Nothing to Lose

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.

55
    The white metal wall was blazing hot in the south and cooler in the north. Vaughan followed it around and stopped halfway along its northern stretch. Then she pulled a tight left and bounced out of the ruts and nosed slowly head-on toward the wall and stopped with her front bumper almost touching it. The front half of the hood was directly below the wall’s horizontal cylinder. The base of the windshield was about five feet down and two feet out from the cylinder’s maximum bulge.
    Reacher got out and dragged the stepladder off the rear bench. He laid it on the ground and unfolded it and adjusted it into an upside-down L-shape. Then he estimated by eye and relaxed the angle a little beyond ninety degrees and locked all the joints. He lifted it high. He jammed the feet in the gutter at the base of the Crown Vic’s windshield, where the hood’s lip overlapped the wipers. He let it fall forward, gently. It hit the wall with a soft metallic noise, aluminum on painted steel. The long leg of the L came to rest almost vertical. The short leg lay on top of the cylinder, almost horizontal.
    “Back up about a foot,” he whispered.
    Vaughan moved the car and the base of the ladder pulled outward to a kinder angle and the top fell forward by a corresponding degree and ended up perfectly flat.
    “I love hardware stores,” Reacher said.
    Vaughan said, “I thought this kind of wall was supposed to be impregnable.”
    “We’re not over it yet.”
    “But we’re close.”
    “Normally they come with guard towers and searchlights, to make sure people don’t bring cars and ladders.”
    Vaughan shut the engine down and jammed the parking brake on tight. The laptop screen turned itself off and they were forced back to the visible spectrum, which didn’t contain anything very visible. Just darkness. Vaughan carried the flashlight and Reacher took the wrecking bar from the trunk. He levered himself up onto the hood and crouched under the swell of the cylinder. He stepped forward to the base of the windshield and turned again and started to climb the ladder. He carried the wrecking bar in his left hand and gripped the upper rungs with his right. The aluminum squirmed against the steel and set up a weird harmonic in the hollows of the wall. He slowed down to quiet the noise and made it to the angle and leaned forward and crawled along the short horizontal leg of the L on