14 61 Hours

by Lee Child

  Last aboard was Jay Knox himself, once the driver, now just a passenger. He walked down the aisle and dumped himself in a window seat three rows behind the last of the seniors. Reacher’s seat. Near the rear wheels, where the ride was roughest. No point in travelling, if you’re not feeling it.

  The new driver latched the hold compartments and bounced up the step. A second later the door sucked shut behind him. The engine started. Reacher heard the heavy diesel rattle. Heard the air brake release and the snick of a gear. The engine roared and the bus moved away, out of the lot, on to the road. The icy wind battered at it. It headed south towards the highway. Reacher watched it go, until it was lost to sight.

  Peterson clapped him on the back.

  Reacher said, ‘A viable mode of transportation just left town without me on it. I just broke the habit of a lifetime.’

  Plato dialled his guy again. Direct. A risk, but he was enough of an analyst to know that caution sometimes had to be abandoned. To know that chronology couldn’t be beaten. To know that timing was everything. The clock ticked on, whoever you were. Even if you were Plato.

  His guy answered.

  Plato asked, ‘Do you have news for me?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m sorry.’

  Plato paused. ‘It almost seems like it would be easier just to do the job than find new ways of delaying it.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘It seems like you’re working very hard to save the wrong life.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Focus on the life you really want to save.’

  ‘I will. I am.’

  ‘You have a deadline. Please don’t let me down.’

  Reacher walked back to the station. Peterson drove. They met in the silent lobby and stood there for a second. They had nothing to do, and both of them knew it. Then Holland came out of his office and said, ‘We should go up to the camp. To take a look around. Now that it’s empty. While we’ve still got daylight.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  THEY WENT IN HOLLAND’S CAR. IT WAS A BET TER FIT FOR THREE people than Peterson’s cruiser, because it had no security screen between the front seats and the rear. Reacher rode in the back, sprawled sideways, comfortable, watching the roads he had driven that morning. Conditions were still bad. The wind was still strong. The snow was frozen so hard it looked like part of the earth, and it was being scoured into long sharp ridges and runnels. It was blinding white under the pale afternoon sun. Like the Ice Age.

  They turned on to the old road parallel with the highway and again on to the wandering two-lane up towards the camp. The first eight miles were as bad as before. Icy humps and dips, reversed cambers, constant deviations from straight. Then, as before, the horizon changed. The clear grey concrete, massively wide, infinitely long, the aerodynamic berms of snow, the visible wind howling above the surface.

  Holland slowed and bumped up on the new level and stopped and kept his foot on the brake, like a plane waiting to launch. He said, ‘You see what you want to see, don’t you? I was here a dozen times in my life and thought this was just a road. Kind of fancy, maybe, but I guess I figured hey, that’s the military for you.’

  ‘It used to be narrower,’ Peterson said. ‘That’s what made it hard to see. The winds put dirt all over it. Only the middle part was ever used. These guys ploughed it for the first time in fifty years. Not just snow. They pushed the dirt off.’

  ‘It’s a piece of work,’ Holland said. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘That’s for damn sure,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s got to be a yard thick. By volume it’s probably the largest manmade object in South Dakota.’

  They all looked a minute longer and then Holland took his foot off the brake and the snow chains chattered and the car rolled on. Two whole miles. The tan shapes of the huts loomed up, with the slate roof of the stone building standing tall behind them, under its cap of snow. Holland parked about where Reacher had. The scene ahead was different. No people. No trucks. No bikes. Just the empty ploughed spaces, and the wooden huts all forlorn and abandoned among them.

  They all got out of the car. Put their hats on, put their gloves on, zipped up their coats. The temperature was still dropping. Way below zero degrees, and the wind made it worse. The cold struck upward through the soles of Reacher’s boots. His face went numb after seconds. Holland and Peterson were putting on a show of taking it in their stride, but Reacher knew they had to be hurting. Their faces were mottled red and white, and they were blinking, and they were coughing and gasping a little.

  They all headed straight for the stone building. It looked no different from how it had in the morning. Partly forbidding, partly just plain weird. Peterson tried the door. It didn’t move. He rubbed the new frost off the keyhole with his thumb, the same way Reacher had. He said, ‘There are no scratches here. The lock wasn’t in regular use.’

  ‘Didn’t need to be,’ Reacher said. ‘They unlocked it a year ago and relocked it this morning.’

  ‘So where’s the key?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’

  Holland said, ‘They took it with them.’

  Reacher said, ‘I don’t think they did.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Because this place is getting sold. Wouldn’t they have been told to leave the key for the new owner?’

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘Under the mat, probably.’

  ‘There is no mat.’

  ‘Under a flowerpot, then.’

  ‘What flowerpot?’

  ‘Figure of speech,’ Reacher said. ‘People leave keys in prearranged locations.’

