A Wanted Man, Page 40

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  AFTER THAT IT got harder, not easier. First Reacher couldn’t get McQueen out of the chair. He was tied to it with thin cord pulled very tight and the knots were hard as stones. And second, the survivors somewhere in the rooms beyond had finally gotten the message. They must have heard the shot close by and as soon as King didn’t come out all triumphant they started up with a half-assed version of Custer’s last stand. Either that or they were all planning to run for it. And either thing would put live bodies in the way. Reacher heard them all crowding together in the corridor. He heard the snick of slides being pulled. Automatic weapons, being checked and readied. He heard an urgent muffled conference, not far from the door, half in English and half in Arabic.

  He asked, ‘What does Wadiah mean, anyway?’

  McQueen said, ‘Safekeeping.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘You speak Arabic?’

  ‘The odd word.’

  ‘Don’t you have a knife?’

  ‘I have a toothbrush.’

  ‘That won’t help.’

  ‘It’s good against plaque.’

  ‘Just get me out of this damn chair.’

  ‘I’m trying.’

  The cord was too tough to break. It was some kind of a blend, maybe cotton and nylon, woven tight, about a quarter of an inch across. Probably tested against all kinds of strains and weights.

  Reacher said, ‘I have a key.’

  McQueen said, ‘I’m not in handcuffs, for God’s sake.’

  Reacher pulled out the fat man’s key. He nicked at the rope with the rough-edged tang, down by McQueen’s right hand. The tang cut some fibres. Maybe two or three. Out of maybe ten thousand. Reacher said, ‘Put some tension on it. As much as you can. You’re FBI, right? Make like you’re trying to lift your pension.’

  McQueen’s shoulder and biceps bunched and the cord went hard as iron. Reacher sawed at it. Not back and forth. He had to pluck at it. The key worked only one way. But it made progress. Outside the door the voices were loud. Two factions. Doubt and questions, resolve and encouragement. Reacher was rooting for the doubt. Just for a little while longer. McQueen kept the pressure on. Fibres snapped and severed, first a few, then several, then many, then an eighth of an inch, then most of them, then only a few remained, and finally McQueen tore his right hand loose.

  Reacher picked up Peter King’s Beretta from the floor. He put it in McQueen’s right hand. McQueen said, ‘That Colt on your shoulder would be better. These corridors are pretty long.’

  Reacher said, ‘It only has five rounds left in it. I’m planning to use it as a club.’ He started on McQueen’s left wrist, plucking, cutting, fibres popping under the strain. McQueen said, ‘You could reload it.’

  Reacher said, ‘No time. We don’t want to be caught with our pants down.’

  ‘How many in your Glock?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Unlucky.’

  ‘True.’ Reacher stopped sawing and swapped out the magazine for the full one he had taken from Bale, in the motel room in Kansas, about a million years ago. Click, click, hand to hand, not a blur like the showboats could do it, but no more than a second and a half. He started sawing again. The voices were still loud in the corridor.

  Reacher said, ‘Do you have an accurate headcount?’

  McQueen said, ‘Twenty-four tonight, not including me.’

  ‘Six left, then.’

  ‘Is that all? Jesus.’

  ‘I’ve been here at least twenty minutes.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Just a guy, hitching rides.’

  ‘Well, good work, whoever you are.’

  ‘Did you have a private room, when you were here?’

  ‘No, those were for Peter King and the big boss.’

  ‘I thought Peter King was the big boss.’

  ‘No, King was number two.’

  ‘So who’s the big boss?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never met him.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  The door opened. McQueen fired from his chair. A dark shape fell backward. Reacher stepped across and kicked the door shut again. He said, ‘Five left.’

  McQueen said, ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘If I was them? I’d open every door in the corridor and put a guy in the first five rooms with blue spots. They’d see us before we saw them. We couldn’t go anywhere at all.’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’

  ‘Are they smart enough?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ McQueen said. ‘They’re plenty smart in some ways.’

  ‘I’m certainly getting that feeling.’

  ‘How? You know what this is all about?’

  Reacher said, ‘I think I’ve figured most of it out.’

  ‘So you understand we absolutely need to capture this building intact, right?’

  ‘Speak for yourself. All I absolutely need to do is to get to Virginia.’

  ‘What’s in Virginia?’

  ‘Many things. It’s an important state. Twelfth largest in terms of population, and thirteenth in terms of GDP.’

  McQueen’s left hand came free. Reacher gave him the Colt and crouched down and started work on his ankles, from behind.

