Bad Luck and Trouble, Page 29

  Up ahead on the right Reacher saw a vacant corner lot fenced with wire. At a bus bench in the side street was a small crowd of day laborers, waiting for the sun, waiting for work, tiny brown men with tired stoic faces. They were drinking coffee from a mission cart set up outside some kind of a community center. Reacher headed in that direction and paid a hundred of his stolen dollars for a cup. He said it was a donation. The women behind the cart accepted it without a question. They had seen weirder, he guessed, in Hollywood.

  The coffee was good. As good as Denny’s. He sipped it slowly and leaned back on the vacant lot’s fence. The wire gave slightly and supported his bulk like a trampoline. He floated there, not quite upright, coffee in his mouth, fog in his brain.

  Then the fog cleared, and he started thinking.

  About Neagley, principally, and her mysterious contact at the Pentagon.

  He owes me, she had said. Bigger than you could imagine.

  By the time he finished the coffee and tossed the empty cup he had a faint glimmer of new hope, and the outline of a new plan. Odds of success, about fifty-fifty. Better than roulette.

  He was back at the motel by six in the morning. He couldn’t raise the others. No answer from their rooms. So he headed on down Sunset and found them in Denny’s, in the same booth Neagley had used at the very beginning. He slid into the remaining unoccupied seat and the waitress dealt him a paper place mat and clattered a knife and a fork and a mug after it. He ordered coffee, pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, and jelly.

  “You’re hungry,” Dixon said.

  “Starving,” he said.

  “Where were you?”

  “Walking.”

  “Didn’t sleep?”

  “Not even close.”

  The waitress came back and filled his mug. He took a long sip. The others went quiet. They were picking at their food. They looked tired and dispirited. He guessed that none of them had slept well, or at all.

  O’Donnell asked, “When do we drop the dime?”

  Reacher said, “Maybe we don’t.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Ground rules,” Reacher said. “We have to agree something from the start. If Mahmoud has got the missiles, then this thing is bigger than we are. We have to suck it up and move on. There’s too much at stake. Either he’s paramilitary and wants to turn the whole Middle East into a no-fly zone, or he’s a terrorist planning a day of action that’s going to make the Twin Towers look like a day at the beach. Either way around, we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of KIA. Maybe tens of thousands. Those kind of numbers trump any interest of ours. Agreed?”

  Dixon and Neagley nodded and looked away.

  O’Donnell said, “There’s no if about it. We have to assume Mahmoud has got the missiles.”

  “No,” Reacher said. “We have to assume he’s got the electronics. We don’t know if he’s got the rockets and the launch tubes yet. It’s even money. Fifty-fifty. Either he collected the rockets first, or the electronics first. But he’s got to have both before we drop the dime.”

  “How do we find out?”

  “Neagley hits up her Pentagon guy. She calls in whatever markers she’s holding. He organizes some kind of audit out in Colorado. If anything is missing up there, then it’s game over for us. But if everything is still present and correct and accounted for, then it’s game on.”

  Neagley checked her watch. Just after six in the west, just after nine in the east. The Pentagon would have been humming for an hour. She took out her phone and dialed.

  58

  Neagley’s buddy wasn’t dumb. He insisted on calling back from outside the building, and not on his own cell phone, either. And he was smart enough to realize that any pay phone within a mile radius of the Pentagon would be continuously monitored. So there was a whole hour’s delay while he got himself across the river and halfway across town to a phone on a wall outside a bodega on New York Avenue.

  Then the fun began.

  Neagley told him what she wanted. He gave her all kinds of reasons why it wasn’t possible. She started calling in her markers, one by one. The guy owed her a lot of heavy-duty favors. That was clear. Reacher felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. If your balls were in a vise, better that it wasn’t Neagley’s hand on the lever. The guy caved and agreed within ten minutes. Then it became a logistical discussion. How should the job be done, by whom, what should be considered proof positive. Neagley suggested Army CID should roll up unannounced and match the books with physical inventory. Her guy agreed, and asked for a week. Neagley gave him four hours.

  Reacher spent the four hours asleep. Once the plan was settled and the decision was made he relaxed to the point where he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He went back to his room and lay down on the bed. A maid came in after an hour. He sent her away again and went back to sleep. Next thing he knew Dixon was at his door. She told him that Neagley was waiting in the lounge, with news.

  Neagley’s news was neither good nor bad. It was somewhere in between. New Age had no physical plant in Colorado. Just an office. They contracted out their raw missile production, to one of the established aerospace manufacturers in Denver. That manufacturer had a number of Little Wing assemblies available for inspection. An Army CID officer had seen them all and counted them all, and his final tally was precisely what the books said it should be. Everything was present, correct, and accounted for. No problem. Except that exactly six hundred and fifty of the units were currently stored in a separate secure warehouse, crated up and awaiting transport to a facility in Nevada, where they were due to be decommissioned and destroyed.

