Nothing to Lose

71

Reacher trudged through the mud and rolled Thurman’s men into what medics called the recovery position. On their sides, arms splayed, necks at a natural angle, one leg straight and the other knee drawn up. No danger of choking. A slight danger of drowning, if the puddles didn’t stop filling. The rain was still hard. It thrashed against their slickers and drummed on the sides of their boots.

Thurman poked and prodded at the shattered box where the keypad had been. No result. The gates stayed closed. He gave up and slipped and slid back to the center of the hidden area. Reacher and Vaughan fought their way across to the eighteen-wheeler. It was just standing there, shut down and silent and oblivious.

Vaughan said, “You really think this is a bomb?”

Reacher said, “Don’t you?”

“Thurman was mighty plausible. About the gifts for Afghanistan.”

“He’s a preacher. It’s his job to be plausible.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“What if I’m right?”

“How much damage could it do?”

“If they built it right I wouldn’t want to be within three miles of it when it goes off.”

“Threemiles?”

“Twenty tons of TNT, twenty tons of shrapnel. It won’t be pretty.”

“How do we get out of here?”

“Where’s your truck?”

“Where we left it. They ambushed me. Opened the outer gate and drove me through the plant in Thurman’s SUV. It’s parked the other side of the inner gate. Which you just made sure will never open again.”

“No big deal.”

“You can’t climb the wall.”

“But you can,” Reacher said.

They talked for five fast minutes about what to do and how to do it. Knives, welds, the average size and thickness of a car’s roof panel, canvas straps, knots, trailer hitches, four-wheel-drive, low-range gearing. Thurman was pacing aimlessly a hundred yards away. They left him there and headed through the mud to the wall. They picked a spot ten feet left of the gate. Reacher took the two switchblades out of his pocket and handed them to Vaughan. Then he stood with his back to the wall, directly underneath the maximum radius of the horizontal cylinder above. Rain sheeted off it and soaked his head and shoulders. He bent down and curled his left palm and made a stirrup. Vaughan lined up directly in front of him, facing him, and put her right foot in the stirrup. He took her weight and she balanced with her wrists on his shoulders and straightened her leg and boosted herself up. He cupped his right hand under her left foot. She stood upright in his palms and her weight fell forward and her belt buckle hit him in the forehead.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Nothing we haven’t done before,” he said, muffled.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Reacher was six feet five inches tall and had long arms. In modest motel rooms he could put his palms flat on an eight-foot ceiling. Vaughan was about five feet four. Arms raised, she could probably stretch just shy of seven feet. Total, nearly fifteen feet. And the wall was only fourteen feet high.

He lifted. Like starting a bicep curl with a free weights bar loaded with a hundred and twenty pounds. Easy, except that his hands were turned in at an unnatural angle. And his footing was insecure, and Vaughan wasn’t a free weights bar. She wasn’t rigid and she was wobbling and struggling to balance.

“Ready?” he called.

“Wait one,” she said.

He felt her weight move in his hands, left to right, right to left, shifting, equalizing, preparing.

“Now go,” she said.

He did four things. He boosted her sharply upward, used her momentary weightlessness to shift his hands flat under her shoes, stepped forward half a pace, and locked his arms straight.

She fell forward and met the bulge of the cylinder with the flats of her forearms. The hollow metal construction boomed once, then again, much delayed.

“OK?” he called.

“I’m there,” she said.

He felt her go up on tiptoes in his palms. Felt her reach up and straighten her arms. According to his best guess her hands should right then have been all the way up on the cylinder’s top dead-center. He heard the first switchblade pop open. He swiveled his hands a little and gripped her toes. For stability. She was going to need it. He moved out another few inches. By then she should have been resting with her belly against the metal curve. Rain was streaming down all over him. He heard her stab downward with the knife. The wall clanged and boomed.

“Won’t go through,” she called.

“Harder,” he called back.

She stabbed again. Her whole body jerked and he dodged and danced underneath her, keeping her balanced. Like acrobats in a circus. The wall boomed.

“No good,” she called.

“Harder,” he called.

She stabbed again. No boom. Just a little metallic clatter, then nothing.

“The blade broke,” she called.

Reacher’s arms were starting to ache.

“Try the other one,” he called. “Be precise with the angle. Straight downward, OK?”

“The metal is too thick.”

“It’s not. It’s from an old piece-of-shit Buick, probably. It’s like aluminum foil. And that’s a good Japanese blade. Hit it hard. Who do you hate?”

“The guy that pulled the trigger on David.”

“He’s inside the wall. His heart is the other side of the metal.”

He heard the second switchblade open. Then there was silence for a second. Then a convulsive jerk through her legs and another dull boom through the metal.

A different boom.

“It’s in,” she called. “All the way.”

“Pull on it,” he called back.

He felt her take her weight on the wooden handle. He felt her twist as she wrapped both fists around it. He felt her feet pull up out of his hands. Then he felt them come back.

“It’s slicing through,” she called. “It’s cutting the metal.”

“It will,” he called back. “It’ll stop when it hits a weld.”

He felt it stabilize a second later. Called, “Where is it?”

“Right at the top.”

“Ready?”

