by Lee Child
Vaughan said, “One of the four we saw last night.”
Reacher nodded. “The other three will be right behind it. The business day has started.”
“By now they know we broke into that container.”
“They know somebody did.”
“What will they do about it?”
“Nothing.”
The second of the outgoing semis appeared on the horizon. Then the third. Before the fourth showed up another incoming truck blew by. A container truck. A blue China Lines container on it. Heavy, by the way the tires stressed and whined.
New Jersey plates.
Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”
Reacher nodded and said nothing. The truck disappeared in the morning haze and the fourth outgoing load passed it. Then the dust settled and the world went quiet again. Vaughan arched her back and stretched, perfectly straight from her heels to her shoulders.
“I feel good,” she said.
“You deserve to.”
“I needed you to know about David.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Reacher said. He was turned in his seat, watching the western horizon a mile away. He could see a small shape, wobbling in the haze. A truck, far away. Small, because of the distance. Square, and rigid. A box truck, tan-colored.
He said, “Pay attention now.”
The truck took a minute to cover the mile and then it roared past. Two axles, plain, boxy. Tan paint. No logo on it. No writing of any kind.
It had Canadian plates, from Ontario.
“Prediction,” Reacher said. “We’re going to see that truck heading out again within about ninety minutes.”
“Why wouldn’t we? It’ll unload and go home.”
“Unload what?”
“Whatever is in it.”
“Which would be what?”
“Scrap metal.”
“From where?”
“Ontario’s biggest city is Toronto,” Vaughan said. “So from Toronto, according to the law of averages.”
Reacher nodded. “Route 401 in Canada, I-94 around Detroit, I-75 out of Toledo, I-70 all the way over here. That’s a long distance.”
“Relatively.”
“Especially considering that Canada probably has steel mills all its own. I know for sure they’re thick on the ground around Detroit and all over Indiana, which is practically next door. So why haul ass all the way out here?”
“Because Thurman’s place is a specialist operation. You said so yourself.”
“Canada’s army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.”
Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”
Reacher said, “Canada isn’t fighting in Iraq. Canadians had more sense.”
“So what was in that truck?”
“My guess is nothing at all.”
Plenty more trucks passed by in both directions, but they were all uninteresting. Semi trailers from Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Washington State, and California, loaded with crushed cars and bales of crushed steel and rusted industrial hulks that might once have been boilers or locomotives or parts of ships. Reacher looked at them as they passed and then looked away. He kept his focus on the eastern horizon and the clock in his head. Vaughan got out and brought the captured file from under the mat in the trunk. She took the papers out of the cardboard cradle and turned them over and squared them on her knee. Licked her thumb and started with the oldest page first. It was dated a little less than seven years previously. It was a purchase order for five thousand gallons of trichloroethylene, to be delivered prepaid by Kearny Chemical to Thurman Metals. The second-oldest page was identical. As was the third. The fourth fell into the following calendar year.
Vaughan said, “Fifteen thousand gallons in the first year. Is that a lot?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “We’ll have to let the state lab be the judge.”
The second year of orders came out the same. Fifteen thousand gallons. Then the third year jumped way up, to five separate orders for a total of twenty-five thousand gallons. A refill every seventy-some days. An increase in consumption of close to sixty-seven percent.
Vaughan said, “The start of major combat operations. The first wrecks.”
The fourth year held steady at twenty-five thousand gallons.
The fifth year matched it exactly.
“David’s year,” Vaughan said. “His Humvee was rinsed with some of those gallons. What was left of it.”
The sixth year she looked at jumped again. Total of six orders. Total of thirty thousand gallons. Iraq, getting worse. A twenty percent increase. And the current year looked set to exceed even that. There were already six orders in, and the year still had a whole quarter to run. Then Vaughan paused and looked at the six pages again, one by one, side by side, and she said, “No, one of these is different.”
Reacher asked, “Different how?”
“One of the orders isn’t for trichloroethylene. And it isn’t in gallons. It’s in tons, for something called trinitrotoluene. Thurman bought twenty tons of it.”
