“That’s nuts.”

“Only one way to find out. Take a walk around the block and talk to the deputy.”

“You think?”

“Dixon should go. She wasn’t with us in Santa Ana. So if I’m wrong the guy probably won’t shoot her.”

Dixon went. She left the room without a word. O’Donnell said, “I don’t think Angela was hiding anything today. So I don’t think Franz had a client at all.”

“How hard did you press her?” Reacher asked.

“We didn’t need to press her. It was all right out there. She had nothing to tell us. It’s inconceivable that Franz would have gotten into a thing like this for anyone except a big-deal regular customer who went back years, and it’s inconceivable he could have had such a guy without Angela at least hearing a name.”

Reacher nodded. Then he smiled, briefly. He liked his old team. He could rely on them, absolutely. No second-guessing. If Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell went out with questions, they came back with answers. Always, whatever the issue, whatever it took. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.

Neagley asked, “What next?”

“Let’s talk to the deputies first,” Reacher said. “Specifically let’s see if they went out to Vegas.”

“To Sanchez and Orozco’s office? Dixon was just there. It hadn’t been disturbed.”

“She didn’t check their homes.”

Dixon came back thirty minutes later. Said, “He didn’t shoot me.”

“That’s good,” Reacher said.

“I certainly thought so.”

“Did he ‘fess up to anything?”

“He didn’t confirm or deny.”

“Is he mad about his face?”

“Livid.”

“So what’s the story?”

“He called his boss. They want to meet with us. Here, an hour from now.”

“Who’s his boss?”

“A guy called Curtis Mauney. LA County Sheriff ’s Department.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We can do that. We’ll see what the guy has got. We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give.”

They waited the hour downstairs in the lobby. No stress, no strain. Military service teaches a person how to wait. O’Donnell sprawled on a sofa and cleaned his fingernails with his switchblade. Dixon read the seven spreadsheets over and over and then put them away and closed her eyes. Neagley sat alone in a chair against a wall. Reacher sat under an old framed photograph of Raquel Welch. The picture had been taken outside the hotel late in the afternoon and the light was as golden as her skin. The magic hour, photographers called it. Brief, glowing, lovely. Like fame itself, Reacher figured.

The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was waiting, too. He was waiting to take a clandestine meeting in his room in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. He was uncharacteristically nervous and out of sorts. Three reasons. First, his room was dim and shabby. Not at all what he had been expecting. Second, he had a suitcase stacked against the wall. It was a dark gray hard-shell Samsonite, carefully selected like all his accessories, expensive enough to blend with his air of affluence but not ostentatious enough to attract undue attention. Inside it were bearer bonds and cut diamonds and Swiss bank access codes worth a lot of money. Sixty-five million U.S. dollars, to be exact, and the people he was going to be meeting with were not the kind of people a prudent person would trust around portable and untraceable assets.

And third, he hadn’t slept well. The night air had been full of an unpleasant smell. He had run through a mental checklist until he had identified it as dog food. Clearly there was a factory nearby and the wind was blowing in an unfortunate direction. Then he had lain awake and worried about the dog food’s ingredients. Meat, obviously. But he knew that smell was a physical mechanism that depended on the impact of actual molecules on the nasal lining. Therefore, technically, actual fragments of meat were entering his nostrils. They were in contact with his body. And there were certain meats that Azhari Mahmoud should not be in contact with, ever, under any circumstances.

He stepped to the bathroom. Washed his face for the fifth time that day. Looked at himself in the mirror. Clamped his jaw. He wasn’t Azhari Mahmoud. Not right then. He was Alan Mason, a Westerner, and there was a job to be done.

First in through the Chateau Marmont’s lobby door was the banged-up deputy himself, Thomas Brant. He had a vivid bruise on the side of his forehead and the sculptured metal splint on his face was taped to his cheekbones so tight that the skin around his eyes was distorted. He was walking like he hurt. He looked about one-third mad as hell that he had been taken down and one-third sheepish that he had let it happen and one-third pissed that he had to swallow his feelings for the sake of the job. He was followed in by an older guy that had to be his boss, Curtis Mauney. Mauney looked to be approaching fifty. He was short and solid and had the kind of worn look a guy gets when he has been in the same line of work too long. His hair was dyed a dull black that didn’t match his eyebrows. He was carrying a battered leather briefcase. He asked, “Which one of you assholes hit my guy?”

“Does it matter?” Reacher said.

“Shouldn’t have happened.”

“Don’t feel bad about it. He didn’t stand a chance. It was three-on-one. Even though one of the three was a girl.”

Neagley gave him a look that would have blinded him if looks were knives. Mauney shook his head and said, “I’m not criticizing my guy’s self-defense capabilities. I’m saying you don’t come down here and start hitting cops.”

Reacher said, “He was outside of his jurisdiction, he hadn’t identified himself, and he was acting in a suspicious manner. He was asking for it.”

“Why are you here anyway?”

“For our friend’s funeral.”

“The body hasn’t been released yet.”

“So we’ll wait.”

“Was it you who hit my guy?”

Reacher nodded. “I apologize. But all you had to do was ask.”

“For what?”

“For our help.”

Mauney looked blank. “You think we brought you here to help?”

“Didn’t you?”

Mauney shook his head. “No,” he said. “We brought you here as bait.”

Thomas Brant stayed on his feet, surly, unwilling to make the kind of social gesture that sitting down as part of the group would represent. But his boss, Curtis Mauney, took a chair. He sat down and tucked his briefcase between his ankles and put his elbows on his knees.

“Let’s get a couple of things straight,” he said. “We’re LA County sheriffs. We’re not hicks from the sticks, we’re not idiots, and we’re nobody’s poor relations. We’re fast and smart and proactive and light on our feet. We knew every detail of Calvin Franz’s life within twelve hours of finding his body. Including the fact that he was one of eight survivors of an elite military unit. And within twenty-four hours we knew for sure that three other members of that unit were missing also. One from right here in LA, and two from Vegas. Which calls into question exactly how elite you all were, wouldn’t you say? You’re fifty percent MIA in the blink of an eye.”

Reacher said, “I would need to know who the opposition was before I came to any performance conclusions.”

“Whoever, it wasn’t the Red Army.”

“We never fought the Red Army. We fought the U.S. Army.”

“So I’ll ask around,” Mauney said. “I’ll check if the 81st Airborne just won any major victories.”

“Your thesis is someone’s hunting all eight of us?”

“I don’t know what my thesis is. But that’s certainly a possibility. Therefore, flushing you four out was a win-win for me. If you don’t show up, maybe they’ve already got you, which adds pieces to the puzzle. If you do show up, then you’re bait, and maybe I can use you to flush them out.”