by Lee Child
“I’m going crazy in there,” she said.
“I’ve got bad news,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“They had a helper in Chicago,” he said.
She stared up at him.
“They were only gone five days,” he said. “That’s what Fowler said at the trial. He said Loder had been gone just five days.”
“So?” she said.
“So they didn’t have time for surveillance,” he said. “They hadn’t been watching you. Somebody told them where you were going to be, and when. They had help, Holly.”
The color in her face drained away. It was replaced by shock.
“Five days?” she said. “You sure?”
Reacher nodded. Holly went quiet. She was thinking hard.
“So who knew?” he asked her. “Who knew where you’d be, twelve o’clock Monday? A roommate? A friend?”
Her eyes were darting left and right. She was racing through the possibilities.
“Nobody knew,” she said.
“Were you ever tailed?” he asked.
She shrugged helplessly. Reacher could see she desperately wanted to say yes, I was tailed. Because he knew to say no was too awful for her to contemplate.
“Were you?” he asked again.
“No,” she said quietly. “By a bozo like one of these? Forget it. I’d have spotted them. And they’d have had to hang around all day outside the Federal Building, just waiting. We’d have picked them up in a heartbeat.”
“So?” he asked.
“My lunch break was flexible,” she said. “It varied, sometimes by a couple of hours either way. It was never regular.”
“So?” he asked again.
She stared at him.
“So it was inside help,” she said. “Inside the Bureau. Had to be. Think about it, no other possibility. Somebody in the office saw me leave and dropped a dime.”
He said nothing. Just watched the dismay on her face. “A mole inside Chicago,” she said. A statement, not a question. “Inside the Bureau. No other possibility. Shit, I don’t believe it.”
Then she smiled. A brief, bitter smile.
“And we’ve got a mole inside here,” she said. “Ironic, right? He identified himself to me. Young guy, big scar on his forehead. He’s undercover for the Bureau. He says we’ve got people in a lot of these groups. Deep undercover, in case of emergency. He called it in when they put the dynamite in my walls.”
He stared back at her.
“You know about the dynamite?” he said.
She grimaced and nodded.
“No wonder you’re going crazy in there,” he said.
Then he stared at her in a new panic.
“Who does this undercover guy call in to?” he asked urgently.
“Our office in Butte,” Holly said. “It’s just a satellite office. One resident agent. He communicates by radio. He’s got a transmitter hidden out in the woods. But he’s not using it now. He says they’re scanning the frequencies.”
He shuddered.
“So how long before the Chicago mole blows his cover?” he said.
Holly went paler.
“Soon, I guess,” she said. “Soon as somebody figures we were headed out in this direction. Chicago will be dialing up the computers and trawling for any reports coming out of Montana. His stuff will be top of the damn pile. Christ, Reacher, you’ve got to get to him first. You’ve got to warn him. His name is Jackson.”
They turned back. Started hurrying south through the ghost town.
“He says he can break me out,” Holly said. “Tonight, by jeep.”
Reacher nodded grimly.
“Go with him,” he said.
“Not without you,” she said.
“They’re sending me anyway,” he said. “I’m supposed to be an emissary. I’m supposed to tell your people it’s hopeless.”
“Are you going to go?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “Not without you.”
“You should go,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”
He shook his head again.
“I am worrying about you,” he said.
“Just go,” she said. “Forget me and get out.”
He shrugged. Said nothing.
“Get out if you get the chance, Reacher,” she said. “I mean it.”
She looked like she meant it. She was glaring at him.
“Only if you’re gone first,” he said finally. “I’m sticking around until you’re out of here. I’m definitely not leaving you with these maniacs.”
“But you can’t stick around,” she said. “If I’m gone, they’ll go apeshit. It’ll change everything.”
He looked at her. Heard Borken say: she’s more than his daughter.
“Why, Holly?” he said. “Why will it change everything? Who the hell are you?”
She didn’t answer. Glanced away. Fowler strolled into view, coming north, smoking. He walked up to them. Stopped right in front of them. Pulled his pack.
“Cigarette?” he asked.
Holly looked at the ground. Reacher shook his head.
“She tell you?” Fowler asked. “All the comforts of home?”
The guards were standing to attention. They were in a sort of honor guard on the courthouse steps. Fowler walked Holly to them. A guard took her inside. At the door, she glanced back at Reacher. He nodded to her. Tried to make it say: see you later, OK? Then she was gone.
“NOW FOR THE grand tour,” Fowler said. “You stick close to me. Beau’s orders. But you can ask any questions you want, OK?”
Reacher glanced vaguely at him and nodded. Glanced at the six guards behind him. He walked down the steps and paused. Looked over at the flagpole. It was set dead center in the remains of a fine square of lawn in front of the building. He walked across to it and stood in Loder’s blood and looked around.
