by Jude Hardin
“What next move are you talking about?”
“The Director called me a few minutes ago. Jack Reacher is to be eliminated as soon as he steps out of his motel door.”
“So the files from Annex One—”
“Not all of the data has been entered yet, but according to The Director, there’s enough evidence against Reacher for us to move forward.”
“I think it’s a mistake to move forward in the way you’re suggesting,” I said. “We’re talking about taking a man’s life. The operatives analyzing those documents need to process the rest of the information. They need to look at everything.”
Diana ignored me.
“See the file cabinet over there by the toilet?” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a file cabinet. It’s a gun locker. I’m going to open it remotely right now.”
I heard a metallic click, and the front of the cabinet swung open a few inches. The drawers weren’t really drawers. They were fake. They had been welded together and secured with hinges to make a solid steel door. I walked over there and looked inside, found a rifle with a scope. It was the biggest scope I’d ever seen. The front lens compartment was as big as a mayonnaise jar. There were switches on the side of it for various functions, most notably night vision. The gun was the only thing in the cabinet. Spongy blue foam had been molded around it to hold it in place.
“I’m no sniper,” I said.
“But the Administrator on Duty is.”
“The guy who wouldn’t answer his phone?”
“Yeah. He’s going to join you in a few minutes. You’ll be assisting him. Just keep watching Reacher’s door until he gets there. A cleanup crew is on the way to the motel. They’ll load the body into a van and wipe down any blood and tissue splatters.”
“I don’t think this is the right thing to do, Diana.”
“The right thing to do is what The Director tells us to do.”
“Reacher just doesn’t strike me as—”
“You have your instructions. I need to go. Proceed back to the airstrip as soon as the target has been eliminated. Your plane will be there waiting for you.”
She clicked off.
I’d forgotten to tell her about the guy in the plastic chair. I was about to call her back when the door to the booth swung inward and a man I’d never seen before stepped over the threshold. The Administrator on Duty, I thought, until he drew a pistol and aimed it directly at my face.
5
He wore cargo pants and a long-sleeve knit shirt and sneakers and a bandana, everything black.
He closed the door.
“Who are you?” I said. “What do you want?”
“Sit in the chair and put your hands behind your back.”
He held the gun on me with one hand, reached into one of his side flap pockets with the other and pulled out a roll of duct tape. Why he hadn’t shot me yet I didn’t know, but there was no way I was going to let him tie me up. Once he had me restrained, he could do anything he wanted with me. Torture came to mind. He would try to extract as much information as he could in as short a time as possible, and then he would drill a round into the back of my head.
I figured my only chance of surviving the encounter was to make a move right then, so I did. I lunged for my carry-on bag. He fired and missed and I rolled to the floor and grabbed my pistol and aimed it at his core and started pulling the trigger. A deafening barrage of blasts ensued, some from his gun and some from mine, bullets ricocheting and sparks flying and smoke filling the air.
I felt a sizzling bolus of lead bore into my left thigh. White hot jolts of electric pain surged through me in waves, intensifying with every heartbeat. The bullet must have hit the bone in my leg. I’d been shot before, but it had never hurt this bad. I struggled to stay focused, kept firing until my magazine was empty. I yanked it out and reached for the spare, and then I noticed that the assailant was down. He was on the floor over by the toilet. I crawled over there. He was on his back, blood gushing from a fat hole in his throat. His gun was still in his hand and his finger was still pulling the trigger, but he must have run out of ammunition about the same time I did. I pried the pistol out of his hand and tossed it aside.
“Who sent you here?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter that I’m going to die,” he said, ignoring my question. “You’re going to die too. You won’t have time to escape.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the man who paid me a lot of money to come here. He wanted your death to be spectacular. He wanted it to be on all the news channels for weeks to come. And it will. At exactly six forty-five, a fireball the size of a football stadium will light up the sky.”
I grabbed him by the shirt. “Who sent you?” I shouted.
But he was unable to talk anymore. I heard some gurgling sounds coming from somewhere deep in his chest, and then he coughed, and then blood started bubbling from his nose and mouth, and then he stopped breathing.
I noticed something clipped to his belt. It looked like a pager, only bigger. There were several buttons on it and a flashing red LED. I lifted his shirt and saw a tangle of wires sticking out of the top of the device. The wires led to a black case about the size of a deck of cards. The case was taped to his belly. I figured the thing on his belt was a timed detonator, and the thing on his belly had been packed with C-4 or a similar plastic explosive. He must have been planning to leave the bomb in the observation booth after he tied me up.
My cell vibrated. I answered the call.
“I lost the audio and video feeds from your laptop,” Diana said. “There was a bunch of noise and then—”
“We have a situation. I just shot and killed an enemy operative.”
“An enemy operative? Where’s the Administrator on—”
“Dead. He’s probably dead. Along with the security guard. And this guy I shot is wearing an explosive device. He said it would detonate at exactly six forty-five. We need to get it out of here, or a lot of innocent people are going to die.”
There was a long pause.
“How big of an explosive device?” Diana said.
