She turned back to her phone. The last item in their chosen three-month window was a piece about an ocean corridor parallel to the West Coast, from California to Oregon, which great white sharks used for seasonal migration. Not an issue for most folks, except a Frenchman was proposing to swim through it, on his way across the Pacific from Japan. He would sleep on a chase boat every night, and start over every morning, eight hours a day. Apparently the sharks were a secondary problem. First he would have to traverse the Pacific Gyre, which was a slow thousand-mile whirlpool, full of dumped plastic and toxic sludge and all kinds of other crap.

Chang said, “The French are crazy.”

Reacher said, “My mother was French.”

“Was she crazy?”

“Pretty much.”

The traffic slowed again, proportionately, the left-hand lane to what the middle lane had been doing, and the middle lane to what the right-hand lane had been doing, and the right-hand lane itself almost to a stop. Still the driver wouldn’t move over. He just inched along, stopping and starting, barely faster than walking.

Then they found out why.

Just past Culver City and just before Inglewood, with LAX not far away, the guy pulled off the freeway into a sudden unmarked exit on the right, which led to a narrow road that looked like the entrance to some kind of an abandoned maintenance depot. The cab crunched over debris-strewn blacktop, all alone, between rusty iron sheds, and then it turned and bumped across broken concrete into a dead-end fork, with nothing up ahead but a derelict warehouse, which had a busted door hanging open.

The guy drove straight inside, into the dark.

Chapter 31

The warehouse had rusted iron ribs holding up the roof, and what little light there was inside came from hundreds of tiny bright speckles of sun showing through lacy holes in the siding. It was a big place, close to three hundred feet long, but largely empty, except for unexplained piles of abandoned equipment and scrap metal. The floor was concrete, worn smooth in some places, stained with oil in others, and covered with rusty fragments and pigeon feathers everywhere. The crunch of the tires and the engine noise and the beat of the exhaust came back loud through Chang’s open window.

There were no people inside, as far as Reacher could see, which fact the back part of his brain seized upon. One blow to the side of the driver’s head would solve the problem. A right-handed haymaker, around and down a little. Unexpected. No warning. Give the guy some whiplash of his own. Get your retaliation in first. Reacher’s hand balled into a fist, ready.

And then it relaxed again. The guy drove on, slow and steady, but confident, as if he knew exactly where he was going, as if he had been there many times before, and he said, “The hare and the tortoise, my friend. I just saved us twenty minutes.”

At the far end of the warehouse was an identical busted door, hanging open just the same, and the guy drove out through it into the bright light, and over more cracked concrete, between more abandoned sheds, and out a sagging gate onto LAX’s northern perimeter road, just outside the big wire fence. Reacher saw the control tower dead ahead, and runways and taxiways and parked planes and little trucks swarming all around, busy and innocent under the high sky and the blazing sun.

The driver said, “We were trespassing, technically, but I used to work in there, back when it was a going concern, so I figure I’m entitled. It saves using the regular way in off the freeway, which will be a real mess right now. It always is, in the afternoon. I lose a buck or two on the meter, but I make it back double because I get a new fare all the faster. My secret sauce. A little local knowledge never hurts.”

He turned right on a cargo road, and followed the outside of another big wire fence, and ten seconds later they were back in the river of Town Cars and taxis and friends and relatives all heading for the terminals. A minute after that they were at American, slowing down, pulling over, and stopping. Another minute, and Chang’s suitcase was out on the sidewalk, upright, handle raised and ready to go, and the driver was paid and tipped and pulling away again.

Chang got flimsy paper boarding passes from a machine, and then they headed for the security line. They didn’t get there. A guy stepped in the way. He was about forty, pink and solid, with short fair hair. He was wearing tan chinos and a blue polo shirt under a blue warm-up jacket. All the garments looked institutional. A uniform, of sorts. He was wearing a lanyard around his neck. It was tangled and the badge on the end was turned the wrong way around. He said, “Ma’am, sir, I watched you walk inside from the curb.”

Reacher said, “Did you?”

“You passed by the curbside bag drop and used a no-checked-bags machine.”

“Did we?”

“Sir, you have no luggage. Nothing checked, no carry-on, not even a personal item.”

“Is that a problem?”