"Mistake," he said.
Neagley said, "Eating is a mistake?"
"No, eat if you want to. But we're making a mistake. A major conceptual error."
"Where?"
"My fault entirely. I jumped to a false conclusion."
"How?"
"Why can't we find Franz's client?"
"I don't know."
"Because Franz didn't have a client. We made a mistake. His was the first body found, so we just went ahead and assumed this whole thing was about him. Like he had to have been the prime mover here. Like he was the talker and the other three were the listeners. But suppose he wasn't the talker?"
"So who was?"
"We've been saying all along he wouldn't have put himself on the line except for someone special. Someone he was obligated to somehow."
"But that's back to saying he was the prime mover. With a client we can't find."
"No, we're imagining the hierarchy all wrong. It doesn't necessarily go, first the client, then Franz, then the others helping Franz. I think Franz was actually lower down the pecking order. He wasn't at the top of the tree. See what I mean? Suppose he was actually helping one of the others? Suppose he was a listener, not the talker? Suppose this whole thing is basically Orozco's deal? For one of his clients? Or Sanchez's? If they needed help, who were they going to call?"
"Franz and Swan."
"Exactly. We've been wrong from the start. We need to reverse the paradigm. Suppose Franz got a panic call from Orozco or Sanchez? That's certainly someone he regards as special. That's someone he's obligated to somehow. Not a client, but he can't say no. He's got to pitch in and help, no matter what Angela or Charlie think."
Silence in the room.
Reacher said, "Orozco contacted Homeland Security. That's difficult to do. And it's the only really proactive thing we've seen so far. It's more than Franz seems to have done."
O'Donnell said, "Mauney's people think Orozco was dead before Franz. That might be significant."
"Yes," Dixon said. "If this was Franz's deal, why would he farm out the heavy-duty inquiries to Orozco? I imagine Franz was better equipped to handle them himself. That kind of proves the dynamic was flowing the other way, doesn't it?"
"It's suggestive," Reacher said. "But let's not make the same mistake twice. It could have been Swan."
"Swan wasn't working."
"Sanchez, then, not Orozco."
"More likely both of them together."
Neagley said, "Which would mean this was something based in Vegas, not here in LA. Could those numbers be something to do with casinos?"
"Possibly," Dixon said. "They could be house win percentages taking a hit after someone worked out a system."
"What kind of thing gets played nine or ten or twelve times a day?"
"Practically anything. There's no real minimum or maximum."
"Cards?"
"Almost certainly, if we're talking about a system."
O'Donnell nodded. "Six hundred and fifty unscheduled winning hands at an average of a hundred grand a time would get anyone's attention."
Dixon said, "They wouldn't let a guy win six hundred and fifty times for four months solid."
"So maybe it's more than one guy. Maybe it's a cartel."
Neagley said, "We have to go to Vegas."
Then Dixon's room phone rang. She answered it. Her room, her phone. She listened for a second and handed the receiver to Reacher.
"Curtis Mauney," she said. "For you."
Reacher took the phone and said his name and Mauney said: "Andrew MacBride just got on a plane in Denver. He's heading for Las Vegas. I'm telling you this purely as a courtesy. So stay exactly where you are. No independent action, remember?"
42
They decided to drive to Vegas, not fly. Faster to plan and easier to organize and no slower door to door. No way could they take the Hardballers on a plane, anyway. And they had to assume that firepower would be necessary sooner or later. So Reacher waited in the lobby while the others packed. Neagley came down first and checked them out. She didn't even look at the bill. Just signed it. Then she dumped her bag near the door and waited with Reacher. O'Donnell came down next. Then Dixon, with her Hertz key in her hand.
They loaded their bags into the trunk and slid into their seats. Dixon and Neagley up front, Reacher and O'Donnell behind them. They headed east on Sunset and fought through the tangle of clogged freeways until they found the 15. It would run them north through the mountains and then north of east out of state and all the way to Vegas.
It would also run them close to where they knew a helicopter had hovered more than three weeks previously, at least twice, three thousand feet up, dead of night, its doors open. Reacher made up his mind not to look, but he did. After the road brought them out of the hills he found himself looking west toward the flat tan badlands. He saw O'Donnell doing the same thing. And Neagley. And Dixon. She took her eyes off the road for seconds at a time and stared to her left, her face creased against the setting sun and her lips clamped and turned down at the corners.
They stopped for dinner in Barstow, California, at a miserable roadside diner that had no virtues other than it was there and the road ahead was empty. The place was dirty, the service was slow, the food was bad. Reacher was no gourmet, but even he felt cheated. In the past he or Dixon or Neagley or certainly O'Donnell might have complained or heaved a chair through a window, but none of them did that night. They just suffered through three courses and drank weak coffee and got back on the road.
The man in the blue suit called it in from the Chateau Marmont's parking lot: "They skipped out. They're gone. All four of them."
His boss asked, "Where to?"
"The clerk thinks Vegas. That's what she heard."
"Excellent. We'll do it there. Better all around. Drive, don't fly."
The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride stepped out of the jetway inside the Las Vegas airport and the first thing he saw was a bank of slot machines. Bulky black and silver and gold boxes, with winking neon fascias. Maybe twenty of them, back to back in lines of ten. Each machine had a vinyl stool in front of it. Each machine had a narrow gray ledge at the bottom with an ashtray on the left and a cup holder on the right. Perhaps twelve of the twenty stools were occupied. The men and women on them were staring forward at the screens with a peculiar kind of fatigued concentration.
Andrew MacBride decided to try his luck. He decided to designate the result as a harbinger of his future success. If he won, everything would be fine.
And if he lost?
He smiled. He knew that if he lost he would rationalize the result away. He wasn't superstitious.
He sat on a stool and propped his briefcase against his ankle. He carried a change purse in his pocket. It made him faster through airport security, and therefore less noticeable. He took it out and poked around in it and took out all the quarters he had accumulated. There weren't many. They made a short line on the ledge, between the ashtray and the cup holder.
He fed them to the machine, one by one. They made satisfying metallic sounds as they fell through the slot. A red LED showed five credits. There was a large touch pad to start the game. It was worn and greasy from a million fingers.
He pressed it, again and again.
The first four times, he lost.
The fifth time, he won.
A muted bell rang and a quiet whoop-whoop siren sounded and the machine rocked back and forth a little as a sturdy mechanism inside counted out a hundred quarters. They rattled down a chute and clattered into a pressed metal dish near his knee.