by Lee Child
Vaughan shut the engine down and jammed the parking brake on tight. The laptop screen turned itself off and they were forced back to the visible spectrum, which didn’t contain anything very visible. Just darkness. Vaughan carried the flashlight and Reacher took the wrecking bar from the trunk. He levered himself up onto the hood and crouched under the swell of the cylinder. He stepped forward to the base of the windshield and turned again and started to climb the ladder. He carried the wrecking bar in his left hand and gripped the upper rungs with his right. The aluminum squirmed against the steel and set up a weird harmonic in the hollows of the wall. He slowed down to quiet the noise and made it to the angle and leaned forward and crawled along the short horizontal leg of the L on his hands and knees. He shuffled off sideways and lay like a starfish on the cylinder’s top surface. Six feet in diameter, almost nineteen feet in circumference, effectively flat enough to be feasible, but still curved enough to be dangerous. And the white paint was slick and shiny. He raised his head cautiously and looked around.
He was six feet from where he wanted to be.
The pyramid of old oil drums was barely visible in the dark, two yards to the west. Its top tier was about eight feet south and eighteen inches down from the top of the wall. He swam forward and grabbed the ladder again. It shifted sideways toward him. No resistance. He called down, “Get on the bottom rung.”
The ladder straightened under Vaughan’s weight. He hauled himself toward it and clambered over it and turned around and lay down again on the other side. Now he was exactly where he wanted to be. He called, “Come on up.”
He saw the ladder flex and sway and bounce a little and the strange harmonic keening started up again. Then Vaughan’s head came into view. She paused and got her bearings and made it over the angle and climbed off and lay down in the place he had just vacated, uneasy and spread-eagled. He handed her the wrecking bar and hauled the ladder up sideways, awkwardly, crossing and uncrossing his hands until he had the thing approximately balanced on top of the curve. He glanced right, into the arena, and tugged the ladder a little closer to him and then fed it down on the other side of the wall until the short leg of the L came to rest on an oil drum two tiers down from the top. The long leg came to rest at a gentle slope, like a bridge.
“I love hardware stores,” he said again.
“I love solid ground,” Vaughan said.
He took the wrecking bar back from her and stretched forward and got both hands on the ladder rails. He jerked downward, hard, to make sure it was seated tight. Then he supported all his weight with his arms, like he was chinning a bar, and let his legs slide off the cylinder. He kicked and struggled until he got his feet on the ladder. Then he climbed down, backward, his ass in the air where the slope was gentle, in a more normal position after the angle. He stepped off onto the oil drum and glanced around. Nothing to see. He held his end of the ladder steady and called up to Vaughan, “Your turn.”
She came down the same way he had, backward, butt high like a monkey, then more or less vertically after the turn, ending up standing on the drum between his outstretched arms, which were still on the ladder. He left them there for a minute and then he moved and said, “Now it’s easy. Like stairs.”
They clambered down the pyramid. The empty drums boomed softly. They stepped off onto the sticky dirt and crunched out into the open.
“This way,” Reacher said.
They covered the quarter-mile to the vehicle gate in less than five minutes. The white Tahoes were parked close together near one end of it and there was a line of five flat-bed semis near the other. No tractor units attached. Just the trailers, jacked up at their fronts on their skinny parking legs. Four were facing outward, toward the gate. They were loaded with steel bars. Product, ready to go. The fifth was facing inward, toward the plant itself. It was loaded with a closed shipping container, dark in color, maybe blue, with the words CHINA LINES stenciled on it. Scrap, incoming. Reacher glanced at it and passed it by and headed toward the line of offices. Vaughan walked with him. They ignored the security hut, and Thurman’s own office, and Operations, and Purchasing, and Invoicing, and the first white-painted infirmary unit. They stopped outside the second. Vaughan said, “Visiting the sick again?”
Reacher nodded. “He might talk, without Thurman here.”
“The door might be locked.”
