53
Vaughan drove. She insisted on it. It was her watch commander’s car. Reacher was happy to let her. She was a better driver than him. Much better. Her panic one-eighty had impressed him. Backward to forward, at full speed. He doubted if he could have done it. He figured if he had been driving the mob would have caught them and torn them apart.
“Won’t they be there again?” Vaughan asked.
“Possible,” he said. “But I doubt it. It’s late, on the second night. And I told Thurman I wouldn’t be back. I don’t think it will be like yesterday.”
“Why would Thurman believe you?”
“He’s religious. He’s accustomed to believing things that comfort him.”
“We should have planned to take the long way around.”
“I’m glad we didn’t. It would have taken four hours. It wouldn’t have left time for dinner.”
She smiled and they took off, north to First Street, west toward Despair. There was thick cloud in the sky. No moon. No stars. Pitch black. Perfect. They thumped over the line and a mile before the top of the rise Reacher said, “It’s time to go stealthy. Turn all the lights off.”
Vaughan clicked the headlights off and the world went dark and she braked hard.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
“Use the video camera,” he said. “Use the night vision.”
“What?”
“Like a video game,” he said. “Watch the computer screen, not the windshield.”
“Will that work?”
“It’s how tank drivers do it.”
She tapped keys and the laptop screen lit up and then stabilized into a pale green picture of the landscape ahead. Green scrub on either side, vivid boulders, a bright ribbon of road spearing into the distance. She took her foot off the brake and crawled forward, her head turned, staring at the thermal image, not the reality. At first she steered uncertainly, her hand-eye coordination disrupted. She drifted left and right and overcorrected. Then she settled in and got the hang of the new technique. She did a quarter-mile perfectly straight, and then she sped up and did the next quarter a little faster, somewhere between twenty and thirty.
“It’s killing me not to glance ahead,” she said. “It’s so automatic.”
“This is good,” Reacher said. “Stay slow.” He figured that at twenty or thirty there would be almost no engine noise. Just a low purr, and a soft burble from the pipes. There would be surface noise at any speed, from the tires on the grit, but that would get better closer to town. He leaned left and put his head on her shoulder and watched the screen. The landscape reeled itself in, silent and green and ghostly. The camera had no human reactions. It was just a dumb unblinking eye. It didn’t glance left or right or up or down or change focus. They came over the rise and the screen filled with blank cold sky for a second and then the nose of the car dipped down again and they saw the next nine miles laid out in front of them. Green scrub, scattered rocks glowing lighter, the ribbon of road, a tiny flare of heat on the horizon where the embers of the police station were still warm.
Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield a couple of times, but without headlights there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Which meant that anyone waiting far ahead in the distance wasn’t seeing anything either. Not yet anyway. He recalled walking back to Hope, stepping over the line, not seeing Vaughan’s cruiser at all. And that was a newer car, shinier, with white doors and polished reflectors in the light bar on the roof. He hadn’t seen it. But she had seen him.
I saw you half a mile away,
she had said.
A little green speck.
He had seen himself on the screen afterward, a luminous sliver in the dark, getting bigger, coming closer.
Very fancy,
he had said.
Homeland Security money,
she had replied.
Got to spend it on something.
He stared at the screen, watching for little green specks. The car prowled onward, slow and steady, like a black submarine loose in deep water. Two miles. Four. Still nothing ahead. Six miles. Eight. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, except the idling motor and the squelching tires and Vaughan’s tense breathing as she gripped the wheel and squinted sideways at the laptop screen.
“We must be getting close,” she whispered.
He nodded, on her shoulder. The screen showed buildings maybe a mile ahead. The gas station hut, slightly warmer than its surroundings. The dry goods store, with daytime heat trapped in its brick walls. A background glow from the downtown blocks. A pale blur in the air a little ways south and west, above where the police station had been.
No little green specks.
He said, “This is where they were yesterday.”
She said, “So where are they now?”
She slowed a little and drifted onward. The screen held steady. Geography and architecture, nothing more. Nothing moving.
“Human nature,” Reacher said. “They got all pumped up yesterday and thought they’d gotten rid of us. They don’t have the stamina to do it all again.”
“There could be one or two out and about.”
“Possible.”
“They’ll call ahead and warn the plant.”
“That’s OK,” Reacher said. “We’re not going to the plant. Not yet anyway.”
They drifted on, slow and dark and silent. The vacant lot and the abandoned motor court barely showed up on the screen. Thermally they were just parts of the landscape. The gas station and the household goods store shone brighter. Beyond them the other blocks glowed mid-green. There were window-sized patches of brighter color, and heat was leaking from roofs with imperfect insulation. But there were no pinpoints of light. No little green specks. No crowds, no small groups of shuffling people, no lone sentries.
