"Specifically?" Reacher asked.
"No idea. It's a shame you burned the first eleven passwords. We could have seen what information was new or different."
O'Donnell said, "It's got to be the names. They were the only hard data."
"Numbers can be hard data, too," Dixon said.
"You'll go blind figuring them out."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes numbers speak to me."
"These won't."
There was quiet in the car for a moment. Traffic was moving OK. Dixon stayed on the 405 and blew through the intersection with the 10.
"Where are we headed?" she asked.
Neagley said, "Let's go to the Chateau Marmont. It's out of the way and discreet."
"And expensive," Reacher said. Something in his tone made Dixon take her eyes off the road and glance behind her. Neagley said, "Reacher's broke."
"I'm not surprised," Dixon said. "He hasn't worked in nine years."
"He didn't do much when he was in the army, either," O'Donnell said. "Why change the habit of a lifetime?"
"He's sensitive about other people paying for him," Neagley said.
"Poor baby," Dixon said.
Reacher said, "I'm just trying to be polite."
Dixon stayed on the 405 until Santa Monica Boulevard. Then she struck out north and east, aiming to pass through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to hit Sunset right at the base of Laurel Canyon.
"Mission statement," she said. "You do not mess with the special investigators. The four of us here have to make that stick. On behalf of the four of us who aren't here. So we need a command structure and a plan and a budget."
Neagley said, "I'll take care of the budget."
"Can you?"
"This year alone there's seven billion dollars of Homeland Security money washing around the private system. Some of it comes our way in Chicago and I own half of whatever part of it sticks in our books."
"So are you rich?"
"Richer than I was when I was a sergeant."
"We'll get it back anyway," O'Donnell said. "People get killed for love or money, and our guys sure as hell didn't get killed for love. So there's money in this somewhere."
"So are we agreed on Neagley staking the budget?" Dixon asked.
"What is this, a democracy?" Reacher said.
"Temporarily. Are we agreed?"
Four raised hands. Two majors and a captain, letting a sergeant pick up the tab.
"OK, the plan," Dixon said.
"Command structure first," O'Donnell said. "Can't put the cart before the horse."
"OK," Dixon said. "I nominate Reacher for CO."
"Me too," O'Donnell said.
"Me three," Neagley said. "Like it always was."
"Can't do it," Reacher said. "I hit that cop. If it comes to it, I'm going to have to put my hands up for it and leave the rest of you to carry on without me. Can't have a CO in that position."
Dixon said, "Let's cross that bridge if we come to it."
"We're coming to it," Reacher said. "For sure. Tomorrow or the next day at the latest."
"Maybe they'll let it go."
"Dream on. Would we have let it go?"
"Maybe he'll be too shamefaced to report it."
"He doesn't have to report it. People will notice. He's got a busted window and a busted nose."
"Does he even know who you are?"
"He put Neagley's name in the machine. He was tailing us. He knows who we are."
"You can't put your hands up for it," O'Donnell said. "You'll go to jail. If it comes to it, you'll have to get out of town."
"Can't do that. If they don't get me, they'll come after you and Neagley as accessories. We don't want that. We need boots on the ground here."
"We'll get you a lawyer. A cheap one."
"No, a good one," Dixon said.
"Whatever, I'll still be preoccupied," Reacher said.
Nobody spoke.
Reacher said, "Neagley should be CO."
"I decline," Neagley said.
"You can't decline. It's an order."
"It can't be an order until you're CO."
"Dixon, then."
"Declined," Dixon said.
"OK, O'Donnell."
"Pass."
Dixon said, "Reacher until he goes to jail. Then Neagley. All in favor?"
Three hands went up.
"You'll regret this," Reacher said. "I'll make you regret it."
"So what's the plan, boss?" Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.
"Same as ever," he said. "We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors' graves."
25
The Chateau Marmont was a bohemian old pile on Sunset, near the foot of Laurel Canyon. All kinds of movie stars and rock stars had stayed there. There were plenty of photographs on the walls. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, James Dean, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane had booked in there. John Belushi had died in there, after speedballing enough heroin and cocaine to take down every guest in the hotel. There were no photographs of him.
The desk clerk wanted IDs along with Neagley's platinum card, so they all checked in under their real names. No choice. Then the guy told them there were only three rooms available. Neagley had to be alone, so Reacher and O'Donnell bunked together and let the women have a room each. Then O'Donnell drove Neagley back to the Beverly Wilshire in Dixon's car to pick up their bags and check out. Then Neagley would take the Mustang back to LAX and O'Donnell would follow her in convoy to bring her back. It would be a three-hour hiatus. Reacher and Dixon would stay behind and spend the three hours working on the numbers.
***
They set up in Dixon's room. According to the desk guy, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in there once, but there was no remaining sign of him. Reacher laid the seven spreadsheets side by side on the bed and watched as Dixon bent down and scanned them, the same way some people read music or poetry.
"Two key issues," she said immediately. "There are no hundred percent scores. No ten out of ten, no nine out of nine."
"And?"
"The first three sheets have twenty-six numbers, the fourth has twenty-seven, and the last three all have twenty-six again."
"Which means what?"
"I don't know. But none of the sheets is full. Therefore the twenty-six thing and the twenty-seven thing must mean something. It's deliberate, not accidental. It's not just a continuous list of numbers with page breaks. If it was, Franz could have gotten them onto six sheets, not seven. So it's seven separate categories of something."
"Separate but similar," Reacher said. "It's a descriptive sequence."
"The scores get worse," Dixon said.
"Radically."
"And quite suddenly. They're OK, and then they fall off a cliff."
"But what are they?"
"No idea."
Reacher asked, "What can be measured like that, repetitively?"
"Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse."