Nothing to Lose (37 page)

72

They abandoned Thurman’s Tahoe next to where Vaughan’s old Chevy was waiting. They transferred between vehicles and bumped through the deserted parking lot and found the road. Three miles later they were in downtown Despair. It was still raining. The streets and the sidewalks were dark and wet and completely deserted. The middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. They threaded through the cross-streets and pulled up outside the hotel. The façade was as blank and gloomy as before. The street door was closed but not locked. Inside the place looked just the same. The empty dining room on the left, the deserted bar on the right, the untended reception desk dead ahead. The register on the desk, the large square leather book. Easy to grab, easy to swivel around, easy to open, easy to read. Reacher put his fingertip under the last registered guests, the couple from California, from seven months previously. He tilted the book, so that Vaughan had a clear view of their names and addresses.

“Call them in,” he said. “And if they’re helping the deserters, do whatever your conscience tells you to.”

“If?”

“I think they might be into something else.”

Vaughan made the call from her cell and they sat in faded armchairs and waited for the call back. Vaughan said, “Gifts are a perfectly plausible explanation. Churches send foreign aid all the time. Volunteers, too. They’re usually good people.”

“No argument from me,” Reacher said. “But my whole life has been about the people that aren’t usual. The exceptions.”

“Why are you so convinced?”

“The welding.”

“Locks can be broken.”

“The container was welded to the trailer. And that’s not how containers get shipped. They get lifted off and put on boats. By cranes. That’s the whole point of containers. The welding suggests they don’t mean for that container to leave the country.”

Vaughan’s phone rang. A three-minute wait. From a cop’s perspective, the upside of all the Homeland Security hoopla. Agencies talked, computers were linked, databases were shared. She answered and listened, four long minutes. Then she thanked her caller and clicked off.

“Can’t rule out the AWOL involvement,” she said.

“Because?” Reacher asked.

“They’re listed as activists. And activists can be into all kinds of things.”

“What kind of activists?”

“Religious conservatives.”

“What kind?”

“They run something called the Church of the Apocalypse in LA.”

“The Apocalypse is a part of the End Times story,” Reacher said.

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher said, “Maybe they came here to recruit Thurman as a brother activist. Maybe they recognized his special potential.”

“They wouldn’t have stayed in this hotel. They’d have been guests in his house.”

“Not the first time. He didn’t know them yet. The second time, maybe. And the third and the fourth, maybe the fifth and the sixth. Depends how hard they had to work to convince him. There’s a four-month gap between their first visit and when he ordered the TNT from Kearny.”

“He said that was a bureaucratic error.”

“Did you believe him?”

Vaughan didn’t answer.

“Four phone calls,” Reacher said. “That’s all it’s going to take.”

They drove west to the edge of town. Three miles away through the rainy darkness they could see the plant’s lights, faint and blue and distant, blurred by the rain on the windshield, a fragmented sepulchral glow way out in the middle of nowhere. Empty space all around it. They parked on a curb facing out of town, level with the last of the buildings. Reacher eased his butt off the seat and took the cell phone he had borrowed out of his pocket. Then he took out the sheet of paper he had taken from the purchasing office. The new cell phone numbers. The paper was wet and soggy and he had to peel apart the folds very carefully.

“Ready?” he asked.

Vaughan said, “I don’t understand.”

He dialed the third number down. Heard ring tone in his ear, twice, four times, six times, eight. Then the call was answered. A muttered greeting, in a voice he recognized. A man’s voice, fairly normal in tone and timbre, but a little dazed, and muffled twice, first by coming from a huge chest cavity, and again by the cellular circuitry.

The big guy, from the plant.

Reacher said, “How are you? Been awake long?”

The guy said, “Go to hell.”

Reacher said, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I’m not sure about the likelihood of things like that. You guys are the theologians, not me.”

No reply.

Reacher asked, “Is your buddy awake, too?”

No reply.

Reacher said, “I’ll call him and see for myself.”

He clicked off and dialed the second number on the list. It rang eight times and the plant foreman answered.

Reacher said, “Sorry, wrong number.”

He clicked off.

Vaughan asked, “What exactly are you doing?”

“How did the insurgents hurt David?”

“With a roadside bomb.”

“Detonated how?”

“Remotely, I assume.”

Reacher nodded. “Probably by radio, from the nearest ridge line. So if Thurman
has
built a bomb, how will he detonate it?”

“The same way.”

“But not from the nearest hill. He’ll probably want a lot more distance than that. He’ll probably want to be out of state somewhere. Maybe at home here in Colorado, or in his damn church. Which would take a very powerful radio. In fact, he’d probably have to build one himself, to be sure of reliability. Which is a lot of work. So my guess is he decided to use one that someone else already built. Someone like Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular.”

“Cell phone?”

Reacher nodded again. “It’s the best way. The phone companies spend a lot of time and money building reliable networks. Look at their commercials. They’re proud of the fact that you can call anywhere from anywhere. Some of them even give you free long distance.”

“And the number is on that list?”

“It would make sense,” Reacher said. “Two things happened at the same time, three months ago. Thurman ordered twenty tons of TNT, and four new cell phones. Sounds like a plan to me. He already had everything else he needed. My guess is he kept one phone for himself, and gave two to his inner circle, so they could have secure communications between themselves, separate from anything else they were doing. And my guess is the fourth phone is buried in the heart of that container, with the ringer wired to a primer circuit. The ringer on a cell phone puts out a decent little voltage. Maybe they fitted a standby battery, and maybe they connected an external antenna. Maybe one of those antennas on the Peterbilt was a cell antenna from Radio Shack, wired back to the trailer.”

“And you’re going to call that number?”

Reacher said, “Soon.”

He dialed the first number on the list. It rang, and then Thurman answered, fast and impatient, like he had been waiting for the call. Reacher asked, “You guys over the wall yet?”

Thurman said, “We’re still here. Why are you calling us?”

“You starting to see a pattern?”

“The last phone was Underwood’s. He’s dead, so he won’t answer. So there’s no point calling it.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“How long are you going to keep us here?”

“Just a minute more,” Reacher said. He clicked off and laid the phone on the Chevy’s dash. Stared out through the windshield.

Vaughan said, “You can’t do this. It would be murder.”

Reacher said, “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Thurman should know that quotation better than anyone. It’s from the Bible. Matthew, chapter twenty-six, verse fifty-two. Slightly paraphrased. Also, they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, chapter eight, verse seven. I’m sick of people who claim to live by the scriptures cherry-picking the parts they find convenient, and ignoring all the rest.”

“You could be completely wrong about him.”

“Then there’s no problem. Gifts don’t explode. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“But you might be right.”

“In which case he shouldn’t have lied to me. He should have confessed. I would have let him take his chance in court.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We’ll never know now.”

“He doesn’t seem worried enough.”

“He’s used to saying things and having people believe him. And he told me he’s not afraid of dying. He told me he’s going to a better place.”

“You’re not a one-man justice department.”

“He’s no better than whoever blew up David’s Humvee. Worse, even. David was a combatant, at least. And out on the open road. Thurman is going to have that thing driven to a city somewhere. With children and old people all around. Thousands of them. And more thousands maybe not quite close enough. He’s going to put thousands more people in your situation.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“And for what?” Reacher said. “For some stupid, deluded fantasy.”

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher checked the final number. Entered it into his phone. Held the phone flat on his palm and held it out to Vaughan.

“Your choice,” he said. “Green button to make the call, red button to cancel it.”

Vaughan didn’t move for a moment. Then she took her hand off the wheel. Folded three fingers and her thumb. Held her index finger out straight. It was small, neat, elegant, and damp, and it had a trimmed nail. She held it still, close to the phone’s LED window.

Then she moved it.

She pressed the green button.

