Lee Child - A Wanted Man

‘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.

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 much 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.