Older, but maybe a little wiser, too. There was a lot of talent and experience and capability right there in the picture. And an easy camaraderie and a mutual trust still floating on recent renewal. Four tough guys. In Reacher’s opinion, four of the best eight in the world.

Who or what had beaten them?

Behind them, running away from the camera, were narrow store aisles that looked familiar.

“Where is this?” Reacher asked.

Mauney said, “The pharmacy in Culver City. Next to Franz’s office. The guy behind the counter remembered them. Swan was buying aspirin.”

“That doesn’t sound like Swan.”

“For his dog. It had arthritis in its hips. He gave it a quarter-tab of aspirin a day. The pharmacist said that’s a pretty common practice with dogs. Especially big dogs.”

“How much aspirin did he buy?”

“The economy bottle. Ninety-six pills, generic.”

Dixon said, “At a quarter-tab a day, that’s a year and nineteen days’ worth.”

Reacher looked at the picture again. Four guys, relaxed poses, no urgency, all the time in the world, a routine purchase, a provision on behalf of a pet animal designed to stretch more than a year into the future.

They never even saw it coming.

Who or what had beaten them?

“Can I keep this picture?” he asked.

“Why?” Mauney said. “You see something in it?”

“Four of my old friends.”

Mauney nodded. “So keep it. It’s a copy.”

“What next?”

“Stay here,” Mauney said. He dropped the lid of his case and clicked the latches, loud in the silence. “Stay visible, and call me if you see anyone sniffing around. No more independent action, OK?”

“We’re just here for the funeral,” Reacher said.

“But whose funeral?”

Reacher didn’t reply to that. Just stood up and turned and looked at Raquel Welch’s picture again. The glass in the frame was reflective and behind him he saw Mauney getting out of his chair, and the others standing up with him. When a seated person stands up, he slides forward to do it, so that when a seated group stands up they all end up temporarily closer to one another than they were when they were sitting down. Therefore their next communal move is to shuffle backward, turning, dispersing, widening the circle, respecting space. Neagley was first and fastest, of course. Mauney turned toward the door and set himself to thread through the limited space between the chairs. O’Donnell stepped the other way, toward the interior of the hotel. Dixon paralleled him, small, deft, nimble, side-stepping a coffee table.

But Thomas Brant moved the other way.

Inward.

Reacher kept his eye on the glass in front of Raquel. Watched Brant’s tan reflection. He knew instantly what was going to happen. Brant was going to tap him on his right shoulder with his left hand. Whereupon Reacher was supposed to turn inquiringly and take a massive straight right to the face.

Brant stepped closer. Reacher focused on the gold ring between the two halves of Raquel’s bikini top. Brant’s left hand snaked forward and his right hand eased back. His left hand had the index finger extended and his right hand was bunched into a fist the size of a softball. Good but not great technique. Reacher sensed that Brant’s feet were not perfectly placed. Brant was a brawler, not a fighter. He was hobbling himself about fifty percent.

Brant tapped Reacher on the shoulder.

Because he was expecting it Reacher turned much faster than he might have done and caught the incoming straight right in his left palm a foot in front of his face. Like snaring a line drive barehanded in the infield. It was a hefty blow. A lot of weight behind it. It made a hell of a smack. It stung Reacher’s palm all the way down to the tendons.

Then it was all about superhuman self-control.

Every ounce of Reacher’s animal instinct and muscle memory dictated a head butt to Brant’s damaged nose. It was a no-brainer. Use the adrenaline. Jerk forward from the waist, plenty of snap, bury that forehead deep. A move that Reacher had perfected at the age of five. A reaction that was almost mandatory a lifetime later.

But Reacher held off.

He just stood still, gripping Brant’s bunched fist. He looked into Brant’s eyes, breathed out, and shook his head.

“I apologized once,” he said. “And I’m apologizing again, right now. If that’s not good enough for you, then wait until after this is all over, OK? I’ll stick around. You can get a couple of buddies and jump me three-on-one when I’m not looking for it. That’s fair, right?”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Brant said.

“You should. But choose your buddies carefully. Don’t pick anyone who can’t afford six months in the hospital.”

“Tough guy.”

“I ain’t the one wearing the splint here.”

Curtis Mauney came over and said, “No fighting. Not now, not ever.” He hauled Brant away by the collar. Reacher waited until they were both out the door and then grimaced and shook his left hand wildly and said, “Damn, that stings.”

“Put some ice on it,” Neagley said.

“Wrap it around a cold beer,” O’Donnell said.

“Get over it and let me tell you about the number six hundred and fifty,” Dixon said.

34

They went up to Dixon’s room and she arranged the seven spreadsheets neatly on the bed. Said, “OK, what we have here is a sequence of seven calendar months. Some kind of a performance analysis. For simplicity’s sake let’s just call them hits and misses. The first three months are pretty good. Plenty of hits, not too many misses. An average success rate of approximately ninety percent. A hair over eighty-nine point five-three percent, to be precise, which I know you want me to be.”

“Move along,” O’Donnell said.

“Then in the fourth month we fall off a cliff and we get worse.”

“We know that already,” Neagley said.

“So for the sake of argument let’s take the first three months as a baseline. We know they can hit ninety percent, give or take. They’re capable of it. Let’s say they could have or should have continued that level of performance indefinitely.”

“But they didn’t,” O’Donnell said.

“Exactly. They could have, but they didn’t. What’s the result?”

Neagley said, “More misses later than earlier.”

“How many more?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Dixon said. “On this volume if they had continued their baseline success rate through the final four months they would have saved themselves exactly six hundred and fifty extra misses.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Dixon said. “Numbers don’t lie, and percentages are numbers. Something happened at the end of month three that went on to cost them six hundred and fifty avoidable future failures.”

Reacher nodded. A total of 183 days, a total of 2,197 events, a total of 1,314 successes and 883 failures. But with markedly unequal distribution. The first three months, 897 events, 802 successes, 95 failures. The next four months, 1,300 events, a miserable 502 successes, a catastrophic 798 failures, 650 of which wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t changed.

“I wish we knew what we were looking at,” he said.

“Sabotage,” O’Donnell said. “Someone got paid to screw up something.”

“At a hundred grand a time?” Neagley said. “Six hundred and fifty times over? That’s nice work if you can get it.”

“Can’t be sabotage,” Reacher said. “You could get a whole factory or office or whatever torched for a hundred grand, easy. Probably a whole town. You wouldn’t have to pay per occasion.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it ties in,” Dixon said. “Doesn’t it? There was a definite mathematical relationship between what Franz knew and what Sanchez knew.”

A minute later Reacher stepped to Dixon’s window and looked out at the view. Asked, “Would it be fair to assume that Orozco knew whatever Sanchez knew?”