Bad Luck and Trouble Read online

  “But?”

  “We move on down the list. Alan Mason flies to Denver, Colorado. Takes a room at a downtown hotel.”

  “And then?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’re still checking.”

  “But you think they’re all the same guy?”

  “Obviously they’re all the same guy. The initials are a dead giveaway.”

  Reacher said, “That makes me Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”

  “You sure act like it.”

  “So who is he?”

  “I have no idea. The INS inspector won’t remember him. Those Terminal Four guys see ten thousand faces a day. The New York hotel people won’t remember him. We haven’t spoken to Denver yet. But they probably won’t remember him, either.”

  “Wasn’t he photographed at Immigration?”

  “We’re working on getting the picture.”

  Reacher went back to the first fax. The Homeland Security data. The advance passenger information.

  “He’s British,” he said.

  Mauney said, “Not necessarily. He had at least one British passport, that’s all.”

  “So what’s your play?”

  “We start a watch list of our own. Sooner or later Andrew MacBride or Anthony Matthews will show up somewhere. Then at least we’ll know where he’s going.”

  “What do you want from us?”

  “You ever heard any of those names?”

  “No.”

  “No friends anywhere with the initials A and M?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Enemies?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Did Orozco know anyone with those initials?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to Orozco in ten years.”

  “I was wrong,” Mauney said. “About the rope on his hands and feet. I had a guy take a look at it. It isn’t very common after all. It’s a sisal product from the Indian subcontinent.”

  “Where would someone get it?”

  “It’s not for sale anywhere in the United States. It would have to come in on whatever gets exported from there.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Rolled carpets, bales of unfinished cotton fabric, stuff like that.”

  “Thanks for sharing.”

  “No problem. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Mauney left and they went up to Dixon’s room. No real reason. They were still dead-ended. But they had to be somewhere. O’Donnell cleaned blood off his switchblade and checked over the captured Hardballers in his usual meticulous fashion. They had been manufactured by AMT not far away in Irwindale, California. They were fully loaded with jacketed .45s. They were in fine condition and fully operational. Clean, oiled, undamaged, which made it likely that they had been very recently stolen. Dope dealers were not usually careful with weapons. The Hardballers’ only limitations came from being faithful copies of a design that had been around since the year 1911. Magazine capacity was only seven rounds, which must have seemed more than OK in a world full of six-shooters, but which didn’t stack up very well against modern capacities of fifteen or more.

  “Pieces of shit,” Neagley said.

  “Better than throwing stones,” O’Donnell said.

  “Too big for my hand,” Dixon said. “I like the Glock 19, personally.”

  “I like anything that works,” Reacher said.

  “The Glock holds seventeen rounds.”

  “It only takes one per head. I’ve never had seventeen people after me all at once.”

  “Could happen.”

  The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride was on the underground train inside the Denver airport. He had time to kill so he was riding it back and forth over and over again between the main terminal and Concourse C, which was the last stop. He was enjoying the jug-band music. He felt lightened, unburdened, and free. His luggage was now minimal. No more heavy suitcase. Just an overnight roll-on and a briefcase. The bill of lading was inside the briefcase, folded into a hardcover book. The padlock key was zipped into a secure pocket.

  The man in the blue suit in the blue Chrysler sedan dialed his cell phone.

  “They’re back in the hotel,” he said. “All four of them.”

  “Are they getting close to us?” his boss asked.

  “I have no way of telling.”

  “Gut feeling?”

  “Yes, I think they’re getting close.”

  “OK, it’s time to take them down. Leave them there and come on in. We’ll make our move in a couple of hours.”

  41

  O’Donnell stood up and walked to Dixon’s window and asked, “What have we got?”

  It was a routine question from the past. It had been a big part of the special unit’s standard operating procedure. Like an unbreakable habit. Reacher had always insisted on constant recaps. He had insisted on combing through accumulated information, restating it, testing it, re-examining it, looking at it from new angles in the light of what had come afterward. But this time nobody answered, except Dixon, who said, “All we’ve got is four dead friends.”

