by Lee Child
New Age’s gate was rolling back. Because a fire alarm was better than any kind of pass or paperwork.
Then Neagley slammed her car twenty feet into a side street and was out of her seat and running hard through the darkness. Reacher followed her all the way. They crossed the road at maximum speed and caught up with the last truck as it slowed to turn in. They stayed on its left, on the blind side, away from the guard shack, away from the fire. Away from the center of attention. They ran hard to keep pace. They tracked the truck all the way in through the gate. Its siren was still sounding. Its engine was roaring. It was deafening. Smoke was drifting from the fire, sharp and acrid on the night air. The truck roared straight ahead. Neagley turned a hard left and ran down the inside face of the fence. Reacher headed half-left through the grass. He gave it ten long seconds of maximum effort and then flung himself down and rolled and crammed himself flat on his front with his face hard down in the dirt.
A minute later he raised his head.
He was sixty yards from the fire. Between him and it were the three trucks, huge, noisy, blue lights flashing, headlights blazing. Beyond the trucks he could see flames. He could see people moving around. New Age security. They were over by the far fence, trying to see who or what had started the fire. They were darting forward and dropping back, beaten by the heat. Firemen were running everywhere, hauling equipment, unrolling hoses.
Chaos.
Reacher turned his head and strained hard to see through the darkness. Saw a flat humped shape in the grass forty feet away that had to be Neagley.
They were inside the fence.
Undetected.
It took eight minutes for LA’s bravest to put out the fire. Then they spent another thirty-one dousing the ashes and taking notes and following up in one way or another. Total duration of their visit, thirty-nine minutes. Reacher spent the first twenty of them surveying the buildings from as close as he dared to get. Then he spent the final nineteen crawling backward as far as he could go. By the time the trucks finished up and rolled out the gate he was jammed up in the far back corner of the property, a hundred and fifty yards from the action.
The closest thing to him was the helicopter. It was still standing on its pad, about halfway along the lot’s diagonal, maybe seventy yards away. Beyond it was the closest of the small outbuildings. The pilot’s office, Reacher guessed. He had seen a guy in a leather jacket run out the door. Behind him in a blaze of light he had seen charts and maps pinned on a wall.
Equidistant from the helicopter and the pilot’s office and thirty yards south of both was the parking lot. It was full of the six blue Chryslers, all of them cold and quiet.
Beyond the pilot’s office was the second small outbuilding. A store room of some kind, Reacher guessed. The fire chief had been allowed to take a fast look inside.
Then came the main building. The hub of the operation. The assembly line. Where women in shower caps labored over laboratory benches. All around it people were still out in the open and moving around. Reacher was pretty sure he recognized Lamaison, by his size and his shape, stamping around in the last of the smoke, yelling orders, directing operations. Lennox and Parker were there, too. Plus others. Hard to say how many. Too much darkness and confusion and milling about. Three at least. Maybe four, or even five.
The third small outbuilding was set far back, away from everything else, toward the corner directly opposite Reacher’s. Its door had not opened at any point, and nobody had gone anywhere near it. Not Lamaison or his people, not the firefighters.
That was the prison, Reacher guessed.
The main gate to the street was closed again. It had rolled back into place with a loud shrieking sound after the last fire truck was through and then it had slammed shut with an impact that had sent a shudder through the roll of concertina wire welded to its top rail. The guard was still in his shack. His silhouette was clear behind the glass. The light above his head was spilling out in a soft twenty-foot circle, perfectly round, broken only by four bars of shadow from the window frames.
Beyond the main building the security guys were still looking for something. Lamaison had four of them formed up for a briefing. He split them into two pairs and sent them off to check the fence, one pair clockwise, the other counterclockwise. Each pair walked slowly, parallel to the boundary, scuffing the grass with their feet, looking down, looking up, looking at the wire. A hundred and fifty yards away Reacher rolled onto his back. Checked the sky. It was close to full dark. The smog that was tan by day was now dull black, like a blanket. There was no moon. No light at all, except the last imperceptible taint of daylight and a little orange scatter from the city’s lights.
Reacher rolled onto his front again. The security guys were still in pairs and moving slow. Lamaison was stepping back into the main building. Parker and Lennox were nowhere to be seen. Inside already, Reacher guessed. He watched the searchers. First one pair, then the other. Two different directions. The clockwise guys were Neagley’s. The counterclockwise guys were his. They had about a hundred and fifty yards to cover before they got anywhere near him. A little over four minutes, at their current pace. They were concentrating on the fence and a strip maybe fifteen feet wide just inside it. Like the warning track around a baseball field. They had no flashlights. They were searching by feel alone. They would have to fall over something to find it. Reacher crawled twenty yards inward. Found a dip behind a hummock in the grass and pressed himself down into it. No man’s land. The property covered about two acres, which was 9,680 square yards. Reacher occupied roughly two of them. Neagley, roughly the same. Four square yards out of 9,680. Odds of one in 2,420 against being randomly discovered. If they stayed still and quiet, that was.