  All three of them turned a slow circle, looking at everything there was to see. Which wasn’t much. Just snow, and concrete, and the huts, and the building itself.

  ‘What’s it going to look like?’ Peterson asked. ‘Just a key?’

  ‘Big,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s a blast door, so the lock will be complex. Lots of moving parts. Hard to turn. So the key will be big and strong. Probably T-shaped, like a clock key, probably made out of some kind of fancy steel. Probably cost the Pentagon a thousand bucks all on its own.’

  ‘Maybe they buried it in the snow. We have a metal detector in the car.’

  ‘But I’m guessing the Russian guy from Brooklyn doesn’t. Which means it isn’t in the snow. That’s no kind of customer relations. You can’t ask a guy to dig around in a snow bank for an hour.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  There were stone ledges and carved mouldings and Gothic features all over the building. Eye-level and below was too obvious. Reacher walked a circuit and ran his hands along everything up to about eight feet off the ground. Nothing there. And anything higher would be inaccessible, unless the Russian was figuring on bringing a folding ladder.

  Reacher stopped walking and looked around all over again and said, ‘It has to be somewhere definite. Like under the third thing from the left or the fourth thing from the right.’

  Peterson said, ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Hut, bed, anything.’

  ‘Can’t we just jimmy the door with a tyre iron?’

  ‘It’s a blast door. Designed to stand up to a big pressure wave.’

  ‘But we’d be pulling outward, not pushing inward.’

  ‘Pressure waves are followed by vacuums. Compression and then rarefaction. Compression pushes in, rarefaction sucks back out, and just as hard. Both ways around, that’s a strong door.’

  Peterson said, ‘So we better start searching.’

  ‘What’s your lucky number?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘So start with the third hut, under the third mattress.’

  ‘Counting from where?’

  Reacher paused. ‘That’s another good question. Front row, from the left, probably. But ultimately any counting system could be called subjective. And therefore potentially confusing. The only real objectivity would be in saying the nearest or the farthest.’

  ‘From where?’


  ‘Here. The locked door.’

  ‘That’s assuming it’s in a hut at all.’

  ‘It’s not in the snow and it can’t be in the building itself. What else is there?’

  Peterson headed for the nearest hut. The first in the back row, opposite the second in the front row. The first one Reacher had checked that morning. The door was unlocked. Peterson pushed it open and stepped inside. Reacher and Holland followed him. The burlap drapes were still at the windows. Everything else portable was gone. There was nothing to see except the twelve cots, now stripped back to striped blue mattress ticking and dull iron frames. The place looked sad and abandoned and empty.

  But it was warm.

  The paraffin heater had its burner turned to the off position, but it was still giving out plenty of residual heat. It was glorious. Reacher stripped off his gloves and held his hands out to it. Simple physics meant that it had to be cooling all the time, and maybe in three hours’ time it would be merely lukewarm, and three hours after that it would be stone cold, but right then it was completely magnificent. Still too hot to touch, in fact. The combination of cast iron and recent hydrocarbon combustion was a wonderful thing. Reacher said, ‘You guys go search somewhere else. I’m staying right here.’

  Peterson said, ‘With a bit of luck they’ll all be the same.’

  They were. All three of them hustled to the farthest hut to check it out, and they found the same situation. Empty room, stripped beds, warm stove. They started the serious search right there. The warmth made them patient and painstaking. They checked every mattress, every cot frame, every nook, and every cranny. They checked the toilet tank in the bathroom area. They looked for loose boards, listened for hollows in the walls, and opened every bulkhead light fixture.

  They found nothing.

  Five to three in the afternoon.

  Thirteen hours to go.

  They searched the kitchen next. Reacher figured it was a strong possibility. A kitchen was an unambiguous location. A singularity. There was only one of them. Even more definite than the first hut or the last. But the key wasn’t in it. The jars of flour and sugar and coffee were still there, but too empty to hide a metal object from even the most cursory of shakes. It wasn’t shoved to the back of the shelves, it wasn’t taped to the underside of a table, it wasn’t in the cornflake dregs like a toy, it wasn’t nested in a pile of bowls.

  After the kitchen they worked back towards the stone building, hut by hut. They got better and faster at searching each step of the way, from sheer practice and repetition, because each hut was identical to all the others. They got to where they could have done it blindfold, or asleep. But even so, they got the same result everywhere. Which was no result at all.

  They arrived back where they had begun, in the hut nearest the stone building. They were reluctant to start searching it, because they felt sure they would be disappointed, and drawing a blank in the last of fifteen places carried with it some kind of finality. Reacher walked through the space, stopping at the stove, moving on to the last bed on the right.

  He said, ‘There was a girl sitting here this morning.’

  Holland stepped alongside him. ‘What girl?’

  ‘Just a biker, maybe nineteen or twenty. The only one I saw inside. The others were all out working on the snow.’

