Bad Luck and Trouble

him?”
    “Yes and no. I think he was choosing to believe a lie to salve his own conscience. Whatever else he was, he was a citizen. He didn’t want to know the truth.”
    “Which is?”
    “Terrorism here in the States. Got to be. It’s obvious. Kashmir is a squabble between governments. Governments have purchasing missions. They don’t run around with Samsonite suitcases full of bearer bonds and bank access codes and diamonds.”
    Dixon asked, “Is that what you found?”
    “Highland Park. Sixty-five million dollars’ worth. Neagley’s got it all. You’re going to have to convert it for us, Karla.”
    “If I survive. My plane back to New York might get blown up.”
    Reacher nodded. “If not tomorrow, then the next day, or the next.”
    “How do we find them? Eight hours at fifty miles an hour is already a radius of four hundred miles. Which is a half-million-square-mile circle.”
    “Five hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and twenty,” Reacher said, automatically. “Assuming you use only three decimal places for pi. But that’s the bargain we made. We could stop them when the circle was small, or we could come for you guys.”
    “Thanks,” O’Donnell said.
    “Hey, I voted to stop the truck. Neagley overruled me.”
    “So how do we do this?”
    “You ever seen a really great centerfielder play baseball? He never chases the ball. He runs to where the ball is about to arrive. Like Mickey Mantle.”
    “You never saw Mantle play.”
    “I saw newsreels.”
    “The United States is close to four million square miles. That’s bigger than center field at Yankee Stadium.”
    “But not much,” Reacher said.
    “So where do we run to?”
    “Mahmoud isn’t dumb. In fact he strikes me as a very smart and cautious guy. He just spent sixty-five million dollars on what are basically just components. He must have insisted that part of the deal was that someone would show him how to screw the damn things together.”
    “Who?”
    “What did Neagley’s woman friend tell us? The politician? Diana Bond?”
    “Lots of things.”
    “She told us that New Age’s engineer does the quality control tests because so far he’s the only guy in the world who knows how Little Wing is supposed to work.”
    Dixon said, “And Lamaison had him on a string somehow.”
    “He was threatening the guy’s daughter.”
    O’Donnell said, “So Lamaison was going to pimp him out. Lamaison was going to take him somewhere. And you threw Lamaison out of the damn helicopter before you asked him.”
    Reacher shook his head. “Lamaison talked about the whole thing like it was firmly in the past. He said it was a done deal. There was something in his voice. Lamaison wasn’t taking anyone anywhere.”
    “So who?”
    “Not who,” Reacher said. “The question is, where?”
    Dixon said, “If there’s only one guy, and Lamaison wasn’t planning to take him somewhere, they’ll have to bring the missiles to him.”
    “Which is ridiculous,” O’Donnell said. “You can’t bring a semi full of missiles to a garden apartment in Century City or wherever.”
    “The guy doesn’t live in Century City,” Reacher said. “He lives way out in the desert. The middle of nowhere. The back of beyond. Where better to bring a semi full of missiles?”
    “Cell phones are up,” the pilot called.
    Reacher pulled out his Radio Shack pay-as-you-go. Found Neagley’s number. Hit the green button. She answered.
    “Dean’s place?” he asked.
    “Dean’s place,” she said. “For sure. I’m twenty minutes away.”

83
    The Bell had GPS, but not the kind that drew a road map on a screen. Not like O’Donnell’s rental car. The Bell’s system produced a pair of always-changing latitude and longitude readings instead, pale green numbers, plain script. Reacher told the pilot to get himself somewhere south of Palmdale and wait. The pilot was nervous about fuel. Reacher told him to lose altitude. Helicopters sometimes survived engine failures at a few hundred feet. They rarely survived at a few thousand.
    Then Reacher called Neagley back. She had gotten Dean’s address from Margaret Berenson in the Pasadena hotel. But she had no GPS, either. She was adrift in the dark, behind two last-generation headlights made weaker by blue paint on the lenses. And cell coverage was patchy. Reacher lost her twice. Before he lost her a third time he told her to find Dean’s spread and drive in tight circles with her lights on bright.
    Reacher took