Bad Luck and Trouble

34

They went up to Dixon’s room and she arranged the seven spreadsheets neatly on the bed. Said, “OK, what we have here is a sequence of seven calendar months. Some kind of a performance analysis. For simplicity’s sake let’s just call them hits and misses. The first three months are pretty good. Plenty of hits, not too many misses. An average success rate of approximately ninety percent. A hair over eighty-nine point five-three percent, to be precise, which I know you want me to be.”

“Move along,” O’Donnell said.

“Then in the fourth month we fall off a cliff and we get worse.”

“We know that already,” Neagley said.

“So for the sake of argument let’s take the first three months as a baseline. We know they can hit ninety percent, give or take. They’re capable of it. Let’s say they could have or should have continued that level of performance indefinitely.”

“But they didn’t,” O’Donnell said.

“Exactly. They could have, but they didn’t. What’s the result?”

Neagley said, “More misses later than earlier.”

“How many more?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Dixon said. “On this volume if they had continued their baseline success rate through the final four months they would have saved themselves exactly six hundred and fifty extra misses.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Dixon said. “Numbers don’t lie, and percentages are numbers. Something happened at the end of month three that went on to cost them six hundred and fifty avoidable future failures.”

Reacher nodded. A total of 183 days, a total of 2,197 events, a total of 1,314 successes and 883 failures. But with markedly unequal distribution. The first three months, 897 events, 802 successes, 95 failures. The next four months, 1,300 events, a miserable 502 successes, a catastrophic 798 failures, 650 of which wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t changed.

“I wish we knew what we were looking at,” he said.

“Sabotage,” O’Donnell said. “Someone got paid to screw up something.”

“At a hundred grand a time?” Neagley said. “Six hundred and fifty times over? That’s nice work if you can get it.”

“Can’t be sabotage,” Reacher said. “You could get a whole factory or office or whatever torched for a hundred grand, easy. Probably a whole town. You wouldn’t have to pay per occasion.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it ties in,” Dixon said. “Doesn’t it? There was a definite mathematical relationship between what Franz knew and what Sanchez knew.”

A minute later Reacher stepped to Dixon’s window and looked out at the view. Asked, “Would it be fair to assume that Orozco knew whatever Sanchez knew?”

“Totally,” O’Donnell said. “And vice versa, certainly. They were friends. They worked together. They must have talked all the time.”

“So all we’re missing is what Swan knew. We’ve got fragments from the other three. Nothing from him.”

“His house was clean. Nothing there.”

“So it’s at his office.”

“He didn’t have an office. He was canned.”

“But only very recently. So his office is just sitting there empty. They’re shedding staff, not hiring. So there’s no pressure on space. His office is mothballed. With his computer still right there on his desk. And maybe there are notes in the desk drawers, stuff like that.”

Neagley said, “You want to go see the dragon lady again?”

“I think we have to.”

“We should call before we drive all the way out there.”

“Better if we just show up.”

“I’d like to see where Swan worked,” O’Donnell said.

“Me too,” Dixon said.

Dixon drove. Her rental, her responsibility. She headed east on Sunset, hunting the 101. Neagley told her what she was going to have to do after that. A complex route. Slow traffic. But the ride through Hollywood itself was picturesque. Dixon seemed to enjoy it. She liked LA.

The man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler tailed them all the way. Outside the KTLA studios, just before the freeway, he dialed his phone. Told his boss, “They’re heading east. All four of them together in the car.”

His boss said, “I’m still in Colorado. Watch them for me, OK?”