Bad Luck and Trouble (48 page)

Dixon did the smart thing, which was to ignore the knuckleduster and haul herself across the cabin like a mermaid to Lamaison’s pockets, where she found a wallet and another SIG and O’Donnell’s switchblade. Two seconds later her feet were free, and five seconds after that O’Donnell was free. Both of them had been tied up for hours, and they were stiff and cramped and their hands were shaking pretty badly. But they didn’t have difficult tasks ahead of them. There was only the pilot to subdue. O’Donnell grabbed the guy’s collar in one fist and jammed a SIG’s muzzle up under his chin. There was no chance of him missing with a contact shot, however badly his hands were shaking. No chance at all. The pilot understood that. He stayed passive. Reacher stuck his SIG in Lamaison’s ear and leaned the other way, toward the pilot, and asked, “Height?”

The pilot swallowed and said, “Three thousand feet.”

“Let’s take it up a little,” Reacher said. “Let’s try five thousand feet.”

81

The climb took the Bell out of its slow rotation and the open door flapped around for a moment and then slammed itself shut. The cabin went quiet. Almost silent, by comparison. O’Donnell still had his gun to the pilot’s head. Reacher still had Lamaison arched backward in his seat. Lamaison had his hands on Reacher’s forearm, hauling downward, but listlessly. He had gone strangely passive and inert. Like he sensed exactly what was threatened, but couldn’t believe it was really going to happen.

Like Swan couldn’t,
Reacher thought.
Like Orozco couldn’t, and Franz couldn’t, and Sanchez couldn’t.

He felt the Bell top out and level off. Heard the rotor bite stationary air, felt the turbines settle to a fast urgent whine. The pilot glanced in his direction and nodded.

“More,” Reacher said. “Let’s do another two hundred and eighty feet. Let’s make it a whole mile.”

The engine noise changed and the rotor noise changed and the craft moved upward again, slowly, precisely. It turned a little and then came back to a hover.

The pilot said, “One mile.”

Reacher asked, “What’s below us now?”

“Sand.”

Reacher turned to Dixon and said, “Open the door.”

Lamaison found some new energy. He bucked and thrashed in his seat and said, “No, please, please, no.”

Reacher tightened his elbow and asked, “Did my friends beg?”

Lamaison just shook his head.

“They wouldn’t,” Reacher said. “Too proud.”

Dixon moved back in the cabin and grabbed Lennox’s seat harness in her left hand. Held on tight and groped for the door release with her right. She was smaller than Lennox had been and for her it was more of a stretch. But she got there. She clicked the release and pushed off hard with spread fingertips and the door swung open. Reacher turned to the pilot and said, “Do that spinning thing again.” The pilot set up the slow clockwise rotation and the door opened up all the way and pinned itself back against its hinge straps. Shattering noise and cold night air poured in. The mountains showed black on the horizon. Beyond them the glow of Los Angeles was visible, fifty miles away, a million bright lights trapped under air as thick as soup. Then that view rotated away and was replaced by desert blackness.

Dixon sat down on Parker’s folded seat. O’Donnell tightened his hold on the pilot’s collar. Reacher twisted Lamaison’s neck up and back with his forearm hard against his throat. Pulled him upward against the limits of the harness. Held him there. Then he reached over and used the SIG’s muzzle to hit the harness release. The belts came free. Reacher pulled Lamaison backward all the way over the top of the seat and dumped him on the floor.

Lamaison saw his chance, and he took it. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and scrabbled his heels on the carpet, trying to get his feet under him. But Reacher was ready. Readier than he had ever been. He kicked Lamaison hard in the side and swung an elbow that caught him on the ear. Wrestled him facedown on the floor and got a knee between his shoulder blades and jammed the SIG against the top of his spine. Lamaison’s head was up and Reacher knew he was staring out into the void. His feet were drumming on the carpet. He was screaming. Reacher could hear him clearly over the noise. He could feel his chest heaving.

