by Lee Child
He heard footsteps at one minute past.
Long strides, a heavy tread. The big guy from the plant, hustling. Lights came on in the barn. A bright rectangle of glare spilled forward, shadowed with wings and propeller blades.
Then nothing, for two minutes.
Then more footsteps. Slower. A shorter stride. An older man with good shoes, overweight, battling stiffness and limping with joint pain.
Reacher took a breath and stepped around the corner of the barn, into the light.
The big guy from the plant was standing behind the Piper’s wing, just waiting, like some kind of a servant or a butler. Thurman was on the path leading from the house. He was dressed in his wool suit. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue tie.
He was carrying a small cardboard carton.
The carton was about the size of a six-pack of beer. There was no writing on it. The top flaps were folded shut, one under the other. It wasn’t heavy. Thurman was carrying it two-handed, out in front of his body, reverentially, but without strain. He stopped dead on the path but didn’t speak. Reacher watched him try to find something to say, and then watched him give up. So he filled the silence himself. He said, “Good evening, folks.”
Thurman said, “You told me you were leaving.”
“I changed my mind.”
“You’re trespassing.”
“Probably.”
“You need to leave now.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“I meant it before, and I mean it now.”
“I’ll leave when I’ve seen what’s in that box.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m curious about what part of Uncle Sam’s property you’re smuggling out of here every night.”
The big guy from the plant squeezed around the tip of the Piper’s wing and stepped out of the barn and put himself between Reacher and Thurman, closer to Thurman than Reacher. Two against one, explicitly. Thurman looked beyond the big guy’s shoulder directly at Reacher and said, “You’re intruding.” Which struck Reacher as an odd choice of word. Interfering, trespassing, butting in, he would have expected.
“Intruding on what?” he asked.
The big guy asked his boss, “You want me to throw him out?”
Reacher saw Thurman thinking about his answer. There was debate in his face, some kind of a long-range calculus that went far beyond the possible positive or negative outcome of a two-minute brawl in front of an airplane hangar. Like the old guy was playing a long game, and thinking eight moves ahead.
Reacher said, “What’s in the box?”
The big guy said, “Shall I get rid of him?”
Thurman said, “No, let him stay.”
Reacher said, “What’s in the box?”
Thurman said, “Not Uncle Sam’s property. God’s property.”
“God brings you metal?”
“Not metal.”
Thurman stood still for a second. Then he stepped around his underling, still carrying the box two-handed out in front of him, like a wise man bearing a gift. He knelt and laid it at Reacher’s feet, and then stood up and backed away again. Reacher looked down. Theoretically the box might be booby-trapped, or he might get hit on the head while he crouched down next to it. But he felt either thing was unlikely. The instructors at Rucker had said: be skeptical, but not too skeptical. Too much skepticism led to paranoia and paralysis.
Reacher knelt next to the box.
Unlaced the criss-crossed flaps.
Raised them.
The box held crumpled newspaper, with a small plastic jar nested in it. The jar was a standard medical item, sterile, almost clear, with a screw lid. A sample jar, for urine or other bodily fluids. Reacher had seen many of them.
The jar was a quarter full with black powder.
The powder was coarser than talc, finer than salt.
Reacher asked, “What is it?”
Thurman said, “Ash.”
“From where?”
“Come with me and find out.”
“Come with you?”
“Fly with me tonight. I have nothing to hide. And I’m a patient man. I don’t mind proving my innocence, over and over and over again, if I have to.”
The big guy helped Thurman up onto the wing and watched as he folded himself in through the small door. Then he passed the box up. Thurman took it and laid it on a rear seat. The big guy stood back and let Reacher climb up by himself. Reacher ducked low and led with his legs and made it into the co-pilot’s seat. He slammed the door and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get, and then he buckled his harness. Beside him Thurman buckled his and hit a bunch of switches. Dials lit up and pumps whirred and the whole airframe tensed and hummed. Then Thurman hit the starter button and the exhaust coughed and the propeller blade jerked around a quarter of the way and then the engine caught with a roar and the prop spun up and the cabin filled with loud noise and furious vibration. The plane lurched forward, uncertain, earthbound, darting slightly left and right. It waddled forward out of the hangar. Dust blew up all over the place. The plane moved on, down the taxiway, the prop turning fast, the wheels turning slow. Reacher watched Thurman’s hands. He was operating the controls the same way an old guy drives a car, leaning back in his seat, casual, familiar, automatic, using the kind of short abbreviated movements born of long habit.
The taxiway led through two clumsy turns to the north end of the runway. The lights were on. Thurman got centered on the graded strip and hit the power and the vibration leached forward out of the cabin into the engine and the wheels started thumping faster below. Reacher turned and saw the cardboard carton slide backward on the seat and nestle against the back cushion. He glanced ahead and saw lit dirt below and rushing darkness above. Then the plane went light and the nose lifted. The plane clawed its way into the night sky and climbed and turned and Reacher looked down and saw first the runway lights go off and then the hangar lights. Without them, there was little to see. The wall around the metal plant was faintly visible, a huge white rectangle in the gloaming.