  The room went quiet.

  “Let’s get dinner,” Neagley said. “No point in the rest of us starving ourselves to death.”

  Dinner. Reacher recalled the burger barn, twenty-four hours previously. Sunset Boulevard, the noise, the thick beef patties, the cold beer. The round table for four. The conversation. The way the center of attention had rotated freely between them all. Always one talker and three listeners, a shifting pyramid that had swung first one way and then another.

  One talker, three listeners.

  “Mistake,” he said.

  Neagley said, “Eating is a mistake?”

  “No, eat if you want to. But we’re making a mistake. A major conceptual error.”

  “Where?”

  “My fault entirely. I jumped to a false conclusion.”

  “How?”

  “Why can’t we find Franz’s client?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because Franz didn’t have a client. We made a mistake. His was the first body found, so we just went ahead and assumed this whole thing was about him. Like he had to have been the prime mover here. Like he was the talker and the other three were the listeners. But suppose he wasn’t the talker?”

  “So who was?”

  “We’ve been saying all along he wouldn’t have put himself on the line except for someone special. Someone he was obligated to somehow.”

  “But that’s back to saying he was the prime mover. With a client we can’t find.”

  “No, we’re imagining the hierarchy all wrong. It doesn’t necessarily go, first the client, then Franz, then the others helping Franz. I think Franz was actually lower down the pecking order. He wasn’t at the top of the tree. See what I mean? Suppose he was actually helping one of the others? Suppose he was a listener, not the talker? Suppose this whole thing is basically Orozco’s deal? For one of his clients? Or Sanchez’s? If they needed help, who were they going to call?”

  “Franz and Swan.”

  “Exactly. We’ve been wrong from the start. We need to reverse the paradigm. Suppose Franz got a panic call from Orozco or Sanchez? That’s certainly someone he regards as special. That’s someone he’s obligated to somehow. Not a client, but he can’t say no. He’s got to pitch in and help, no matter what Angela or Charlie think.”

  Silence in the room.

  Reacher said, “Orozco contacted Homeland Security. That’s difficult to do. And it’s the only really proactive thing we’ve seen so far. It’s more than Franz seems to have done.”

  O’Donnell said, “Mauney’s people think Orozco was dead before Franz. That might be significant.”

  “Yes,” Dixon said. “If this was Franz’s deal, why would he farm out the heavy-duty inquiries to Orozco? I imagine Franz was better equipped to handle them himself. That kind of proves the dynamic was flowing the other way, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s s
uggestive,” Reacher said. “But let’s not make the same mistake twice. It could have been Swan.”

  “Swan wasn’t working.”

  “Sanchez, then, not Orozco.”

  “More likely both of them together.”

  Neagley said, “Which would mean this was something based in Vegas, not here in LA. Could those numbers be something to do with casinos?”

  “Possibly,” Dixon said. “They could be house win percentages taking a hit after someone worked out a system.”

  “What kind of thing gets played nine or ten or twelve times a day?”

  “Practically anything. There’s no real minimum or maximum.”

  “Cards?”

  “Almost certainly, if we’re talking about a system.”

  O’Donnell nodded. “Six hundred and fifty unscheduled winning hands at an average of a hundred grand a time would get anyone’s attention.”

  Dixon said, “They wouldn’t let a guy win six hundred and fifty times for four months solid.”

  “So maybe it’s more than one guy. Maybe it’s a cartel.”

  Neagley said, “We have to go to Vegas.”

  Then Dixon’s room phone rang. She answered it. Her room, her phone. She listened for a second and handed the receiver to Reacher.

  “Curtis Mauney,” she said. “For you.”

  Reacher took the phone and said his name and Mauney said: “Andrew MacBride just got on a plane in Denver. He’s heading for Las Vegas. I’m telling you this purely as a courtesy. So stay exactly where you are. No independent action, remember?”

