by Lee Child
He fumbled the flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on. He held it between his teeth and watched the water and picked the spot where half of it was sluicing one way and half the other. The geometric dead-center of the cylinder. The continental divide. He lined up with it and eased off the ladder and sat down. An uneasy feeling. Wet cotton on wet paint. Insecure. No friction. Water was dripping off him and threatening to float him away like an aquaplaning tire.
He sat still for a long moment. He needed to twist from the waist and lift the ladder and reverse it. But he couldn’t move. The slightest turn would unstick him. Newton’s Law of Motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If he twisted his upper body to the left, the torque would spin his lower body to the right, and he would slide right off the cylinder. An effective design, derived from prison research.
Fourteen feet to the ground. He could survive a controlled fall, if he didn’t land on a tangle of jagged scrap. But without the ladder on the inside it wasn’t clear how he would ever get out again.
Perhaps the gates had simpler switches on the inside. No combination locks.
Perhaps he could improvise a ladder out of scrap metal. Perhaps he could learn to weld, and build one.
Or perhaps not.
He thought: I’ll worry about all that later.
He sat for a moment more in the rain and then nudged himself forward and rolled over onto his stomach as he slid and his palms squealed against the wet metal and the wrecking bar thumped and banged and then ninety degrees past top dead-center he was free-falling through empty air, one split second, and two, and three.
He hit the ground a whole lot later than he thought he would. But there was no scrap metal under him and his knees were bent and he went down in a heap and rolled one way and the wrecking bar went the other. The flashlight spun away. The breath was knocked out of him. But that was all. He sat up and a fast mental inventory revealed no physical damage, beyond mud and grease and oil all over his clothes, from the sticky earth.
He got to his feet and wiped his hands on his pants. Found the flashlight. It was a yard away, still burning bright. He carried it in one hand and the wrecking bar in the other and stood for a moment behind the pyramid of old oil drums. Then he stepped out and set off walking, south and west. Dark shapes loomed up at him. Cranes, gantries, crushers, crucibles, piles of metal. Beyond them the distant inner compound was still lit up.
The lights made a T shape.
A very shallow T. The crossbar was a blazing blue line half a mile long. Above it light spill haloed in the wet air. Below it the T shape’s vertical stroke was very short. Maybe fourteen feet tall. That was all. Maybe thirty feet wide. A very squat foundation for such a long horizontal line.
But it was there.
The inner gate was open.
An invitation. A trap, almost certainly. Like moths to a flame. Reacher looked at it for a long moment and then slogged onward. The flashlight beam showed rainbow puddles everywhere. Oil and grease, floating. Rain was washing down through the sand and capillary action was pulling waste back to the surface. Walking was difficult. Within ten paces Reacher’s shoes were carrying pounds of sticky mud. He was getting taller with every step. Every time the flashlight showed him a pile of old I-beams or a tangle of old rebar he stopped and scraped his soles. He was wetter than if he had fallen into a swimming pool. His hair was plastered to his head and water was running into his eyes.
Ahead he could see the white security Tahoes, blurred and ghostly in the darkness. They were parked side by side to the left of the main vehicle gate. Three hundred yards away. He headed straight for them. The trip took him seven minutes. Half-speed, because of the soft ground. When he got there, he turned right and checked the vehicle gate. No luck. On the inside it had the same gray box as on the outside. The same keypad. The same three-million-plus combinations. He turned away from it and tracked along the wall and walked past the security office, and Thurman’s office, and the operations office. He stopped outside Purchasing. Scraped his shoes and climbed the steps and used his fingernails to pull the screws out of the padlock hasp. The door sagged open. He went inside.
He headed straight for the row of file cabinets. Aimed toward the right-hand end. Opened the T drawer. Pulled the Thomas file. The telecoms company. The cell phone supplier. Clipped to the back of the original purchase order was a thick wad of paper. The contracts, the details, the anytime minutes, the taxes, the fees, the rebates, the makes, the models. And the numbers. He tore off the sheet with the numbers and folded it into his pants pocket. Then he headed back out to the rain.
Close to one mile and forty minutes later he was approaching the inner gate.
69
The inner gate was still open. The inner compound was still blazing with light. Up close, the light was painfully bright. It spilled out in a solid bar the width of the opening and spread and widened like a lighthouse beam that reached a hundred yards.
Reacher hugged the wall and approached from the right. He stopped in the last foot of shadow and listened hard. Heard nothing over the pelting rain. He waited one slow minute and then stepped into the light. His shadow moved behind him, fifty feet long.
No reaction.
He walked in, fast and casual. No alternative. He was as lit up and vulnerable as a stripper on a stage. The ground under his feet was rutted with deep grooves. He was up to his ankles in water. Ahead on the left was the first artful pile of shipping containers. They were stacked in an open V, point outward. To their right and thirty feet farther away was a second V. He aimed for the gap between them. Stepped through, and found himself alone in an arena within an arena within an arena.
