north of Glendale. Nobody spoke. Reacher sat in the back next to O’Donnell and did what he was pretty sure O’Donnell was doing too, which was to run through a long involuntary sequence of remembered Orozco moments. The guy had been a comedian, part on purpose, part unwittingly. He had been of Mexican descent, born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, but for many years had pretended to be a white Australian. He had called everyone mate. As an officer his command skills had been first rate, but he had never really issued orders. He would wait until a junior officer or a grunt had grasped the general consensus and then he would say, If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please. It had become a group catchphrase every bit as ubiquitous as You do not mess.
Coffee?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
Cigarette?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
Want me to shoot this mother?
If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.
O’Donnell said, “We knew already. This is not a surprise.”
Nobody answered him.
The county facility turned out to be a brand-new medical center with a hospital on one side of a wide new street. On the other side was a state-of-the-art receiving station for townships without morgues of their own. It was a white concrete cube set on stilts a story high. Meat wagons could roll right under the bulk of the building to hidden elevator doors. Neat, clean, discreet. Californian. Mauney parked in a line of visitor slots near some trees. Dixon parked right next to him. Everyone got out and stood for a moment, stretching, looking around, wasting time.
Nobody’s favorite trip.
Mauney led the way. There was a personnel elevator opening off a cross-hatched walkway. Mauney hit the call button and the elevator door slid back and cold chemical air spilled out. Mauney stepped on, then Reacher, then O’Donnell, then Dixon, then Neagley.
Mauney pressed 4.
The fourth floor was as cold as a meat locker. There was a miserable public viewing area with a wide internal window backed by a venetian blind. Mauney passed it by and headed through a door to a storage area. Three walls showed the fronts of refrigerated drawers. Dozens of them. The air was bitter with cold and heavy with smells and noisy from reflections off stainless steel. Mauney pulled a drawer. It came out easily on ball bearing runners. Full length. It smacked all the way open against end stops made of rubber.
Inside was a refrigerated corpse. Male. Hispanic. The wrists and the ankles were tied with rough twine that had bitten deep. The arms were behind the back. The head and the shoulders were grievously damaged. Almost unrecognizable as human.
“He fell head first,” Reacher said, softly. “He would, I guess, tied up lik
e that. If you’re right about the helicopter.”
“No tracks to or from,” Mauney said.
Further medical details were hard to discern. Decomposition was well advanced, but due to the desert heat and dryness it looked more like mummification. The body was shrunken, diminished, collapsed, leathery. It looked empty. There was some animal damage, but not much. Contact with the gully’s walls had prevented more.
Mauney asked, “Do you recognize him?”
“Not really,” Reacher said.
“Check the tattoo.”
Reacher just stood there.
Mauney said, “Want me to call an orderly?”
Reacher shook his head and put a hand under the corpse’s icy shoulder. Lifted. The body rolled awkwardly, all of a piece, stiff, like a log or a stump. It settled facedown, the arms flung upward, tied and contorted as if the desperate struggle for freedom had continued until the very last.
Which it undoubtedly had, Reacher thought.
The tattoo was a little folded and creased and wrinkled by the sloughing looseness of the skin and the unnatural inward pressure of the upper arms.
It was a little faded by time.
But it was unmistakable.
It said: Orozco, M.
Under it was a nine-digit service number.
“It’s him,” Reacher said. “It’s Manuel Orozco.”
Mauney said, “I’m very sorry.”
There was silence for a moment. Nothing to hear, except cooled air forcing its way through aluminum vents. Reacher asked, “Are you still searching the area?”
“For the others?” Mauney said. “Not actively. It’s not like we’ve got a missing child.”
“Is Franz in here, too? In one of these damn drawers?”
“You want to see him?” Mauney asked.
“No,” Reacher said. Then he looked back at Orozco and asked, “When is the autopsy?”
“Soon.”
“Is the string going to tell us anything?”
“It’s probably too common.”
“Do we have an estimate on when he died?”
Mauney half-smiled, cop to cop. “When he hit the ground.”
“Which was when?”
“Three, four weeks ago. Before Franz, we think. But we may never know for sure.”
“We will,” Reacher said.
“How?” Mauney asked.
“I’ll ask whoever did it. And he’ll tell me. By that point he’ll be begging to.”
“No independent action, remember?”
“In your dreams.”
Mauney stayed to process paperwork and Reacher and Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell took the elevator back down to warmth and sunlight. They stood in the lot, saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just crackling and trembling and twitching with suppressed rage. It was a given that soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. Some of them even want it. But deep down they want it to be fair. Me against him, may the best man win. They want it to be noble. Win or lose, they want it to arrive with significance.
A soldier dead with his arms tied behind him was the worst kind of outrage. It was about helplessness and submission and abuse. It was about powerlessness.
It took away all the illusions.
“Let’s go,” Dixon said. “We’re wasting time.”
37
At the hotel Reacher sat for a moment with the photograph Mauney had given him. The video surveillance frame. The pharmacy. Four men in front of the counter. Manuel Orozco on the left, glancing right, restless. Then Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then Tony Swan, looking straight ahead. Then Jorge Sanchez, on the right, his finger hooked under his collar.