Reacher raised the wrecking bar.
“I have a key,” he said.
But the door wasn’t locked. And the sick deputy wasn’t talking. The sick deputy was dead.
The guy was still tucked tight under the sheet, but he had taken his last breath some hours previously. That was clear. And maybe he had taken it alone. He looked untended. His skin was cold and set and waxy. His eyes were clouded and open. His hair was thin and messy, like he had been tossing on the pillow, listlessly, looking for companionship or comfort. His chart had not been added to or amended since the last time Reacher had seen it. The long list of symptoms and complaints was still there, unresolved and apparently undiagnosed.
“TCE?” Vaughan said.
“Possible,” Reacher said.
We’re doing the best we can, Thurman had said. We’re hoping he’ll get better. I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow.
Bastard, Reacher thought.
“This could happen in Hope,” Vaughan said. “We need the data for Colorado Springs. For the lab.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Reacher said.
They stood by the bedside for a moment longer and then they backed out. They closed the door gently, as if it would make a difference to the guy, and headed down the steps and then up the line to the office marked Purchasing. Its door was secured with a padlock through a hasp. The padlock was strong and the hasp was strong but the screws securing the hasp to the jamb were weak. They yielded to little more than the weight of the wrecking bar alone. They pulled out of the wood frame and fell to the ground and the door sagged open an inch. Vaughan turned the flashlight on and hid its beam in her palm. She led the way inside. Reacher followed and closed the door and propped a chair against it.
There were three desks inside and three phones and a whole wall of file cabinets, three drawers high, maybe forty inches tall. A hundred and forty cubic feet of purchase orders, according to Reacher’s automatic calculation.
“Where do we start?” Vaughan whispered.
“Try T for TCE.”
The T drawers were about four-fifths of the way along the array, as common sense and the alphabet dictated they should be. They were crammed with papers. But none of the papers referred to trichloroethylene. Everything was filed according to supplier name. The T drawers were all about corporations called Tri-State and Thomas and Tomkins and Tribune. Tri-State had renewed a fire insurance policy eight months previously, Thomas was a telecommunications company that had supplied four new cell phones three months previously, Tomkins had put tires on two front-loaders six months ago, and Tribune delivered binding wire on a two-week schedule. All essential activity for the metal plant’s operation, no doubt, but none of it chemical in nature.
“I’ll start at A,” Vaughan said.
“And I’ll start at Z,” Reacher said. “I’ll see you at M or N, if not before.”
Vaughan was faster than Reacher. She had the flashlight. He had to rely on stray beams spilling from the other end of the array. Some things were obviously irrelevant. Anything potentially questionable, he had to haul it out and peer at it closely. It was slow work. The clock in his head ticked around, relentlessly. He started to worry about the dawn. It wasn’t far away. At one point he found something ordered in the thousands of gallons, but on close inspection it was only gasoline and diesel fuel. The supplier was Western Energy of Wyoming and the purchaser was Thurman Metals of Despair, Colorado. He crammed the paper back in place and moved left to the V drawers. The first file he pulled was for medical supplies. Saline solution, IV bags, IV stands, miscellaneous requisites. Small quantities, enough for a small facili
ty.
The supplier was Vernon Medical of Houston, Texas.
The purchaser was Olympic Medical of Despair, Colorado.
Reacher held the paper out to Vaughan. An official purchase order, on an official company letterhead, complete with the same corporate logo they had seen twice on the billboards south of Colorado Springs. Main office address, inside the metal plant, two cabins down.
“Thurman owns Olympic,” Reacher said. “Where your husband is.”
Vaughan was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t think I like that.”
Reacher said, “I wouldn’t either.”
“I should get him out of there.”
“Or get Thurman out of there.”
“How?”
“Keep digging.”
They got back to work. Reacher got through V, and U, and skipped T because they had already checked it. He learned that Thurman’s oxyacetylene supplier was Utah Gases and his kerosene supplier was Union City Fuels. He found no reference to trichloroethylene. He was opening the last of the S drawers when Vaughan said, “Got it.”