Altogether there were eight stacks of shipping containers arranged in a giant circle. They hid an area of maybe thirty acres. The thirty acres held cranes and gantries and crushers, and parked backhoes and bulldozers, and carts and dollies and trailers loaded with smaller pieces of equipment. Coils of baling wire, cutting torches, gas bottles, air hammers, high pressure spray hoses, hand tools. All grimy and battered and well used. Here and there leather welders’ aprons and dark goggles were dumped in piles.
Apart from the industrial infrastructure, there were two items of interest.
The first, on the right, was a mountain of wrecked main battle tanks.
The mountain was maybe thirty feet high and fifty across at the base. It looked like an elephants’ graveyard, from a grotesque prehistoric nightmare. Bent gun barrels reared up, like giant tusks or ribs. Turret assemblies were dumped and stacked haphazardly, characteristically low and wide and flat, peeled open like cans. Humped engine covers were stacked on their ends, like plates in a rack, some of them torn and shattered. Side skirts were everywhere, some of them ripped like foil. Parts of stripped hulls were tangled in the wreckage. Some of them had been taken apart by Thurman’s men. Most of them had been taken apart much farther away, by different people using different methods. That was clear. There were traces of desert camouflage paint in some places. But not many. Most of the metal was scorched dull black. It looked cold in the blue light and it glistened in the rain, but Reacher felt he could see smoke still rising off it, and hear men still screaming under it.
He turned away. Looked left.
The second item of interest was a hundred yards east.
It was an eighteen-wheel semi truck.
A big rig. Ready to roll. A tractor, a trailer, a blue forty-foot China Lines container on the trailer. The tractor was a huge square Peterbilt. Old, but well maintained. The trailer was a skeletal flat-bed. The container looked like every container Reacher had ever seen. He walked toward it, a hundred yards, two minutes through mud and water. He circled the rig. The Peterbilt tractor was impressive. A fine paint job, an air filter the size of an oil drum, bunk beds behind the front seats, twin chrome smokestacks, a forest of antennas, a dozen mirrors the size of dinner plates. The container looked mundane and shabby in comparison. Dull paint, faded lettering, a few dings and dents.
It was clamped tight to the trailer. It had a double door, secured with the same four foot-long levers and the same four long bolts that he had seen before. The levers were all in the closed position.
There were no padlocks.
No plastic tell-tale tags.
Reacher put the wrecking bar in one hand and pulled himself up with the other and got a precarious slippery foothold on the container’s bottom ledge. Got his free hand on the nearest lever and pushed it up.
It wouldn’t move.
It was welded to its bracket. An inch-long worm of metal had been melted into the gap. The three other levers were the same. And the doors had been welded to each other and to their frames. A neat patient sequence of spot welds had been applied, six inches apart, their bright newness hidden by flicks of dirty blue paint. Reacher juggled the wrecking bar and jammed the flat of the tongue into the space between two welds and pushed hard.
No result. Impossible. Like trying to lift a car with a nail file.
He climbed down, and looked again at the trailer clamps. They were turned tight. And welded.
He dropped the wrecking bar and walked away. He covered the whole of the hidden area, and the whole of the no-man’s-land that lay beyond the stacks of piled containers, and the whole length of the perimeter track inside the wall. A long walk. It took him more than an hour. He came back to the inner circle the other way. From the side opposite the inner gates. They were two hundred yards away.
And they were closing.
70
The gates were motorized. Driven by electricity. That was Reacher’s first absurd conclusion. They were moving slowly, but smoothly. A consistent speed. Too smooth and too consistent for manual operation. Relentless, at about a foot a second. They were already at a right angle to the wall. Each gate was fifteen feet wide. Five yards. The total remaining arc of travel for each of them was therefore about eight yards.
Twenty-four seconds.
They were two hundred yards away. No problem for a college sprinter on a track. Debatable for a college sprinter in six inches of mud. Completely impossible for Reacher. But still he started forward involuntarily, and then slowed as the arithmetic reality hit him.
He stopped altogether when he saw four figures walk in through the closing gap.
He recognized them immediately, by their size and shape and posture and movement. On the right was Thurman. On the left was the giant with the wrench. In the middle was the plant foreman. He was pushing Vaughan in front of him. The three men were walking easily. They were dressed in yellow slickers and sou’wester hats and rubber boots. Vaughan had no protection against the weather. She was soaked to the skin. Her hair was plastered against her head. She was stumbling, as if every few paces she was getting a shove in the back.
They all kept on coming.
Reacher started walking again.
The gates closed, with a metallic clang that sounded twice, first in real time and then again as an echo. The echo died, and Reacher heard a solenoid open and a bolt shoot home, a loud precise sound like a single shot from a distant rifle.
The four figures kept on coming.
Reacher kept on walking.
They met in the center of the hidden space. Thurman and his men stopped. They stood still five feet short of an imaginary line that ran between the pile of wrecked tanks and the eighteen-wheeler. Reacher stopped five feet on the other side. Vaughan kept on going. She picked her way through the mud and made it to Reacher’s side and turned around. Put a hand on his arm.