Not dead ahead anyway.
The camera’s fixed angle was useless against the cross-streets. It showed their mouths to a depth of about five feet. That was all. Reacher stared sideways into the darkness as they rolled past each opening. Saw nothing. No flashlights, no match flares, no lighter sparks, no cigarette coals glowing red. The tire noise had dropped away to almost nothing. Main Street was worn down to the tar. No more pebbles. Vaughan was holding her breath. Her foot was feather light on the pedal. The car rolled onward, a little faster than walking, a lot slower than running.
Two green specks stepped out ahead.
They were maybe a quarter of a mile away, at the west end of Main Street. Two figures, emerging from a cross-street. A foot patrol. Vaughan braked gently and came to a stop, halfway through town. Six blocks behind her, six ahead.
“Can they see us?” she whispered.
“I think they’re facing away,” Reacher said.
“Suppose they’re not?”
“They can’t see us.”
“There are probably more behind us.”
Reacher turned and stared through the rear window. Saw nothing. Just pitch black night. He said, “We can’t see them, they can’t see us. Laws of physics.”
The screen lit up with a white flare. Cone-shaped. Moving. Sweeping.
“Flashlight,” Reacher said.
“They’ll see us.”
“We’re too far away. And I think they’re shining it west.”
Then they weren’t. The screen showed the beam turning through a complete circle, flat and level, like a lighthouse. Its heat burned the screen dead white as it passed. Its light lit up the night mist like fog.
Vaughan asked, “Did they see us?”
Reacher watched the screen. Thought about the reflectors in the Crown Vic’s headlights. Polished metal, like cats’ eyes. He said, “Whoever they are, they’re not moving. I don’t think they have enough candlepower.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait.”
They waited two minutes, then three, then five. The idling engine whispered. The flashlight beam snapped off. The image on the laptop screen collapsed back to two narrow vertical specks, distant, green, barely moving. There was nothing to see through the rear window. Just empty darkness.
Vaughan said, “We can’t stay here.”
Reacher said, “We have to.”
The green specks moved, from the center of the screen to the left-hand edge. Slow, blurred, a ghost trail of luminescence following behind them. Then they disappeared, into a cross-street. The screen stabilized. Geography, and architecture.
“Foot patrol,” Reacher said. “Heading downtown. Maybe worried about fires.”
“Fires?” Vaughan said.
“Their police station burned down last night.”
“Did you have something to do with that?”
“Everything,” Reacher said.
“You’re a maniac.”
“Their problem. They’re messing with the wrong guy. We should get going.”
“Now?”
“Let’s get past them while their backs are turned.”
Vaughan feathered the gas and the car rolled forward. One block. Two. The screen held steady. Geography, and architecture. Nothing more. The tires were quiet on the battered surface.
“Faster,” Reacher said.
Vaughan sped up. Twenty miles an hour. Thirty. At forty the car set up a generalized
whoosh
from the engine and the exhaust and the tires and the air. It seemed painfully loud. But it generated no reaction. Reacher stared left and right into the downtown streets and saw nothing at all. Just black voids. Vaughan gripped the wheel and held her breath and stared at the laptop screen and ten seconds later they were through the town and in open country on the other side.
Four minutes after that, they were approaching the metal plant.
54
The thermal image showed the sky above the plant to be lurid with heat. It was coming off the dormant furnaces and crucibles in waves as big as solar flares. The metal wall was warm. It showed up as a continuous horizontal band of green. It was much brighter at the southern end. Much hotter around the secret compound. It glowed like crazy on the laptop screen.
“Some junkyard,” Reacher said.
“They’ve been working hard in there,” Vaughan said. “Unfortunately.”
The acres of parking seemed to be all empty. The personnel gate seemed to be closed. Reacher didn’t look at it directly. He was getting better information below the visible spectrum, down in the infrared.
Vaughan said, “No sentries?”
Reacher said, “They trust the wall. As they should. It’s a great wall.”
They drove on, slow and dark and silent, past the lot, past the north end of the plant, onto the truck route. Fifty yards later, they stopped. The Tahoes’ beaten tracks showed up on the screen, almost imperceptibly lighter than the surrounding scrub. Compacted dirt, no microscopic air holes, therefore no ventilation, therefore slightly slower to cool at the end of the day. Reacher pointed and Vaughan turned the wheel and bumped down off the blacktop. She stared at the screen and got lined up with the ruts. The car bucked and bounced across the uneven ground. She followed the giant figure 8. The camera’s dumb eye showed nothing ahead except gray-green desert. Then it picked up the fieldstone wall. The residential compound. The stones had trapped some daytime heat. The wall showed up as a low speckled band, like a snake, fifty yards to the right, low and fluid and infinitely long.