The town of Yorke was pretty much dead. Looked like it had died some time ago. And it looked like it had never been much of a place to begin with. The road came through north to south, and there had been four developed blocks flanking it, two on the east side and two on the west. The courthouse took up the whole of the southeastern block and it faced what might have been some kind of a county office on the southwestern block. The western side of the street was higher. The ground sloped way up. The foundation of the county office building was about level with the second floor of the courthouse. It had started out the same type of structure, but it had fallen into ruin, maybe thirty years before. The paint was peeled and the siding showed through iron-gray. There was no glass in any window. The sloping knoll surrounding it had returned to mountain scrub. There had been an ornamental tree dead center. It had died a long time ago, and it was now just a stump, maybe seven feet high, like an execution post.
The northern blocks were rows of faded, boarded-up stores. There had once been tall ornate frontages concealing simple square buildings, but the decay of the years had left the frontages the same dull brown as the boxy wooden structures behind. The signs above the doors had faded to nothing. There were no people on the sidewalks. No vehicle noise, no activity, no nothing. The place was a ghost. It looked like an abandoned cowboy town from the Old West.
“This was a mining town,” Fowler said. “Lead, mostly, but some copper, and a couple of seams of good silver for a while. There was a lot of money made here, that’s for damn sure.”
“So what happened?” Reacher asked.
Fowler shrugged.
“What happens to any mining place?” he said. “It gets worked out, is what. Fifty years ago, people were registering claims in that old county office like there was no tomorrow, and they were disputing them in that old courthouse, and there were saloons and banks and stores up and down the street. Then they started coming up with dirt instead of metal, and they moved on, and this is what got left behind.”
Fowler was looking around at the dismal view and Reacher was following
his gaze. Then he transferred his eyes upward a couple of degrees and took in the giant mountains rearing on the horizon. They were massive and indifferent, still streaked with snow on the third of July. Mist hung in the passes and floated through the dense conifers. Fowler moved and Reacher followed him up a track launching steeply northwest behind the ruined county office. The guards followed in single file behind. He realized this was the track he’d stumbled along twice in the dark the night before. After a hundred yards, they were in the trees. The track wound uphill through the forest. Progress was easier in the filtered green daylight. After a mile of walking they had made maybe a half mile of straight-line progress and they came out in the clearing the white truck had driven into the previous night. There was a small sentry squad, armed and immaculate, standing at attention in the center of the space. But there was no sign of the white truck. It had been driven away.
“We call this the Bastion,” Fowler said. “These were the very first acres we bought.”
In the clear daylight, the place looked different. The Bastion was a big tidy clearing in the brush, nestled in a mountain bowl three hundred feet above the town itself. There was no man-made perimeter. The perimeter had been supplied a million years ago by the great glaciers grinding down from the Pole. The north and west sides were mountainous, rearing straight up to the high peaks. Reacher saw snow again, packed by the wind into the high north-facing gullies. If it was there in July, it had to be there twelve months of the year.
To the southeast, the town was just visible below them through the gaps in the trees where the track had been carved out. Reacher could see the ruined county building and the white courthouse set below it like models. Directly south, the mountain slopes fell away into the thick forest. Where there were no trees, there were savage ravines. Reacher gazed at them, quietly. Fowler pointed.
“Hundred feet deep, some of those,” he said. “Full of elk and bighorn sheep. And we got black bears roaming. A few of the folk have seen mountain lions on the prowl. You can hear them in the night, when it gets real quiet.”
Reacher nodded and listened to the stunning silence. Tried to figure out how much quieter the nights could be. Fowler turned and pointed here and there.
“This is what we built,” he said. “So far.”
Reacher nodded again. The clearing held ten buildings. They were all large utilitarian wooden structures, built from plywood sheet and cedar, resting on solid concrete piles. There was an electricity supply into each building from a loop of heavy cable running between them.
“Power comes up from the town,” Fowler said. “A mile of cable. Running water, too, piped down from a pure mountain lake through plastic tubing, installed by militia labor.”
Reacher saw the hut he’d been locked into most of the night. It was smaller than the others.
“Administration hut,” Fowler said.
One of the huts had a whip antenna on the roof, maybe sixty feet high. Shortwave radio. And Reacher could see a thinner cable, strapped to the heavy power line. It snaked into the same hut, and didn’t come out again.
“You guys are on the phone?” he asked. “Unlisted, right?”
He pointed and Fowler followed his gaze.
“The phone line?” he said. “Runs up from Yorke with the power cable. But there’s no telephone. World government would tap our calls.”
He gestured for Reacher to follow him over to the hut with the antenna, where the line terminated. They pushed in together through the narrow door. Fowler spread his hands in a proud little gesture.
“The communications hut,” he said.
The hut was dark and maybe twenty feet by twelve. Two men inside, one crouched over a tape recorder, listening to something on headphones, the other slowly turning the dial of a radio scanner. Both long sides of the hut had crude wooden desks built into the walls. Reacher glanced up at the gable and saw the telephone wire running in through a hole drilled in the wall. It coiled down and fed a modem. The modem was wired into a pair of glowing desktop computers.
“The National Militia Internet,” Fowler said.
A second wire bypassed the desktops and fed a fax machine. It was whirring away to itself and slowly rolling a curl of paper out.