  The ankle ropes went slower. The tough fibres were doing the work the hardware store guy should have done with his buffing wheel. The key was getting smooth. Not good. So Reacher adapted his technique. He used the last of the burr on the tang to tug up part of the knot, and he used the key from the FBI’s motel in Kansas as a spike to force the knot apart. A different approach, and slower, but it got the job done a small fraction at a time. Five minutes later McQueen was three-quarters free, and five minutes after that he was out of the chair completely. He was trailing bracelets of severed rope from his wrists. He had the Colt sub-machine gun in his left hand and Peter King’s Beretta in his right. Good to go. They were about two hundred feet from the first mechanized door, and three hundred feet from the second. Three hundred feet from the sweet night air. Three hundred feet from safety.

  ‘Ready?’ Reacher said.

  McQueen nodded.

  Reacher opened the door to the corridor.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  THE ESCAPE WENT bad immediately. The three hundred feet might as well have been three thousand miles. The five survivors had done the smart thing. All the room doors were standing open, along the whole length of the corridor, to the left and the right. Whichever way Reacher and McQueen went they risked getting fired on from inside as they passed. Or not. It was unpredictable. It was a lottery. Five hostiles, thirty-nine doors, not counting the one they were coming out of. Standard infantry tactics would have been to roll grenades into every room, at an angle, as they approached, or to blast through one plywood wall after another with anti-tank weapons. But they had no grenades, and no anti-tank weapons. They had two handguns and an almost-empty sub-machine gun.

  Problem.

  Reacher said, ‘We need a diversion.’

  McQueen said, ‘What kind?’

  ‘We could set the place on fire.’

  ‘We absolutely cannot do that. We need to preserve the paperwork.’

  ‘I don’t have any matches, anyway. We’d have to try to get to the kitchen and use the stove. In which case we might as well try to get all the way out.’

  ‘We should go sideways. There’s a clear run through the third chamber.’

  ‘Pick a door,’ Reacher said. He couldn’t see the blue spots. All the doors were folded back into the rooms. He knew there were six doors with blue spots. Built like rooms, used like lobbies. There were five bad guys. Therefore one way through was clear. A sixteen per cent chance. Sixteen point six, recurring for ever, to be totally accurate.

  ‘Back to back?’ McQueen asked.

  ‘Who leads?’ Reacher said.

  ‘Doesn’t really matter.’

  ‘It might,’ Reacher said. He wasn’t pinning muc
h hope on a sixteen per cent chance. They were likely to run into someone in whichever lateral lobby they chose. One of the five. The resulting gunfire would alert the other four. If they gave chase, then the backward-facing guy would have to do most of the hard work. But if the four survivors did the smart thing and made lateral loops of their own, one by one, like outflanking manoeuvres, then the forward-facing guy would take most of the load.

  ‘You lead,’ Reacher said.

  McQueen stepped out into the corridor. Reacher stepped out behind him, walking backward, and they moved together, slow and quiet and cautious, back to back, almost touching, but not quite. From that point on it was all about trust. Reacher desperately wanted to glance back over his shoulder, and he knew McQueen felt the same, but neither man did. Each was responsible for a hundred and eighty degrees, no more, no less. They made it twenty feet, to the next pair of doors, one on the left and one on the right, and McQueen slowed and took a breath. Both doors were open.

  No blue spots.

  Nobody in the rooms.

  Onward.

  Another twenty feet. Another pair of doors. One on the left, one on the right.

  Smarter than smart.

  The bad guys had people in both rooms.

  Reacher and McQueen pivoted ninety degrees, instantly, Reacher firing right, McQueen firing left, and way up at the far end of the corridor a third guy stepped out and way down at the bottom end a fourth guy stepped out and Reacher and McQueen were caught in a literal crossfire, with incoming rounds from all four points of the compass. Reacher hit the guy in the room ahead of him and the guy went down and McQueen bundled in after Reacher and slammed the door. They stood there together, stooped and panting, with the dead guy on the floor between them.

  ‘You hit?’ Reacher asked.

  ‘No,’ McQueen said.

  That was the good news. The rest of the news was all bad. Ahead of them was a blastproof concrete wall probably ten feet thick. To their left and their right and behind them were plywood partitions just half an inch thick. And outside a thin cheap door with no lock were four hostiles who knew exactly where they were.

  Reacher said, ‘They don’t even need to come in. They can fire through the walls. Or the door.’

  ‘I know,’ McQueen said.

