Nothing to Lose

behind him he could see a faint red glow on the horizon. Despair was still on fire. He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked forward and crossed the line again and climbed in next to Vaughan.
    “You smell of cigarettes,” she said.
    “I found one,” he said. “I smoked a half-inch, for old times’ sake.”
    “They give you cancer, too.”
    “I heard that. You believe it?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I do, absolutely.”
    She took off east, at a moderate speed, one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap. He asked her, “How’s your day going?”
    “A gum wrapper blew across the street in front of me. Right there in my headlights. Violation of the anti-littering ordinance. That’s about as exciting as it gets in Hope.”
    “Did you call Denver? About Maria?”
    She nodded.
    “The old man picked her up,” she said. “By the hardware store. He confirmed her name. He knew a lot about her. They talked for half an hour.”
    “Half an hour? How? It’s less than a twenty-minute drive.”
    “He didn’t let her out in Despair. She wanted to go to the MP base.”

    They got to the diner at twenty minutes past midnight. The college-girl waitress was on duty. She smiled when she saw them walk in together, as if some kind of a long-delayed but pleasant inevitability had finally taken place. She looked to be about twenty years old, but she was grinning away like a smug old matchmaker from an ancient village. Reacher felt like there was a secret he wasn’t privy to. He wasn’t sure that Vaughan understood it either.
    They sat opposite each other in the back booth. They didn’t order doughnuts. Reacher ordered coffee and Vaughan ordered juice, a blend of three exotic fruits, none of which Reacher had ever encountered before.
    “You’re very healthy,” he said.
    “I try.”
    “Is your husband in the hospital? With cancer, from smoking?”
    She shook her head.
    “No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

    Their drinks arrived and they sipped them in silence for a moment and then Reacher asked, “Did the old guy know why Maria wanted to go to the MPs?”
    “She didn’t tell him. But it’s a weird destination, isn’t it?”
    “Very,” Reacher said. “It’s an active-service forward operating base. Visitors wouldn’t be permitted. Not even if she knew one of the grunts. Not even if one of the grunts was her brother or her sister.”
    “Combat MPs use women grunts?”
    “Plenty.”
    “So maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she was reporting back on duty, after furlough.”
    “Then why would she have booked two more nights in the motel and left all her stuff there?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe she was just checking something.”
    “She’s too small for a combat MP.”
    “They have a minimum size?”
    “The army always has had, overall. These days, I’m not sure what it is. But even if she squeezed in, they’d put her somewhere else, covertly.”
    “You sure?”
    “No question. Plus she was too quiet and timid. She wasn’t military.”
    “So what did she want from the MPs? And why isn’t she back yet?”
    “Did the old guy actually see her get in?”
    “Sure,” Vaughan said. “He waited, like an old-fashioned gentleman.”
    “Therefore a better question would be, if they let her in, what did they want from her?”
    Vaughan said, “Something to do with espionage.”
    Reacher shook his head. “I was wrong about that. They’re not worried about espionage. They’d have the plant buttoned up, east and west, probably with a presence inside, or at least on the gates.”
    “So why are they there?”
    “They’re guarding the truck route. Which means they’re worried about theft, of something that would need a truck to haul away. Something heavy, too heavy for a regular car.”
    “Something too heavy for a small plane, then.”
    Reacher nodded. “But that plane is involved somehow. This morning I was barging around and therefore they had to shut down the secret operation for a spell, and tonight the plane didn’t fly. I didn’t hear it, and I found it later, right there in its hangar.”
    “You think it only flies when they’ve been working on the military stuff?”
    “I know for sure it didn’t when they hadn’t been, so maybe the obverse is true, too.”
    “Carrying something? In or out?”
    “Maybe both. Like trading.”
    “Secrets?”
    “Maybe.”
    “People? Like Lucy Anderson’s husband?”
    Reacher drained his mug. Shook his head. “I can’t make that work.