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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. Le
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 Le
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.
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More than a hundred yards away, Lamaison answered the call. Reacher kept his thumb over the phone’s bright LCD window. He wanted to preserve his night vision and he didn’t want the searchers to look up and see a tiny disembodied face bathed in a distant blue glow. He spoke as normally as he dared.
“We’re stuck on the 210,” he said. “There’s a stalled car up ahead.”
“Bullshit,” Lamaison said. “You’re right here in the neighborhood. You’ve been throwing gasoline bombs over my fence.” His voice was loud and angry. Over the cellular circuits it came through edgy and penetrating. A little grating and distorted. Reacher slipped the pad of his index finger over the earpiece perforations and glanced up at the searchers. They were a hundred and twenty yards away. They hadn’t reacted.
“What bombs?” he said, into the phone.
“You heard me.”
“We’re on the freeway. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit, Reacher. You’re right here. You started a fire. But it was pathetic. It took them all of five minutes to put it out. I’m sure you saw them do it.”
Eight minutes, actually, Reacher thought. Give me some damn credit. But he said nothing. Just watched his pair of searchers. They were a hundred and ten yards away.
“The deal is off,” Lamaison said.
“Wait,” Reacher said. “I’m still thinking about the deal. But I’m not an idiot. I want a proof of life. You could have shot them already.”
“They’re still alive.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“I’ll call you when we’re through this traffic. You can bring them to the gate.”
“No way. They stay where they are.”
“Then we can’t do business.”
Lamaison said, “I’ll ask them a question for you.”
The searchers were ninety yards away.
“What question?” Reacher said.
“Think of a question only they can answer. We’ll ask them and call you back.”
“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said. “I don’t answer the phone when I’m driving.”
“You’re not driving. What’s the question?”
Reacher said, “Ask them who they were with before they joined the 110th MP.” Then he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
The searchers were about seventy yards away. Reacher crawled another twenty yards inward, slow and cautious, parallel with the fence. The searchers managed another ten yards while he was doing it. Now they were forty yards away, coming on slowly, five feet apart, scuffing the grass, peering outward at the fence, checking for breaches.
Reacher saw light at the front of the main building. The door, opening. A tall shape stepped out. Parker, probably. He closed the door behind him and hustled around the near gable wall and headed for the distant shack thirty yards away. He unlocked the door and went in and less than a minute later he came back out and locked up again.
The prison, Reacher thought. Thank you.
The searchers were twenty yards away. Eighteen and a quarter meters, sixty feet, 720 inches, one-point-one-three percent of a mile. Reacher shuffled ahead a little and closed the gap. The searchers stumbled on. Now they were ten yards ahead, on a diagonal, maybe eight yards to Reacher’s left.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He hauled it out and cupped it in his hand. The caller ID said Dixon, which meant Lamaison. The answers to his question, recently relayed by Parker.
I said I’d call you, Reacher thought. Can’t talk now.
He jammed the phone back in his pocket and waited. The searchers were almost dead level with him, eight yards to his left. They moved on. Reacher squirmed around, a silent half-circle on the ground. The searchers walked on. Reacher completed the circle. Now he was behind them. He got silently to his feet. Took short quiet strides, stepping high to keep his soles from brushing the grass with telltale rustles. He fell in behind the two guys, ten feet back, then eight, then six, centered exactly between them. They were a decent size. Maybe six-two, two-ten, pale and meaty. Blue suits, white shirts, crew cuts. Broad shoulders, thick necks.
He hit the first guy with a massive straight right, dead-center in the back of the neck, two hundred and fifty pounds and days of rage behind the blow. The guy’s neck snapped forward and his skull snapped back and bounced straight off Reacher’s fist and smashed forward again until his chin smacked his chest. Whiplash. Like a crash test dummy rear-ended by a speeding truck. The guy went straight down in a heap and his buddy turned toward him in shock and Reacher danced through a short shuffle step and headbutted him full in the face. He knew it was a great one by the sound alone. Bone, gristle, muscle, flesh, the unmistakable crunch of serious damage. The guy stayed vertical but unconscious for a second and then went down flat.