Nothing to Lose

place to ourselves.”
    They passed the MP post thirty minutes later. There were still four guys in the guard shack. They were dressed in rain capes. Their orange nightlight was on. It made a thousand dull jewels from the raindrops on the windows.
    Vaughan asked, “Will Thurman fly in this weather?”
    Reacher said, “He doesn’t need to. They weren’t working today.”
    They drove on. Up ahead they saw a horizontal sliver of blue light. The plant, lit up. Much smaller than before. Like it had moved ten miles south, toward the horizon. But as they got closer they saw that it hadn’t moved. The glow was smaller because only the farthest quarter was illuminated. The secret compound.
    Vaughan said, “Well, they’re working now.”
    “Good,” Reacher said. “Maybe they left the gates open.”
    They hadn’t. The personnel gate and the main vehicle gate were both closed. The bulk of the plant was dark. Nearly a mile beyond it the secret compound was bright and distant and tempting.
    Vaughan said, “Are you sure about this?”
    Reacher said, “Absolutely.”
    “OK, where?”
    “Same place as before.”
    The Tahoes’ beaten ruts were soft and full of water. The little Chevy spun its wheels and fishtailed and clawed its way forward. Vaughan found the right place. Reacher said, “Back it in.” The wheels spun and the truck bumped up out of the ruts and Vaughan stopped it with its tailgate well under the curve of the metal cylinder, which put its rear window about where the base of the Crown Vic’s windshield had been.
    “Good luck,” she said. “And be careful.”
    “Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “My biggest risk will be pneumonia.”
    He got out into the rain and was soaked to the skin even before he got his stuff out of the load bed. He knelt in the mud beside the truck and adjusted the ladder to the relaxed L-shape that had worked before. He put the flashlight in one pocket and hooked the crook of the wrecking bar in the other. Then he lifted the ladder vertically into the back of the pick-up and jammed its feet into the right angle between the load bed floor and the back wall of the cab. He let it fall forward and the short leg of the L came down flat on top of the cylinder, aluminum against steel, a strange harmonic clonk that sounded twice, once immediately and then once again whole seconds later, as if the impact had raced all around the miles of hollow wall and come back stronger.
    Reacher climbed into the load bed. Rain lashed the metal and bounced up to his knees. It drummed on the steel cylinder above his head and sheeted down off the bulge of its maximum curvature like a thin waterfall. Reacher stepped sideways and up and started climbing. Rain hammered his back. Gravity pulled the wrecking bar vertical and it hit every tread on the ladder. Steel against aluminum against steel. The harmonics came back, a weird metallic keening modulated by the thrash of the rain. He made it over the angle of the L and stopped. The cylinder was covered in shiny paint and the paint was slick with running water. Maneuvering had been hard before. Now it was going to be very difficult.
    He fumbled the flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on. He held it between his teeth and watched the water and picked the spot where half of it was sluicing one way and half the other. The geometric dead-center of the cylinder. The continental divide. He lined up with it and eased off the ladder and sat down. An uneasy feeling. Wet cotton on wet paint. Insecure. No friction. Water was dripping off him and threatening to float him away like an aquaplaning tire.
    He sat still for a long moment. He needed to twist from the waist and lift the ladder and reverse it. But he couldn’t move. The slightest turn would unstick him. Newton’s Law of Motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If he twisted his upper body to the left, the torque would spin his lower body to the right, and he would slide right off the cylinder. An effective design, derived from prison research.
    Fourteen feet to the ground. He could survive a controlled fall, if he didn’t land on a tangle of jagged scrap. But without the ladder on the inside it wasn’t clear how he would ever get out again.
    Perhaps the gates had simpler switches on the inside. No combination locks.
    Perhaps he could improvise a ladder out of scrap metal. Perhaps he could learn to weld, and build one.
    Or perhaps not.
    He thought: I’ll worry about all that