Too late,
Reacher thought.
You reap what you sow.

Lamaison flailed weak backhand blows that didn’t come close to landing. Then he put his hands flat on the floor and tried to buck Reacher off.
No chance,
Reacher thought.
Not unless you can do a push-up with two hundred and fifty pounds riding on your back.
Some guys could. Reacher had seen it done. But Lamaison couldn’t. He was strong, but not strong enough. He strained for a spell and collapsed.

Reacher swapped the SIG into his left hand and looped his right over Lamaison’s neck from behind like a pincer. Lamaison had a big neck, but Reacher had big hands. He jammed his thumb and the tip of his middle finger into the hollows behind Lamaison’s ears and squeezed hard. Lamaison’s arteries compressed and his brain starved for oxygen and he stopped screaming and his feet stopped drumming. Reacher kept the pressure on for a whole extra minute and then rolled him over and spun him around and sat him up like a drunk.

Grabbed his belt and his collar.

Pushed him across the floor on his ass, feet-first.

He got him as far as the door sill and held him there, arms pinned behind him. The helicopter turned, slowly. The engines whined and the rotor beat out discrete bass thumps of sound. Reacher felt every one of them in his chest, like heartbeats. Minutes passed and fresh air blew in and Lamaison came around to find himself sitting upright on the edge with his feet hanging out over the void like a guy on a high wall.

A mile above the desert floor. Five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet.

Reacher had rehearsed a speech. He had started composing it in the Denny’s on Sunset, with Franz’s file in his hand. He had perfected it over the following days. It was full of fine phrases about loyalty and retribution, and heartfelt eulogies for his four dead friends. But when it came to it he didn’t say much. No point. Lamaison wouldn’t have heard a word. He was crazy with terror and there was too much noise. A cacophony. In the end Reacher just leaned forward and put his mouth close to Lamaison’s ear and said, “You made a bad mistake. You messed with the wrong people. Now it’s time to pay.”

Then he straightened Lamaison’s arms behind his back and pushed. Lamaison slid an inch and then lunged forward to try to jack his ass backward on the sill. Reacher pushed again. Lamaison folded up and his chest met his knees. He was staring straight down into the blackness. One mile. A speeding car would take a whole minute to cover it.

Reacher pushed. Lamaison let his shoulders go slack. No leverage.

Reacher put his heel flat against the small of Lamaison’s back.

Bent his leg.

Let go of Lamaison’s arms.

Straightened his leg, fast and smooth.

Lamaison went over the edge and disappeared into the night.

There was no scream. Or maybe there was. Maybe it was lost in the rotor noise. O’Donnell nudged the pilot and the pilot yawed the craft and reversed the rotation and the door slammed neatly shut. The cabin went quiet. Silent, by comparison. Dixon hugged Reacher hard. O’Donnell said, “You certainly left it until the last minute, didn’t you?”

Reacher said, “I was trying to decide whether to let them throw you out before I saved Karla. Tough decision. Took some time.”

“Where’s Neagley?”

“Working, I hope. The missiles rolled out of the gate in Colorado eight hours ago. And we don’t know where they’re going.”

82

There was nothing the pilot could do to them without killing himself also, so they left him alone in the cockpit. But not before checking the fuel load. It was low. Much less than an hour’s flying time. There was no cell reception. Reacher told the pilot to lose height and drift south to find a signal. Dixon and O’Donnell latched the rear seat backs upright and sat down. They didn’t strap themselves in. Reacher guessed they were done with confinement. He lay on his back on the floor with his arms and legs flung wide like a snow angel. He was tired and dispirited. Lamaison was gone, but no one had come back.

O’Donnell asked, “Where would you take six hundred and fifty SAMs?”

“The Middle East,” Dixon said. “And I’d send them by sea. The electronics through LA and the tubes through Seattle.”

Reacher raised his head. “Lamaison said they were going to Kashmir.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes and no. I think he was choosing to believe a lie to salve his own conscience. Whatever else he was, he was a citizen. He didn’t want to know the truth.”