“Kearny Chemical of New Jersey,” she said. “TCE purchases going back seven years.”
She lifted the whole file cradle out of the drawer and shone the flashlight on it and riffed through the papers with her thumb. Reacher saw the word trichloroethylene repeated over and over, jumping around from line to line like a kid’s badly drawn flip cartoon.
“Take the whole thing,” he said. “We’ll add up the quantities later.”
Vaughan jammed the file under her arm and pushed the drawer shut with her hip. Reacher moved the chair and opened the door and they stepped out together to the dark. Reacher stopped and used the flashlight and found the fallen screws and pushed them back into their holes with his thumb. They held loosely and made the lock look untouched. Then he followed Vaughan as she retraced their steps, past Operations, past Thurman’s digs, past the security office. She waited for him and they dodged around the China Lines container together and headed out into open space.
Then Reacher stopped again.
Turned around.
“Flashlight,” he said.
Vaughan gave up the flashlight and he switched it on and played the beam across the side of the container. It loomed up, huge and unreal in the sudden light, high on its trailer like it was suspended in midair. It was forty feet long, corrugated, boxy, metal. Completely standard in every way. It had CHINA LINES painted on it in large letters, dirty white, and a vertical row of Chinese characters, plus a series of ID numbers and codes stenciled low in one corner.
Plus a word, handwritten in capitals, in chalk.
The chalk was faded, as if it had been applied long ago at the other end of a voyage of many thousands of miles.
The word looked like CARS.
Reacher stepped closer. The business end of the container had a double door, secured in the usual way with four foot-long levers that drove four sturdy bolts that ran the whole height of the container and socketed home in the box sections top and bottom. The levers were all in the closed position. Three were merely slotted into their brackets, but the fourth was secured with a padlock and guaranteed by a tell-tale plastic tag.
Reacher said, “This is an incoming delivery.”
Vaughan said, “I guess. It’s facing inward.”
“I want to see what’s inside.”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
“There are cars inside. Every junkyard has cars.”
He nodded in the dark. “I’ve seen them come in. From neighboring states, tied down on open flat-beds. Not locked in closed containers.”
Vaughan was quiet for a beat. “You think this is army stuff from Iraq?”
“It’s possible.”
“I don’t want to see. It might be Humvees. They’re basically cars. You said so yourself.”
He nodded again. “They are basically cars. But no one ever calls them cars. Certainly not the people who loaded this thing.”
“If it’s from Iraq.”
“Yes, if.”
“I don’t want to see.”
“I do.”
“We need to get going. It’s late. Or early.”
“I’ll be quick,” he said. “Don’t watch, if you don’t want to.”
She stepped away, far enough into the darkness that he couldn’t see her anymore. He held the flashlight in his teeth and stretched up tall and jammed the tongue of the wrecking bar through the padlock’s hoop. Counted one two and on three he jerked down with all his strength.
No result.
Working way above his head was reducing his leverage. He got his toes on the ledge where the box was reinforced at the bottom and grabbed the vertical bolt and hauled himself up to where he could tackle the problem face-to-face. He got the wrecking bar back in place and tried again. One, two, jerk.
No result.
Case-hardened steel, cold rolled, thick and heavy. A fine padlock. He wished he had bought a three-foot bar. Or a six-foot pry bar. He thought about finding some chain and hooking a Tahoe up to it. The keys were probably in. But the chain would break before the padlock. He mused on it and let the frustration build. Then he jammed the wrecking bar home for a third try. One. Two. On three he jerked downward with all the force in his frame and jumped off his ledge so that his whole bodyweight reinforced the blow. A two-fisted punch, backed up by two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass.
The padlock broke.
