by Lee Child
He felt her weight move in his hands, left to right, right to left, shifting, equalizing, preparing.
“Now go,” she said.
He did four things. He boosted her sharply upward, used her momentary weightlessness to shift his hands flat under her shoes, stepped forward half a pace, and locked his arms straight.
She fell forward and met the bulge of the cylinder with the flats of her forearms. The hollow metal construction boomed once, then again, much delayed.
“OK?” he called.
“I’m there,” she said.
He felt her go up on tiptoes in his palms. Felt her reach up and straighten her arms. According to his best guess her hands should right then have been all the way up on the cylinder’s top dead-center. He heard the first switchblade pop open. He swiveled his hands a little and gripped her toes. For stability. She was going to need it. He moved out another few inches. By then she should have been resting with her belly against the metal curve. Rain was streaming down all over him. He heard her stab downward with the knife. The wall clanged and boomed.
“Won’t go through,” she called.
“Harder,” he called back.
She stabbed again. Her whole body jerked and he dodged and danced underneath her, keeping her balanced. Like acrobats in a circus. The wall boomed.
“No good,” she called.
“Harder,” he called.
She stabbed again. No boom. Just a little metallic clatter, then nothing.
“The blade broke,” she called.
Reacher’s arms were starting to ache.
“Try the other one,” he called. “Be precise with the angle. Straight downward, OK?”
“The metal is too thick.”
“It’s not. It’s from an old piece-of-shit Buick, probably. It’s like aluminum foil. And that’s a good Japanese blade. Hit it hard. Who do you hate?”
“The guy that pulled the trigger on David.”
“He’s inside the wall. His heart is the other side of the metal.”
He heard the second switchblade open. Then there was silence for a second. Then a convulsive jerk through her legs and another dull boom through the metal.
A different boom.
“It’s in,” she called. “All the way.”
“Pull on it,” he called back.
He felt her take her weight on the wooden handle. He felt her twist as she wrapped both fists around it. He felt her feet pull up out of his hands. Then he felt them come back.
“It’s slicing through,” she called. “It’s cutting the metal.”
“It will,” he called back. “It’ll stop when it hits a weld.”
He felt it stabilize a second later. Called, “Where is it?”
“Right at the top.”
“Ready?”
“On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”
She jerked herself upward and he helped as much as he could, fingertips and tiptoes, and then her weight was gone. He came down in a heap and rolled away in case she was coming down on top of him. But she wasn’t. He got to his feet and walked away to get a better angle and saw her lying longitudinally on top of the cylinder, legs spread, both hands wrapped tight around the knife handle. She rested like that for a second and then shifted her weight and slid down the far side of the bulge, slowly at first, then faster, swinging around, still holding tight to the knife handle. He saw her clasped hands at the top of the curve, and then her weight started pulling the blade through the metal, fast at first where a track was already sliced and then slower as the blade bit through new metal. It would jam again at the next weld, which he figured was maybe five feet down the far side, allowing for the size of a typical car’s roof panel, minus a folded flange at both sides for assembly purposes, which would be about a quarter of the way around the cylinder’s circumference, which would mean she would be hanging off the wall at full stretch with about four feet of clear air under the soles of her shoes.
A survivable fall.
Probably.
He waited what seemed like an awful long time, and then he heard two hard thumps on the outside of the wall. They each sounded twice, once immediately and then again as the sound raced around the hollow circle and came back. He closed his eyes and smiled. Their agreed signal. Out, on her feet, no broken bones.
“Impressive,” Thurman said, from ten yards away.
Reacher turned. The old guy was still hatless. His blow-dried waves were ruined. Ninety yards beyond him his two men were still down and inert.
Four minutes, Reacher thought.
Thurman said, “I could do what she did.”
“In your dreams,” Reacher said. “She’s fit and agile. You’re a fat old man. And who’s going to boost you up? Real life is not like the movies. Your guys aren’t going to wake up and shake their heads and get right to it. They’re going to be puking and falling down for a week.”
“Are you proud of that?”
“I gave them a choice.”
“Your lady friend can’t open the gate, you know. She doesn’t have the combination.”
“Have faith, Mr. Thurman. A few minutes from now you’re going to see me ascend.”
Reacher strained to hear sounds from the main compound, but the rain was too loud. It hissed in the puddles and pattered on the mud and clanged hard against the metal of the wall. So he just waited. He took up station six feet from the wall and a yard left of where Vaughan had gone over. Thurman backed off and watched.