Two against three.
Thurman called, “What are you doing here?”
Reacher could hear the rain beating against the slickers. Three guys, three sets of shoulders, three hats, stiff plastic material.
He said, “I’m looking around.”
“At what?”
“At what you’ve got here.”
Thurman said, “I’m losing patience.”
Reacher said, “What’s in the truck?”
“What kind of incredible arrogance makes you think you’re entitled to an answer to that question?”
“No kind of arrogance,” Reacher said. “Just the law of the jungle. You answer, I leave. You don’t, I don’t.”
Thurman said, “My tolerance for you is nearly exhausted.”
“What’s in the truck?”
Thurman breathed in, breathed out. Glanced to his right, at his foreman, and then beyond the foreman at the giant with the wrench. He looked at Vaughan, and then back at Reacher. Reacher said, “What’s in the truck?”
Thurman said, “There are gifts in the truck.”
“What kind?”
“Clothes, blankets, medical supplies, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, dried and powdered foodstuffs, purified water, antibiotics, vitamins, sheets of construction-grade plywood. Things like that.”
“Where from?”
“They were bought with tithes from the people of Despair.”
“Why?”
“Because Jesus said, it is more blessed to give than to receive.”
“Who are the gifts for?”
“Afghanistan. For refugees and displaced persons and those living in poverty.”
“Why is the container welded shut?”
“Because it has a long and perilous journey ahead of it, through many countries and many tribal areas where warlords routinely steal. And padlocks on shipping containers can be broken. As you well know.”
“Why put it all together here? In secret?”
“Because Jesus said, when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret. We follow scripture here, Mr. Reacher. As should you.”
“Why turn out the whole town in defense of a truckful of gifts?”
“Because we believe that charity should know neither race nor creed. We give to Muslims. And not everyone in America is happy with that policy. Some feel that we should give only to fellow Christians. An element of militancy has entered the debate. Although in fact it was the prophet Muhammad himself who said a man’s first charity should be to his own family. Not Jesus. Jesus said whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. He said love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.”
Reacher said, “Where are the cars from Iran?”
“The what?”
“The cars from Iran.”
Thurman said, “Melted down and shipped out.”
“Where is the TNT?”
“The what?”
“You bought twenty tons of TNT from Kearny Chemical. Three months ago.”
Thurman smiled.
“Oh, that,” he said. “It was a mistake. A typo. A coding error. A new girl in the office was one number off, on Kearny’s order form. We got TNT instead of TCE. They’re adjacent in Kearny’s inventory. If you were a chemist, you’d understand why. We sent it back immediately, on the same truck. Didn’t even unload. If you had troubled yourself to break into Invoicing as well as Purchasing, you would have seen our application for a credit.”
“Where is the uranium?”
“The what?”
“You pulled twenty tons of depleted uranium out of these tanks. And I just walked all over this compound and I didn’t see it.”
“You’re standing on it.”
Vaughan looked down. Reacher looked down.
Thurman said, “It’s buried. I take security extremely seriously. It could be stolen and used in a dirty bomb. The state is reluctant to let the army move it. So I keep it in the ground.”
Reacher said, “I don’t see signs of digging.”
“It’s the rain. Everything is churned up.”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “Satisfied?”
Reacher said nothing. He glanced right, at the eighteen-wheeler. Left, at the parked backhoe. Down, at the ground. The rain splashed in puddles all around and thrashed against the slickers ten feet away.
“Sa
tisfied?” Thurman asked again.
Reacher said, “I might be. After I’ve made a phone call.”
“What phone call?”
“I think you know.”
“I don’t, actually.”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “But anyway, this is not the right time for phone calls.”
Reacher said, “Not the right place either. I’ll wait until I get back to town. Or back to Hope. Or Kansas.”
Thurman turned and glanced at the gate. Turned back. Reacher nodded. Said, “Suddenly you want to check on what numbers I know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“I want some courtesy and respect.”
“And I want to hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium. I think both of us are going to be disappointed.”
Thurman said, “Turn out your pockets.”
Reacher said, “Worried about those numbers? Maybe I memorized them.”
“Turn out your pockets.”
“Make me.”
Thurman went still and his eyes narrowed and debate crossed his face, the same kind of long-range calculus that Reacher had seen before, in front of the airplane hangar. The long game, eight moves ahead. Thurman spent a second or two on it and then he stepped back, abruptly, and raised his right arm. His plastic sleeve came out into the downpour and made noise. He waved his two employees forward. They took two long strides and stopped again. The plant foreman kept his hands loose at his sides and the big guy slapped the wrench in and out of his palm, wet metal on wet skin.
Reacher said, “Not a fair fight.”
Thurman said, “You should have thought about that before.”
Reacher said, “Not fair to them. They’ve been cutting uranium. They’re sick.”
“They’ll take their chances.”
“Like Underwood did?”
“Underwood was a fool. I give them respirators. Underwood was too lazy to keep his on.”
