Bad Luck and Trouble

73

The fire department showed up inside four minutes. Clearly New Age had an alarm system hard-wired straight into the precinct house. A Pentagon requirement, Reacher guessed, like the guard shack at the gate. Far to his right in the distance he heard the faint bass bark of sirens and saw blue lights flashing on the horizon. He saw Neagley start her car and put it in gear. He started his own. And then he waited. The sirens grew louder. They changed to a manic continuous shriek, once, then again, at busy intersections. Then they died back to random barking. The blue lights got brighter. The trucks were two blocks away. Headlight beams were bright in the gloom. Neagley eased off the curb. Reacher followed her. She drove ahead and waited on the stop line. Reacher was right behind her. The fire trucks were a block away, bearing down, coming on fast, honking and flashing. Neagley swooped out and made the left, right in front of the convoy. Reacher followed her, tires chirping, just yards in front of the leading truck. Its siren blared at him angrily. Neagley drove a couple of hundred yards. One block. Two. Onto New Age’s block. She followed the fence along the front of the property. Reacher was behind her all the way. The sirens behind him were yelping furiously. Then Neagley pulled over, like a good citizen. Reacher tucked in behind her. The trucks lurched left and roared past them both. Then more or less immediately they braked hard and turned and headed for New Age’s gate. There were three of them. A whole engine company. A priority client.

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.