Three minutes passed. Then four. Then without warning a long canvas strap snaked up and over the wall and the free end landed four feet to Reacher’s right. The kind of thing used for tying down scrap cars to a flat-bed trailer. Vaughan had driven Thurman’s Tahoe up to the security office and had found a strap of the right length in the pile near the door and had weighted its end by tying it around a scrap of pipe. He pictured her after the drive back, twenty feet away through the metal, swinging the strap like a cowgirl with a rope, building momentum, letting it go, watching it sail over.
Reacher grabbed the strap and freed the pipe and retied the end into a generous two-foot loop. He wrapped the canvas around his right hand and walked toward the wall. Kicked it twice and backed off a step and put his foot in the loop and waited. He pictured Vaughan securing the other end to the trailer hitch on Thurman’s Tahoe, climbing into the driver’s seat, selecting four-wheel-drive for maximum traction across the mud, selecting the low-range transfer case for delicate throttle control. He had been insistent about that. He didn’t want his arms torn off at the shoulders when she hit the gas.
He waited. Then the strap went tight above him and started to quiver. The canvas around his hand wrapped tight. He pushed down into the loop with his sole. He saw the strap pull across the girth of the cylinder. No friction. Wet canvas on painted metal, slick with rain. The canvas stretched a little. Then he felt serious pressure under his foot and he lifted smoothly into the air. Slowly, maybe twelve inches a second. Less than a mile an hour. Idle speed, for the Tahoe’s big V-8. He pictured Vaughan behind the wheel, concentrating hard, her foot like a feather on the pedal.
“Goodbye, Thurman,” he said. “Looks like it’s you that’s getting left behind this time.”
Then he looked up and got his left hand on the bulge of the cylinder and pushed back and hauled with his right to stop his wrapped knuckles crushing against the metal. His hips hit the maximum curve and he unwrapped his hand and hung on and let himself be pulled up to top dead-center. Then he dropped the strap and let the loop around his foot pull his legs up sideways and then he kicked free of the loop and came to rest spread-eagled on his stomach along the top of the wall. He jerked his hips and sent his legs down the far side and squealed his palms across ninety degrees of wet metal and pushed off and fell, two long split seconds. He hit the ground and fell on his back and knocked the wind out of himself. He rolled over and forced some air into his lungs and crawled up on his knees.
Vaughan had stopped Thurman’s Tahoe
twenty feet away. Reacher got to his feet and walked over to it and unhooked the strap from the trailer hitch. Then he climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You OK?” she asked.
“Fine. You?”
“I feel like I did when I was a kid and I fell out of an apple tree. Scared, but a good scared.” She changed to high-range gearing and took off fast. Two minutes later they were at the main vehicle gate. It was standing wide open.
“We should close it,” Reacher said.
“Why?”
“To help contain the damage. If I’m right.”
“Suppose you’re not?”
“Maximum of five phone calls will prove it one way or the other.”
“How do we close it? They don’t seem to have any manual override.”
They stopped just outside the gate and got out and walked over to the gray metal box on the wall. Reacher flipped the lid. One through nine, plus zero.
“Try six-six-one-three,” he said.
Vaughan looked blank but stepped up and raised her index finger. Pressed six, six, one, three, neat and rapid. There was silence for a second and then motors whined and the gates started closing. A foot a second, wheels rumbling along tracks. Vaughan asked, “How did you know?”
“Most codes are four figures,” Reacher said. “ATM cards, things like that. People are used to four-figure codes.”
“Why those four figures?”
“Lucky guess,” Reacher said. “Revelation is the sixty-sixth book in the King James Bible. Chapter one, verse three says the time is at hand. Which seems to be Thurman’s favorite part.”
“So we could have gotten out without climbing.”
“If we had, they could have, too. I want them in there. So I had to smash the lock.”
“Where to now?”
“The hotel in Despair. The first phone call is one that you get to make.”
