Nothing to Lose

Silence came back, like a blanket.

The runway lights died.

Reacher watched.

The plane’s right-hand door opened and Thurman eased himself out onto the wing step. Big, bulky, stiff, awkward. He was still in his wool suit. He climbed down and stood for a second and then walked away toward the house.

He was carrying nothing.

No bag, no valise, no briefcase, no kind of a package.

Nothing.

He stepped beyond the light spill and disappeared. The giant from the metal plant hauled the steel cable out of the barn and hooked it to an eye below the tail plane. He walked back to the winch and hit a button and the electric motor whined and the plane was pulled slowly backward into the barn. It stopped in its parked position and the giant unhooked the cable and rewound the winch all the way. Then he squeezed around the wing tip and killed the lights and walked away into the darkness.

Carrying nothing.

He had opened no compartments or cubbies, he had checked no holds or nacelles, and he had retrieved nothing from the cabin.

Reacher waited twenty long minutes, for safety’s sake. He had never blundered into trouble through impatience, and he never pla

Vaughan said, “So now we know. They’re taking stuff out, not in.”

Reacher said, “But what, and to where? What kind of range does this thing have?”

“With full tanks? Around seven or eight hundred miles. The state cops had a plane like this, once. It’s a question of how fast you fly and how hard you climb.”

“What would be normal?”

“A little over half-power might get you eight hundred miles at a hundred and twenty-five knots.”

“He’s gone seven hours every night. Give him an hour on the ground, call it six hours in the air, three there, three back, that’s a radius of three hundred and seventy-five miles. That’s a circle nearly four hundred thousand square miles in area.”

“That’s a lot of real estate.”

“Can we tell anything from the vector he comes in on?”

Vaughan shook her head. “He has to line up with the runway and land into the wind.”

“There’s no big tank of gas here. Therefore he refuels at the other end. Therefore he goes where you can buy gas at ten or eleven at night.”

“Which is a lot of places,” Vaughan said. “Municipal airfields, flying clubs.”

Reacher nodded. Pictured a map in his head and thought:Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, part of Oklahoma, part of Texas, New Mexico, the northeast corner of Arizona, Utah. Always assuming Thurman didn’t just fly an hour each way and spend five at di

“Think he’ll tell us?”

“Eventually.”

They ducked back under the wing and retraced their steps behind the barn to the wall. A minute later they were back in the car, following the ghostly green image of the Tahoes’ ruts counterclockwise, all the way around the metal plant to the place where Reacher had decided to break in.

55

The white metal wall was blazing hot in the south and cooler in the north. Vaughan followed it around and stopped halfway along its northern stretch. Then she pulled a tight left and bounced out of the ruts and nosed slowly head-on toward the wall and stopped with her front bumper almost touching it. The front half of the hood was directly below the wall’s horizontal cylinder. The base of the windshield was about five feet down and two feet out from the cylinder’s maximum bulge.

Reacher got out and dragged the stepladder off the rear bench. He laid it on the ground and unfolded it and adjusted it into an upside-down L-shape. Then he estimated by eye and relaxed the angle a little beyond ninety degrees and locked all the joints. He lifted it high. He jammed the feet in the gutter at the base of the Crown Vic’s windshield, where the hood’s lip overlapped the wipers. He let it fall forward, gently. It hit the wall with a soft metallic noise, aluminum on painted steel. The long leg of the L came to rest almost vertical. The short leg lay on top of the cylinder, almost horizontal.

“Back up about a foot,” he whispered.

Vaughan moved the car and the base of the ladder pulled outward to a kinder angle and the top fell forward by a corresponding degree and ended up perfectly flat.

“I love hardware stores,” Reacher said.

Vaughan said, “I thought this kind of wall was supposed to be impregnable.”

“We’re not over it yet.”

“But we’re close.”

“Normally they come with guard towers and searchlights, to make sure people don’t bring cars and ladders.”

Vaughan shut the engine down and jammed the parking brake on tight. The laptop screen turned itself off and they were forced back to the visible spectrum, which didn’t contain anything very visible. Just darkness. Vaughan carried the flashlight and Reacher took the wrecking bar from the trunk. He levered himself up onto the hood and crouched under the swell of the cylinder. He stepped forward to the base of the windshield and turned again and started to climb the ladder. He carried the wrecking bar in his left hand and gripped the upper rungs with his right. The aluminum squirmed against the steel and set up a weird harmonic in the hollows of the wall. He slowed down to quiet the noise and made it to the angle and leaned forward and crawled along the short horizontal leg of the L on his hands and knees. He shuffled off sideways and lay like a starfish on the cylinder’s top surface. Six feet in diameter, almost nineteen feet in circumference, effectively flat enough to be feasible, but still curved enough to be dangerous. And the white paint was slick and shiny. He raised his head cautiously and looked around.

He was six feet from where he wanted to be.

The pyramid of old oil drums was barely visible in the dark, two yards to the west. Its top tier was about eight feet south and eighteen inches down from the top of the wall. He swam forward and grabbed the ladder again. It shifted sideways toward him. No resistance. He called down, “Get on the bottom rung.”

The ladder straightened under Vaughan’s weight. He hauled himself toward it and clambered over it and turned around and lay down again on the other side. Now he was exactly where he wanted to be. He called, “Come on up.”

He saw the ladder flex and sway and bounce a little and the strange harmonic keening started up again. Then Vaughan’s head came into view. She paused and got her bearings and made it over the angle and climbed off and lay down in the place he had just vacated, uneasy and spread-eagled. He handed her the wrecking bar and hauled the ladder up sideways, awkwardly, crossing and uncrossing his hands until he had the thing approximately balanced on top of the curve. He glanced right, into the arena, and tugged the ladder a little closer to him and then fed it down on the other side of the wall until the short leg of the L came to rest on an oil drum two tiers down from the top. The long leg came to rest at a gentle slope, like a bridge.

“I love hardware stores,” he said again.

“I love solid ground,” Vaughan said.

He took the wrecking bar back from her and stretched forward and got both hands on the ladder rails. He jerked downward, hard, to make sure it was seated tight. Then he supported all his weight with his arms, like he was chi