17 A Wanted Man

little would have been heard beyond the second door. If anything at all. The door was designed to be effective against a hundred-megaton atom bomb. The pop of a single nine-millimetre round and the sound of a car crash would be nothing to it.
    He forced open his distorted door and climbed out of the wreckage. He stepped around to what was left of the hood. The second guy was about cut in half. Bleeding badly from every hole he had. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned. Foreign, for sure.
But we all bleed the same colour red
. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of his misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price.
    The Colt sub-machine guns were all tangled in the passenger footwell, thrown there by the crash. Reacher lined them up straight and hung one on his left shoulder, and one on his right. He swapped out the Glock’s two-gone magazine for the fresh one he had taken from Sorenson’s belt. Two rounds can make a difference.
    Then he walked the rest of the tunnel and pushed the big red button.

SEVENTY-TWO
    REACHER HEARD A whine like a starter motor, and a cough, and then two huge truck engines burst into life and the second door started to open. Up close and on foot it was a different experience. The truck engines were as big and as loud as anything they put on a Mack or a Peterbilt. The doors were huge and thick, like buildings all their own.
    And up close and on foot they seemed to move faster. Or maybe that was an illusion. Which would be understandable. Because the gap was going to be man-sized a long time before it was vehicle-sized. Everything was relative. Ten more seconds and the gap would be big enough to step out on stage.
    The big diesels dug in, and the gap grew two feet wide.
    Then two and a half.
    Reacher raised the Glock.
    He stepped through the gap.
    No one there.
    Reacher was in an empty garage. The space was maybe forty feet by forty. It had a sad old pick-up truck in one corner, grey primer, down at the front on a flat tyre, but that was it in terms of vehicle content. The rest was all empty space and oil stains. All the way to the back wall, which was a recent installation in plywood. The side walls and the ceiling were the original concrete. And in fact the side walls and the ceiling were all more or less the same thing. Like a tunnel, continuing on from the entrance tunnel, forty feet wide and probably four hundred feet long, but now interrupted by the new partition.
    There were three ways out of the garage, not counting the door Reacher had just come in through, which would be a fourth. There was a new door dead ahead in the plywood partition, and there was an original door in each of the side walls. In those two original spots the tunnel’s vaulted curve was straightened out by a door frame cast so thick and so deep it was almost a tunnel in itself. Reacher pictured the complexity of the lumber formwork, and the anxious DoD engineers inspecting it, and the immense stress it was under until the mass of concrete had set.
    The original door on the right was taped over.
    It had a sheet of heavy see-through plastic laid over it, fixed at the edges with what looked like a whole roll of duct tape.
    Purpose unknown.
    But Reacher’s motto was
if in doubt, turn left
, so he went the other way. Through the other original door, in the left-hand side wall. The door itself was a stout old item faced in some kind of faded laminate. Probably a real big deal fifty years ago. Some kind of a new wonder material. The handle was a plain steel affair, but thick and solid. Probably cost a thousand dollars all on its own.
    Reacher turned the thick steel handle and pushed the door and stepped into a square room made from two old walls and two new. Some kind of a crew room. Comfortable chairs, low to the ground. A man in one of the chairs. Not McQueen. He started to get up. He went back down easily enough. Centre mass, not a head shot. Safer. More to aim at. Instantaneous brain death not required. Not in that situation. The guy’s finger was not on a launch button.
    The crew room had a second door, and Reacher kept the Glock hard on it until he was sure no one was coming to the rescue. Then he moved on, through that second door, into a long narrow internal hallway that ran away from him to the right, four hundred feet or more. He was beginning to see the layout. The building inside was three