by Lee Child
“Probably more than ten, and less than a hundred.”
“With employment problems two years ago?”
“Anything else?”
Reacher asked, “What are you wearing?”
“What is this, a dirty phone call now?”
Reacher smiled. “No, I’m just trying to picture the scene. For old times’ sake. I know the desk. Same office?”
“I assume so. Upstairs, third on the left.”
“That’s the one.” Reacher saw it in his mind. Stone stairs, a metal handrail, a narrow corridor floored with linoleum, lines of doors left and right with fluted glass windows in them, offices behind each one, each office equipped according to some complex DoD protocol. His had had the metal desk, two phones with a total of three lines, a vinyl chair on casters, file cabinets, and two visitor chairs with springy bent-tube legs. Plus a glass light shade shaped like a bowl and hung from the ceiling on three metal chains. Plus an out-of-date map of the United States on the wall, made after Hawaii and Alaska had joined the Union but before the interstate highway system had been completed.
Made, in fact, around the same time that the strange installation near Bolton, South Dakota, was being put in.
The voice said, “I’m wearing my ACUs with a T-shirt. I’ve got the jacket on, because it’s cold tonight.”
Reacher said, “You’re in Virginia. You don’t know what cold is.”
“Quit whining. You’re still in double figures up there. Negative, but hey. Minus eleven degrees. But the radar shows colder air moving in from the west.”
“How could it get colder?”
“You’re going to get what Wyoming just had, that’s how.”
“You talking to meteorologists?”
“No, I’m looking at the Weather Channel.”
“What did Wyoming just have?”
“They were thirty below zero.”
“Terrific.”
“You can take it. You’re a big guy. Probably a Norseman way back, by the look of you.”
“What, Google Earth can see through roof tiles now?”
“No, there’s a photo of you in your file.”
“What about you?”
“Yes, there’s a photo of me in my file, too.”
“Not what I meant, smart-ass. I don’t have your file.”
“I’m a one-eyed fifty-year-old hunchback.”
“I thought so, judging by your voice.”
“Asshole.”
“I’m thinking maybe five-six or five-seven, but thin. Your voice is all in your throat.”
“You saying I’m flat-chested?”
“34A at best.”
“Damn.”
“Blonde hair, probably short. Blue eyes. From northern California.”
She asked, “Age?”
Reacher had been thirty-two years old, the first time he sat behind that battered desk. Which was both old and young for a command of that importance. Young, because he had been something of a star, but old, too, in that he had gotten there a little later than a star should, because he wasn’t an organization man and hadn’t been entirely trusted. He said, “You’re thirty or thirty-one,” because he knew that when it came to a woman’s age it was always better to err on the side of caution.
She said, “Flattery will get you everywhere.” Then she said, “Got to go. Call me later.”
* * *
The household got right back into its settled routine. Peterson left, and the two day-watch women went up to bed. Janet Salter showed Reacher to the front upstairs room with the window over the porch roof. In principle the most vulnerable, but he wasn’t worried. Sheer rage would overcome any theoretical tactical disadvantage. He hated to be woken in the night. An intruder came through that window, he would go straight back out like a spear.
Five to two in the morning.
Twenty-six hours to go.
Chapter 22
Reacher had planned on sleeping until eight, but he was woken at half past six. By Peterson. The guy came into the bedroom and some primal instinct must have made him pause and kick the bed frame and then step smartly back. He must have figured that was the safest thing to do. He must have figured if he leaned over and shook Reacher gently by the shoulder he could get his arm broken.
And he might have been right.
Reacher said, “What?”
Peterson said, “First light is less than an hour away.”
“And?”
“You need to get going.”
“Where?”
“The biker camp. Remember? You offered.”
Janet Salter was already in her kitchen. Reacher found her there. She was dressed for the day. She had coffee going. The old percolator was slurping and rattling. He said, “I have to go out.”
She nodded. “Mr. Peterson told me. Will you be OK?”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t see how. There are a hundred people out there, and all you have is a six-shooter.”
“We need information.”
“Even so.”
“I’ve got the Fourth Amendment. That’s all the protection I need. If I get hurt or don’t come back, the cops get probable cause for a search. The bikers don’t want that. They’ll treat me with kid gloves.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“Will you be OK here?”
“I hope so.”
“If the cops leave again, take your gun and lock yourself in the basement. Don’t open the door to anyone except me.”
“Should we have a password?”
“You can ask about my favorite book.”
“You don’t have one. You told me that.”
“I know. So that will be the correct answer.” The percolator finished and Reacher poured a generous measure into one of six white mugs standing on the counter.
Janet Salter asked, “Will the police leave again?”
“Probably not.”
“There could be another riot.”
“Unlikely. Prison riots are rare. Like revolutions in a nation’s history. The conditions have to be exactly right.”
“An escape, then.”
“Even less likely. Escapes are hard. The prison people make sure of that.”
“Are you saying my problems are over?”
“It’s possible.”