He ended up sprawled in the dirt. Curved fragments of metal hit him in the head and the shoulder. The wrecking bar clanged off the ledge and caught him in the foot. He didn’t care. He climbed back up and broke the tag and smacked the levers out of their slots and opened the doors. Metal squealed. He lit up the flashlight and took a look inside.
Cars.
The restlessness of a long sea voyage had shifted them neatly to the right side of the container. There were four of them, two piled on two, longitudinally. Strange makes, strange models. Dusty, sandblasted, pastel colors.
They were grievously damaged. They were opened like cans, ripped, peeled, smashed, twisted. They had holes through their sheet metal the size of telephone poles.
They had pale rectangular license plates covered with neat Arabic numbers. Off-white backgrounds, delicate backward hooks and curls, black diamond-shaped dots.
Reacher turned in the doorway and called into the darkness, “No Humvees.” He heard light footsteps and Vaughan appeared in the gloom. He leaned down and took her hand and pulled her up. She stood with him and followed the flashlight beam as he played it around.
“From Iraq?” she asked.
He nodded. “Civilian vehicles.”
“Suicide bombers?” she asked.
“They’d be blown up worse than this. There wouldn’t be anything left at all.”
“Insurgents, then,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t stop at the roadblocks.”
“Why bring them here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Roadblocks are defended with machine guns. These things were hit by something else entirely. Just look at the damage.”
“What did it?”
“Cannon fire, maybe. Some kind of big shells. Or wire-guided missiles.”
“Ground or air?”
“Ground, I think. The trajectories look like they were pretty flat.”
“Artillery versus sedans?” Vaughan said. “That’s kind of extreme.”
“You bet it is,” Reacher said. “Exactly what the hell is going on over there?”
They closed the container and Reacher scratched around in the sand with the flashlight until he found the shattered padlock. He threw the separate pieces far into the distance. Then they hiked the quarter-mile back to the oil drum pyramid and scaled the wall in the opposite direction. Out, not in. It was just as difficult. The construction was perfectly symmetrical. But they got over. They climbed down and stepped off onto the Crown Vic’s hood and slid back to solid
ground. Reacher folded the ladder and packed it in the rear seat. Vaughan put the captured Kearny Chemical file in the trunk, under the mat.
She asked, “Can we take the long way home? I don’t want to go through Despair again.”
Reacher said, “We’re not going home.”
56
They found Despair’s old road and followed it west to the truck route. They turned their headlights on a mile later. Four miles after that they passed the MP base, close to four o’clock in the morning. There were two guys in the guard shack. The orange nightlight lit their faces from below. Vaughan didn’t slow but Reacher waved anyway. The two guys didn’t wave back.
Vaughan asked, “Where to?”
“Where the old road forks. We’re going to pull over there.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to watch the traffic. I’m working on a theory.”
“What theory?”
“I can’t tell you. I might be wrong, and then you wouldn’t respect me anymore. And I like it better when a woman respects me in the morning.”
Thirty minutes later Vaughan bumped down off the new blacktop and U-turned in the mouth of the old road and backed up on the shoulder. When the sun came up they would have a view a mile both ways. They would be far from inconspicuous, but also far from suspicious. Crown Vics were parked on strategic bends all over America, all day every day.
They cracked their windows to let some air in and reclined their seats and went to sleep. Two hours, Reacher figured, before there would be anything to see.
Reacher woke up when the first rays of the morning sun hit the left-hand corner of the windshield. Vaughan stayed asleep. She was small enough to have turned in her seat. Her cheek was pressed against the mouse fur. Her knees were up and her hands were pressed together between them. She looked peaceful.
The first truck to pass them by was heading east toward Despair. It was a flat-bed semi with Nevada plates on both ends. It was loaded with a tangle of rusted-out junk. Washing machines, tumble dryers, bicycle frames, bent rebar, road signposts all folded and looped out of shape by accidents. The truck thundered by with its exhaust cackling on the overrun as it coasted through the bend. Then it was gone, in a long tail of battered air and dancing dust.