  ‘Was she sick?’

  ‘She looked OK to me.’

  ‘Was she locked up?’

  ‘No, the door was open.’

  ‘Maybe she was guarding the key. Like that was her function.’

  ‘Maybe she was. But where did she leave it?’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Tall and thin and blond, like the rest of you.’

  ‘You think she was local?’

  ‘Meth is a rural thing,’ Reacher said. Then he thought: Tall and thin and blond. He asked, ‘Are you getting a cell signal out here?’

  ‘Sure,’ Holland said. ‘Flat land all around. Wind and dust and microwaves, they’re all the same to us.’

  ‘Let me use your phone.’

  Holland handed it over and Reacher dialled the number he remembered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Amanda, please.’

  A click. A purr. The voice. It said, ‘Where the hell are you?’

  Reacher said, ‘What? Now you’re my mother?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘I’m out at the air force place. Trying to get in. Looking for the key. I need to know the top twenty ingenious places you’ve ever found a small hidden object.’

  ‘VCR slot, kettle, shoe, inside a TV set, the battery compartment of a transistor radio, a hollowed-out book, cut into the foam inside the seat of a car, in a bar of soap, in a tub of cream cheese.’

  ‘That’s only nine. You’re hopeless.’

  ‘Give me time.’

  ‘There isn’t any of that kind of stuff here.’

  ‘So what is there?’

  Reacher walked around the hut and described everything he was seeing.

  The voice said, ‘The toilet tank.’

  ‘Checked them all.’

  ‘Any torn mattresses?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Loose boards?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So burn the place down and sift the ashes. An air force key is probably made of the same stuff as warheads. It would survive, easy.’

  ‘Why were you trying to get hold of me?’

  ‘Because I know what that place is.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PETERSON AND HOLLAND HAD HEARD THE THIN SQUAWK OF HER words from the earpiece. They stepped closer. Reacher sat down on the bed, where the biker girl had been. The voice on the phone said, ‘That place was built as an orphanage.’

  Reacher said, ‘Underground?’

  ‘It was fifty years ago. The height of the Cold War. Everyone was going nuts. My guy faxed me the file. The casualty predictions were horrendous. The Soviets were assumed to have missiles to spare, by the hundreds. A full-scale launch, they’d have been scratching their heads for targets. We ran scenarios, and it all came down to the day of the week and the time of the year. Saturday or Sunday or during the school vacations, it was assumed everyone would get it pretty much equally. But weekdays during the semester, they predicted a significant separation between the adult population and the juvenile, in terms of physical location. Parents would be in one place, their kids would be in another, maybe in a shelter under a school.’

  ‘Or under their desks,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Wherever,’ the voice said. ‘The point is that the survival numbers two weeks after the launch were very skewed. They showed a lot more kids than adults. Some guy on House Appropriations started obsessing about it. He wanted places for these kids to go. He figured they might be able to get to undamaged regional airports and be flown out to remote areas. He wanted combination radiation shelters and living accommodations built. He talked to the air force. He scratched their backs, they scratched his. He was from South Dakota, so that’s where they started.’

  ‘The local scuttlebutt is about a scandal,’ Reacher said. ‘Building an orphanage doesn’t sound especially scandalous.’

  ‘You don’t understand. The assumption was there would be no adults left. Maybe a sick and dying pilot or two, that’s all. Some harassed bureaucrat with a clipboard. The idea was that these kids would be dumped out of the planes and left alone to lock themselves underground and manage the best they could. On their own. Like feral animals. It wasn’t a pretty picture. They got reports from psychologists saying there would be tribalism, fighting, killing, maybe even cannibalism. And the median age of the survivors was supposed to be seven. Then the psychologists talked to the grown-ups, and it turned out that their worst fear was that they would die and their kids would live on without them. They needed to hear that things would be OK, you know, with doctors and nurses and clean sheets on the bed. They didn’t want to hear about how things were really going to be. So the
re was a lot of fuss and then the idea was dropped, as a matter of civilian morale.’

  ‘So this place just stood here for fifty years?’

  ‘Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else.’

  ‘Do we know what the compromises were?’

  ‘No. The plans are missing.’

  ‘So is the place empty?’

  ‘They filled it with junk they needed to store and then they forgot all about it.’

  ‘Is the stuff still in there?’

  ‘I’m assuming so.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. That’s in another file. But it can’t be very exciting. It’s something that was already surplus to requirements fifty years ago.’

  ‘Are you going to find out?’

  ‘My guy has requested the file.’

  ‘How’s my weather?’

  ‘Stick your head out the door.’

  ‘I mean, what’s coming my way?’

  A pause. ‘It’ll be snowing again tomorrow. Clear and cold until then.’

  ‘Where would a bunch of bikers have hidden a key?’