Lee Child - A Wanted Man

But not a recent invention. Because nothing in the chamber was recent. There was a thick layer of dust over everything. Over the massive containers, over the flatbed trailers, over the concrete floor. Grey, and spectral, and undisturbed. Under the trailers most of the tyres looked soft. Some of them were flat completely. There were cobwebs. The scene was archaeological. Like breaking through into a pharaoh’s tomb. The first to lay eyes on it for five thousand years.

Or twenty years, maybe. The physical evidence was there. The age of the equipment. The dust. The perished rubber. The still air. The chill. It was perfectly possible to believe those trailers had been backed in two decades ago, and detached from their tractor units, never to move again, and then walled off, and left behind, and forgotten.

Eight trailers. Sixteen containers. Sixty-four Volkswagens. The steel was painted bright yellow, now faded a little by dust and time. On the side of each one, at a modest size, no bigger than a basketball, was stencilled a design first sketched in 1946, by a bunch of smart guys at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Smart guys with time on their hands, designing a symbol, coming up with what they thought was stuff coming out of an atom. Most people thought it was three fat propeller blades, black on yellow.

Nuclear waste.

REACHER KILLED THE lights and squeezed back through the slit in the plastic. He crossed the empty room and stepped out to the corridor. And saw three people. All men. They were walking away from him, talking as they went, piles of three-ring binders in their arms. Shirtsleeves. Dark pants. Unarmed. None of them was McQueen.

Reacher let them go. The cost outweighed the gain. Too noisy, for no real reason. They opened a blue-spot door on the left, way far up the corridor. Clearly heading sideways into the first chamber. Four spots down, one room over, one room back. Or whatever. Like map coordinates. Not unlike getting around the Pentagon.

They had come out of a room ahead and on the left of where Reacher was standing. Its door was open, and it hadn’t been before. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and walked the thirty feet. The room was an office, maybe twenty feet by seventeen, with one concrete wall and three plywood walls. All four walls were full of shelves. The floor was full of desks. Both desks and shelves were full of paper. Loose, in stacks, clipped together, in rubber bands, in binders. The paper was full of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figure numbers, of no great interest or appeal, just raw material to be added and subtracted and multiplied. Which they had been. Most of the papers were like ledger pages.

No computers.

All paper.

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.