Bad Luck and Trouble

muscle. It was inconceivable that a Director of Security would be out on an emergency alert without his cell phone switched on. It was inconceivable that a Director of Security would ignore an incoming call in such circumstances. Therefore none of these five was the director of security. Not the guy in the raincoat. He was third man on the totem pole, at best, allowing for Swan’s number-two spot. And he was acting like a guy in third place. He was slow, and ponderous. He had no instinctive grasp of tactics. Anybody with half a brain would have figured out his best course of action long ago. A small square building, potential armed hostiles inside, three solid cars at his disposal, he should have solved his problem already. All three cars go in, high speed, different directions, they circle the building, they draw fire, two guys go in the back, two guys go in the front, game over.
    Civilians, Reacher thought.
    He waited.
    Eventually the guy in the raincoat made the right decision. Painfully slow, but he got there in the end. He ordered everyone back in their cars and they maneuvered for a spell and then burst into the lot at high speed. Reacher watched them circle the building a couple of times and then he started the Honda and headed west.

    Reacher kept on the surface streets and stayed off the freeway. He had noticed that the freeways were thick with cops at night, and he hadn’t seen any anywhere else. So he erred on the side of caution. He got lost near Dodger Stadium and ended up driving an aimless circle that took him right past the LA Police Academy. He stopped in Echo Park and checked in with the others by phone. They were nearly home, streaming west at circumspect speeds like bombers returning from a night raid.

    They regrouped in O’Donnell’s room dead-on three o’clock in the morning. The captured paperwork was laid out on the bed in three neat piles. Reacher unrolled Swan’s stuff from his pocket and added it to the line. It wasn’t very interesting. Most of it was a memorandum about future overtime requirements for his secretarial staff. The rest of it was a justification for the overtime they had already worked.
    O’Donnell’s collection wasn’t very interesting either, but it was instructive in a negative way. It proved that the glass cube was purely an administrative center. It had been relatively unsecured because it contained very little worth stealing. Some minor design work happened there, and some component sourcing, but most of the square footage was given over to management functions. Personnel stuff, corporate finance stuff, routine transport, and maintenance and bureaucracy. Nothing inherently valuable.
    Which made it all the more important to find the plant location.
    Which was where Dixon’s stuff made all the difference. She had dug through the wreckage of the reception area and crawled under the crashed Chrysler and in about fifty seconds flat she had come up with solid gold. In the shattered remains of a locked drawer she had found New Age’s internal phone directory. Now it was right there on the bed, a thick wad of loose-leaf pages punched into a white three-ring binder, a little battered and covered in dust. The cover was printed with New Age’s corporate logo and most of the pages were printed with names that meant nothing, with matching four-digit telephone extensions. But right at the front of the book was a block diagram detailing the company’s various divisions. Names were printed in boxes, and lines connected the boxes downward through all the various hierarchies. The Security Division was headed by a guy called Allen Lamaison. His number two had been Tony Swan. Below Swan two lines led to two other guys, and below them five more lines fanned out to five more guys, one of which had the name Saropian, and who was as dead as Tony Swan, in a Vegas hotel foundation. A total staff of nine, two down, seven survivors.
    “Turn to the back,” Dixon said.
    The last section had account numbers for FedEx and UPS and DHL. Plus full street addresses and landline phone numbers for two of New Age’s operations, which was what courier services needed. The East LA glass cube, the contracting office up in Colorado.
    And then, bizarrely, a third address, with a note printed in bold and underlined: No deliveries to this location.
    The third address was for the electronics manufacturing plant.
    It was in Highland Park, halfway between Glendale and South Pasadena. Six and a half