Bad Luck and Trouble (11 page)

“Then please take a seat.” The woman picked up her desk phone and Reacher and Neagley stepped away to the leather chairs. Neagley sat down but Reacher stayed on his feet. He watched the dull aluminum reflection of the woman on the phone and heard her say, “Two friends of Tony Swan to see him.” Then she put the phone down and smiled in Reacher’s direction even though he wasn’t looking directly at her. Then the lobby went quiet.

It stayed quiet for about four minutes and then Reacher heard the click of shoes on slate from a corridor that entered the lobby to the side of and behind the desk. A measured stride, no hurry, a person of medium height and medium weight. He watched the mouth of the corridor and saw a woman step into view. About forty years old, slim, brown hair stylishly cut. She was in a tailored black pant suit and a white blouse. She looked swift and efficient and had an open and welcoming expression on her face. She smiled a token thank you to the receptionist and walked straight past her toward Reacher and Neagley. Held out her hand and said, “I’m Margaret Berenson.”

Neagley stood up and she and Reacher said their names and shook hands with her. Up close she had old looping car crash scars under her makeup and the chilly breath of a big-time gum chewer. She was wearing decent jewelry, but no wedding band.

“We’re looking for Tony Swan,” Reacher said.

“I know,” the woman said. “Let’s find somewhere to talk.”

One of the aluminum wall panels was a door that led to a small rectangular conference room directly off the lobby. Clearly it was designed for discussions with visitors who didn’t merit admission into the inner sanctums. It was a cool spare space with a table and four chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave directly onto the parking lot. The front bumper of Neagley’s Mustang was about five feet away.

“I’m Margaret Berenson,” the woman said again. “I’m New Age’s Human Resources director. I’ll get straight to the point, which is that Mr. Swan isn’t with us anymore.”

Reacher asked, “Since when?”

“A little over three weeks ago,” Berenson said.

“What happened?”

“I’d feel more comfortable talking about it if I knew for sure you have a connection with him. Anyone can walk up to a reception counter and claim to be old friends.”

“I’m not sure how we could prove it.”

“What did he look like?”

“About five-nine tall and about five-eight wide.”

Berenson smiled. “If I told you he used a piece of stone as a paperweight, could you tell me where that piece of stone came from?”

“The Berlin Wall,” Reacher said. “He was in Germany when it came down. I saw him there just afterward. He took the train up and got himself a souvenir. And it’s concrete, not stone. There’s a trace of graffiti on it.”

Berenson nodded.

“That’s the story I heard,” she said. “And that’s the object I’ve seen.”

“So what happened?” Reacher asked. “He quit?”

Berenson shook her head.

“Not exactly,” she said. “We had to let him go. Not just him. You have to understand, this is a new company. It was always speculative, and there was always risk. In terms of our business plan, we’re not where we want to be. Not yet, anyway. So we reached the stage where we had to revise our staffing levels. Downward, unfortunately. We operated a last-in-first-out policy, and basically that meant we had to let the whole assistant management level go. I lost my own assistant director. Mr. Swan was Assistant Director of Security, so unfortunately the policy swept him away, too. We were very sorry to see him go, because he was a real asset. If things pick up, we’ll beg him to come back. But I’m sure he’ll have secured another position by then.”

Reacher glanced through the window at the half-empty parking lot. Listened to the quiet of the building. It sounded half-empty, too.

“OK,” he said.

“Not OK,” Neagley said. “I’ve been calling his office over and over for the last three days and every time I was told he had just stepped out for a minute. That doesn’t add up.”

Berenson nodded again. “That’s a professional courtesy that I insist upon. With this caliber of management it would be a disaster for an individual if his personal network of contacts heard the news secondhand. Much better if Mr. Swan can inform people himself, directly. Then he can spin it however he wants. So I insist that the remaining secretarial staff tell little white lies during the readjustment period. I don’t apologize for it, but I do hope you understand. It’s the least I can do for the people we’ve lost. If Mr. Swan can approach a new employer as if it were a voluntary move, he’s in a far better position than if everyone knew he’d been let go from here.”

Neagley thought about it for a moment, and then she nodded.

“OK,” she said. “I can see your point.”

“Especially in Mr. Swan’s case,” Berenson said. “We all liked him very much.”

“What about the ones you didn’t like?”

“There weren’t any. We would never hire people we didn’t believe in.”

Reacher said, “I called Swan and nobody answered at all.”

Berenson nodded again, still patient and professional. “We had to cut the secretarial pool, too. The ones we kept on are covering five or six phones each. Sometimes they can’t get to every call.”

Reacher asked, “So what’s up with your business plan?”

“I really can’t discuss that in detail. But I’m sure you understand. You were in the army.”

“We both were.”

“Then you know how many new weapons systems work straight out of the gate.”

“Not many.”

“Not
any.
Ours is taking a little longer than we hoped.”

“What kind of a weapon is it?”

“I really can’t discuss that.”

“Where is it made?”

“Right here.”

Reacher shook his head. “No, it isn’t. You’ve got a fence a three-year-old could walk through and no guard shack at the gate and an unsecured lobby. Tony Swan wouldn’t have let you get away with that if anything sensitive was happening here.”

“I really can’t comment on our procedures.”

“Who was Swan’s boss?”

“Our Director of Security? He’s a retired LAPD lieutenant.”

“And you kept him and let Swan go? Your last-in-first-out policy didn’t do you any favors there.”

“They’re all great people, the ones who stayed and the ones who went. We hated making the cut. But it was an absolute necessity.”