“The Patriotic Fax Network,” Fowler said.
Reacher nodded and walked closer. The fax machine sat on the counter next to another computer and a large shortwave radio.
“This is the shadow media,” Fowler said. “We depend on all this equipment for the truth about what’s going on in America. You can’t get the truth any other way.”
Reacher took a last look around and shrugged.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “That’s the truth about me. No dinner and no breakfast. You got someplace with coffee?”
Fowler looked at him and grinned.
“Sure,” he said. “Mess hall serves all day. What do you think we are? A bunch of savages?”
He dismissed the six guards and gestured again for Reacher to follow him. The mess hall was next to the communications hut. It was about four times the size, twice as long and twice as wide. Outside, it had a sturdy chimney on the roof, fabricated from bright galvanized metal. Inside, it was full of rough trestle tables in neat lines, simple benches pushed carefully underneath. It smelled of old food and the dusty smell that large communal spaces always have.
There were three women working in there. They were cleaning the tables. They were dressed in olive fatigues, and they all had long, clean hair and plain, unadorned faces, red hands and no jewelry. They paused when Fowler and Reacher walked in. They stopped working and stood together, watching. Reacher recognized one of them from the courtroom. She gave him a cautious nod of greeting. Fowler stepped forward.
“Our guest missed breakfast,” he said.
The cautious woman nodded again.
“Sure,” she said. “What can I get you?”
“Anything,” Reacher said. “As long as it’s got coffee with it.”
“Five minutes,” the woman said.
She led the other two away through a door where the kitchen was bumped out in back. Fowler sat down at a table and Reacher took the bench opposite.
“Three times a day, this place gets used for meals,” Fowler said. “The rest of the time, afternoons and evenings mainly, it gets used as the central meeting place for the community. Beau gets up on the table and tells the folk what needs doing.”
“Where is Beau right now?” Reacher asked.
“You’ll see him before you go,” Fowler said. “Count on it.”
Reacher nodded slowly and focused through the small window toward the mountains. The new angle gave him a glimpse of a farther range, maybe fifty miles distant, hanging there in the clear air between the earth and the sky. The silence was still awesome.
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
“Working,” Fowler said. “Working, and training.”
“Working?” Reacher said. “Working at what?”
“Building up the southern perimeter,” Fowler said. “The ravines are shallow in a couple of places. Tanks could get through. You know what an abatis is?”
Reacher looked blank. He knew what an abatis was. Any conscientious West Pointer who could read knew what an abatis was. But he wasn’t about to let Fowler know exactly how much he knew about anything. So he just looked blank.
“You fell some trees,” Fowler said. “Every fifth or sixth tree, you chop it down. You drop it facing away from the enemy. The trees around here, they’re mostly wild pines, the branches face upward, right? So when they’re felled, the branches are facing away from the enemy. Tank runs into the chopped end of the tree, tries to push it along. But the branches snag against the trees you left standing. Pretty soon, that tank is trying to push two or three trees over. Then four or five. Can’t be done. Even a big tank like an Abrams can’t do it. Fifteen-hundred-horsepower gas turbine on it, sixty-three tons, it’s going to stall when it’s trying to push all those trees over. Even if they ship
the big Russian tanks in against us, it can’t be done. That’s an abatis, Reacher. Use the power of nature against them. They can’t get through those damn trees, that’s for sure. Soviets used it against Hitler, Kursk, World War Two. An old Commie trick. Now we’re turning it around against them.”
“What about infantry?” Reacher said. “Tanks won’t come alone. They’ll have infantry right there with them. They’ll just skip ahead and dynamite the trees.”
Fowler grinned.
“They’ll try,” he said. “Then they’ll stop trying. We’ve got machine gun positions fifty yards north of the abatises. We’ll cut them to pieces.”
The cautious woman came back out of the kitchen carrying a tray. She put it down on the table in front of Reacher. Eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, beans, all on an enamel plate. A metal pint mug of steaming coffee. Cheap flatware.
“Enjoy,” she said.
“Thank you,” Reacher said.
“I don’t get coffee?” Fowler said.
The cautious woman pointed to the back.
“Help yourself,” she said.
Fowler tried a man-to-man look at Reacher and got up. Reacher kept on looking blank. Fowler walked back to the kitchen and ducked in the door. The woman watched him go and laid a hand on Reacher’s arm.
“I need to talk to you,” she whispered. “Find me after lights-out, tonight. I’ll meet you outside the kitchen door, OK?”
“Talk to me now,” Reacher whispered back. “I could be gone by then.”
“You’ve got to help us,” the woman whispered.
Then Fowler came back out into the hall and the woman’s eyes clouded with terror. She straightened up and hurried away.
THERE WERE SIX bolts through each of the long tubes in the bed frame. Two of them secured the mesh panel which held up the mattress. Then there were two at each end, fixing the long tube to the right-angle flanges attached to the legs. She had studied the construction for a long time, and she had spotted an improvement. She could leave one flange bolted to one end. It would stand out like a rigid right-angled hook. Better than separating the flange and then jamming it into the open end. More strength.