“Maybe a hundred grams of C-Four. That would be my guess. There’s a timer hooked up to a little black case. The case is secured to his abdomen with a strip of duct tape.”
“That’s a fairly sophisticated design. There’s probably a delayed relay kept open by the small amount of voltage generated by his skin. Once that voltage is removed, the relay starts to close. Eventually the device will detonate on its own, regardless of how many seconds are left on the timer. He probably set the delay for a minute or so, enough time for him to remove the bomb from himself and attach it to you. How long has he been dead?”
“He stopped breathing right before you called. His heart might have kept beating a few seconds after that. There was still some blood pulsing out of a wound on his neck.”
“You need to remove the case from his body and tape it to yourself. If there’s a delayed relay, it has already started to close now that he’s dead. You need to replace the constant flow of voltage. Otherwise, the bomb could go off at any time. And its proximity to the grain elevator will only make matters worse. The dust floating around inside the silos might ignite and—”
“A fireball the size of a football stadium will light up the sky,” I said. “Those were his exact words.”
“Yeah. But it’s the percussive impact of the C-Four that concerns me the most. So make the switch.”
I peeled the tape from his belly. I saw that he had shaved the area to avoid painful removal. Not that it mattered now. I tore off a fresh strip of duct tape from the roll he’d been carrying and attached the black case under my left ribcage. I clipped the timer onto my belt next to the walkie-talkie the security guard had given me.
“I’m injured,” I said. “I don’t think I can get down the ladder by myself. I need you to send a helicopter.”
“You’re going to have
to get down the ladder by yourself. I have a helicopter on call, but it’s about forty miles away. It’s not going to make it there in time.”
“Are you listening to me?” I said. “I’ve been shot. If I don’t get some help—and I mean fast—me and a bunch of other people are going to get blown to pieces.”
There was another long pause.
“It’s more than just you and town’s residents,” Diana said. “There’s an underground missile silo directly beneath the grain elevator. Live nuclear warhead. If the C-Four blows, the nuke might blow. Or it might even launch. If the warhead blows, it’s going to destroy everything within a hundred mile radius, and there’s going to be lethal fallout from Canada to Mexico. If it launches, we’re talking World War Three.”
“Why is there a live nuclear warhead in Mother’s Rest?” I said.
“You don’t have a high enough security clearance for me to tell you that. It’s part of an experiment called The Velocity Sequence. VelSeq for short. That’s all you need to know. That’s the codename you’ll use if you ever need to refer to it again. Anyway, none of that is important at the moment. You need to do whatever it takes to get that bomb at least a mile away from the grain elevator. That’s the only thing you need to be thinking about right now.”
“Could you get someone on the phone to help me defuse it?” I said.
“You would need a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers and a multi-meter and some wire cutters and some piggybacks with alligator clips. And if you’re unsuccessful, if the C-Four detonates, we’ll be dealing with an international event of a magnitude the world has never seen before. We couldn’t risk it, even if you had all the tools. Which you don’t.”
“What if—”
“Stop asking questions. Just get away from there as fast as you can.”
She hung up.
I looked at my watch.
06:29.
Sixteen minutes until thousands of acres of wheat fields got turned into a smoldering crater.
And blood was dripping from my left thigh like water from a leaky faucet.
6
I used some duct tape and the dead man’s black bandana to fashion a pressure dressing for my leg. I figured it might slow the bleeding enough for me to stay conscious for a while. Maybe long enough to get down to my car and speed away from the grain elevator and ditch the bomb in a field somewhere.
The wound still hurt like crazy. Like someone was digging at it with a soldering iron.
I tried calling the guard with the walkie-talkie. No answer. I didn’t think there would be, but I had to try. I crawled over to the table and managed to pull myself up into the desk chair, and then I rolled over to the faux file cabinet and grabbed the sniper rifle. I didn’t plan on shooting anyone with it. I planned on using it to help me walk when I got down to the ground.
I went ahead and loaded the fresh magazine into my pistol and jacked a round into the chamber, and then I rolled to the door and opened it and pushed the wheels of the chair over the little hump at the threshold.
It was a lot easier to breathe outside the observation booth. It had been stuffy in there to begin with, and the smell of gun smoke and blood had only made it worse. I was glad to be out of there. I stopped on the bridge to the catwalk and looked down at the motel through the big scope on the rifle. I should have kept moving, but for some reason I felt compelled to take one last look. Nothing had changed. Reacher’s window was still dark, and the guy was still sitting in the plastic chair out by the office. Then a light came on in room 106. Reacher was awake. Maybe he was planning on catching the seven o’clock train. Maybe tomorrow he would be hundreds of miles away from Mother’s Rest. Or maybe he would stick around for a while. There was no way for me to know. At any rate, it looked like he was going to get to live at least one more day. Unless I didn’t get away from the grain elevator in time. Then he was going to die this morning, along with me and millions of other people.
06:31.
Fourteen minutes.
The catwalk had been constructed with scalloped steel bars welded about half an inch apart. The platform was approximately two-and-a-half feet wide, and it spanned the length of the grain elevator. Steel cables for handrails, like the little bridge to the observation booth. The non-skid surface was great for walking, not so great for rolling. I almost toppled over several times as I pulled myself along. It was a clumsy and painstaking way of getting from one side to the other, but I couldn’t put any weight on my wounded leg and the handrails weren’t sturdy enough to use as supports. So I had to inch along in the rolling desk chair.
