Bad Luck and Trouble (50 page)

Dean went to make coffee in the kitchen and Dixon said, “Nine hours twenty-six minutes.” Neagley and O’Donnell didn’t get the point, but Reacher did. Assuming three decimal places for
pi
and a speed of fifty for the truck, then nine hours and twenty-six minutes made the potential search area exactly seven hundred thousand square miles.

“Mahmoud is cautious,” Reacher said. “He’s not going to buy a pig in a poke. Either it’s his money and he doesn’t want to waste it, or it’s someone else’s money and he doesn’t want to get his head cut off for screwing up. He’s coming.”

“Dean says not.”

“Dean says he wasn’t told in advance. There’s a difference.”

Dean came back and served the coffee and nobody spoke for a quarter of an hour. Then Reacher turned to Dean and asked, “Did you do your own electrical work here?”

Dean said, “Some of it.”

“Got any plastic cable ties?”

“Lots of them. Workshop out back.”

“You should drive north,” Reacher said. “Head for Palmdale, get some breakfast.”

“Now?”

“Now. Stay for lunch. Don’t come back until the afternoon.”

“Why? What’s going to happen here?”

“I’m not sure yet. But whatever, you shouldn’t be around.”

Dean sat still for a moment. Then he got up and found his keys and left. They heard his car start up. Heard the crunch of power steering on gravel. Then the noise faded to nothing and the house went quiet again.

Dixon said, “Nine hours forty-six minutes.” Reacher nodded. The circle was now three-quarters of a million square miles in size.

“He’s coming,” Reacher said.

The circle reached a million square miles at seventeen minutes past one in the morning. Reacher found an atlas in a bookcase and traced a likely route and worked out that Denver was eighteen hours away, which made six in the morning a likely rendezvous time. Ideal, from Mahmoud’s point of view. Lamaison would have told him about the threat against the daughter, and he would figure under any circumstances the kid would be home at six in the morning. And therefore a perfect reminder of Dean’s vulnerability. Maybe Mahmoud was dropping by unannounced, but there was no doubt he expected to get what he wanted.

Reacher got up and went for a stroll, first outside, and then inside. The property consisted of the house and a garage block and the workshop that Dean had mentioned. Beyond that, there was nothing. It was pitch dark but Reacher could feel vast silent emptiness all around. Inside, the house was simple. Three bedrooms, a den, a kitchen, the living room. One of the bedrooms was the daughter’s. There were inkjet prints of photographs pinned up on a board. Groups of teenage girls, three or four at a time. The kid and her friends, presumably. By a process of elimination Reacher worked out which girl appeared in every picture. Dean’s daughter, he assumed. Her camera, her room. She was a tall blonde girl, maybe fourteen, still a little awkward, braces on her teeth. But a year or two into the future she was going to be spectacular, and she was going to stay that way for thirty years. A hostage to fortune. Reacher understood Dean’s distress, and wished Lamaison had screamed a little more on the way down.

People say the darkest hour is just before dawn, but people are wrong. By definition the darkest hour is in the middle of the night. By five in the morning the sky in the east was lightening. By five-thirty visibility was pretty good. Reacher took another walk. Dean had no neighbors. He was living in the middle of thousands of empty acres. The view was clear to every horizon. Worthless, sunblasted land. The power lines ran south to north and disappeared in the haze. A stony driveway came in from the southeast. It was at least a mile long, maybe more. Reacher walked a little ways down it and turned around and checked what Mahmoud would see when he arrived. The helicopter was out of sight. By chance a lone mesquite bush blocked the rotor crown from view. Reacher moved Neagley’s Civic behind the garage block and checked again.
Perfect.
A somnolent group of three buildings, low and dusty, almost part of the landscape. A hundred yards out he saw a flat broken fragment of rock the size and shape of a coffin. He walked over there and took Tony Swan’s lump of concrete out of his pocket and rested it on the slab, like a monument. He walked back and ducked into the workshop. The door was unlocked. The place was laid out neatly and smelled of machine oil heated by the sun. He found a tray of black plastic cable ties and took eight of the biggest. They were about two feet long, thick and stiff. For strapping heavy cable into perforated conduit boxes.

Then he went back inside the house to wait.

Six o’clock arrived, and Mahmoud didn’t. Now the circle measured more than two and a half million square miles. Six-fifteen came and went, two-point-six million square miles. Six-thirty, two-point-seven million.

Then, at exactly six thirty-two, the telephone bell dinged, just once, brief and soft and muted.

“Here we go,” Reacher said. “Someone just cut the phone line.”

They moved to the windows. They waited. Then five miles south and east they saw a tiny white dot winking in the early sun. A vehicle, closing fast, trailing a cloud of khaki dust that was backlit by the dawn like a halo.

85

They moved away from the windows and waited in the living room, tense and silent. Five minutes later they heard the crunch of stones under tires and the wet muffled beat of a worn Detroit V-8. The crunching stopped and the engine died and they heard a parking brake ratchet on. A minute after that they heard a tinny door slam and the sound of random footsteps on gravel. The driver, stumbling around, yawning and stretching.

A minute after that, they heard a knock at the door.

Reacher waited.

The knock came again.

Reacher counted to twenty and walked down the hall. Opened the door. Saw a man standing on the step, framed against the light, with a mid-sized panel truck parked behind him. The truck was a rented U-Haul, white and red, top-heavy, a little ungainly. Reacher felt like he had seen it before. He had never seen the man before. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian.