  “Why?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Current production is specified as Mark Two,” Neagley said. “They’re junking what’s left of the Mark Ones.”

  “Which just happens to be exactly six hundred and fifty units.”

  “You got it.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The Mark Twos have a small fluorescent arrow painted on them. To make loading easier in the dark.”

  “That’s all?”

  “You got it.”

  “It’s a scam.”

  “Of course it’s a scam. It’s a way of making the paperwork look legal when Mahmoud’s people drive them through the factory gate.”

  Reacher nodded. A gate guard would fight to the death to prevent the unauthorized removal of ordnance. But if he saw paperwork with a reason on it, he would pass the load through with a smile and a cheery wave. Even if the reason was the absence of a small painted arrow on something that cost more than he made in a year. Reacher had seen the Pentagon junk stuff for less.

  He asked, “How do the electronics packs fit on?”

  “In,” Neagley said. “Not on. There’s an access port in the side. You unscrew it and plug the pack in. Then there’s some testing and calibration.”

  “Could I do it?”

  “I doubt it. You’d need training. In the field it’s going to be a specialist’s job.”

  “So Mahmoud couldn’t do it, either. Or his people.”

  “We have to assume they’ve got a guy. They wouldn’t spend sixty-five million dollars without being shown how to put the things together.”

  “Can we nix that transport order?”

  “Not without raising an alarm. Which would be the same thing as dropping the dime.”

  “You still got any markers left on your guy?”

  “A couple.”

  “Tell him to have someone call you the second those units roll out.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then Mahmoud doesn’t have the missiles. Until then we have complete freedom of action.”

  59

  At that instant it became a race against time. When the warehouse door opened in Colorado, a door of a different kind would slam shut in LA. But there was still a lot to prepare. There was still a lot to discover. Including exact locations. Clearly New Age’s glass cube in East LA wasn’t the center of anything. For one thi
ng, there was no helicopter there.

  And they needed exact identities.

  They needed to know who knew, and who flew.

  “I want them all,” Reacher said.

  “Including the dragon lady?” Neagley asked.

  “Starting with the dragon lady. She lied to me.”

  They needed equipment, clothing, communications, and alternative vehicles.

  And training, Neagley thought.

  “We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty,” she said. “We’re a million miles from what we used to be.”

  “We’re not too bad,” O’Donnell said.

  “Time was when you’d have put a double tap through that guy’s eyes,” she said. “Not a lucky low shot to his leg.”

  They sat in the lounge like four out-of-towners discussing how to spend their day. As far as ordnance went, they had two Hardballers and the Daewoo DP-51 from Vegas. Thirteen rounds each for the Hardballers, eleven for the Daewoo. Not nearly good enough. O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley had personal cell phones registered to their real names and real addresses and Reacher had nothing. Not nearly good enough. They had a Hertz Ford 500 rented in Dixon’s real name and the captured Chrysler. Not nearly good enough. O’Donnell was in a thousand-dollar suit from his East Coast tailor and Neagley and Dixon had jeans, jackets, and evening wear. Not nearly good enough.

  Neagley swore that budget was not a problem. But that didn’t help with the time factor. They needed four untraceable pay-as-you-go cell phones, four anonymous cars, and work clothes. That was a day’s shopping right there. Then they needed guns and ammunition. Best case, a free choice for each of them and a lot of spare rounds. Worst case, one more make-do handgun and a lot of spare rounds. That was another day’s shopping. Like most cities, LA had a thriving black market in untraceable weapons, but it would take time to penetrate.

  Two days of material preparation.

  Maybe two days of surveillance and research.

  “We don’t have time to train,” Reacher said.

  Azhari Mahmoud had time for a leisurely lunch. He took it in a sidewalk café in Laguna Beach. He was staying in a rented townhouse a short walk away. Safe enough. The lease was legitimate. The development had a large transient population. It wasn’t unusual to see U-Haul trucks parked overnight. Mahmoud’s was two streets away, in a lot, locked up and empty.

  It wouldn’t be empty for long.

  His contacts at New Age had insisted that Little Wing must not be used inside the United States. He had readily agreed. He had said he planned to use the weapon in Kashmir, on the border, against the Indian Air Force. He had lied, of course. He had been amazed that they had taken him for a Pakistani. He had been amazed that they cared what his intentions were. Maybe they were patriotic. Or maybe they had relatives who flew a lot, domestically.

