Nothing to Lose

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