53

They got in the parked Chrysler, for quiet. The doors were thick and heavy and closed tight and gave the kind of vacuum hush a luxury sedan was supposed to. Reacher opened the dead guy’s phone and scrolled through the call log to the last call made and then pressed the green button to make it all over again. Then he cupped the phone to his ear and waited. And listened. He had never owned a cell phone but he knew how they were used. People felt them vibrate in their pockets or heard them ring and fished them out and looked at the screen to see who was calling and then decided whether or not to answer. Altogether it was a much slower process than picking up a regular phone. It could take five or six rings, at least.

The phone rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then it was answered in a real hurry.

A voice said, “Where the hell have you been?”

The voice was deep. A man, not young. Not small. Behind the exasperation and the urgency there was a civilized West Coast accent, professional, but with a faint remnant of streetwise edge still in it. Reacher didn’t reply. He listened hard for background sounds from the phone. But there were none. None at all. Just silence, like a closed room or a quiet office.

The voice said, “Hello? Where the hell are you? What’s happening?”

“Who is this?” Reacher asked, like he had every right to know. Like he had gotten an accidental wrong number.

But the guy didn’t bite. He had seen the caller ID.

“No, who are you?” he asked back, slowly.

Reacher paused a beat and said, “Your boy failed last night. He’s dead and buried, literally. Now we’re coming for you.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice said, “Reacher?”

“You know my name?” Reacher said. “Doesn’t seem fair that I don’t know yours.”

“Nobody ever said life was fair.”

“True. But fair or not, enjoy what’s left of it. Buy yourself a bottle of wine, rent a DVD. But not a box set. You’ve got about two days, max.”

“You’re nowhere.”

“Look out your window.”

Reacher heard sudden movement. The rustle of jacket tails, the oiled grind of a swivel chair. An office. A guy in a suit. A desk facing the door.

Only about a million of those in the 310 area code.

“You’re nowhere,” the voice said again.

“We’ll see you soon,” Reacher said. “We’re going to take a helicopter ride together. Just like you did before. But with one big difference. My friends were reluctant, presumably. But you won’t be. You’ll be begging to jump out. You’ll be pleading. I can absolutely promise you that.”

Then he closed the phone and dropped it in his lap.

Silence in the car.

“First impressions?” Neagley asked.

Reacher breathed out.

“An executive,” he said. “A big guy. A boss. Not dumb. An ordinary voice. A solo office with a window and a closed door.”

“Where?”

“Couldn’t tell. There were no background sounds. No traffic, no airplanes. And he didn’t seem too worried that we have his phone number. The registration is going to come back phony as hell. This car, too, I’m sure.”

“So what now?”

“We head back to LA. We never should have left.”

“This is about Swan,” O’Donnell said. “Got to be, right? We can’t make a case for it being about Franz, it’s not about Sanchez or Orozco, so what else is left? He must have gotten into something immediately after he quit New Age. Maybe he had it all lined up and waiting.”

Reacher nodded. “We need to talk to his old boss. We need to see if he shared any private concerns before he left.” He turned to Neagley. “So set up the thing with Diana Bond again. The Washington woman. About New Age and Little Wing. We need a bargaining chip. Swan’s old boss might talk more if he knows we have something solid to keep quiet about in exchange. Besides, I’m curious.”

“Me too,” Neagley said.

They stole the Chrysler. Didn’t even get out. Reacher took the key from Neagley and started it up and drove it around to the hotel. He waited in the drop-off lane while the others went inside to pack. He quite liked the car. It was quiet and powerful. He could see its exterior styling reflected in the hotel’s window. It looked good in blue. It was square and bluff and about as subtle as a hammer. His kind of machine. He checked the controls and the toys and plugged the dead guy’s phone into its charger and closed the armrest lid on it.

Dixon came out of the lobby first, trailing a bellhop carrying her luggage and a valet sprinting ahead to get her car. Then came Neagley and O’Donnell together. Neagley was stuffing a credit card receipt into her purse and closing her cell phone all at the same time.

“We got a hit on the license plate,” she said. “It traces back to a shell corporation called Walter, at a commercial mail drop in downtown LA.”

