24

Hertz had given Dixon a Ford 500, which was a decent-sized four-seat sedan. She put her bags in the trunk and climbed in the driver’s seat. Neagley sat next to her in the front and Reacher and O’Donnell squeezed in the back. Dixon started up and left the airport heading north on Sepulveda. She talked for the first five minutes. She had been working undercover as a new hire at a Wall Street brokerage house. Her client was a major institutional investor worried about illegalities. Like all undercover operatives who want to survive, she had stuck religiously to her cover, which meant she could afford no contact with her regular life. She couldn’t call her office on her brokerage-supplied cell or on her brokerage-supplied landline from her brokerage-supplied corporate apartment, or get her e-mail on her brokerage-supplied BlackBerry. Eventually she had checked in clandestinely from a Port Authority pay phone and found the long string of increasingly desperate 10-30s on her machine. So she had ditched her job and her client and headed straight for JFK and jumped on America West. From the Vegas airport she had called Sanchez and Orozco and gotten no reply. Worse, their voice mail was full, which was a bad sign. So she had cabbed over to their offices and found them deserted with three weeks’ worth of mail backed up behind the door. Their neighbors hadn’t seen them in a long time.

“So that’s it,” Reacher said. “Now we know for sure. It’s just the four of us left.”

Then Neagley talked for five minutes. She gave the same kind of clear concise briefing she had given a thousand times before. No wasted words, no omitted details. She covered all the hard intelligence and all the speculation from Angela Franz’s first phone call onward. The autopsy report, the small house in Santa Monica, the trashed Culver City office, the flash memories, the New Age building, O’Donnell’s arrival, the dead dog, the unfortunate attack on the LA County deputy outside Swan’s house in Santa Ana, the subsequent decision to ditch the Hertz cars to derail the inevitable pursuit.

“Well, that part is taken care of at least,” Dixon said. “Nobody is following us now, so this car is clean for the time being.”

“Conclusions?” Reacher asked.

Dixon thought for three hundred yards of slow boulevard traffic. Then she slid onto the 405, the San Diego Freeway, but heading north, away from San Diego, toward Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys.

“One conclusion, mainly,” she said. “This wasn’t about Franz calling only some of us because he assumed only some of us would be available. And it wasn’t about him calling only some of us because he underestimated the extent of his problem. Franz was way too smart for that. And too cautious now, apparently, what with the kid and all. So we need to shift the paradigm. Look at who’s here and who isn’t. I think this was about Franz calling only those of us who could get to him in a big hurry. Real fast. Swan, obviously, because he was right here in town, and then Sanchez and Orozco because they were only an hour or so away in Vegas. The rest of us were no good to him. Because we were all at least a day away. So this is about speed and panic and urgency. The kind of thing where half a day makes a difference.”

“Specifically?” Reacher asked.

“No idea. It’s a shame you burned the first eleven passwords. We could have seen what information was new or different.”

O’Donnell said, “It’s got to be the names. They were the only hard data.”

“Numbers can be hard data, too,” Dixon said.

“You’ll go blind figuring them out.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes numbers speak to me.”

“These won’t.”

There was quiet in the car for a moment. Traffic was moving OK. Dixon stayed on the 405 and blew through the intersection with the 10.

“Where are we headed?” she asked.

Neagley said, “Let’s go to the Chateau Marmont. It’s out of the way and discreet.”

“And expensive,” Reacher said. Something in his tone made Dixon take her eyes off the road and glance behind her. Neagley said, “Reacher’s broke.”

“I’m not surprised,” Dixon said. “He hasn’t worked in nine years.”

“He didn’t do much when he was in the army, either,” O’Donnell said. “Why change the habit of a lifetime?”

“He’s sensitive about other people paying for him,” Neagley said.

“Poor baby,” Dixon said.

Reacher said, “I’m just trying to be polite.”

Dixon stayed on the 405 until Santa Monica Boulevard. Then she struck out north and east, aiming to pass through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to hit Sunset right at the base of Laurel Canyon.

“Mission statement,” she said. “You do not mess with the special investigators. The four of us here have to make that stick. On behalf of the four of us who aren’t here. So we need a command structure and a plan and a budget.”

Neagley said, “I’ll take care of the budget.”

“Can you?”

“This year alone there’s seven billion dollars of Homeland Security money washing around the private system. Some of it comes our way in Chicago and I own half of whatever part of it sticks in our books.”

“So are you rich?”

“Richer than I was when I was a sergeant.”

“We’ll get it back anyway,” O’Donnell said. “People get killed for love or money, and our guys sure as hell didn’t get killed for love. So there’s money in this somewhere.”

“So are we agreed on Neagley staking the budget?” Dixon asked.

“What is this, a democracy?” Reacher said.

“Temporarily. Are we agreed?”

Four raised hands. Two majors and a captain, letting a sergeant pick up the tab.

“OK, the plan,” Dixon said.

“Command structure first,” O’Donnell said. “Can’t put the cart before the horse.”

“OK,” Dixon said. “I nominate Reacher for CO.”

“Me too,” O’Donnell said.

“Me three,” Neagley said. “Like it always was.”

“Can’t do it,” Reacher said. “I hit that cop. If it comes to it, I’m going to have to put my hands up for it and leave the rest of you to carry on without me. Can’t have a CO in that position.”

Dixon said, “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“We’re coming to it,” Reacher said. “For sure. Tomorrow or the next day at the latest.”

“Maybe they’ll let it go.”

“Dream on. Would we have let it go?”

“Maybe he’ll be too shamefaced to report it.”

“He doesn’t have to report it. People will notice. He’s got a busted window and a busted nose.”

“Does he even know who you are?”

“He put Neagley’s name in the machine. He was tailing us. He knows who we are.”

“You can’t put your hands up for it,” O’Donnell said. “You’ll go to jail. If it comes to it, you’ll have to get out of town.”

“Can’t do that. If they don’t get me, they’ll come after you and Neagley as accessories. We don’t want that. We need boots on the ground here.”

“We’ll get you a lawyer. A cheap one.”

“No, a good one,” Dixon said.

“Whatever, I’ll still be preoccupied,” Reacher said.

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “Neagley should be CO.”

“I decline,” Neagley said.

“You can’t decline. It’s an order.”

“It can’t be an order until you’re CO.”

“Dixon, then.”

“Declined,” Dixon said.

“OK, O’Donnell.”

“Pass.”

Dixon said, “Reacher until he goes to jail. Then Neagley. All in favor?”

Three hands went up.

“You’ll regret this,” Reacher said. “I’ll make you regret it.”

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.

“Same as ever,” he said. “We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.”