Two minutes later Reacher and Neagley were back in the Mustang, sitting in New Age’s parking lot, engine idling to run the air, with the full scope of the disaster plain to both of them.

“Really bad timing,” Reacher said. “Suddenly Swan is at loose ends, Franz calls him with a problem, what else is Swan going to do? He’s going to run right over there. It’s twenty minutes down the road.”

“He’d have gone anyway, unemployed or not.”

“They all would. And I guess they all did.”

“So are they all dead now?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“You got what you wanted, Reacher. It’s just the two of us.”

“I didn’t want it for these reasons.”

“I just can’t believe it.
All
of them?”

“Someone’s going to pay.”

“You think? We’ve got nothing. We’ve got one last chance with a password. Which by definition we’ll be too nervous to take.”

“This is no kind of a time to be getting nervous.”

“So tell me what to type.”

Reacher said nothing.

They retraced their route through the surface streets. Neagley drove in silence and Reacher pictured Tony Swan making the same drive more than three weeks earlier. Maybe with the contents of his New Age desk boxed up in his trunk, his pens and pencils and his chip of Soviet concrete. On his way to help his old buddy. Other old buddies pouring in down spokes of an invisible wheel. Sanchez and Orozco hustling over from Vegas on the 15. O’Donnell and Dixon coming in on planes from the East Coast, toting luggage, taking taxis, assembling.

Meeting and greeting.

Running into some kind of a brick wall.

Then their images faded away and he was alone again with Neagley in the car.
Just the two of us.
Facts were to be faced, not fought.

Neagley left the car with the Beverly Wilshire valets and they entered the lobby from the rear through the crooked corridor. They rode up in the elevator in silence. Neagley used her key and pushed open her door.

Then she stopped dead.

Because sitting in her chair by the window, reading Calvin Franz’s autopsy report, was a man in a suit.

Tall, fair, aristocratic, relaxed.

David O’Donnell.

17

O’Donnell looked up, somber. “I was going to inquire as to the meaning of all those rude and abusive messages on my answering machine.” Then he raised the autopsy report, an explanatory gesture. “But now I understand.”

Neagley asked, “How did you get in here?”

O’Donnell just said, “Oh, please.”

“Where the hell were you?” Reacher asked.

“I was in New Jersey,” O’Donnell said. “My sister was sick.”

“How sick?”

“Very sick.”

“Did she die?”

“No, she recovered.”

“Then you should have been here days ago.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

“We were worried,” Neagley said. “We thought they got you, too.”

O’Donnell nodded. “You should be worried. You should stay worried. It’s a worrying situation. I had to wait four hours for a flight. I used the time making calls. No answer from Franz, obviously. Now I know why, of course. No answer from Swan or Dixon or Orozco or Sanchez, either. My conclusion was that one of them had gotten all the others together and they had run into a problem. Not you or Reacher, because you’re too busy in Chicago and who the hell could ever find Reacher? And not me, because I was temporarily off the grid in New Jersey.”

“I wasn’t too busy,” Neagley said. “How could anyone think that? I’d have dropped everything and come running.”

O’Donnell nodded again. “At first that was the only thing that gave me hope. I figured they would have called you.”

“So why didn’t they? Don’t they like me?”

“If they hated you they’d still have called you. Without you it would have been like fighting with one hand behind their backs. Who would do that voluntarily? But in the end it’s perception that counts, not reality. You’re very high grade now compared to the rest of us. I think they might have hesitated with you. Maybe until it was too late.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that one of them, and now I see that it would have been Franz, was in trouble, and he called all of us that he perceived as readily available. Which excluded you and Reacher by definition, and me also, by bad luck, because I wasn’t where I normally am.”

“That’s how we saw it, too. Except you’re a bonus. Your sister being sick was a stroke of luck for us. And for you, maybe.”

“But not for her.”

“Stop whining,” Reacher said. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

“Nice to see you, too,” O’Donnell said. “After all these years.”

“How
did
you get in here?” Neagley asked.

O’Donnell shifted in his seat and took a switchblade from one coat pocket and a set of brass knuckles from the other. “A guy who can get these through airport security can get into a hotel room, believe me.”

“How did you get those through an airport?”

“My secret,” O’Donnell said.

“Ceramic,” Reacher said. “They don’t make them anymore. Because they don’t set the metal detector off.”

“Correct,” O’Donnell said. “No metal at all, apart from the switchblade spring, which is still steel. But that’s very small.”

“It’s good to see you again, David,” Reacher said.

“Likewise. But I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“The circumstances just got fifty percent happier. We thought it was just the two of us. Now it’s the three of us.”

“What have we got?”

“Very little. You’ve seen what’s in his autopsy report. Apart from that we’ve got two generic white men who tossed his office. Didn’t find anything, because he was mailing stuff to himself in a permanent loop. We found his mail box and picked up four flash memories and we’re down to the last try at a password.”

“So start thinking about computer security,” Neagley said.

O’Donnell took a deep breath and held it longer than seemed humanly possible. Then he exhaled, gently. It was an old habit.

“Tell me what words you’ve tried so far,” he said.

Neagley opened her notebook to the relevant page and handed it over. O’Donnell put a finger to his lips and read. Reacher watched him. He hadn’t seen him in eleven years, but he hadn’t changed much. He had the kind of corn-colored hair that would never show gray. He had the kind of greyhound’s body that would never show fat. His suit was beautifully cut. In the same way as Neagley, he looked settled and prosperous and successful. Like he was making it.