Nothing to Lose

Plus a word, handwritten in capitals, in chalk.

The chalk was faded, as if it had been applied long ago at the other end of a voyage of many thousands of miles.

The word looked likeCARS.

Reacher stepped closer. The business end of the container had a double door, secured in the usual way with four foot-long levers that drove four sturdy bolts that ran the whole height of the container and socketed home in the box sections top and bottom. The levers were all in the closed position. Three were merely slotted into their brackets, but the fourth was secured with a padlock and guaranteed by a tell-tale plastic tag.

Reacher said, “This is an incoming delivery.”

Vaughan said, “I guess. It’s facing inward.”

“I want to see what’s inside.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious.”

“There are cars inside. Every junkyard has cars.”

He nodded in the dark. “I’ve seen them come in. From neighboring states, tied down on open flat-beds. Not locked in closed containers.”

Vaughan was quiet for a beat. “You think this is army stuff from Iraq?”

“It’s possible.”

“I don’t want to see. It might be Humvees. They’re basically cars. You said so yourself.”

He nodded again. “They are basically cars. But no one ever calls them cars. Certainly not the people who loaded this thing.”

“If it’s from Iraq.”

“Yes, if.”

“I don’t want to see.”

“I do.”

“We need to get going. It’s late. Or early.”

“I’ll be quick,” he said. “Don’t watch, if you don’t want to.”

She stepped away, far enough into the darkness that he couldn’t see her anymore. He held the flashlight in his teeth and stretched up tall and jammed the tongue of the wrecking bar through the padlock’s hoop. Countedone two and onthree he jerked down with all his strength.

No result.

Working way above his head was reducing his leverage. He got his toes on the ledge where the box was reinforced at the bottom and grabbed the vertical bolt and hauled himself up to where he could tackle the problem face-to-face. He got the wrecking bar back in place and tried again.One, two, jerk.

No result.

Case-hardened steel, cold rolled, thick and heavy. A fine padlock. He wished he had bought a three-foot bar. Or a six-foot pry bar. He thought about finding some chain and hooking a Tahoe up to it. The keys were probably in. But the chain would break before the padlock. He mused on it and let the frustration build. Then he jammed the wrecking bar home for a third try.One. Two. Onthree he jerked downward with all the force in his frame and jumped off his ledge so that his whole bodyweight reinforced the blow. A two-fisted punch, backed up by two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass.

The padlock broke.

He ended up sprawled in the dirt. Curved fragments of metal hit him in the head and the shoulder. The wrecking bar clanged off the ledge and caught him in the foot. He didn’t care. He climbed back up and broke the tag and smacked the levers out of their slots and opened the doors. Metal squealed. He lit up the flashlight and took a look inside.

Cars.

The restlessness of a long sea voyage had shifted them neatly to the right side of the container. There were four of them, two piled on two, longitudinally. Strange makes, strange models. Dusty, sandblasted, pastel colors.

They were grievously damaged. They were opened like cans, ripped, peeled, smashed, twisted. They had holes through their sheet metal the size of telephone poles.

They had pale rectangular license plates covered with neat Arabic numbers. Off-white backgrounds, delicate backward hooks and curls, black diamond-shaped dots.

Reacher turned in the doorway and called into the darkness, “No Humvees.” He heard light footsteps and Vaughan appeared in the gloom. He leaned down and took her hand and pulled her up. She stood with him and followed the flashlight beam as he played it around.

“From Iraq?” she asked.

He nodded. “Civilian vehicles.”

“Suicide bombers?” she asked.

“They’d be blown up worse than this. There wouldn’t be anything left at all.”

“Insurgents, then,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t stop at the roadblocks.”

“Why bring them here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Roadblocks are defended with machine guns. These things were hit by something else entirely. Just look at the damage.”

“What did it?”

“Ca

“Ground or air?”

“Ground, I think. The trajectories look like they were pretty flat.”

“Artillery versus sedans?” Vaughan said. “That’s kind of extreme.”

“You bet it is,” Reacher said. “Exactly what the hell is going on over there?”

They closed the container and Reacher scratched around in the sand with the flashlight until he found the shattered padlock. He threw the separate pieces far into the distance. Then they hiked the quarter-mile back to the oil drum pyramid and scaled the wall in the opposite direction. Out, not in. It was just as difficult. The construction was perfectly symmetrical. But they got over. They climbed down and stepped off onto the Crown Vic’s hood and slid back to solid ground. Reacher folded the ladder and packed it in the rear seat. Vaughan put the captured Kearny Chemical file in the trunk, under the mat.

She asked, “Can we take the long way home? I don’t want to go through Despair again.”

Reacher said, “We’re not going home.”

56

They found Despair’s old road and followed it west to the truck route. They turned their headlights on a mile later. Four miles after that they passed the MP base, close to four o’clock in the morning. There were two guys in the guard shack. The orange nightlight lit their faces from below. Vaughan didn’t slow but Reacher waved anyway. The two guys didn’t wave back.

Vaughan asked, “Where to?”

“Where the old road forks. We’re going to pull over there.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to watch the traffic. I’m working on a theory.”

“What theory?”

“I can’t tell you. I might be wrong, and then you wouldn’t respect me anymore. And I like it better when a woman respects me in the morning.”

Thirty minutes later Vaughan bumped down off the new blacktop and U-turned in the mouth of the old road and backed up on the shoulder. When the sun came up they would have a view a mile both ways. They would be far from inconspicuous, but also far from suspicious. Crown Vics were parked on strategic bends all over America, all day every day.

They cracked their windows to let some air in and reclined their seats and went to sleep. Two hours, Reacher figured, before there would be anything to see.

Reacher woke up when the first rays of the morning sun hit the left-hand corner of the windshield. Vaughan stayed asleep. She was small enough to have turned in her seat. Her cheek was pressed against the mouse fur. Her knees were up and her hands were pressed together between them. She looked peaceful.

The first truck to pass them by was heading east toward Despair. It was a flat-bed semi with Nevada plates on both ends. It was loaded with a tangle of rusted-out junk. Washing machines, tumble dryers, bicycle frames, bent rebar, road signposts all folded and looped out of shape by accidents. The truck thundered by with its exhaust cackling on the overrun as it coasted through the bend. Then it was gone, in a long tail of battered air and dancing dust.

Ten minutes later a second truck blew by, an identical flat-bed doing sixty, from Montana, heaped with wrecked cars. Its tires whined loud and Vaughan woke up and glanced ahead at it and asked, “How’s your theory doing?”