  And they did. Immediately. The first round came through the door. It punched out an ugly scab of wood that spun sideways and missed McQueen by an inch. The second round came through the wall. The plywood was tougher. But not much. The bullet came right through, but it had shattered into fragments. One of them nicked Reacher on the back of his hand. No big deal, in the grand scheme of things, but the cut started a fat trickle of blood. He stepped close to the splintered hole and put the Glock’s muzzle hard on it and fired back, twice, at different angles. McQueen did the same thing at the door. Reacher heard feet wheeling away.

  Temporary relief, but ultimately only a stalemate.

  Reacher stepped to the side wall and raised his boot high and kicked it, the same way a firefighter kicks down a door. The wall cracked and gave a little. He figured they could kick their way through eventually. But there was no point. They were on the wrong side of the corridor for the old lateral doors. All the blue spots were on the opposite side. And slow and noisy progress from one rat trap to another would gain them absolutely nothing.

  Not good.

  And then it got worse.

  The building filled with a faint diesel roar. The outer door, opening, at the far end of the hundred-foot entrance tunnel. Reacher pictured the seal breaking, the big diesels rumbling, the two halves of the door grinding back along their tracks, the gap between them widening slowly and unstoppably. Far too soon for Quantico. They were still in the air, surely. Over Missouri by that point, hopefully, maybe even on approach to Whiteman, maybe even right then lowering the landing gear, but Whiteman was all of sixty miles away, and they still had complex preparations and transfers to make.

  So, not the cavalry.

  More bad guys.

  He said, ‘They’re bringing in reinforcements.’

  McQueen nodded, and said nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘How many, do you think?’

  ‘Could be dozens. Hundreds, even. There’s a network. Everything’s a co-production now.’

  Reacher said, ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ McQueen said. ‘Thank you for everything you tried to do.’

  They shook hands, mute and awkward in the miserable plywood room, McQueen still trailing frayed cords from his wrists, Reacher’s hand bloody from his cut.

  The diesel noise started up again. The outer door closing, to allow the inner door to open, the ancient fail-safe circuits still obedient.

  McQueen said, ‘I assume they’ll lead them straight here.’

  Reacher nodded. ‘So at least let’s not wait for them. Let’s make them work for it.’

  ‘The third chamber is the place to be. They’ll be a little less willing to shoot in there.’

  Reacher nodded again. The flatbed trailers, the giant yellow flasks. The radiation symbols. He said, ‘Don’t stop for me. No matter what. Better that one of us gets out than neither.’

  McQueen said, ‘Likewise.’

  ‘I’ll go first. I’ll go left and through. You go right.’

  ‘You want the Colt back?’

  ‘You keep it. It drifts left and down. Remember that.’ Reacher cannibalized his part-gone magazines and put a full load in his Glock. One in the chamber, seventeen in the box. Some of the brass ended up smeared with his blood. Which seemed appropriate. Some old guy once said the meaning of life is that it ends. Which was inescapably true. No one lives for ever. In his head Reacher had always known he would die. Every human does. But in his heart he had never really imagined it. Never imagined the time and the place and the details and the particulars.

  He smiled.

  He said, ‘On three?’

  McQueen nodded.

  He said, ‘One.’

  The diesels sounded louder. The inner door, opening.

  McQueen said, ‘Two.’

  Reacher stepped over to the splintered threshold.

  McQueen said, ‘Three.’

  Reacher burst out at full speed, through the door, through some kind of final mental barrier, into the corridor, ice cold and careless, in his mind already dead like his father and his mother and his brother, bargaining for nothing more at all except the chance to take someone with him, or two of them, or three, and a guy to his left heard the noise and stepped out of a room and Reacher shot him, a triple tap, chest, chest, head, and then he plunged onward, across the narrow space, into a blue-spot room, a guy right in front of him going down the same way, chest, chest, head, and then Reacher was through the ancient door, into another plywood room, which was empty, with gunfire behind him, and out into the centre chamber’s corridor, a shape running towards him from the right, firing, and into the next blue-spot room, with footsteps behind him, and then it was all over, finally and utterly and completely and definitively, because of the taped plastic sheet over the old door ahead of him, and because the Glock jammed and wouldn’t fire any more.

  A tired spring in the magazine, maybe, or his blood on the shell casings, already sticky and all fouled up.

  The world went very quiet.

  He turned around, slowly, and he put his back on the plastic sheet. Two men had guns on him. One pale face, one dark. The odd ethnic mixture. They were shoulder to shoulder in the doorway. The last two survivors from the original headcount. Both for him. Which was OK. It meant McQueen was getting a clear run, at least for the moment.