He asked, “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Reacher watched the compass. It was holding steady on south and east. There was an LED window below the compass with two green numbers showing. A GPS readout, latitude and longitude. They were below the fortieth parallel and more than a hundred degrees west. Both numbers were ticking downward, slowly and in step. South and east, at a modest speed. He called up maps in his mind. Empty land ahead, the corner of Colorado, the corner of Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle. Then the compass swung a little farther south, and Reacher realized that Thurman had been skirting the airspace around Colorado Springs. An Air Force town, probably a little trigger-happy. Better to give it a wide berth.
Thurman kept the height at two thousand feet and the speed at a hundred and a quarter and the compass stayed a little south of southeast. Reacher consulted his mental maps again and figured that if they didn’t land or change course they were going to exit Colorado just left of the state’s bottom right-hand corner. The time readout on the dash showed seventeen minutes past seven in the evening, which was two minutes fast. Reacher thought about Vaughan, alone in her car. She would have heard the plane take off. She would be wondering why he hadn’t come back over the wall.
Thurman said, “You broke into a container last night.”
Reacher said, “Did I?”
“It’s a fair guess. Who else would have?”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “You saw the cars.”
“Did I?”
“Let’s assume so, like intelligent men.”
“Why do they bring them to you?”
“There are some things any government feels it politic to conceal.”
“What do you do with them?”
“The same thing we do with the wrecks towed off I-70. We recycle them. Steel is a wonderful thing, Mr. Reacher. It goes around and around. Peugeots and Toyotas from the Gulf might once have been Fords and Chevrolets from Detroit, and they in turn might once have been Rolls-Royces from England or Holdens from Australia. Or bicycles or refrigerators. Some steel is new, of course, but surprisingly little of it. Recycling is where the action is.”
“And the bottom line.”
“Naturally.”
“So why don’t you buy yourself a better plane?”
“You don’t like this one?”
“Not much,” Reacher said.
They flew on. There was nothing but darkness ahead, relieved occasionally by tiny clusters of yellow light far below. Hamlets, farms, gas stations. At one point Reacher saw brighter lights in the distance to the left and the right. Lamar, probably, and La Junta. Small towns, made larger by comparison with the emptiness all around them. Sometimes cars were visible on roads, tiny cones of blue light crawling slowly.
Reacher asked, “How is Underwood doing? The deputy?”
Thurman paused a moment. Then he said, “He passed on.”
“In the hospital?”
“Before we could get him there.”
“Will there be an autopsy?”
“He has no next of kin to request one.”
“Did you call the coroner?”
“No need. He was old, he got sick, he died.”
“He was about forty.”
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s in store for all of us.”
“You don’t sound very concerned.”
“A good Christian has nothing to fear in death. And I own a town, Mr. Reacher. I see births and deaths all the time. One door closes, another opens.”
Thurman leaned back, his gut between him and the stick, his hands held low. The engine held fast on a mid-range roar and the whole plane shivered with vibration and bucked occasionally on rough air. The latitude number counted down slowly, and the longitude number slower still. Reacher closed his eyes. Flight time to the state line would be about seventy or eighty minutes. He figured they weren’t going to land in Colorado itself. There wasn’t much left of it. Just empty grassland. He figured they were going to Oklahoma, or Texas.
They flew on. The air got steadily worse. Reacher opened his eyes. Downdrafts dropped them into troughs like a stone. Then updrafts hurled them back up again. They were sideswiped by gusts of wind. Not like in a big commercial Boeing. No juddering vibration and bouncing wings. No implacable forward motion. Just violent physical displacement, like a pinball caught between bumpers. There was no storm outside. No rain, no lightning. No thunderheads. Just roiling evening thermals coming up off the plains in giant waves, invisible, compressing, decompressing, making solid walls and empty voids. Thurman held the stick loosely and let the plane buck and dive. Reacher moved in his seat and smoothed the harness straps over his shoulders.
Thurman said, “Youare afraid of flying.”
“Flying is fine,” Reacher said. “Crashing is another story.”
“An old joke.”
“For a reason.”
Thurman started jerking the stick and hammering the rudder. The plane rose and fell sharply and smashed from side to side. At first Reacher thought they were seeking smoother air. Then he realized Thurman was deliberately making things worse. He was diving where the downdrafts were sucking anyway and climbing with the updrafts. He was turning into the side winds and taking them like roundhouse punches. The plane was hammering all over the sky. It was being tossed around like the insignificant piece of junk it was.
Thurman said, “This is why you need to get your life in order. The end could come at any time. Maybe sooner than you expect.”
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, “I could end it for you now. I could roll and stall and power dive. Two thousand feet, we’d hit the deck at three hundred miles an hour. The wings would come off first. The crater would be ten feet deep.”
Reacher said, “Go right ahead.”
“You mean that?”
“I dare you.”
An updraft hit and the plane was thrown upward and then the decompression wave came in and the lift under the wings dropped away to a negative value and the plane fell again. Thurman dropped the nose and hit the throttle and the engine screamed and the Piper tilted into a forty-five-degree power dive. The artificial horizon on the dash lit up red and a warning siren sounded. It was barely audible over the scream of the engine and the battering airflow. Then Thurman pulled out of the dive. He jerked the nose up. The airframe groaned as the main spar stressed and the plane curved level and then rose again through air that was momentarily calmer.
Reacher said, “Chicken.”
Thurman said, “I have nothing to fear.”
“So why pull out?”
“When I die, I’m going to a better place.”
“I thought the big guy got to make that decision, not you.”
“I’ve been a faithful servant.”
“So go for it. Go to a better place, right now. I dare you.”
Reacher said nothing. Thurman flew on, straight and level, through air that was calming down. Two thousand feet, a hundred and twenty-five knots, south of southeast.
“Chicken,” Reacher said again. “Phony.”
Thurman said, “God wants me to complete my task.”
“What, he told you that in the last two minutes?”
“I think you’re an atheist.”
“We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”
Thurman didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “Just remember, it was you who was afraid to die, not me.”
They flew on, twenty more minutes. The air went still and quiet. Reacher closed his eyes again. Then dead-on an hour and a quarter total elapsed time Thurman moved in his seat. Reacher opened his eyes. Thurman hit a couple of switches and fired up his radio and held the stick with his knees and clamped a headset over his ears. The headset had a microphone on a boom that came off the left-hand earpiece. Thurman flicked it with his fingernail and said, “It’s me, on approach.” Reacher heard a muffled crackling reply and far below in the distance saw lights come on. Red and white runway lights, he assumed, but they were so far away they looked like a tiny pink pinpoint. Thurman started a long slow descent. Not very smooth. The plane was too small and light for finesse. It jerked and dropped and leveled and dropped again. Laterally it was nervous. It darted left, darted right. The pink pinpoint jumped around below them and drew closer and resolved into twin lines of red and white. The lines looked short. The plane wobbled and stumbled in the air and dipped low and then settled on a shallow path all the way down. The runway lights rushed up to meet it and started blurring past, left and right. For a second Reacher thought Thurman had left it too late, but then the wheels touched down and bounced once and settled back and Thurman cut the power and the plane rolled to a walk with half the runway still ahead of it. The engine note changed to a deep roar and the walk picked up to taxiing speed and Thurman jerked left off the runway and drove a hundred yards to a deserted apron. Reacher could see the vague outlines of brick buildings in the middle distance. He saw a vehicle approaching, headlights on. Big, dark, bulky.