Bad Luck and Trouble

"Lamaison didn’t hire Swan. He didn’t want him. But I convinced our CEO we needed some diversity of background. It wasn’t healthy to have all of them from the same place."

"So you hired him?"

"Basically. I’m sorry."

"Where did all the bad stuff happen?"

"Highland Park. The helicopter is there. And there are outbuildings. It’s a big place."

"Is there somewhere you can go?" Reacher asked.

"Go?" Berenson said.

"For a couple of days, until this is over."

"It won’t be over. You don’t know Lamaison. You can’t beat him."

Reacher looked at Neagley.

"Can we beat him?" he asked.

"Like a drum," she said.

Berenson said, "But there are four of them."

"Three," Reacher said. "Saropian is already down. Three of them, four of us."

"You’re crazy."

"They’re going to think so. That’s for damn sure. They’re going to think I’m completely psychotic."

Berenson was quiet for a long moment.

"I could go to a hotel," she said.

"When does your son get home?"

"I’ll go get him out of school."

Reacher nodded. "Pack your bags."

Berenson said, "I will."

"Who flew?" Reacher asked.

"Lamaison, Lennox, and Parker. Just the three of them."

"Plus the pilot," Reacher said. "That’s four."

Berenson went upstairs to pack and Reacher put the kitchen knife away. Then he put Swan’s rock back in his pocket and pulled the Evian bottle off the Glock.

"Would that really have worked?" Neagley asked. "As a silencer?"

"I doubt it," Reacher said. "I read it in a book once. It worked on the page. But in the real world I imagine it would have exploded and blinded me with shards of flying plastic. But it looked good, didn’t it? It added an extra element. Better than just pointing the gun."

Then his phone rang. His Radio Shack pay-as-you-go, not Saropian’s cell from Vegas. It was Dixon. She and O’Donnell had been on station in Highland Park for four and a half hours. They had seen all they were going to see, and they were starting to feel conspicuous.

"Head home," Reacher said. "We’ve got what we need."

Then Neagley’s phone rang. Her personal cell, not her pay-as-you-go. Her Chicago guy. Ten-thirty in LA, lunch time in Illinois. She listened, not moving, not asking questions, just absorbing information. Then she clicked off.

"Preliminary data from the LAPD grapevine," she said. "In twenty years Lamaison fought eighteen Internal Affairs investigations and won all of them."

"Charges?"

"You name it. Excessive force, bribery, corruption, missing dope, missing money. He’s a bad guy, but smart."

"How does a guy like that get a job with a defense contractor?"

"How does he get one with the LAPD in the first place? And then promotions on top? By putting up a front and working hard to keep his record clean, that’s how. And by having a partner who knew when and how to keep quiet."

"His partner was probably just as bad. It usually works that way."

"You should know," Neagley said.

Forty minutes later Berenson came downstairs with two bags. An expensive black leather carry-on, and a bright green nylon duffel with a sports logo on it. Hers, and the kid’s, Reacher guessed. She loaded them into the Toyota’s trunk. Reacher and Neagley walked down to get their cars and drove them back and formed up into a close protection convoy. Same basic method as surveillance, different purpose. Neagley stayed tight, and Reacher hung back. After a mile he decided O’Donnell had been wrong about the tricked-out Hondas being the most invisible cars in California. The Toyota fit that bill better. He was staring right at it and could barely see it.

Berenson stopped at a school. It was a big tan spread with the kind of black-hole silence around it that schools get when all the kids are inside working. After twenty minutes she came back out with a brown-haired boy in tow. He was small. He barely reached her shoulder. He looked a little puzzled, but happy enough to be dragged away from class.

Then Berenson drove a little ways on the 110 and came off in Pasadena and headed for an inn on a quiet street. Reacher approved of her choice. The place had a lot in back where the Toyota wouldn’t be seen from the road, and a bellman at the door, and two women behind a counter inside. Plenty of vigilant eyes before the elevators and the rooms. Better than a motel.

Reacher and Neagley stayed on site to give Berenson and her kid time to settle in. They figured ten minutes would do it. They used the time getting lunch, in a bar off the lobby. Club sandwiches, coffee for Reacher, soda for Neagley. Reacher liked club sandwiches. He liked the way he could pick his teeth afterward with the tasseled thing that had held the sandwich together. He didn’t want to be talking to people with chicken fibers caught in there.

His phone rang as he was finishing up his coffee. Dixon again. She was back at the motel, with O’Donnell. There was an urgent message waiting at the desk. From Curtis Mauney.

"He wants us up at that place north of Glendale," Dixon said. "Right now."

"Where we went for Orozco?"

"Yes."

"Because they found Sanchez?"

"He didn’t say. But Reacher, he didn’t tell us to meet him at the morgue. He said meet him at the hospital across the street. So if it’s Sanchez, he’s still alive."

68

Dixon and O’Donnell were starting from the Dunes Motel and Reacher and Neagley were starting from the inn in Pasadena. Both locations were exactly equidistant from the hospital north of Glendale. Ten miles, along different sides of the same shallow triangle.

Reacher expected that he and Neagley would get there first. The way the freeways lined up with the flanks of the San Gabriel mountains gave them a straight shot on the 210. Dixon and O’Donnell would be heading northeast, at right angles to the freeways, a difficult trip battling surface congestion all the way.

But the 210 was jammed. Within a hundred yards of the ramp it was completely static. A river of stalled cars curved ahead into the distance, winking in the sun, burning gas, going nowhere. A classic LA panorama. Reacher checked his mirror and saw Neagley’s Honda right behind him. Hers was a Civic, white, about four model-years old. He couldn’t see her behind the wheel. The screen was tinted too dark. It had a band of plastic across the top, dark blue with the words No Fear written across it in jagged silver script. Very appropriate, he thought, for Neagley.

He called her on the phone.

"Accident up ahead," she said. "I heard it on the radio."

"Terrific."

"If Sanchez made it this far, he can make it a few minutes more."

Reacher asked, "Where did they go wrong?"

"I don’t know. This wasn’t the toughest thing they ever faced."

"So something tripped them up. Something unpredictable. Where would Swan have started?"

"With Dean," Neagley said. "The quality control guy. His behavior must have been the trigger. Bad numbers on their own don’t necessarily mean much. But bad numbers plus a stressed-out quality control guy mean a lot."

"Did he get the whole story out of Dean?"

"Probably not. But enough to join the dots. Swan was a lot smarter than Berenson."

"What was his next step?"

"Two steps in parallel," Neagley said. "He secured Dean’s situation, and he started the search for corroborating evidence."