06:33.
I finally made it across to the ladder, stopped and looked down at the ground. It was a long way down. Ten stories, I guessed. About a hundred feet. Difficult enough to manage with two good legs, maybe impossible with just one. But I had to try. The only other choice was to sit there and wait to blow up. And if I blew up, the grain elevator would blow up, and the percussive impact from the C-4 might trigger the nuke. So I had to try, even though I was dizzy and nauseated and couldn’t feel the bottom of my left foot.
I eased out of the chair and scooted over to the edge of the silo and threw the sniper rifle over the side. I didn’t hear it hit the ground, but I doubted that the nice expensive scope survived the fall. The big lens probably shattered on impact. I heaved the desk chair over the side, too, even though I was almost certain it would get smashed to pieces. I probably wouldn’t be able to use it when I got to the ground, but my car was parked at the security office, and the security office was only about a hundred feet from the grain elevator. I figured I could make it using the rifle as a crutch. That was the plan. But I had to get to the bottom of the ladder first. Right now that was the biggest challenge.
The ladder was a couple of feet taller than the roof. I grabbed the top rung with both hands and held on tight while I swiveled around and let gravity pull my legs off the side. I dangled there for a second or two until I found a rung with my right foot. I steadied myself and tried not to look down. My left leg was pretty much useless. The muscles in my thigh weren’t working, which made it impossible to bend my knee, so I gripped onto the next rung down from my hands and then sort of hopped to the next rung down from my feet. I kept repeating that precarious little maneuver until I got about halfway down, and then I had to take a break. The ladder was slippery with dew and my fingers ached and my arms and shoulders felt like someone was beating them with hammers. I took a few deep breaths, trying to oxygenate my muscles, unsure if I was going to be able to hold on for another fifty feet, unsure if I was going to be able to hold on for another second.
I tried to shift most of my weight inward, toward the silo, and then I opened my mouth and used my teeth to clamp down on the rung closest to my face. I relaxed my hands, opened and closed them a few times and let them drop to my sides, pins and needles jabbing at my fingers as the circulation returned. I knew that if my right foot slipped I would go plummeting to the ground, but I had to rest my hands and my arms and my shoulders, at least for a little while. Otherwise I was going to go plummeting to the ground anyway. The fall would probably kill me, and when my heart stopped so would the flow of electricity holding the delayed relay open. Then the bomb might detonate in twelve seconds instead of twelve minutes.
06:35.
Make that ten minutes.
My mother died in a car accident when I was five, but I remember her making me brush my teeth every morning after breakfast and every night before I went to bed. It was one of those things that tend to annoy you when you’re three or four years old. How could brushing your teeth possibly be more important than the cartoon show coming on next? But then I guess you never truly appreciate the importance of proper oral hygiene until you’re hanging by your teeth fifty feet in the air with a bomb taped to your belly. I was glad that my mother had made me brush twice a day, and I was glad that I’d kept up with my dental appointments through the years.
I stayed there and bit down on the filthy steel
for several seconds. It tasted terrible. Like a handful of sweaty nickels. My jaw started hurting and my hands started feeling better so I gripped the rung in front of me and continued my little hopping routine until I made it to the bottom of the ladder. I let go and rolled to the ground and looked at my watch.
06:38.
The desk chair was ruined. It had broken in two, the seat now separate from the base. I crawled over to where the rifle had landed, saw that the big lens on the scope had indeed shattered. Careful to avoid the slivers of glass there on the ground, I grabbed the gun and jammed the barrel into the dirt and struggled to a standing position. I hobbled over to my car as fast as I could, opened the door and slid in behind the wheel and started the engine.
There was a black four-door sedan parked by the security truck. It hadn’t been there before. I guessed it belonged to the man lying on the pavement beside it. The Administrator on Duty, probably. I backed around so that my headlights were shining that way. The guy had a bullet hole in his forehead. There was nothing I could do for him. Then I saw the guard. He was lying in a pool of blood beside the door to the shack. His coffee cup was still in his hand. He’d also been shot in the head.
06:42.
I turned the car around and sped toward the gate.
Which of course was locked.
I thought about crashing on through, but I knew that all kinds of things could go wrong if I did. The gate looked pretty strong, for one thing, and I wasn’t sure my little car would make it to the other side in one piece. I stopped at the keypad and entered the code and waited for the welded steel pipes and heavy-gauge chain-link wire to roll out of my way.
Only the welded steel pipes and heavy-gauge chain-link wire didn’t roll out of my way. Something was wrong. I backed up and switched on my brights, saw that the chain drive connected to the electric motor had been knocked off its sprocket. Courtesy the guy I’d killed up in the observation booth, I guessed. He’d probably followed the Administrator on Duty in on foot. Then, after he’d shot the Administrator on Duty and the security guard, he’d wanted to make sure that nobody else entered or exited the facility until he finished his mission.