“What if they’re not hunting all eight of us?”

“Then you can hang around here and wait for the funerals. No skin off my nose.”

“Did you go to Vegas?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know the two from Vegas are missing?”

“Because I called,” Mauney said. “We work with the Nevada Staties a lot, and they work with the Vegas cops a lot, and your guys Sanchez and Orozco went missing three weeks ago and both their apartments have been royally trashed. So that’s how I know. The telephone system. Useful technology.”

“Trashed as bad as Franz’s office?”

“Similar handiwork.”

“They miss anything?”

“Why would they?”

“People miss things.”

“Did they miss something at Franz’s place? Did we?”

Reacher had said: We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give. But Mauney was better than any asshole provost marshal. That was clear. He looked like a pretty good cop. Not dumb. But maybe playable. So Reacher nodded and said, “Franz was mailing computer files back and forth to himself for security. They missed them. You missed them. We got them.”

“From out of his post office box?”

Reacher nodded.

“That’s a federal crime,” Mauney said. “You should have gotten a warrant.”

“I couldn’t have,” Reacher said. “I’m retired.”

“Then you should have butted out.”

“So arrest me.”

“I can’t,” Mauney said. “I’m not federal.”

“What did they miss in Vegas?”

“Are we trading here?”

Reacher nodded. “But you go first.”

“OK,” Mauney said. “In Vegas they missed a napkin with writing on it. It was the kind of paper napkin you get with Chinese delivery. It was balled up and greasy in Sanchez’s kitchen trash. My guess is Sanchez was eating and the phone rang. He scribbled down a note to himself and transferred it later to a book or a file that we don’t have. Then he threw the napkin in the trash because he didn’t need it anymore.”

“How do we know it’s got anything to do with anything?”

“We don’t,” Mauney said. “But the timing is suggestive. Ordering that Chinese delivery seems to be about the last thing Sanchez ever did in Las Vegas.”

“What does the note say?”

Mauney bent down and hauled his battered briefcase up on his knees and clicked the latches. Lifted the lid. Took out a clear plastic page protector with a color photocopy in it. The photocopy was edged with smudged black where the napkin hadn’t filled the platen. It showed the creases and the grease stains and the pimpled paper texture. And a scrawled half-line in Jorge Sanchez’s familiar handwriting: 650 at $100k per. Bold, confident, forward-leaning, done with a blue fiber-tipped pen, vivid against the unbleached beige of the paper.

650 at $100k per.

Mauney asked, “What does it mean?”

Reacher said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” He was looking at the numbers, and he knew Dixon would be, too. The k abbreviation meant thousand and was fairly standard among U.S. Army personnel of Sanchez’s generation, coming either from math or engineering school or from having served long years overseas where distances were measured in kilometers instead of miles. A kilometer was nick-named a klick and measured a thousand meters, about sixty percent of a mile. Therefore $100k meant one hundred thousand dollars. The per was a standard Latin preposition meaning for each, as in miles per gallon or miles per hour.

“I think it’s an offer or a bid,” Mauney said. “Like, you can have six hundred and fifty of something for a hundred grand each.”

“Or a market report,” O’Donnell said. “Like six hundred and fifty of something were sold at a hundred grand each. Overall value, sixty-five million dollars. Some kind of a fairly big deal. Certainly big enough for people to get killed over.”

“People can get killed for sixty-five cents,” Mauney said. “Doesn’t always take millions of dollars.”

Karla Dixon was silent. Still, quiet, preoccupied. Reacher knew she had seen something in the number 650 that he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine what. It wasn’t an interesting number.

650 at $100k per.

“No bright ideas?” Mauney asked.

Nobody spoke.

Mauney said, “What did you get from Franz’s post office box?”

“A flash memory chip,” Reacher said. “For a computer.”

“What’s on it?”

“We don’t know. We can’t break the password.”

“We could try,” Mauney said. “There’s a lab we use.”

“I don’t know. We’re down to the last attempt.”

“Actually, you don’t have a choice. It’s evidence, and therefore it’s ours.”

“Will you share the information?”

Mauney nodded. “We’re in sharing mode here, apparently.”

“OK,” Reacher said. He nodded to Neagley. She put her hand in her tote bag and came out with the silver plastic sliver. Tossed it underhand to him. He caught it and passed it to Mauney.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Pointers?” Mauney asked.

“It’ll be numbers,” Reacher said. “Franz was a numbers type of guy.”

“OK.”

“It wasn’t an airplane, you know.”

“I know,” Mauney said. “That was just hick stuff to get you interested. It was a helicopter. You know how many private helicopters there are within cruise range of the place we found him?”

“No.”

“More than nine thousand.”

“Did you check Swan’s office?”

“He was canned. He didn’t have an office.”

“Did you check his house?”

“Through the windows,” Mauney said. “It hadn’t been tossed.”

“Bathroom window?”

“Pebbled glass.”

“So one last question,” Reacher said. “You checked on Swan and sent the Nevada Staties after Sanchez and Orozco. Why didn’t you call D.C. and New York and Illinois about the rest of us?”

“Because at that point I was dealing with what I had.”

“Which was what?”

“I had all four of them on tape. Franz, Swan, Sanchez, and Orozco. All four of them together. Video surveillance, the night before Franz went out and didn’t come back.”

33

Curtis Mauney didn’t wait to be asked. He raised the lid of his briefcase again and took out another clear plastic page protector. In it was a copy of a still frame from a black and white surveillance tape. Four men, shoulder to shoulder in front of some kind of a store counter. Upside down and from a distance, Reacher couldn’t make out much detail.

Mauney said, “I made the IDs by comparing a bunch of old snapshots from a shoe box in Franz’s bedroom closet.” Then he passed the photograph to his right, to Neagley. She studied it for a moment, nothing in her face except light reflected off the shiny plastic. She passed it counterclockwise, to Dixon. Dixon looked at it for ten long seconds and blinked once and passed it to O’Donnell. O’Donnell took it and studied it and shook his head and passed it to Reacher.

Manuel Orozco was on the left of the frame, glancing to his right, caught by the camera in his perpetual state of restlessness. Then came Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then came Tony Swan, front and center, looking straight ahead. On the right was Jorge Sanchez, in a buttoned-up shirt, no tie, with a finger hooked under his collar. Reacher knew that pose. He had seen it a thousand times before. It meant that Sanchez had shaved about ten hours previously, and the stubble on his throat was growing back and beginning to irritate him. Even without the time code burned into the lower right of the shot Reacher would have known he was looking at a picture taken early in the evening.

They all looked a little older. Orozco’s hair was gray at the temples and his eyes were lined and weary. Franz had maybe lost a little weight. Some of the muscle was gone from his shoulders. Swan was as wide as ever, barrel-chested, thicker in the gut. His hair was short and had crept backward maybe half an inch. Sanchez’s scowl had settled into a tracery of permanent down-turned lines running from his nose to his chin and framing his mouth.