Bad Luck and Trouble

under its midsection.
    Which is going to make Dixon’s research difficult, Reacher thought.
    Then he shut his mind to that problem and unclipped his belt and forced his door open. Spilled out onto the lobby floor and crawled away. All around him tiny white alarm strobes were flashing. His hearing was coming back. A loud siren was sounding. He got to his feet and saw the others hurdling the wreckage in the doorway and running inside from the lot. Dixon was heading straight for the back of the lobby and O’Donnell and Neagley were heading for the mouth of the corridor where the dragon lady had come out twice before. Their flashlights were already on and bright cones of light were jerking and bouncing in front of them through clouds of swirling white dust. He pulled his own flashlight out and switched it on and followed them.
    Twenty-one seconds gone, he thought.
    There were two elevators halfway down the corridor. Their indicator panels showed it to be a three-story building. He didn’t press the call button. He figured the alarm would have already shut down the elevators. Instead he flung open an adjacent door and hit the stairs. Ran all the way up to the third floor, two steps at a time. The sound of the siren was unbearable in the stairwell. He burst out into the third-floor corridor. He didn’t need his flashlight. The alarm strobes were lighting the place up like the disco from hell. The corridor was lined on both sides with maple doors twenty feet apart. Offices. The doors had nameplates on them. Long black plastic rectangles, engraved with letters cut through to a white base layer. Directly in front of him Neagley was busy kicking down a door labeled Margaret Berenson. The stop-motion effect of the alarm strobes made her movements weird and jerky. The door wouldn’t give. She pulled out her Glock and fired three aimed shots into the lock. Three loud explosions. The spent brass kicked out of the pistol’s ejection port and rolled away on the carpet, frozen by the strobes into a long golden chain. Neagley kicked the door again and it sagged open. She went inside.
    Reacher moved on. Fifty-two seconds gone, he thought.
    He passed a door labeled Allen Lamaison. Twenty carpeted feet farther on he saw another door: Anthony Swan. He braced himself against the opposite wall and wound up and delivered a mighty kick with his heel, just above the lock. The maple splintered and the door sagged but the catch held. He finished the job with a sharp blow from the flat of his gloved hand and tumbled inside.
    Sixty-three seconds gone, he thought.
    He stood stock-still and played his flashlight beam all around his dead friend’s office. It was untouched. It was like Swan had just stepped out to the bathroom or gone out for lunch. There was a coat hanging on a hat stand. It was a khaki windbreaker, old, worn, plaid-lined like a golf jacket, short and wide. There were file cabinets. Phones. A leather chair, crushed in places by the weight of a heavy barrel-shaped man. There was a computer on the desk. And a new blank notepad. And pens, and pencils. A stapler. A clock. A small pile of papers.
    And a paperweight, holding the papers down. A lump of Soviet concrete, irregular in shape, the size of a fist, gray and polished to a greasy shine by handling, one flat face with faint traces of blue and red sprayed graffiti still on it.
    Reacher stepped to the desk and put the lump of concrete in his pocket. Took the pile of papers from under it and rolled them tight and put them in his other pocket. Suddenly became aware of a softness under his feet. He played the flashlight beam downward. Saw rich red colors reflected back. Ornate patterns. Thick pile. An Oriental rug. Brand new. He recalled the cord on Orozco’s wrists and ankles and Curtis Mauney’s words: It’s a sisal product from the Indian subcontinent. It would have to come in on whatever gets exported from there.
    Eighty-nine seconds gone, he thought. Thirty-one to go.
    He stepped to the window. Saw Karla Dixon far below in the darkness, already on her way out of the lot. Her pants and her jacket were scuffed and coated with white dust. She looked like a ghost. From crawling around in the wallboard dust, he guessed. She was carrying papers and some kind of a white three-ring binder. She was lit up in short blue pulses by the strobe on the front of the building.
    Twenty-six seconds to go.
    He saw O’Donnell run out below like he was escaping from a burning house, taking