Vaughan circled the compound in the Tahoes’ tracks, almost all the way around, to a point Reacher judged to be directly behind the airplane barn. They parked and shut down and Reacher switched the interior light to the off position and they opened their doors and climbed out. It was pitch dark. The air felt fresh and cold. The clock in his head showed one-thirty in the morning.
Perfect.
They walked fifty yards to the fieldstone wall. They climbed it easily and dropped down on the other side. The back of the airplane barn was directly ahead of them, huge, looming, darker than the sky. They headed straight for it, past cypress trees and over stony ground. The barn was standing dark and empty. The plane was out. Reacher listened hard. Heard nothing. He signaled and Vaughan came up alongside him.
“Step one,” he whispered. “We just verified that when they work by day, the plane flies by night.”
Vaughan asked, “What’s step two?”
“We verify whether they’re bringing stuff in, or taking stuff out, or both.”
“By watching?”
“You bet.”
“How long have we got?”
“About half an hour.”
They stepped into the barn. It was vast and pitch dark. It smelled of oil and gasoline and wood treated with creosote. The floor was beaten dirt. Most of the space was completely empty, ready to receive the returning plane. They felt their way around the walls. Vaughan risked a peek with the flashlight. She clamped its head in her palm and reduced its light to a dull red glow. There were shelves on the walls, loaded with gas cans and quarts of oil and small components boxed up in cardboard. Oil filters, maybe, and air filters. Service items. In the center of the back wall was a horizontal drum wrapped with thin steel cable. The drum was set in a complex floor-mounted bracket and had an electric motor bolted to its axle. A winch. To its right the walls were lined with more shelves. There were spare tires. More components. The whole place felt halfway between tidy and chaotic. It was a workspace, nothing more. There were no obvious hiding places. And there were arc lights faintly visible, high above them in the rafters. If they were turned on, the space would be as bright as day.
Vaughan turned off the flashlight.
“No good,” she said.
Reacher nodded in the dark. Led the way back out of the barn, to the taxiway, which was a broad strip of dirt beaten and graded the same as the runway. Either side of it were patches of cultivated garden a hundred yards square, spiky silver bushes and tall slender trees set in gravel. Xeriscaping, near enough to the barn for a reasonable view, far enough away that light spill would fall short. Reacher pointed and whispered, “We’ll take one each. Hunker down and don’t move until I call you. The runway lights will come on behind you, but don’t worry about them. They’re set to shine flat, north and south.”
She nodded and he went left and she went right. She was invisible in the gloom after three paces. He crawled his way to the garden’s center and lay down on his front with bushes either side of him and a tree towering over him. Ahead at an angle he had a good oblique view into the barn. He guessed Vaughan would have a complementary view from the other direction. Together they had the whole thing covered. He pressed himself into the ground and waited.
He heard the plane at five after two in the morning. The single engine, distant, lonely, far away, feathering and blipping. He pictured the landing light as he had seen it before, hanging in the sky, hopping a little, heading down. The sound grew closer but quieter, as Thurman found his glide path and backed off the power. The runway lights came on. They were brighter than Reacher had expected. He felt suddenly vulnerable. He could see his own shadow ahead of him, tangled up with the shadows of the leaves all around him. He craned his neck and looked for Vaughan. Couldn’t see her. The engine noise grew louder. Then the hangar lights came on. They were very bright. They threw a hard edge of shadow from the barn’s roof that came within six feet of him. He looked ahead and saw the giant from the metal plant standing in the barn, his hand on a light switch, a huge shadow thrown out beyond him, almost close enough for Reacher to touch. Nine hundred yards away to his right the plane’s engine blipped and sputtered and he heard a rush of air and felt a tiny thump through the ground as the wheels touched down. The engine noise dropped to a rough idle as the plane coasted and then it ramped back up to a roar as the plane taxied. Reacher heard it coming in behind him, unbearably loud. The ground shook and trembled. The plane came in between the two garden areas and the noise thundered and the propeller wash blasted dust off the ground. It slowed and darted right on its unstable wheelbase and the engine revved hard and it turned a tight circle and came to rest in front of its barn, facing outward. It rocked and shuddered for a second and then the engine shut down and the exhaust popped twice and the propeller jerked to a stop.
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 planned to. When he was sure all was quiet he crawled out from the planted area and crossed the taxiway and called softly to Vaughan. He couldn’t see her. She was well concealed. She came up from the darkness at his feet and hugged him briefly. They walked to the darkened barn and ducked under the Piper’s wing and regrouped next to the fuselage.
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 dinner somewhere close by in Colorado itself. He said, “We’re going to have to ask him.”
“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.