Which Reacher couldn’t afford to do.
Because the clock in his head had ticked around to the two-hour mark. He got up on his elbows and pulled out his phone and dialed Dixon’s cell.
74
More than a hundred yards away, Lamaison answered the call. Reacher kept his thumb over the phone’s bright LCD window. He wanted to preserve his night vision and he didn’t want the searchers to look up and see a tiny disembodied face bathed in a distant blue glow. He spoke as normally as he dared.
“We’re stuck on the 210,” he said. “There’s a stalled car up ahead.”
“Bullshit,” Lamaison said. “You’re right here in the neighborhood. You’ve been throwing gasoline bombs over my fence.” His voice was loud and angry. Over the cellular circuits it came through edgy and penetrating. A little grating and distorted. Reacher slipped the pad of his index finger over the earpiece perforations and glanced up at the searchers. They were a hundred and twenty yards away. They hadn’t reacted.
“What bombs?” he said, into the phone.
“You heard me.”
“We’re on the freeway. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit, Reacher. You’re right here. You started a fire. But it was pathetic. It took them all of five minutes to put it out. I’m sure you saw them do it.”
Eight minutes, actually, Reacher thought. Give me some damn credit. But he said nothing. Just watched his pair of searchers. They were a hundred and ten yards away.
“The deal is off,” Lamaison said.
“Wait,” Reacher said. “I’m still thinking about the deal. But I’m not an idiot. I want a proof of life. You could have shot them already.”
“They’re still alive.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“I’ll call you when we’re through this traffic. You can bring them to the gate.”
“No way. They stay where they are.”
“Then we can’t do business.”
Lamaison said, “I’ll ask them a question for you.”
The searchers were ninety yards away.
“What question?” Reacher said.
“Think of a question only they can answer. We’ll ask them and call you back.”
“I’ll call y
ou back,” Reacher said. “I don’t answer the phone when I’m driving.”
“You’re not driving. What’s the question?”
Reacher said, “Ask them who they were with before they joined the 110th MP.” Then he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
The searchers were about seventy yards away. Reacher crawled another twenty yards inward, slow and cautious, parallel with the fence. The searchers managed another ten yards while he was doing it. Now they were forty yards away, coming on slowly, five feet apart, scuffing the grass, peering outward at the fence, checking for breaches.
Reacher saw light at the front of the main building. The door, opening. A tall shape stepped out. Parker, probably. He closed the door behind him and hustled around the near gable wall and headed for the distant shack thirty yards away. He unlocked the door and went in and less than a minute later he came back out and locked up again.
The prison, Reacher thought. Thank you.
The searchers were twenty yards away. Eighteen and a quarter meters, sixty feet, 720 inches, one-point-one-three percent of a mile. Reacher shuffled ahead a little and closed the gap. The searchers stumbled on. Now they were ten yards ahead, on a diagonal, maybe eight yards to Reacher’s left.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He hauled it out and cupped it in his hand. The caller ID said Dixon, which meant Lamaison. The answers to his question, recently relayed by Parker.
I said I’d call you, Reacher thought. Can’t talk now.
He jammed the phone back in his pocket and waited. The searchers were almost dead level with him, eight yards to his left. They moved on. Reacher squirmed around, a silent half-circle on the ground. The searchers walked on. Reacher completed the circle. Now he was behind them. He got silently to his feet. Took short quiet strides, stepping high to keep his soles from brushing the grass with telltale rustles. He fell in behind the two guys, ten feet back, then eight, then six, centered exactly between them. They were a decent size. Maybe six-two, two-ten, pale and meaty. Blue suits, white shirts, crew cuts. Broad shoulders, thick necks.
He hit the first guy with a massive straight right, dead-center in the back of the neck, two hundred and fifty pounds and days of rage behind the blow. The guy’s neck snapped forward and his skull snapped back and bounced straight off Reacher’s fist and smashed forward again until his chin smacked his chest. Whiplash. Like a crash test dummy rear-ended by a speeding truck. The guy went straight down in a heap and his buddy turned toward him in shock and Reacher danced through a short shuffle step and headbutted him full in the face. He knew it was a great one by the sound alone. Bone, gristle, muscle, flesh, the unmistakable crunch of serious damage. The guy stayed vertical but unconscious for a second and then went down flat.
Reacher rolled the first guy on his back and sat on his chest and pinched his nose with one hand and blocked his mouth with his other palm. Then he waited until the guy suffocated. It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. Then he did the same thing with the other guy. Another minute.