  42

  They decided to drive to Vegas, not fly. Faster to plan and easier to organize and no slower door to door. No way could they take the Hardballers on a plane, anyway. And they had to assume that firepower would be necessary sooner or later. So Reacher waited in the lobby while the others packed. Neagley came down first and checked them out. She didn’t even look at the bill. Just signed it. Then she dumped her bag near the door and waited with Reacher. O’Donnell came down next. Then Dixon, with her Hertz key in her hand.

  They loaded their bags into the trunk and slid into their seats. Dixon and Neagley up front, Reacher and O’Donnell behind them. They headed east on Sunset and fought through the tangle of clogged freeways until they found the 15. It would run them north through the mountains and then north of east out of state and all the way to Vegas.

  It would also run them close to where they knew a helicopter had hovered more than three weeks previously, at least twice, three thousand feet up, dead of night, its doors open. Reacher made up his mind not to look, but he did. After the road brought them out of the hills he found himself looking west toward the flat tan badlands. He saw O’Donnell doing the same thing. And Neagley. And Dixon. She took her eyes off the road for seconds at a time and stared to her left, her face creased against the setting sun and her lips clamped and turned down at the corners.

  They stopped for dinner in Barstow, California, at a miserable roadside diner that had no virtues other than it was there and the road ahead was empty. The place was dirty, the service was slow, the food was bad. Reacher was no gourmet, but even he felt cheated. In the past he or Dixon or Neagley or certainly O’Donnell might have complained or heaved a chair through a window, but none of them did that night. They just suffered through three courses and drank weak coffee and got back on the road.

  The man in the blue suit called it in from the Chateau Marmont’s parking lot: “They skipped out. They’re gone. All four of them.”

  His boss asked, “Where to?”

  “The clerk thinks Vegas. That’s what she heard.”

  “Excellent. We’ll do it there. Better all around. Drive, don’t fly.”

  The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride stepped out of the jetway inside the Las Vegas airport and the first thing he saw was a bank of slot machines. Bulky black and silver and gold boxes, with winking neon fascias. Maybe twenty of them, back to back in lines of ten. Each machine had a vinyl stool in front of it. Each machine had a narrow gray ledge at the bottom with an ashtray on the left and a cup holder on the right. Perhaps twelve of the twenty stools were occupied. The men and women on them were staring forward at the screens with a peculiar kind of fatigued concentration.

  Andrew MacBride decided to try his luck. He decided to designate the result as a harbinger of his future success. If he won, everything would be fine.

  And if he lost?

  He smiled. He knew that if he lost he would rationalize the result away. He wasn’t superstitious.

  He sat on a stool and propped his briefcase against his ankle. He carried a change purse in his pocket. It made him faster through airport security, and therefore less noticeable. He took it out and poked around in it and took out all the quarters he had accumulated. There weren’t many. They made a short line on the ledge, between the ashtray and the cup holder.

  He fed them to the machine, one by one. They made satisfying metallic sounds as they fell through the slot. A red LED showed five credits. There was a large touch pad to start the game. It was worn and greasy from a million fingers.

  He pressed it, again and again.

  The first four times, he lost.

  The fifth time, he won.

  A muted bell rang and a quiet whoop-whoop siren sounded and the machine rocked back and forth a little as a sturdy mechanism inside counted out a hundred quarters. They rattled down a chute and clattered into a pressed metal dish near his knee.

  Barstow, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada, was going to be about two hundred miles. At night on the 15, with due deference to one state’s Highway Patrol and the other’s State Police, that was going to take a little over three hours. Dixon said she was happy to drive all the way. She lived in New York, and driving was a novelty for her. O’Donnell dozed in the back. Reacher stared out the window. Neagley said, “Damn, we forgot all about Diana Bond. She’s coming down from Edwards. She’s going to find us gone.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” Dixon said.

  “I should call her,” Neagley said. But she couldn’t get a signal on her cell phone. They were way out in the Mojave, and coverage was patchy.