“Cute,” Reacher said. “Walter for Walter Chrysler. I bet the phone comes back to a corporation called Alexander, for Graham Bell.”

“The Walter Corporation leases a total of seven cars,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “We need to bear that in mind. They’ll have major reinforcements waiting somewhere.”

Dixon said she would drive O’Donnell back in her rental. So Reacher popped the Chrysler’s trunk and Neagley heaved her bags in and then slid in beside him on the passenger seat.

“Where are we holing up?” Dixon asked, through the window.

“Somewhere different,” Reacher said. “So far they’ve seen us in the Wilshire and the Chateau Marmont. So now we need a change of pace. We need the kind of place they won’t think to look. Let’s try the Dunes on Sunset.”

“What is that?”

“A motel. My kind of place.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s fine. It has beds. And doors that lock.”

Reacher and Neagley took off first. Traffic was slow all the way out of town and then the 15 emptied and Reacher settled in for the cruise across the desert. The car was quiet and swift and civilized. Neagley spent the first thirty minutes playing phone tag around Edwards Air Force Base, trying to get Diana Bond on the line before her cell coverage failed. Reacher tuned her out and concentrated on the road ahead. He was an adequate driver, but not great. He had learned in the army and had never received civilian instruction. Never passed a civilian test, never held a civilian license. Neagley was a much better driver than he was. And much faster. She finished her calls and fidgeted with impatience. Kept glancing over at the speedometer.

“Drive it like you stole it,” she said. “Which you did.”

So he accelerated a little. Started passing people, including a medium-sized U-Haul truck lumbering west in the right-hand lane.

Ten miles shy of Barstow, Dixon caught up with them and flashed her lights and pulled alongside and O’Donnell made eating motions from the passenger seat. Like helpless masochists they stopped at the same diner they had used before. No alternative for miles, and they were all hungry. They hadn’t eaten lunch.

The food was as bad as before and the conversation was desultory. Mostly they talked about Sanchez and Orozco. About how hard it was to keep a viable small business going. Especially about how hard it was for ex-military people. They entered the civilian world with all the wrong assumptions. They expected the same kind of certainties they had known before. The straightforwardness, the transparency, the honesty, the shared sacrifice. Reacher felt that part of the time Dixon and O’Donnell were actually talking about themselves. He wondered exactly how well they were doing, behind their facades. Exactly how it all looked on paper for them, at tax time. And how it was going to look a year from then. Dixon was in trouble because she had walked out on her last job. O’Donnell had been out for a spell with his sister. Only Neagley seemed to have no worries. She was an unqualified success. But she was one out of nine. A hit rate a fraction better than eleven percent, for some of the finest graduates the army had ever produced.

Not good.

You’re well out of it, Dixon had said.

I usually feel that way, he had replied.

All that we’ve got that you don’t is suitcases, O’Donnell had said.

But what have I got that you don’t? he had replied.

He finished the meal a little closer to an answer than before.

After Barstow came Victorville and Lake Arrowhead. Then the mountains reared in front of them. But first, this time to their right, were the badlands where the helicopter had flown. Once again Reacher told himself he wouldn’t look, but once again he did. He took his eyes off the road and glanced north and west for seconds at a time. Sanchez and Swan were out there somewhere, he guessed. He saw no reason to hope otherwise.

They passed through an active cell and Neagley’s phone rang. Diana Bond, all set to leave Edwards at a moment’s notice. Reacher said, “Tell her to meet us at that Denny’s on Sunset. Where we were before.” Neagley made a face and he said, “It’s going to taste like Maxim’s in Paris after that place we just stopped.”

So Neagley arranged the rendezvous and he kicked the transmission down and climbed onto Mount San Antonio’s first low slopes. Less than an hour later they were checking in at the Dunes Motel.

The Dunes was the kind of place where no room went even close to three figures for the night and where guests were required to leave a security deposit for the TV remote, which was issued with great ceremony along with the key. Reacher paid cash from his stolen wad for all four rooms, which got around the necessity for real names and ID. They parked the cars out of sight of the street and regrouped in a dark battered lounge next to a laundry room, as anonymous as four people could get in Los Angeles County.

Reacher’s kind of place.

An hour later Diana Bond called Neagley to say she was pulling into the Denny’s lot.