More footsteps in the corridor.
Reacher listened hard. He heard a door open. He heard it close. He heard nothing else. He stepped back out to the hallway. He figured if McQueen was being held prisoner somewhere, it would be deep in the bowels. Four hundred feet away, potentially. Way in the back, far from the outside world. In one of two chambers. A complex search pattern. And the long central hallways were deathtraps. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Apart from the rooms with blue spots. But there weren't many of them. And worrying about sideways escape routes didn't do much for sustained forward motion.
That's a military kind of problem, isn't it? Did you train for this stuff?
Not exactly. Not without people and ordnance and helicopters and radios and fire support. Which he didn't have.
He checked the room opposite. Another office, twenty feet by seventeen, shelves, desks, papers, numbers. Lots of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figures, all of them added and subtracted. All of them carefully recorded and accounted for. He checked the room next door. Same exact thing. Desks, shelves, papers, and numbers. He retraced his steps and headed back to the first room he had come from. The room with the lateral door.
He heard more footsteps in the hallway.
He stepped inside the room and closed the door.
Now he heard lots of footsteps in the hallway.
People, running.
People, shouting.
He went Glock-first through the slit in the plastic and closed the door behind him.
The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Reacher hustled the length of the third chamber, four hundred feet, past all the abandoned trailers, past all the huge sinister bottles. Dust came up from under his feet. It was like walking in thin snow. For the first time he was glad about his busted nose. His nasal passages were lined with scab tissue. Without it he would be sneezing like crazy.
The last original door was ten feet from the end of the tunnel. Exactly in line with the last yellow bottle. Exactly in line with its radiation symbol. Reacher pulled it open and took out the fat man's motel key and fought his way through the plastic skin. Cut, rip, cut, rip. Easier in that direction. The plastic bellied out into the room and he could keep plenty of tension on it. The space beyond was empty. It had been built like a room, but it was being used like a lobby.
He listened at the door to the corridor. He heard sounds, but they were distant. They were the sounds of chaos and confusion. A hurried search, combing the length of the building, moving away from him. He was behind the front lines. Way in the back, far from the outside world.
He opened the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet to his left men were going room to room. Five of them, maybe, searching, in and out, in and out. Moving away from him.
The door opposite had a blue spot. It would be empty. Built like a room, used like a lobby. So Reacher started one room down, across the corridor. No blue spot. He crept over to it, slow and silent. He opened the door. An office. Shelves, desks, paper. A man behind one of the desks. Reacher shot him in the head. The blast of the gunshot ripped through the chamber, barely muffled at all by the plywood partitions. Reacher stepped back to the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet away the five searchers were frozen in place, bodies moving one way, eyes the other. Reacher put the Glock in his pocket and took one of the Colts off his shoulder. A sub-machine gun. He clicked it to full auto and held it high and sighted down the barrel. He pulled the trigger and fought the muzzle climb. Twenty rounds at the rate of nine hundred a minute. Less than a second and a half. Smooth as a sewing machine. All five men went down. Probably three dead, one wounded, one panicking. Not that Reacher was keeping score. He already knew the score. He was winning. So far.
He dropped the empty gun and slipped the other Colt off his other shoulder. He thought: Time to visit the first chamber. Time to keep them guessing. He ducked back to the door with the blue spot. He opened it. He went in. Built like a room, used like a lobby.
But not empty.
There was a staircase in it.
It was a metal thing, like a ladder, steep, like something from a warship. It led into a vertical tunnel through the roof concrete. At the top of the vertical tunnel was a square steel hatch, massive, with cantilevered arms and springs and a rotary locking wheel, like in a submarine. It was closed. Reacher figured it would be domed on the outside, designed to seat itself tighter under the pulsing pressure of a blast wave.
The locking wheel drove pegs through a complicated sequence of gears, into clips all around the rim. The wheel was in the unlocked position. That was obvious. None of the pegs was engaged. Clearly the guys on the roof had closed the hatch behind them, to hide the light from below. To preserve their night vision, and for secrecy. But they had left it unlocked, so they could get back in. Common sense.
The smart move would have been to shin up the ladder and spin the locking wheel so that whoever was out there stayed out there. That way Reacher could have continued his inside activities undisturbed.
But the sniper was out there. With his M14, and his one-gone magazine, and probably a big smug smile on his face.
Reacher turned out the lobby light. He waited four seconds in the dark, for his irises to open wide. Then another minute, for his retinal chemistry to kick in. Then he found the handrail by feel and started climbing.
SEVENTY-FIVE
REACHER GOT TO the top of the ladder and felt around in the dark and used an after-image of what he had seen. He figured the hatch might weigh a few tons. Maybe more, if it was some kind of a sophisticated steel-and-concrete sandwich construction. Which it might be, because of radiation concerns. Those old-time architects would have been well schooled in such things. Possibly by the pointy-heads at the University of California. No point in designing a hatch to survive a blast if it was going to leak gamma rays afterwards. But no human could lift several tons while standing on a ladder. Which meant the bulk of the weight would be counterbalanced by the springs. Which meant the hatch should open with a decent push.
He pushed.
The hatch rose two inches. Accompanied by deep twanging and grinding from the springs.
Loud.
He waited.
A band of not-quite-black showed around three sides of the rim. He figured the sentries would be standing at the edge railing. Which would put three-quarters of them some distance away. The roof was the size of Yankee Stadium. Only those on the south side were close.
He pushed again, harder.
The hatch rose another foot.
More twanging and grinding.
No reaction.
He pushed again. The hatch opened all the way. Ninety degrees, like a door. He looked up and saw a square of dark Missouri sky. The hatch was hinged on the north side of the square. The ladder was bolted to the east side. Which meant he would come out with his front and his back and his right-hand side all vulnerable.
Which meant he should come out fast. Which was not easy to do. No way of keeping his finger on the trigger. The moment of maximum danger. Every mission had one. He hated stairs. He hated leading with his head.
He clamped the Colt in his right hand, between the flat of his thumb and his palm. He jumped his left hand up, rung by rung. He got the Colt out and put his knuckles on the roof, like an ape. He twisted at the waist and got his left hand flat on the concrete.
He took a breath and counted to three and vaulted out.
He got up in a crouch and held the Colt high, jerking it side to side as he scanned around. The house-storming shuffle, all over again.
He was close to the edge of the roof, on the south side. To his half-left was the sterile southeastern corridor. No one there. To his right was the west, with a lone shadowy figure far away at the rail, looking away from him. He turned north and saw five figures staring out where Bale's GPS had shown the two-lane. They thought Sorenson's approach had been a cross-country diversion. They thought the main attack was coming from the road.