Bad Luck and Trouble

19

Neagley detoured to the Beverly Wilshire’s basement business center and printed out all eight of Franz’s secret files. Then she joined O’Donnell and Reacher for lunch in the lobby restaurant. She sat between the two of them with the kind of look on her face that made Reacher think she was reliving a hundred similar meals.

And Reacher was doing the same thing himself. But back in the day they had been in creased BDUs and they had eaten in O Clubs or grimy off-post diners or they had shared sandwiches and pizza around battered metal desks. Now the déjà vu was corrupted by the new context. The room was dim and tall and stylish and full of people who could have been movie agents or executives. Actors, even. Neagley and O’Donnell looked right at home. Neagley was wearing baggy black high-waisted pants and a cotton T-shirt that fitted her like a second skin. Her face was tan and flawless and her makeup was so subtle it was like she was wearing none at all. O’Donnell’s suit was gray with a slight sheen to it and his shirt was white and crisp and immaculate even though he must have put it on three thousand miles away. His tie was striped and regimental and perfectly knotted.

Reacher was in a shirt a size too small with a tear in the sleeve and a stain on the front. His hair was long and his jeans were cheap and his shoes were scuffed and he couldn’t afford to pay for the dish he had ordered. He couldn’t even afford to pay for the Norwegian water he was drinking.

Sad, he had said about Franz, when he had seen the strip mall office. From the big green machine to this?

What were Neagley and O’Donnell thinking about him?

“Show me the pages with the numbers,” he said.

Neagley passed seven sheets of paper across the table. She had marked them in pencil, top right-hand corner, to indicate their order. He scanned them all, one through seven, quickly, looking for overall impressions. A total of 183 proper fractions, not canceled. Proper, in that the numerator, the top number, was always smaller than the denominator, the bottom number. Not canceled, in that 10/12 and 8/10 were not expressed as 5/6 and 4/5, which they would have been if the arithmetic convention had been properly followed.

Therefore, they were not really fractions at all. They were scores, or results, or performance assessments. They were saying ten times out of twelve or eight times out of ten, something happened.

Or didn’t happen.

There were consistently twenty-six scores on each page, except for the fourth sheet, where there were twenty-seven.

The scores or the results or the ratios or whatever they were on the first three sheets looked pretty healthy. Expressed like a batting average or a win percentage, they hovered between a fine.870 and an excellent.907. Then there was a dramatic fall on the fourth sheet, where the overall average looked like a.574. The fifth, sixth, and seventh sheets got progressively more and more dismal, with a.368, a.308, and a.307.

“Got it yet?” Neagley asked.

“No clue,” Reacher said. “I wish Franz was here to explain it.”

“If he was here, we wouldn’t be here.”

“We could have been. We could have all gotten together from time to time.”

“Like a class reunion?”

“It might have been fun.”

O’Donnell raised his glass and said, “Absent friends.”

Neagley raised her glass. Reacher raised his. They drank water that had frozen at the top of a Scandinavian glacier ten thousand years ago and then inched downward over centuries, before melting into mountain springs and streams, to the memory of four friends, five including Stan Lowrey, who they assumed they would never see again.

But they assumed wrong. One of their friends had just gotten on a plane in Las Vegas.