“When?”
“Three months ago. Maybe they misfiled it.”
“From Kearny?”
“Yes.”
“Then it isn’t misfiled.”
“Maybe it’s another kind of degreaser.”
“It isn’t.”
“You heard of it?”
“Everyone has heard of it. It was invented in 1863 in Germany, for use as a yellow dye.”
“I never heard of it,” Vaughan said. “I don’t like yellow.”
“A few years later they realized it decomposes in an exothermic manner.”
“What does that mean?”
“It explodes.”
Vaughan said nothing.
“Trichloroethylene is called TCE,” Reacher said. “Trinitrotoluene is called TNT.”
“I’ve heard of that. ”
“Everyone has heard of it.”
“Thurman bought twenty tons of dynamite? Why?”
“Dynamite is different. It’s nitroglycerine soaked into wood pulp and molded into cylinders wrapped in paper. TNT is a specific chemical compound. A yellow solid. Much more stable. Therefore much more useful.”
“OK, but why did he buy it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he busts things up with it. It melts easily, and pours. That’s how they get it into shell casings and bombs and shaped charges. Maybe he uses it like a liquid and forces it between seams he can’t cut. He was boasting to me about his advanced techniques.”
“I never heard any explosions.”
“You wouldn’t. You’re twenty miles from the plant. And maybe they’re small and controlled.”
“Is it a solvent, when it’s liquid?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a reagent, that’s all I know. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Some complicated formula, lots of sixes and threes and twos.”
Vaughan riffled back through the pages she had already examined.
“Whatever, he never bought any before,” she said. “It’s something new.”
Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield. Saw the tan box truck heading back toward them. It was less than a mile away. He took the red bubble light off the dash and held it in his hand.
“Stand by,” he said. “We’re going to stop that truck.”
“We can’t,” Vaughan said. “We don’t have jurisdiction here.”
“The driver doesn’t know that. He’s Canadian.”
57
Vaughan was a cop from a small quiet town, but she handled the traffic stop beautifully. She started the car when the truck was still a quarter-mile away and put it in gear. Then she waited for the truck to pass and pulled out of the old road onto the new and settled in its wake. She hung back a hundred yards, to be clearly visible in its mirrors. Reacher opened his window and clamped the bubble light on the roof. Vaughan hit a switch and the light started flashing. She hit another switch and her siren quacked twice.
Nothing
happened for ten long seconds.
Vaughan smiled.
“Here it comes,” she said. “The Who, me? moment.”
The truck started to slow. The driver lifted off and the cab pitched down a degree as weight and momentum settled on the front axle. Vaughan moved up fifty yards and drifted left to the crown of the road. The truck put its turn signal on. It rolled ahead and then braked hard and aimed for a spot where the shoulder was wide. Vaughan skipped past and tucked in again and the two vehicles came to a stop, nose-to-tail in the middle of nowhere, forty miles of empty road behind them and more than that ahead.
She said, “A search would be illegal.”
Reacher said, “I know. Just tell the guy to sit tight, five minutes. We’ll wave him on when we’re done.”
“With what?”
“We’re going to take a photograph.”
Vaughan got out and cop-walked to the driver’s window. She spoke for a moment, then walked back. Reacher said, “Back up on the other shoulder, at right angles. We need to see the whole truck, side-on with the camera.”
Vaughan checked ahead and behind and jockeyed forward and back and then reversed across the blacktop in a wide curve and came to rest sideways on the opposite shoulder, with the front of her car pointed dead-center at the side of the truck. It was a plain, simple vehicle. A stubby hood, a cab, twin rails running back from it with a box body bolted on. The box had alloy skin and was corrugated every foot for strength and rigidity. Tan paint, no writing.
Reacher said, “Camera.”
Vaughan hit laptop keys and the screen lit up with a picture of the truck.
Reacher said, “We need to see the thermal image.”
Vaughan said, “I don’t know if it works in the daytime.” She hit more keys and the screen blazed white. No detail, no definition. Everything was hot.