“On three,” she called. “One, two,three. ”

She jerked herself upward and he helped as much as he could, fingertips and tiptoes, and then her weight was gone. He came down in a heap and rolled away in case she was coming down on top of him. But she wasn’t. He got to his feet and walked away to get a better angle and saw her lying longitudinally on top of the cylinder, legs spread, both hands wrapped tight around the knife handle. She rested like that for a second and then shifted her weight and slid down the far side of the bulge, slowly at first, then faster, swinging around, still holding tight to the knife handle. He saw her clasped hands at the top of the curve, and then her weight started pulling the blade through the metal, fast at first where a track was already sliced and then slower as the blade bit through new metal. It would jam again at the next weld, which he figured was maybe five feet down the far side, allowing for the size of a typical car’s roof panel, minus a folded flange at both sides for assembly purposes, which would be about a quarter of the way around the cylinder’s circumference, which would mean she would be hanging off the wall at full stretch with about four feet of clear air under the soles of her shoes.

A survivable fall.

Probably.

He waited what seemed like an awful long time, and then he heard two hard thumps on the outside of the wall. They each sounded twice, once immediately and then again as the sound raced around the hollow circle and came back. He closed his eyes and smiled. Their agreed signal. Out, on her feet, no broken bones.

“Impressive,” Thurman said, from ten yards away.

Reacher turned. The old guy was still hatless. His blow-dried waves were ruined. Ninety yards beyond him his two men were still down and inert.

Four minutes,Reacher thought.

Thurman said, “I could do what she did.”

“In your dreams,” Reacher said. “She’s fit and agile. You’re a fat old man. And who’s going to boost you up? Real life is not like the movies. Your guys aren’t going to wake up and shake their heads and get right to it. They’re going to be puking and falling down for a week.”

“Are you proud of that?”

“I gave them a choice.”

“Your lady friend can’t open the gate, you know. She doesn’t have the combination.”

“Have faith, Mr. Thurman. A few minutes from now you’re going to see me ascend.”

Reacher strained to hear sounds from the main compound, but the rain was too loud. It hissed in the puddles and pattered on the mud and clanged hard against the metal of the wall. So he just waited. He took up station six feet from the wall and a yard left of where Vaughan had gone over. Thurman backed off and watched.

Three minutes passed. Then four. Then without warning a long canvas strap snaked up and over the wall and the free end landed four feet to Reacher’s right. The kind of thing used for tying down scrap cars to a flat-bed trailer. Vaughan had driven Thurman’s Tahoe up to the security office and had found a strap of the right length in the pile near the door and had weighted its end by tying it around a scrap of pipe. He pictured her after the drive back, twenty feet away through the metal, swinging the strap like a cowgirl with a rope, building momentum, letting it go, watching it sail over.

Reacher grabbed the strap and freed the pipe and retied the end into a generous two-foot loop. He wrapped the canvas around his right hand and walked toward the wall. Kicked it twice and backed off a step and put his foot in the loop and waited. He pictured Vaughan securing the other end to the trailer hitch on Thurman’s Tahoe, climbing into the driver’s seat, selecting four-wheel-drive for maximum traction across the mud, selecting the low-range transfer case for delicate throttle control. He had been insistent about that. He didn’t want his arms torn off at the shoulders when she hit the gas.

He waited. Then the strap went tight above him and started to quiver. The canvas around his hand wrapped tight. He pushed down into the loop with his sole. He saw the strap pull across the girth of the cylinder. No friction. Wet canvas on painted metal, slick with rain. The canvas stretched a little. Then he felt serious pressure under his foot and he lifted smoothly into the air. Slowly, maybe twelve inches a second. Less than a mile an hour. Idle speed, for the Tahoe’s big V-8. He pictured Vaughan behind the wheel, concentrating hard, her foot like a feather on the pedal.

“Goodbye, Thurman,” he said. “Looks like it’s you that’s getting left behind this time.”

Then he looked up and got his left hand on the bulge of the cylinder and pushed back and hauled with his right to stop his wrapped knuckles crushing against the metal. His hips hit the maximum curve and he unwrapped his hand and hung on and let himself be pulled up to top dead-center. Then he dropped the strap and let the loop around his foot pull his legs up sideways and then he kicked free of the loop and came to rest spread-eagled on his stomach along the top of the wall. He jerked his hips and sent his legs down the far side and squealed his palms across ninety degrees of wet metal and pushed off and fell, two long split seconds. He hit the ground and fell on his back and knocked the wind out of himself. He rolled over and forced some air into his lungs and crawled up on his knees.

Vaughan had stopped Thurman’s Tahoe twenty feet away. Reacher got to his feet and walked over to it and unhooked the strap from the trailer hitch. Then he climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You OK?” she asked.

“Fine. You?”

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and I fell out of an apple tree. Scared, but a good scared.” She changed to high-range gearing and took off fast. Two minutes later they were at the main vehicle gate. It was standing wide open.

“We should close it,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“To help contain the damage. If I’m right.”

“Suppose you’re not?”

“Maximum of five phone calls will prove it one way or the other.”

“How do we close it? They don’t seem to have any manual override.”

They stopped just outside the gate and got out and walked over to the gray metal box on the wall. Reacher flipped the lid. One through nine, plus zero.

“Try six-six-one-three,” he said.

Vaughan looked blank but stepped up and raised her index finger. Pressed six, six, one, three, neat and rapid. There was silence for a second and then motors whined and the gates started closing. A foot a second, wheels rumbling along tracks. Vaughan asked, “How did you know?”

“Most codes are four figures,” Reacher said. “ATM cards, things like that. People are used to four-figure codes.”

“Why those four figures?”

“Lucky guess,” Reacher said. “Revelation is the sixty-sixth book in the King James Bible. Chapter one, verse three says the time is at hand. Which seems to be Thurman’s favorite part.”

“So we could have gotten out without climbing.”

“If we had, they could have, too. I want them in there. So I had to smash the lock.”

“Where to now?”

“The hotel in Despair. The first phone call is one that you get to make.”