He waited. Then the strap went tight above him and started to quiver. The canvas around his hand wrapped tight. He pushed down into the loop with his sole. He saw the strap pull across the girth of the cylinder. No friction. Wet canvas on painted metal, slick with rain. The canvas stretched a little. Then he felt serious pressure under his foot and he lifted smoothly into the air. Slowly, maybe twelve inches a second. Less than a mile an hour. Idle speed, for the Tahoe’s big V-8. He pictured Vaughan behind the wheel, concentrating hard, her foot like a feather on the pedal.

“Goodbye, Thurman,” he said. “Looks like it’s you that’s getting left behind this time.”

Then he looked up and got his left hand on the bulge of the cylinder and pushed back and hauled with his right to stop his wrapped knuckles crushing against the metal. His hips hit the maximum curve and he unwrapped his hand and hung on and let himself be pulled up to top dead-center. Then he dropped the strap and let the loop around his foot pull his legs up sideways and then he kicked free of the loop and came to rest spread-eagled on his stomach along the top of the wall. He jerked his hips and sent his legs down the far side and squealed his palms across ninety degrees of wet metal and pushed off and fell, two long split seconds. He hit the ground and fell on his back and knocked the wind out of himself. He rolled over and forced some air into his lungs and crawled up on his knees.

Vaughan had stopped Thurman’s Tahoe twenty feet away. Reacher got to his feet and walked over to it and unhooked the strap from the trailer hitch. Then he climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You OK?” she asked.

“Fine. You?”

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and I fell out of an apple tree. Scared, but a good scared.” She changed to high-range gearing and took off fast. Two minutes later they were at the main vehicle gate. It was standing wide open.

“We should close it,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“To help contain the damage. If I’m right.”

“Suppose you’re not?”

“Maximum of five phone calls will prove it one way or the other.”

“How do we close it? They don’t seem to have any manual override.”

They stopped just outside the gate and got out and walked over to the gray metal box on the wall. Reacher flipped the lid. One through nine, plus zero.

“Try six-six-one-three,” he said.

Vaughan looked blank but stepped up and raised her index finger. Pressed six, six, one, three, neat and rapid. There was silence for a second and then motors whined and the gates started closing. A foot a second, wheels rumbling along tracks. Vaughan asked, “How did you know?”

“Most codes are four figures,” Reacher said. “ATM cards, things like that. People are used to four-figure codes.”

“Why those four figures?”

“Lucky guess,” Reacher said. “Revelation is the sixty-sixth book in the King James Bible. Chapter one, verse three says the time is at hand. Which seems to be Thurman’s favorite part.”

“So we could have gotten out without climbing.”

“If we had, they could have, too. I want them in there. So I had to smash the lock.”

“Where to now?”

“The hotel in Despair. The first phone call is one that you get to make.”

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.”