Nothing happened. Not at first. Reacher wasn’t surprised. He knew a little about cell phone technology. He had read a long article, in a trade publication abandoned on an airplane. Press the green button, and the phone in your hand sends a request by radio to the nearest cell tower, called a base transceiver station by the people who put it there. The phone says:
Hey, I want to make a call.
The base transceiver station forwards the plea to the nearest base station controller, by microwave if the bean counters got their way during the planning phase, or by fiber optic cable if the engineers got theirs. The base station controller bundles all the near-simultaneous requests it can find and moves them on to the closest mobile switching center, where the serious action starts.

Maybe at this point a ring tone starts up in your earpiece. But it means nothing. It’s a placebo. It’s there to reassure you. So far you’re not even close to connected.

The mobile switching center identifies the destination phone. Checks if it’s switched on, that it’s not busy, that it’s not set to call divert. Speech channels are limited in number, and therefore expensive to operate. You don’t get near one unless there’s a viable chance of an answer.

If all is well, a speech channel clicks in. It extends first from your local mobile switching center to its distant opposite number. Maybe by fiber optics, maybe by microwave, maybe by satellite if the distance is great. Then the distant mobile switching center hits up its closest base station controller, which hits up its closest base transceiver station, which emits a radio blast to the phone you’re looking for, an 850 megahertz or a 1.9 gigahertz pulse surfing on a perfect spherical wavefront close to the speed of light. A nanosecond later, the circuit is complete. The tone in your ear morphs from phony to real and the target phone starts its urgent ringing.

Total time lag, an average of seven whole seconds.

Vaughan took her finger back and stared forward out the windshield. The Chevy’s engine was still running and the wipers were still beating back and forth. The windshield smeared in perfect arcs. There was still a little protective wax on the glass.

Two seconds.

“Nothing,” Vaughan said.

Reacher said, “Wait.”

Four seconds.

Five.

They stared into the distance. The blue arena lights hung and shimmered in the wet air, pale and misty, fractured by intervening raindrops like twinkling starlight.

Six seconds.

Seven.

Then: The silent horizon lit up with an immense white flash that filled the windshield and bloomed instantly higher and wider. The rain all around turned to steam as the air superheated and jets of white vapor speared up and out in every direction like a hundred thousand rockets had launched simultaneously. The vapor was followed by a halo of black soot that punched instantly from a tight cap to a raging black hemisphere a mile high and a mile wide. It rolled and tore and folded back on itself and was pierced by violent trails of steam as supersonic white-hot shrapnel flung through it at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour.

No sound. Not then. Just blinding light and silence.

In still air the sound would have taken fourteen seconds to arrive from three miles away. But the air wasn’t still. It was moving fast in a massive compression wave. The wave carried the sound with it. It arrived three seconds after the light. The truck rocked back against the brake and the air roared with the rolling violence of the explosion, first a crisp deafening
crump
and then a banshee screaming from the shrapnel in the air and an otherworldly pelting sound as a million blasted fragments obliterated everything in their path and fell to earth and tore up the scrub and boiled and hissed where they lay. Then the decompression wave blew in the other way as air rushed back to fill the vacuum, and the truck rocked again, and the black cloud was pulverized to nothing by the violent wind, and then there was nothing to see except tongues of random flame and spouts of drifting steam, and nothing to hear except the steady patter of shrapnel falling back to earth from three miles up, and after ten long seconds there was not even that, just the patient rain on the Chevy’s roof.

73

Vaughan called out the whole of the Hope PD for crowd control. Within thirty minutes she had all four of her deputies and her brother officer and her watch commander and the desk guy all lined up on the western edge of Despair’s last block. Nobody was allowed through. The state cops showed up next. Within an hour they had three cars there. Five more showed up within the next four hours. They had taken the long way around. Everyone knew there had been uranium at the plant. The state cops confirmed that the MPs had the road blocked to the west, on a five-mile perimeter. It was close to dawn and they were already stopping incoming trucks.