Then he checked their pockets. The first guy had a cell phone and a gun and a wallet full of cash money and credit cards. Reacher took the gun and the cash money, left the cell phone and the credit cards. The gun was a SIG P226, nine-millimeter. The cash money was a little less than two hundred dollars. The second guy had another phone, another SIG, another wallet.
Plus Dave O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster.
It was right there in his jacket pocket. Either a reward for good work at the hospital takedown, or a stolen souvenir. Spoils of war. Reacher put it in his own pocket and jammed the SIGs in his waistband and the cash in his back pocket. Then he wiped his hands on the second guy’s jacket and crawled away, low and fast, peering into the dark where he imagined Neagley to be. He had heard nothing from that direction. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t worried. Neagley against two guys in the dark was about as reliable as the sun setting in the west.
He found another broad dip in the grass and lay down on his elbows and pulled out his phone. Called Dixon’s number.
“Where the hell were you?” Lamaison asked him.
“I told you,” Reacher said. “I don’t pick up when I’m driving.”
“You’re not driving.”
“So why didn’t I pick up?”
“Whatever,” Lamaison said. “Where are you now?”
“Close by.”
“Before the 110th Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll call you back in ten. When we arrive.”
He clicked off and sat up cross-legged in the dirt. He had his proof-of-life answers. Only problem was, neither one of them was even remotely true.
75
Reacher crawled south through the grass, looking for Neagley in the dark. He made it through fifty fast yards and found a corpse instead. He blundered right into it, hands and then knees. It was a man, cooling fast. Blue suit, white shirt. Broken neck.
“Neagley?” he whispered.
“Here,” she whispered back.
She was twenty feet away, lying on her side, propped up on one elbow.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Feeling good.”
“Was there another one?”
“Behind you,” she said. “To your right.”
Reacher turned. Same kind of guy, same kind of suit, same kind of shirt.
Same kind of injury.
“Any problems?” he asked.
“Easy,” she said. “And quieter than you. I heard that head butt all the way over here.”
They bumped fists in the dark, the old ritual, about as much physical contact as she liked to permit.
“Lamaison thinks we’re on the outside looking in,” Reacher said. “He’s trying to scam us with a deal. If we surrender they’ll lock us all up for a week and then let us go when the heat dies down.”
“Like we’d believe that.”
“One of my guys had Dave’s knuckleduster.”
“That’s not a good sign.”
“They’re OK so far. I asked for a proof of life. Personal questions. Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”
“That’s bullshit. There was no 53rd MP. And Dave was posted to the 110th straight out of Officer Candidate School.”
“They’re talking to us,” Reacher said. “Fifty-three is a prime number. Karla knew I’d pick up on that.”
“So?”
“Five and three make eight. She’s telling us there are eight hostiles.”
“Four left, then. Lennox, Parker, and Lamaison. Plus one. Who’s the fourth?”
“That’s Dave’s message. He’s a words guy. One-three-one. Thirteenth letter of the alphabet, first letter of the alphabet.”
“M and A,” Neagley said.
“Mauney,” Reacher said. “Curtis Mauney is here.”
“Excellent,” Neagley said. “Saves hunting him down later.”
They bumped fists again. Then cell phones started to ring. Loud and piercing and insistent. Two of them, different tones, unsynchronized. One each in the dead guys’ pockets. Reacher had no doubt at all the same thing was happening fifty yards away. Two more dead guys, two more pockets, two more ringing phones. A conference call. Lamaison was touching base with his foot patrol.
Something unpredictable.
The phones rang six times each and stopped. Silence came back.
“What would you do now?” Reacher asked. “If you were Lamaison?”
Neagley said, “I’d get guys in those Chryslers and turn the head-lights on bright and fix myself a little motor patrol. I’d run us down in less than a minute.”
Reacher nodded. Against a man on foot, the lot felt big. Against a car, it would feel small. Against more than one car it would feel tiny. In the dark it felt safe. With xenon beams blazing away it would feel like a goldfish bowl. He pictured cars bouncing over the rough ground, pictured himself
trapped in their lights, darting left, darting right, shading his eyes, one car chasing, two cars converging.
He glanced at the fence.
“Correct,” Neagley said. “The fence keeps us in just as well as it kept us out. We’re two balls on a pool table and someone’s about to turn on the lights and pick up a cue.”
“What are they going to do if they don’t find us?”
“How are they not going to find us?”
“Suppose.”
Neagley shrugged and said, “They’re going to assume we got out somehow.”
“And then?”
“They’re going to panic.”
“How?”
“They’re going to kill Karla and Dave and hunker down.”