The plane climbed hard for a minute and then leveled off and Reacher was dumped forward in his seat against his harness straps. He looked over at the dash and saw the altimeter reading two thousand feet. Airspeed was a little over a hundred and twenty. The compass reading was southeast. Fuel was more than half-full. Trim was good. The artificial horizon was level. There were plenty of green lights, and no reds.
Thurman saw him checking and asked, “Are you afraid of flying, Mr. Reacher?”
Reacher said, “No.”
The engine was loud and the vibration was setting up a lot of buzzes and rattles. Wind was howling around the screens and whistling in through cracks. Altogether the little Piper reminded Reacher of the kind of old cars people used as taxis at suburban railroad stations. Sagging, worn out, clunky, but capable of making it through the ride. Maybe.
He asked, “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Reacher watched the compass. It was holding steady on south and east. There was an LED window below the compass with two green numbers showing. A GPS readout, latitude and longitude. They were below the fortieth parallel and more than a hundred degrees west. Both numbers were ticking downward, slowly and in step. South and east, at a modest speed. He called up maps in his mind. Empty land ahead, the corner of Colorado, the corner of Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle. Then the compass swung a little farther south, and Reacher realized that Thurman had been skirting the airspace around Colorado Springs. An Air Force town, probably a little trigger-happy. Better to give it a wide berth.
Thurman kept the height at two thousand feet and the speed at a hundred and a quarter and the compass stayed a little south of southeast. Reacher consulted his mental maps again and figured that if they didn’t land or change course they were going to exit Colorado just left of the state’s bottom right-hand corner. The time readout on the dash showed seventeen minute
s past seven in the evening, which was two minutes fast. Reacher thought about Vaughan, alone in her car. She would have heard the plane take off. She would be wondering why he hadn’t come back over the wall.
Thurman said, “You broke into a container last night.”
Reacher said, “Did I?”
“It’s a fair guess. Who else would have?”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “You saw the cars.”
“Did I?”
“Let’s assume so, like intelligent men.”
“Why do they bring them to you?”
“There are some things any government feels it politic to conceal.”
“What do you do with them?”
“The same thing we do with the wrecks towed off I-70. We recycle them. Steel is a wonderful thing, Mr. Reacher. It goes around and around. Peugeots and Toyotas from the Gulf might once have been Fords and Chevrolets from Detroit, and they in turn might once have been Rolls-Royces from England or Holdens from Australia. Or bicycles or refrigerators. Some steel is new, of course, but surprisingly little of it. Recycling is where the action is.”
“And the bottom line.”
“Naturally.”
“So why don’t you buy yourself a better plane?”
“You don’t like this one?”
“Not much,” Reacher said.
They flew on. There was nothing but darkness ahead, relieved occasionally by tiny clusters of yellow light far below. Hamlets, farms, gas stations. At one point Reacher saw brighter lights in the distance to the left and the right. Lamar, probably, and La Junta. Small towns, made larger by comparison with the emptiness all around them. Sometimes cars were visible on roads, tiny cones of blue light crawling slowly.
Reacher asked, “How is Underwood doing? The deputy?”
Thurman paused a moment. Then he said, “He passed on.”
“In the hospital?”
“Before we could get him there.”
“Will there be an autopsy?”
“He has no next of kin to request one.”
“Did you call the coroner?”
“No need. He was old, he got sick, he died.”
“He was about forty.”
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s in store for all of us.”
“You don’t sound very concerned.”
“A good Christian has nothing to fear in death. And I own a town, Mr. Reacher. I see births and deaths all the time. One door closes, another opens.”
Thurman leaned back, his gut between him and the stick, his hands held low. The engine held fast on a mid-range roar and the whole plane shivered with vibration and bucked occasionally on rough air. The latitude number counted down slowly, and the longitude number slower still. Reacher closed his eyes. Flight time to the state line would be about seventy or eighty minutes. He figured they weren’t going to land in Colorado itself. There wasn’t much left of it. Just empty grassland. He figured they were going to Oklahoma, or Texas.
They flew on. The air got steadily worse. Reacher opened his eyes. Downdrafts dropped them into troughs like a stone. Then updrafts hurled them back up again. They were sideswiped by gusts of wind. Not like in a big commercial Boeing. No juddering vibration and bouncing wings. No implacable forward motion. Just violent physical displacement, like a pinball caught between bumpers. There was no storm outside. No rain, no lightning. No thunderheads. Just roiling evening thermals coming up off the plains in giant waves, invisible, compressing, decompressing, making solid walls and empty voids. Thurman held the stick loosely and let the plane buck and dive. Reacher moved in his seat and smoothed the harness straps over his shoulders.
Thurman said, “You are afraid of flying.”
“Flying is fine,” Reacher said. “Crashing is another story.”
“An old joke.”
“For a reason.”