Four friends.
Two down for sure.
Presumably all four down.
“Shit happens,” O’Donnell said.
Reacher nodded. “And we get over it.”
“Do we?” Neagley said. “Will we this time?”
“We always have before.”
“This never happened before.”
“My brother died.”
“I know. But this is worse.”
Reacher nodded again. “Yes, it is.”
“I was hoping the other three were still OK somehow.”
“We all were.”
“But they’re not. They’re all gone.”
“Looks that way.”
“We need to work,” Dixon said. “That’s all we’ve got now.”
They went up to Dixon’s room, but work was a relative term. They were dead-ended. They had nothing to go on. Those feelings didn’t improve any when they transferred to Neagley’s room and found an e-mail response from her Pentagon contact: Sorry, no way. New Age is classified. Just seven words, blank and dismissive.
“Seems he doesn’t owe you all that big,” O’Donnell said.
“He does,” Neagley said. “Bigger than you could imagine. This says more about New Age than him and me.”
She scrolled on through her inbox. Then she stopped. There was another message from the same guy. Different version of his name, different e-mail address.
“Disposable,” Neagley said. “That’s a one-time free account.”
She clicked on the message. It said: Frances, great to hear from you. We should get together. Dinner and a movie? And I need to return your Hendrix CDs. Thanks so much for the loan. I loved them all. The sixth track on the second album is dynamically brilliant. Let me know when you’re next in Washington. Please call soonest.
Reacher said, “You own CDs?”
“No,” Neagley said. “I especially don’t own Jimi Hendrix CDs. I don’t like him.”
O’Donnell said, “You’ve been to movies and dinner with this guy?”
“Never,” Neagley said.
“So he’s confusing you with some other woman.”
“Unlikely,” Reacher said.
“It’s coded,” Neagley said. “That’s what it is. It’s the answer to my question. Got to be. A kosher reply from his official address, and then a coded follow-up from an unofficial address. His ass is covered both ways.”
Dixon asked, “What’s the code?”
“Something to do with the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”
Reacher said, “What was the second Hendrix album?”
O’Donnell said, “Electric Ladyland?”
“That was later,” Dixon said. “The first was Are You Experienced?”
“Which one had the naked women on the cover?”
“That was Electric Ladyland.”
“I loved that cover.”
“You’re disgusting. You were eight years old.”
“Nearly nine.”
“That’s still disgusting.”
Reacher said, “Axis: Bold as Love. That was the second album.”
“What was the sixth track?” Dixon asked.
“I have no idea.”
O’Donnell said, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”
They walked a long way east on Sunset, until they found a record store. They went inside and found cool air and young people and loud music and the H section in the Rock/Pop aisles. There was a dense foot-and-a-half of Jimi Hendrix albums. Four old titles that Reacher recognized, plus a bunch of posthumous stuff. Axis: Bold as Love was right there, three copies. Reacher pulled one and flipped it. It was wrapped in plastic and the store’s barcode label was stuck over the second half of the track listings.
Same for the second copy.
Same for the third.
“Rip it off,” O’Donnell said.
“Steal it?”
“No, rip the plastic off.”
“Can’t do that. It’s not ours.”
“You smack cops around but you won’t damage a store’s wrapper?”
“It’s different.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to buy it. We can play it in the car. Cars have CD players, right?”
�
�For the last hundred years,” Dixon said.
Reacher took the CD and lined up behind a girl with more metal punched through her face than a grenade victim. He made it to the register and peeled off thirteen of his remaining eight hundred dollars and for the first time in his life became the owner of a digital product.
“Unwrap it,” O’Donnell said.
It was wrapped tight. Reacher used his fingernails to scrape up a corner and then his teeth to tear the plastic. When he got it all off he turned the CD over and ran his finger down the track list.
“ ‘Little Wing,’ ” he said.
O’Donnell shrugged. Neagley looked blank.
“Doesn’t help,” Dixon said.
“I know the song,” Reacher said.
“Please don’t sing it,” Neagley said.
“So what does it mean?” O’Donnell said.
Reacher said, “It means New Age makes a weapons system called ‘Little Wing.’ ”
“Obviously. But that doesn’t help us if we don’t know what Little Wing is.”
“Sounds aeronautical. Like a drone plane or something.”
“Nobody heard of it?” Dixon asked. “Anybody?”
O’Donnell shook his head.
“Not me,” Neagley said.
“So it really is supersecret,” Dixon said. “No loose lips in D.C. or on Wall Street or among all of Neagley’s connections.”
Reacher tried to open the CD box but found it taped shut with a title label that ran all the way across the top seam. He picked at it with his nails and it came off in small sticky fragments.
“No wonder the record business is in trouble,” he said. “They don’t make these things very easy to enjoy.”
Dixon asked, “What are we going to do?”
“What did the e-mail say?”
“You know what it said.”
“But do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did it say?”
“Find the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“No, it said “ ‘Please call soonest.’ ”
“That’s ridiculous,” Neagley said. “If he won’t tell me by e-mail, why would he tell me on the phone?”