In turn Azhari Mahmoud saw a disheveled giant of a white man. Two meters tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty gray denims and work boots.
A crazy scientist,
he thought.
Right at home in a desert shack.

“Edward Dean?” he said.

“Yes,” Reacher said. “Who are you?”

“No cell coverage here, I notice.”

“So?”

“And I took the precaution of cutting your landline ten miles down the road.”

“Who are you?”

“My name doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of Allen Lamaison’s. That’s all you need to know. You are to extend me the same courtesies that you would extend to him.”

“I don’t extend courtesies to Allen Lamaison,” Reacher said. “So get lost.”

Mahmoud nodded. “Let me put it another way. The threat that Lamaison made is still operative. And today it will benefit me, not him.”

“Threat?” Reacher said.

“Against your daughter.”

Reacher said nothing.

Mahmoud said, “You’re going to show me how to arm Little Wing.”

Reacher glanced at the U-Haul.

“I can’t,” he said. “All you have are the electronics.”

“The missiles are on their way,” Mahmoud said. “They’ll be here very soon.”

“Where are you going to use them?”

“Here and there.”

“Inside the United States?”

“It’s a target-rich environment.”

“Lamaison said Kashmir.”

“We might ship some units to select friends.”

“We?”

“We’re a big organization.”

“I won’t do it.”

“You will. Like you did before. For the same reason.”

Reacher paused a beat and said, “You better come in.”

He stepped aside. Mahmoud was accustomed to deference, so he squeezed past and walked ahead into the hallway. Reacher hit him hard in the back of the head and sent him stumbling toward the living room door, where Frances Neagley stepped out and dropped him with a neat uppercut. A minute later he was hog-tied on the hallway floor with one figure-eight cable tie binding his left wrist to his right ankle and another binding his right wrist to his left ankle. The ties were zipped hard and the flesh around them was already swelling. Mahmoud was bleeding from the mouth and moaning. Reacher kicked him in the side and told him to shut up. Then he stepped back into the living room and waited for the truck from Denver.

The truck from Denver was a white eighteen-wheeler. Its driver was hog-tied next to Mahmoud a minute after climbing down from the cab. Then Reacher dragged Mahmoud out of the house and left him faceup in the sun next to his U-Haul. Mahmoud’s eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive. O’Donnell dragged the driver out and dumped him next to his truck. They all stood for a moment and looked around one last time and then crammed themselves into Neagley’s Civic and headed south, fast. As soon as cell coverage kicked in they stopped and Neagley called her Pentagon buddy. Seven o’clock in the west, ten in the morning in the east. She told the guy where to look and what he would find. Then they drove on. Reacher watched out the back window and before they even hit the mountains he saw a whole squadron of choppers heading west on the horizon. Bell AH-1s, from some nearby Homeland Security base, he assumed. The sky was thick with them.

After the mountains they talked about money. Neagley gave Dixon the financial instruments and the diamonds, and they all agreed she should carry them back to New York and convert them to cash. First call would be to repay Neagley’s expense budget, second call would be to set up trust funds for Angela and Charlie Franz, and Tammy Orozco and her three children, and Sanchez’s friend Milena, and the third call would be to make one last donation to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in the name of Tony Swan’s dog, Maisi.

Then it got awkward. Neagley was OK for salary, but Reacher sensed that Dixon and O’Donnell were hurting. Hurting, and tempted, but sensitive about asking. So he went ahead and admitted he was flat broke and suggested they take whatever little margin was left over and divide it up four ways between themselves, as wages. Everyone agreed.

After that, they didn’t talk much at all. Lamaison was gone, Mahmoud was in the system, but no one had come back. And Reacher had gotten around to asking himself the big question: If the stalled car on the 210 had not delayed his arrival at the hospital, would he have performed any better than Dixon or O’Donnell? Than Swan, or Franz, or Sanchez, or Orozco? Maybe the others were asking themselves the same question about him. Truth was, he didn’t know the answer, and he hated not knowing.

Two hours later they were at LAX. They abandoned the Civic in a fire lane and walked away from it, heading for different terminals and different airlines. Before they split up they stood on the sidewalk and bumped fists one last time, and said goodbyes they promised would be temporary. Neagley headed inside to American. Dixon went looking for America West. O’Donnell searched for United. Reacher stood in the heat with anxious people swirling all around him and watched them walk away.

Reacher left California with close to two thousand dollars in his pocket, from the dealers behind the wax museum in Hollywood, and from Saropian in Vegas, and from the two guys at New Age’s place in Highland Park. As a result he didn’t run low on cash for almost four weeks. Finally he stopped by an ATM in the bus depot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As always he worked out his balance first, and then checked to see if the bank’s calculation matched his own.

For the second time in his life, it didn’t.

The machine told him that the balance in his account was more than a hundred thousand dollars bigger than he was expecting. Exactly a hundred and eleven thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two dollars and eighteen cents bigger, according to his own blind calculation.

111,822.18.

Dixon, obviously. The spoils of war.

At first he was disappointed. Not with the amount. It was more money than he had seen in a long time. He was disappointed with himself, because he couldn’t perceive any message in the number. He was sure Dixon would have adjusted the total by a few dollars or cents one way or the other to give him a wry smile. But he couldn’t get it. It wasn’t prime. No even number greater than two could be prime. It had hundreds of factors. Its reciprocal was boring. Its square root was a long messy string of digits. Its cube root was worse.