Nothing to Lose (28 page)

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. Counted
one two
and on
three
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.
On
three
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?”

“Cannon fire, maybe. Some kind of big shells. Or wire-guided missiles.”

“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?”

Reacher said, “Nothing to support it yet. But also nothing to disprove it.”

“Good morning.”

“To you, too.”

“Sleep long?”

“Long enough.”

The next truck was also heading east, an ugly ten-wheel army vehicle with two guys in the cab and a green box on the back, a standardized NATO payload hauler built in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and about as pretty as an old pair of dungarees. It wasn’t small, but it was smaller than the preceding semis. And it was slower. It barreled through the curve at about fifty miles an hour and left less of a turbulent wake.

“Resupply,” Reacher said. “For the MP base. Beans, bullets, and bandages, probably from Carson.”

“Does that help?”

“It helps the MPs. The beans anyway. I don’t suppose they’re using many bullets or bandages.”

“I meant, does it help with your theory?”

“No.”

Next up was a semi coming west, out of Despair. The bed was loaded with steel bars. A dense, heavy load. The tractor unit’s engine was roaring. The exhaust note was a deep bellow and black smoke was pouring from the stack.

Vaughan said, “One of the four we saw last night.”

Reacher nodded. “The other three will be right behind it. The business day has started.”

“By now they know we broke into that container.”

“They know somebody did.”

“What will they do about it?”

“Nothing.”

The second of the outgoing semis appeared on the horizon. Then the third. Before the fourth showed up another incoming truck blew by. A container truck. A blue China Lines container on it. Heavy, by the way the tires stressed and whined.

New Jersey plates.

Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. The truck disappeared in the morning haze and the fourth outgoing load passed it. Then the dust settled and the world went quiet again. Vaughan arched her back and stretched, perfectly straight from her heels to her shoulders.

“I feel good,” she said.

“You deserve to.”

“I needed you to know about David.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Reacher said. He was turned in his seat, watching the western horizon a mile away. He could see a small shape, wobbling in the haze. A truck, far away. Small, because of the distance. Square, and rigid. A box truck, tan-colored.

He said, “Pay attention now.”

The truck took a minute to cover the mile and then it roared past. Two axles, plain, boxy. Tan paint. No logo on it. No writing of any kind.

It had Canadian plates, from Ontario.

“Prediction,” Reacher said. “We’re going to see that truck heading out again within about ninety minutes.”

“Why wouldn’t we? It’ll unload and go home.”

“Unload what?”

“Whatever is in it.”

“Which would be what?”

“Scrap metal.”

“From where?”

“Ontario’s biggest city is Toronto,” Vaughan said. “So from Toronto, according to the law of averages.”

Reacher nodded. “Route 401 in Canada, I-94 around Detroit, I-75 out of Toledo, I-70 all the way over here. That’s a long distance.”

“Relatively.”

“Especially considering that Canada probably has steel mills all its own. I know for sure they’re thick on the ground around Detroit and all over Indiana, which is practically next door. So why haul ass all the way out here?”

“Because Thurman’s place is a specialist operation. You said so yourself.”

“Canada’s army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.”

Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”

Reacher said, “Canada isn’t fighting in Iraq. Canadians had more sense.”

“So what was in that truck?”

“My guess is nothing at all.”

Plenty more trucks passed by in both directions, but they were all uninteresting. Semi trailers from Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Washington State, and California, loaded with crushed cars and bales of crushed steel and rusted industrial hulks that might once have been boilers or locomotives or parts of ships. Reacher looked at them as they passed and then looked away. He kept his focus on the eastern horizon and the clock in his head. Vaughan got out and brought the captured file from under the mat in the trunk. She took the papers out of the cardboard cradle and turned them over and squared them on her knee. Licked her thumb and started with the oldest page first. It was dated a little less than seven years previously. It was a purchase order for five thousand gallons of trichloroethylene, to be delivered prepaid by Kearny Chemical to Thurman Metals. The second-oldest page was identical. As was the third. The fourth fell into the following calendar year.

Vaughan said, “Fifteen thousand gallons in the first year. Is that a lot?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “We’ll have to let the state lab be the judge.”

The second year of orders came out the same. Fifteen thousand gallons. Then the third year jumped way up, to five separate orders for a total of twenty-five thousand gallons. A refill every seventy-some days. An increase in consumption of close to sixty-seven percent.

Vaughan said, “The start of major combat operations. The first wrecks.”

The fourth year held steady at twenty-five thousand gallons.

The fifth year matched it exactly.

“David’s year,” Vaughan said. “His Humvee was rinsed with some of those gallons. What was left of it.”

The sixth year she looked at jumped again. Total of six orders. Total of thirty thousand gallons. Iraq, getting worse. A twenty percent increase. And the current year looked set to exceed even that. There were already six orders in, and the year still had a whole quarter to run. Then Vaughan paused and looked at the six pages again, one by one, side by side, and she said, “No, one of these is different.”

Reacher asked, “Different how?”

“One of the orders isn’t for trichloroethylene. And it isn’t in gallons. It’s in tons, for something called trinitrotoluene. Thurman bought twenty tons of it.”

“When?”

“Three months ago. Maybe they misfiled it.”

“From Kearny?”

“Yes.”

“Then it isn’t misfiled.”

“Maybe it’s another kind of degreaser.”

“It isn’t.”

“You heard of it?”

“Everyone has heard of it. It was invented in 1863 in Germany, for use as a yellow dye.”

“I never heard of it,” Vaughan said. “I don’t like yellow.”

“A few years later they realized it decomposes in an exothermic manner.”

“What does that mean?”

“It explodes.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“Trichloroethylene is called TCE,” Reacher said. “Trinitrotoluene is called TNT.”

“I’ve heard of
that.
”

“Everyone has heard of it.”

“Thurman bought twenty tons of dynamite? Why?”

“Dynamite is different. It’s nitroglycerine soaked into wood pulp and molded into cylinders wrapped in paper. TNT is a specific chemical compound. A yellow solid. Much more stable. Therefore much more useful.”

“OK, but why did he buy it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he busts things up with it. It melts easily, and pours. That’s how they get it into shell casings and bombs and shaped charges. Maybe he uses it like a liquid and forces it between seams he can’t cut. He was boasting to me about his advanced techniques.”

“I never heard any explosions.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re twenty miles from the plant. And maybe they’re small and controlled.”

“Is it a solvent, when it’s liquid?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a reagent, that’s all I know. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Some complicated formula, lots of sixes and threes and twos.”

Vaughan riffled back through the pages she had already examined.

“Whatever, he never bought any before,” she said. “It’s something new.”

Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield. Saw the tan box truck heading back toward them. It was less than a mile away. He took the red bubble light off the dash and held it in his hand.

“Stand by,” he said. “We’re going to stop that truck.”

“We can’t,” Vaughan said. “We don’t have jurisdiction here.”

“The driver doesn’t know that. He’s Canadian.”