  But it had been politic to go along to get along. Hence the temporary inconvenience of the shipping container and the dockside location. But there was an easy remedy. Southern California was full of day laborers. Mahmoud calculated that loading the U-Haul would take them a little less than thirty minutes.

  They figured the clothes and the phones would be easy. Any mall would have what they needed. Guns were guns, either obtainable in time or not. Dixon wanted a Glock 19. Neagley’s hands were bigger, so she nominated a Glock 17. O’Donnell was a Beretta guy, by choice. Reacher didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on shooting anybody. He was planning on using his bare hands. But he said he would take a Glock or a SIG or a Beretta or an H&K, or anything that used 9mm Parabellums. That way, all four of them would be using the same ammunition. More efficient.

  Cars were more difficult still. It was hard to find a truly anonymous car. In the end O’Donnell suggested that the best bet would be rice rockets, small Japanese sedans and coupes tricked out with loud big-bore mufflers and lowered suspensions and cotton-reel tires and blue headlights. And black windows. Three-or four-year-old examples would be cheap, and they were everywhere on the street. Close to invisible, in southern California. And O’Donnell figured they were a very effective disguise, psychologically. They were so closely identified in the public mind with Latino gangbangers that nobody would think a white ex-soldier was inside behind the darkened glass.

  They gave the cars and the phones priority over the guns. That way two or three of them could start the surveillance, at least. And if they were going to Radio Shack for the phones, they might as well duck into the Gap or a jeans store for clothes, too. After that, wired and blending in, they could separate and hit used-car lots until they found the wheels they needed.

  All of which required cash money. Lots of it. Which required a visit to a teller’s window by Neagley. Reacher drove her in the captured Chrysler and waited outside a bank in Beverly Hills. Fifteen minutes later she came out with fifty thousand dollars in a brown sandwich bag. Ninety minutes later they had clothes and phones. The phones were straightforward talk-only pay-as-you-go cells, no camera function, no games, no calculators. They bought car chargers and earpieces to go with them. The clothes were soft gray denim shirts and pants and black canvas windbreakers bought from an off-brand store on Santa Monica Boulevard, two sets each for O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley and one set for Reacher, plus gloves and watch caps and boots from a hiking store on Melrose.

  They changed at the motel and spent ten minutes in the lounge storing one another’s numbers in their phones and learning how to set up conference calls. Then they headed north and west to Van Nuys Boulevard, looking for cars. All cities had at least one strip full of auto dealers, and LA had more than one. LA had many. But O’Donnell had heard that Van Nuys north of the Ventura Freeway was the best of them all. And he had heard right. It was a cornucopia. Unlimited choice, new or pre-owned, cheap or expensive, no awkward questions. Four hours after they arrived, most of Neagley’s automotive budget was gone and they owned four used Hondas. Two slammed Civics and two slammed Preludes, two silver and two white. All four were beat up and well on their way to being worn out. But they started and stopped and steered, and no one would give them a second glance.

  Including the captured Chrysler, they had five cars to ferry back to Sunset, but only four drivers, so they had to make two trips. Then they took a Honda each and battled out to East LA for a swing past New Age’s glass cube. But traffic was slow and it was late in the day when they got there. The place was locked up and deserted. Nothing to see.

  They planned via a four-way mobile conference call and went out for dinner in Pasadena. They found a burger bar on a busy street and sat at a table for four, two opposite two, shoulder to shoulder in their new gray denims. A uniform, of sorts. Nobody admitted it but Reacher knew they all felt good. Focused, energized, in motion, up against high stakes. They talked about the past. Escapades, capers, scandals, outrages. Years fell away and Reacher’s mind’s eye swapped the gray for green and Pasadena for Heidelberg or Manila or Seoul.

  The old unit, back together.

  Almost.

  Back on Sunset two hours later, O’Donnell and Neagley volunteered to take first watch at New Age. They planned to get there before five the next morning. Reacher and Dixon were left with the task of buying guns. Before he went to bed, Reacher took the dead guy’s phone out of the captured Chrysler and redialed the number he had spoken to from Vegas. There was no answer. Just voice mail. Reacher didn’t leave a message.

  60

  In Reacher’s experience the best way to get hold of a random untraceable gun was to steal it from someone who had already stolen it. Or from someone who owned it illegally. That way there were no official comebacks. Sometimes there could be unofficial comebacks, like with the guys behind the wax museum, but they could be handled with minimal hassle.

  But to get hold of four specific weapons was a taller order. Groups were always harder to supply than individuals. Limiting the ammunition requirement made it harder still. Concerns about