Reacher said, “Turn down the sensitivity.”
She toggled keys and the screen dimmed. Ahead through the windshield the real-time view stayed unchanged but the image on the laptop screen faded to nothing and then came back ghostly green. Vaughan played around until the road surface and the background scrub showed up as a baseline gray, barely visible. The truck itself glowed a hundred shades of green. The hood was warm, with a bright center where the engine was. The exhaust pipe was a vivid line, with green gases shimmering out the end in clouds. The rear differential was hot and the tires were warm. The cab was warm, a generalized green block with a slight highlight where the driver was sitting and waiting.
The box body was cold at the rear. It stayed cold until it suddenly got warmer three-quarters of the way forward. A section five feet long directly behind the cab was glowing bright.
Reacher said, “Take it down some more.”
Vaughan tapped a key until the tires went gray and merged with the road. She kept on going until the grays went black and the picture simplified to just five disembodied elements in just two shades of green. The engine, hot. The exhaust system, hot. The differential case, warm. The cab, warm.
The first five feet of the box body, warm.
Vaughan said, “It reminds me of the wall around the metal plant. Hotter at one end than the other.”
Reacher nodded. Stuck his arm out the window, waved the driver onward, and peeled the bubble light off the roof. The truck lurched as the gears caught and it pulled across the rumble strip and got straight in the traffic lane and lumbered slowly away, first gear, then second, then third. The laptop screen showed a vivid plume of hot exhaust that swelled and swirled into a lime-green cloud before cooling and dissipating and falling away into blackness.
Vaughan asked, “What did we just see?”
“A truck on its way to Canada.”
“That’s all?”
“You saw what I saw.”
“Is this part of your theory?”
“Pretty much all of it.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Later.”
“Than what?”
“When it’s safely across the border.”
“Why then?”
“Because I don’t want to put you in a difficult position.”
“Why would it?”
“Because you’re a cop.”
“Now you’re trying to keep me out of trouble?”
Reacher said, “I’m trying to keep everybody out of trouble.”
They turned around and drove back to where the old road forked. They bumped down off the new blacktop and this time they kept on going, between the two ruined farms, all the way to Halfway township. First stop was the coffee shop, for a late breakfast. Second stop was a Holiday Inn, where they rented a bland beige room and showered and made love and went to sleep. They woke up at four, and did all the same things in reverse order, like a film run backward. They made love again, showered again, checked out of the hotel, and headed back to the coffee shop for an early dinner. By five-thirty they were on the road again, heading east, back toward Despair.
Vaughan drove. The setting sun was behind her, bright in her mirror. It put a glowing rectangle of light on her face. The truck route was reasonably busy in both directions. The metal plant ahead was still sucking stuff in and spitting it out again. Reacher watched the license plates. He saw representatives from all of Colorado’s neighboring states, plus a container truck from New Jersey, heading outward, presumably empty, and a flat-bed semi from Idaho heading inward, groaning under a load of rusted steel sheet.
He thought: license plates.
He said, “I was in the Gulf the first time around.”
Vaughan nodded. “You wore the same BDUs every day for eight months. In the heat. Which is a delightful image. I felt bad enough putting these clothes back on.”
“We spent most of the time in Saudi and Kuwait, of course. But there were a few covert trips into Iraq itself.”
“And?”
“I remember their license plates being silver. But the ones we saw last night in the container were off-white.”
“Maybe they changed them since then.”
“Maybe. But maybe they didn’t. Maybe they had other things to worry about.”
“You think those weren’t Iraqi cars?”
“I think Iran uses off-white plates.”
“So what are you saying? We’re fighting in Iran and nobody knows? That’s not possible.”
“We were fighting in Cambodia in the seventies and nobody knew. But I think it’s more likely there’s a bunch of Iranians heading west to Iraq to join in the fun every day. Maybe like commuting to a job. Maybe we’re stopping them at the border crossings. With artillery.”
“That’s very dangerous.”
“For the passengers, for sure.”
“For the world,” Vaughan said.