72
They abandoned Thurman’s Tahoe next to where Vaughan’s old Chevy was waiting. They transferred between vehicles and bumped through the deserted parking lot and found the road. Three miles later they were in downtown Despair. It was still raining. The streets and the sidewalks were dark and wet and completely deserted. The middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. They threaded through the cross-streets and pulled up outside the hotel. The façade was as blank and gloomy as before. The street door was closed but not locked. Inside the place looked just the same. The empty dining room on the left, the deserted bar on the right, the untended reception desk dead ahead. The register on the desk, the large square leather book. Easy to grab, easy to swivel around, easy to open, easy to read. Reacher put his fingertip under the last registered guests, the couple from California, from seven months previously. He tilted the book, so that Vaughan had a clear view of their names and addresses.
“Call them in,” he said. “And if they’re helping the deserters, do whatever your conscience tells you to.”
“If?”
“I think they might be into something else.”
Vaughan made the call from her cell and they sat in faded armchairs and waited for the call back. Vaughan said, “Gifts are a perfectly plausible explanation. Churches send foreign aid all the time. Volunteers, too. They’re usually good people.”
“No argument from me,” Reacher said. “But my whole life has been about the people that aren’t usual. The exceptions.”
“Why are you so convinced?”
“The welding.”
“Locks can be broken.”
“The container was welded to the trailer. And that’s not how containers get shipped. They get lifted off and put on boats. By cranes. That’s the whole point of containers. The welding suggests they don’t mean for that container to leave the country.”
Vaughan’s phone rang. A three-minute wait. From a cop’s perspective, the upside of all the Homeland Security hoopla. Agencies talked, computers were linked, databases were shared. She answered and listened, four long minutes. Then she thanked her caller and clicked off.
“Can’t rule out the AWOL involvement,” she said.
“Because?” Reacher asked.
“They’re listed as activists. And activists can be into all kinds of things.”
“What kind of activists?”
“Religious conservatives.”
“What kind?”
“They run something called the Church of the Apocalypse in LA.”
“The Apocalypse is a part of the End Times story,” Reacher said.
Vaughan said nothing.
Reacher said, “Maybe they came here to recruit Thurman as a brother activist. Maybe they recognized his special potential.”
“They wouldn’t have stayed in this hotel. They’d have been guests in his house.”
“Not the first time. He didn’t know them yet. The second time, maybe. And the third and the fourth, maybe the fifth and the sixth. Depends how hard they had to work to convince him. There’s a four-month gap between their first visit and when he ordered the TNT from Kearny.”
“He said that was a bureaucratic error.”
“Did you believe him?”
Vaughan didn’t answer.
“Four phone calls,” Reacher said. “That’s all it’s going to take.”
They drove west to the edge of town. Three miles away through the rainy darkness they could see the plant’s lights, faint and blue and distant, blurred by the rain on the windshield, a fragmented sepulchral glow way out in the middle of nowhere. Empty space all around it. They parked on a curb facing out of town, level with the last of the buildings. Reacher eased his butt off the seat and took the cell phone he had borrowed out of his pocket. Then he took out the sheet of paper he had taken from the purchasing office. The new cell phone numbers. The paper was wet and soggy and he had to peel apart the folds very carefully.
“Ready?” he asked.
Vaughan said, “I don’t understand.”
He dialed the third number down. Heard ring tone in his ear, twice, four times, six times, eight. Then the call was answered. A muttered greeting, in a voice he recognized. A man’s voice, fairly normal in tone and timbre, but a little dazed, and muffled twice, first by coming from a huge chest cavity, and again by the cellular circuitry.
The big guy, from the plant.
Reacher said, “How are you? Been awake long?”
The guy said, “Go to hell.”
Reacher said, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I’m not sure about the likelihood of things like that. You guys are the theologians, not me.”
No reply.
Reacher asked, “Is your buddy awake, too?”
No reply.
Reacher said, “I’ll call him and see for myself.”
He clicked off and dialed the second number on the list. It rang eight times and the plant foreman answered.
Reacher said, “Sorry, wrong number.”
He clicked off.
Vaughan asked, “What exactly are you doing?”
“How did the insurgents hurt David?”
“With a roadside bomb.”
“Detonated how?”
“Remotely, I assume.”
Reacher nodded. “Probably by radio, from the nearest ridge line. So if Thurman has built a bomb, how will he detonate it?”
“The same way.”
“But not from the nearest hill. He’ll probably want a lot more distance than that. He’ll probably want to be out of state somewhere. Maybe at home here in Colorado, or in his damn church. Which would take a very powerful radio. In fact, he’d probably have to build one himself, to be sure of reliability. Which is a lot of work. So my guess is he decided to use one that someone else already built. Someone like Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular.”