Dawn came and the rain finally stopped and the sky turned hard blue and the air turned crystal clear.
Like nerves after pain,
Reacher had read once, in a poem. The morning was too cool to raise steam off the soaked ground. The mountains looked a thousand miles away, but every detail was visible. Their rocky outcrops, their pine forests, their tree lines, their snow channels. Reacher borrowed a pair of binoculars from Vaughan’s watch commander and climbed to the third floor of the last building to the west. He struggled with a jammed window and crouched and put his elbows on the sill and focused into the distance.

Not much to see.

The white metal wall was gone. Just a few rags and tatters of shredded metal remained, blown and tumbled hundreds of yards in every direction. The plant itself was mostly a black smoking pit, with cranes and gantries knocked over and smashed and bent. Crushers had been toppled off their concrete pads. Anything smaller had been smashed to pieces too small to reliably identify. The office buildings were gone entirely. Thurman’s residential compound had been obliterated. The house had been smashed to matchwood. The fieldstone wall was a horizontal rock field spread south and west like grains of spilled salt on a table. The plantings were all gone. Occasional foot-high stumps were all that was left of the trees. The airplane barn had been demolished. No sign of the Piper.

Immense damage.

Better here than somewhere else,
Reacher thought.

He came downstairs to a changed situation. Federal agencies had arrived. Gossip was flowing. Air Force radar in Colorado Springs had detected metal fifteen thousand feet up. It had hung there for a long second before falling back to earth. Radiation-sniffing drone planes had been dispatched and were closing in on wide circular paths. The rain was seen as a mercy. DU dust was believed to be strongly hygroscopic. Nothing bad would drift. Every contractor within a hundred miles, in Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas, had been contacted. A hurricane fence nearly nineteen miles long was needed. The site was going to be fenced off forever, on a three-mile radius. The fence was going to be hung with biohazard signs every six feet. The agencies already owned the signs, but not the wire.

No hard information was volunteered by the townsfolk. No hard questions were asked by the agencies. The word on everyone’s lips was
accident. An accident at the plant.
It was second nature, a part of the hardscrabble culture. An accident at the mill, an accident at the mine. Consistent with history. If the agencies had doubts, they knew better than to voice them. The Pentagon had begun to stonewall even before the last fragments had cooled.

State officials arrived, with contingency plans. Food and water was to be trucked in. Buses were to be laid on, for job searches in neighboring towns. Special welfare would be provided, for the first six months. Transitional help of every kind would be afforded. After that, any stragglers would be strictly on their own.

First Reacher and then Vaughan were pushed steadily east by the official activity. By the middle of the afternoon they were sitting together in the Chevy outside the dry goods store, with nothing more to do. They took one last look to the west and then set off down the road toward Hope.

They went to Vaughan’s house, and showered, and dressed again. Vaughan said, “David’s hospital is going to fold.”

“Someone else will step in,” Reacher said. “Someone better.”

“I’m not going to abandon him.”

“I don’t think you should.”

“Even though he won’t know.”

“He knew beforehand. And it was important to him.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I know soldiers.”

Reacher took the borrowed phone out of his pocket and dropped it on the bed. Followed it with the registration, from the old Suburban’s glove box. Asked Vaughan to mail both things back, with no return address on the package. She said, “That sounds like the start of a farewell speech.”

“It is,” Reacher said. “And the middle, and the end.”

They hugged, a little formally, like two strangers who shared many secrets. Then Reacher left. He walked down her winding path, and walked four blocks north to First Street. He got a ride very easily. A stream of vehicles was heading east, emergency workers, journalists, men in suits in plain sedans, contractors. The excitement had made them friendly. There was a real community spirit. Reacher rode with a post-hole digger from Kansas who had signed up to dig some of the sixteen thousand holes necessary for the new fence. The guy was cheerful. He was looking at months of steady work.

Reacher got out in Sharon Springs, where there was a good road south. He figured San Diego was about a thousand miles away, or more, if he followed some detours.