Bad Luck and Trouble

ordered coffee, pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, and jelly.
    “You’re hungry,” Dixon said.
    “Starving,” he said.
    “Where were you?”
    “Walking.”
    “Didn’t sleep?”
    “Not even close.”
    The waitress came back and filled his mug. He took a long sip. The others went quiet. They were picking at their food. They looked tired and dispirited. He guessed that none of them had slept well, or at all.
    O’Donnell asked, “When do we drop the dime?”
    Reacher said, “Maybe we don’t.”
    Nobody spoke.
    “Ground rules,” Reacher said. “We have to agree something from the start. If Mahmoud has got the missiles, then this thing is bigger than we are. We have to suck it up and move on. There’s too much at stake. Either he’s paramilitary and wants to turn the whole Middle East into a no-fly zone, or he’s a terrorist planning a day of action that’s going to make the Twin Towers look like a day at the beach. Either way around, we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of KIA. Maybe tens of thousands. Those kind of numbers trump any interest of ours. Agreed?”
    Dixon and Neagley nodded and looked away.
    O’Donnell said, “There’s no if about it. We have to assume Mahmoud has got the missiles.”
    “No,” Reacher said. “We have to assume he’s got the electronics. We don’t know if he’s got the rockets and the launch tubes yet. It’s even money. Fifty-fifty. Either he collected the rockets first, or the electronics first. But he’s got to have both before we drop the dime.”
    “How do we find out?”
    “Neagley hits up her Pentagon guy. She calls in whatever markers she’s holding. He organizes some kind of audit out in Colorado. If anything is missing up there, then it’s game over for us. But if everything is still present and correct and accounted for, then it’s game on.”
    Neagley checked her watch. Just after six in the west, just after nine in the east. The Pentagon would have been humming for an hour. She took out her phone and dialed.

58
    Neagley’s buddy wasn’t dumb. He insisted on calling back from outside the building, and not on his own cell phone, either. And he was smart enough to realize that any pay phone within a mile radius of the Pentagon would be continuously monitored. So there was a whole hour’s delay while he got himself across the river and halfway across town to a phone on a wall outside a bodega on New York Avenue.
    Then the fun began.
    Neagley told him what she wanted. He gave her all kinds of reasons why it wasn’t possible. She started calling in her markers, one by one. The guy owed her a lot of heavy-duty favors. That was clear. Reacher felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. If your balls were in a vise, better that it wasn’t Neagley’s hand on the lever. The guy caved and agreed within ten minutes. Then it became a logistical discussion. How should the job be done, by whom, what should be considered proof positive. Neagley suggested Army CID should roll up unannounced and match the books with physical inventory. Her guy agreed, and asked for a week. Neagley gave him four hours.

    Reacher spent the four hours asleep. Once the plan was settled and the decision was made he relaxed to the point where he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He went back to his room and lay down on the bed. A maid came in after an hour. He sent her away again and went back to sleep. Next thing he knew Dixon was at his door. She told him that Neagley was waiting in the lounge, with news.

    Neagley’s news was neither good nor bad. It was somewhere in between. New Age had no physical plant in Colorado. Just an office. They contracted out their raw missile production, to one of the established aerospace manufacturers in Denver. That manufacturer had a number of Little Wing assemblies available for inspection. An Army CID officer had seen them all and counted them all, and his final tally was precisely what the books said it should be. Everything was present, correct, and accounted for. No problem. Except that exactly six hundred and fifty of the units were currently stored in a separate secure warehouse, crated up and awaiting transport to a facility in Nevada, where they were due to be decommissioned and destroyed.
    “Why?” O’Donnell asked.
    “Current production is specified as Mark Two,” Neagley said. “They’re junking what’s left of the Mark Ones.”
    “Which just happens to be exactly six hundred and fifty units.”
    “You got