“Which is?”

“Terrorism here in the States. Got to be. It’s obvious. Kashmir is a squabble between governments. Governments have purchasing missions. They don’t run around with Samsonite suitcases full of bearer bonds and bank access codes and diamonds.”

Dixon asked, “Is that what you found?”

“Highland Park. Sixty-five million dollars’ worth. Neagley’s got it all. You’re going to have to convert it for us, Karla.”

“If I survive. My plane back to New York might get blown up.”

Reacher nodded. “If not tomorrow, then the next day, or the next.”

“How do we find them? Eight hours at fifty miles an hour is already a radius of four hundred miles. Which is a half-million-square-mile circle.”

“Five hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and twenty,” Reacher said, automatically. “Assuming you use only three decimal places for
pi.
But that’s the bargain we made. We could stop them when the circle was small, or we could come for you guys.”

“Thanks,” O’Donnell said.

“Hey, I voted to stop the truck. Neagley overruled me.”

“So how do we do this?”

“You ever seen a really great centerfielder play baseball? He never chases the ball. He runs to where the ball is about to arrive. Like Mickey Mantle.”

“You never saw Mantle play.”

“I saw newsreels.”

“The United States is close to four million square miles. That’s bigger than center field at Yankee Stadium.”

“But not much,” Reacher said.

“So where do we run to?”

“Mahmoud isn’t dumb. In fact he strikes me as a very smart and cautious guy. He just spent sixty-five million dollars on what are basically just components. He must have insisted that part of the deal was that someone would show him how to screw the damn things together.”

“Who?”

“What did Neagley’s woman friend tell us? The politician? Diana Bond?”

“Lots of things.”

“She told us that New Age’s engineer does the quality control tests because so far he’s the only guy in the world who knows how Little Wing is supposed to work.”

Dixon said, “And Lamaison had him on a string somehow.”

“He was threatening the guy’s daughter.”

O’Donnell said, “So Lamaison was going to pimp him out. Lamaison was going to take him somewhere. And you threw Lamaison out of the damn helicopter before you asked him.”

Reacher shook his head. “Lamaison talked about the whole thing like it was firmly in the past. He said it was a done deal. There was something in his voice. Lamaison wasn’t taking anyone anywhere.”

“So who?”

“Not who,” Reacher said. “The question is, where?”

Dixon said, “If there’s only one guy, and Lamaison wasn’t planning to take him somewhere, they’ll have to bring the missiles to him.”

“Which is ridiculous,” O’Donnell said. “You can’t bring a semi full of missiles to a garden apartment in Century City or wherever.”

“The guy doesn’t live in Century City,” Reacher said. “He lives way out in the desert. The middle of nowhere. The back of beyond. Where better to bring a semi full of missiles?”

“Cell phones are up,” the pilot called.

Reacher pulled out his Radio Shack pay-as-you-go. Found Neagley’s number. Hit the green button. She answered.

“Dean’s place?” he asked.

“Dean’s place,” she said. “For sure. I’m twenty minutes away.”

83

The Bell had GPS, but not the kind that drew a road map on a screen. Not like O’Donnell’s rental car. The Bell’s system produced a pair of always-changing latitude and longitude readings instead, pale green numbers, plain script. Reacher told the pilot to get himself somewhere south of Palmdale and wait. The pilot was nervous about fuel. Reacher told him to lose altitude. Helicopters sometimes survived engine failures at a few hundred feet. They rarely survived at a few thousand.

Then Reacher called Neagley back. She had gotten Dean’s address from Margaret Berenson in the Pasadena hotel. But she had no GPS, either. She was adrift in the dark, behind two last-generation headlights made weaker by blue paint on the lenses. And cell coverage was patchy. Reacher lost her twice. Before he lost her a third time he told her to find Dean’s spread and drive in tight circles with her lights on bright.