17 A Wanted Man

right hand. McQueen said, ‘That Colt on your shoulder would be better. These corridors are pretty long.’
    Reacher said, ‘It only has five rounds left in it. I’m planning to use it as a club.’ He started on McQueen’s left wrist, plucking, cutting, fibres popping under the strain. McQueen said, ‘You could reload it.’
    Reacher said, ‘No time. We don’t want to be caught with our pants down.’
    ‘How many in your Glock?’
    ‘Thirteen.’
    ‘Unlucky.’
    ‘True.’ Reacher stopped sawing and swapped out the magazine for the full one he had taken from Bale, in the motel room in Kansas, about a million years ago. Click, click, hand to hand, not a blur like the showboats could do it, but no more than a second and a half. He started sawing again. The voices were still loud in the corridor.
    Reacher said, ‘Do you have an accurate headcount?’
    McQueen said, ‘Twenty-four tonight, not including me.’
    ‘Six left, then.’
    ‘Is that all? Jesus.’
    ‘I’ve been here at least twenty minutes.’
    ‘Who the hell are you?’
    ‘Just a guy, hitching rides.’
    ‘Well, good work, whoever you are.’
    ‘Did you have a private room, when you were here?’
    ‘No, those were for Peter King and the big boss.’
    ‘I thought Peter King was the big boss.’
    ‘No, King was number two.’
    ‘So who’s the big boss?’
    ‘I don’t know. I never met him.’
    ‘Where is he now?’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    The door opened. McQueen fired from his chair. A dark shape fell backward. Reacher stepped across and kicked the door shut again. He said, ‘Five left.’
    McQueen said, ‘How would you do it?’
    ‘If I was them? I’d open every door in the corridor and put a guy in the first five rooms with blue spots. They’d see us before we saw them. We couldn’t go anywhere at all.’
    ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
    ‘Are they smart enough?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ McQueen said. ‘They’re plenty smart in some ways.’
    ‘I’m certainly getting that feeling.’
    ‘How? You know what this is all about?’
    Reacher said, ‘I think I’ve figured most of it out.’
    ‘So you understand we absolutely need to capture this building intact, right?’
    ‘Speak for yourself. All I absolutely need to do is to get to Virginia.’
    ‘What’s in Virginia?’
    ‘Many things. It’s an important state. Twelfth largest in terms of population, and thirteenth in terms of GDP.’
    McQueen’s left hand came free. Reacher gave him the Colt and crouched down and started work on his ankles, from behind.
    The ankle ropes went slower. The tough fibres were doing the work the hardware store guy should have done with his buffing wheel. The key was getting smooth. Not good. So Reacher adapted his technique. He used the last of the burr on the tang to tug up part of the knot, and he used the key from the FBI’s motel in Kansas as a spike to force the knot apart. A different approach, and slower, but it got the job done a small fraction at a time. Five minutes later McQueen was three-quarters free, and five minutes after that he was out of the chair completely. He was trailing bracelets of severed rope from his wrists. He had the Colt sub-machine gun in his left hand and Peter King’s Beretta in his right. Good to go. They were about two hundred feet from the first mechanized door, and three hundred feet from the second. Three hundred feet from the sweet night air. Three hundred feet from safety.
    ‘Ready?’ Reacher said.
    McQueen nodded.
    Reacher opened the door to the corridor.

SEVENTY-NINE
    THE ESCAPE WENT bad immediately. The three hundred feet might as well have been three thousand miles. The five survivors had done the smart thing. All the room doors were standing open, along the whole length of the corridor, to the left and the right. Whichever way Reacher and McQueen went they risked getting fired on from inside as they passed. Or not. It was unpredictable. It was a lottery. Five hostiles, thirty-nine doors, not counting the one they were coming out of. Standard infantry tactics would have been to roll grenades into every room, at an angle, as they approached, or to blast through one plywood wall after another with anti-tank weapons. But they had no grenades, and no anti-tank weapons. They had two handguns and an almost-empty sub-machine gun.
    Problem.
    Reacher said, ‘We need a diversion.’
    McQueen said, ‘What kind?’
    ‘We could set the place on fire.’
    ‘We absolutely cannot do that.