Thurman started jerking the stick and hammering the rudder. The plane rose and fell sharply and smashed from side to side. At first Reacher thought they were seeking smoother air. Then he realized Thurman was deliberately making things worse. He was diving where the downdrafts were sucking anyway and climbing with the updrafts. He was turning into the side winds and taking them like roundhouse punches. The plane was hammering all over the sky. It was being tossed around like the insignificant piece of junk it was.
Thurman said, “This is why you need to get your life in order. The end could come at any time. Maybe sooner than you expect.”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “I could end it for you now. I could roll and stall and power dive. Two thousand feet, we’d hit the deck at three hundred miles an hour. The wings would come off first. The crater would be ten feet deep.”
Reacher said, “Go right ahead.”
“You mean that?”
“I dare you.”
An updraft hit and the plane was thrown upward and then the decompression wave came in and the lift under the wings dropped away to a negative value and the plane fell again. Thurman dropped the nose and hit the throttle and the engine screamed and the Piper tilted into a forty-five-degree power dive. The artificial horizon on the dash lit up red and a warning siren sounded. It was barely audible over the scream of the engine and the battering airflow. Then Thurman pulled out of the dive. He jerked the nose up. The airframe groaned as the main spar stressed and the plane curved level and then rose again through air that was momentarily calmer.
Reacher said, “Chicken.”
Thurman said, “I have nothing to fear.”
“So why pull out?”
“When I die, I’m going to a better place.”
“I thought the big guy got to make that decision, not you.”
“I’ve been a faithful servant.”
“So go for it. Go to a better place, right now. I dare you.”
Reacher said nothing. Thurman flew on, straight and level, through air that was calming down. Two thousand feet, a hundred and twenty-five knots, south of southeast.
“Chicken,” Reacher said again. “Phony.”
Thurman said, “God wants me to complete my task.”
“What, he told you that in the last two minutes?”
“I think you’re an atheist.”
“We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”
Thurman didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “Just remember, it was you who was afraid to die, not me.”
They flew on, twenty more minutes. The air went still and quiet. Reacher closed his eyes again. Then dead-on an hour and a quarter total elapsed time Thurman moved in his seat. Reacher opened his eyes. Thurman hit a couple of switches and fired up his radio and held the stick with his knees and clamped a headset over his ears. The headset had a microphone on a boom that came off the left-hand earpiece. Thurman flicked it with his fingernail and said, “It’s me, on approach.” Reacher heard a muffled crackling reply and far below in the distance saw lights come on. Red and white runway lights, he assumed, but they were so far away they looked like a tiny pink pinpoint. Thurman started a long slow descent. Not very smooth. The plane was too small and light for finesse. It jerked and dropped and leveled and dropped again. Laterally it was nervous. It darted left, darted right. The pink pinpoint jumped around below them and drew closer and resolved into twin lines of red and white. The lines looked short. The plane wobbled and stumbled in the air and dipped low and then settled on a shallow path all the way down. The runway lights rushed up to meet it and started blurring past, left and right. For a second Reacher thought Thurman had left it too late, but then the wheels touched down and bounced once and settled back and Thurman cut the power and the plane rolled to a walk with half the runway still ahead of it. The engine note changed to a deep roar and the walk picked up to taxiing speed and Thurman jerked left off the runway and drove a hundred ya
rds to a deserted apron. Reacher could see the vague outlines of brick buildings in the middle distance. He saw a vehicle approaching, headlights on. Big, dark, bulky.
A Humvee.
Camouflage paint.
The Humvee parked twenty feet from the Piper and the doors opened and two guys climbed out.
Battledress uniform, woodland pattern.
Soldiers.
59
Reacher sat for a moment in the sudden silence with his ears ringing and then he opened the Piper’s door and climbed out to the wing. Thurman passed him the cardboard carton. Reacher took it one-handed and slid down to the tarmac. The two soldiers snapped to attention and threw salutes and stood there like a ceremonial detail, expectantly. Thurman climbed down behind Reacher and took the box from him. One of the soldiers stepped forward. Thurman bowed slightly and offered the box. The soldier bowed slightly and took it and turned on his heel and slow-marched back to the Humvee. His partner fell in behind him, line astern. Thurman followed them. Reacher followed Thurman.
The soldiers stowed the box in the Humvee’s load bed and then climbed in the front. Reacher and Thurman got in the back. Big vehicle, small seats, well separated by the massive transmission tunnel. A diesel engine. They turned a tight circle on the apron and drove toward a building that stood alone in a patch of lawn. Lights were on in two ground floor windows. The Humvee parked and the soldiers retrieved the box from the load bed and slow-marched it into the building. A minute later they came back out again without it.
Thurman said, “Job done, for tonight, at least.”
Reacher asked, “What was in the jar?”
“People,” Thurman said. “Men, maybe women. We scrape them off the metal. When there’s been a fire, that’s all that’s left of them. Soot, baked onto steel. We scrape it off and collect it in twists of paper, and then we put the day’s gleanings into jars. It’s as close as we can get to giving them a proper burial.”
“Where are we?”