“So are you going to come back here or not?”
“I think the highway is still closed.”
“When it opens again, where will you go next?”
“I don’t know.”
Janet Salter said, “I think you’ll head for Virginia.”
“She might be married.”
“You should ask her.”
Reacher smiled. Said, “Maybe I will.”
Peterson briefed him in the hallway. He said the spare unmarked car was outside, warmed up and running. It was reliable. It had been recently serviced. It had a full tank. It had chains on the back and winter tires on the front. There was no direct route to the camp. The way to go was to head south toward the highway, but turn west a mile short of the cloverleaf on the old road that ran parallel.
“The road the lawyer was killed on,” Reacher said.
“That was all the way to the east,” Peterson said. “But still, perhaps you shouldn’t stop if someone tries to flag you down.”
“I won’t,” Reacher said. “Count on it.”
He was to keep on the old road for five miles, and then make a right and head back north on a county two-lane that wandered a little for about eight miles before hitting the ruler-straight section that the army engineers had put in fifty years before. That section was two miles long, and it ran right up to the camp, where he would find the fifteen wooden huts and the old stone building, laid out in two neat lines of eight, running precisely east to west.
“The stone building is in the back left corner,” Peterson said.
Five to seven in the morning.
Twenty-one hours to go.
Seventeen hundred miles south it was
five to eight in the morning. Plato had finished his breakfast and was about to break the habit of a lifetime. He was about to cut out his middleman in the walled city villa and call his guy in the States direct.
He dialed.
He got an answer.
He asked, “Is the witness dead yet?”
There was a pause on the line. His guy said, “You know there was always going to be a delay between the two.”
“How long has that delay been so far?”
His guy knew what to say. “Too long.”
“Correct,” Plato said. “I arranged a riot at the prison last night.”
“I know.”
“Evidently you didn’t make use of it.”
“There was a man in the house.”
“And?”
“I had no instructions.”
“That’s your answer? You needed instructions?”
“I thought perhaps there were complexities I wasn’t grasping.”
Plato breathed out. “How can I hurt you?”
His guy knew what to say. “In ways I don’t want to be hurt.”
“Correct,” Plato said. “But I need you to be more specific. I need you to focus on what’s at stake.”
His guy said, “You’ll kill the person nearest and dearest to me.”
“Yes, I will, eventually. But first there will be a delay, which seems to be a concept you’re very familiar with. I’ll cripple her and mutilate her and let her live for a year or so. Then I’ll kill her. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So for your own sake, get the job done. I don’t care about bystanders. Wipe out the entire damn town if you have to. The entire state, for all I care. How many people live in South Dakota, anyway?”
“About eight hundred thousand.”
“OK. That’s your upper limit for collateral damage. Get it done.”
“I will. I promise.”
Plato hung up and poured himself another cup of coffee.
The spare unmarked was another dark Crown Vic. It smelled dusty and tired inside. Its heater was set to seventy degrees and the fan was blowing hard in a desperate attempt to get there. The weather was way down in a whole new dimension. The temperature was dropping fast. The ground was bone hard and the air was solid with microscopic nubs of snowflakes borne on the wind. They were chilled and shriveled to sharp fragments. They hurled themselves against the windshield and made complex frozen traceries. The wipers wouldn’t shift them. The blades just scraped over them. Reacher set the heater on defrost and waited until the blown air melted oval holes of clarity.
Then he left.
He K-turned across the width of Janet Salter’s street. The ruts were frozen solid. The Crown Vic’s tires bumped up and down. The stake-out car at the end of the road backed up to let him squeeze by. He turned right and drove away from town. The wheel ruts that had been soft the day before were now as hard as concrete trenches. It was like driving a train on a track. He didn’t need to steer. The chains on the back dug in and splintered the ice and the front tires hammered left and right and kept him basically straight. The world outside was entirely white. There was pale light in the sky but no sun. The air was too full of ice. It was like dust. Like mist. The wind was blowing right-to-left in front of him. Small streamlined drifts had built up and frozen solid, against fence posts and power poles. The weird shapes on the power lines had shifted to the east, as if the whole world was tilted.
Reacher found the turn a mile short of the cloverleaf. Getting out of the frozen ruts was difficult. He had to slow to a walk and turn the wheel way over and churn his way out one tire at a time, four separate climbs, four separate drops. He found new ruts running west and settled in for five more miles of autopilot. He repeated the escape maneuver at the next turn and headed north toward the camp. The new road was different. It hadn’t seen much traffic. There were no established ruts. It was just a narrow ribbon of frozen snow. The front wheels skated and wandered a little. The blowing ice pattered left-to-right against the driver’s window. The road humped and dipped and curved left and right for no apparent reason. The camber tilted one way, then the other. Not a great piece of civil engineering. Reacher slowed a little and concentrated hard. To slide into a ditch would be fatal. No chance of a tow before he froze. Even a blown tire would be a disaster. The wheel nuts were probably frozen solid.
Five slow careful miles, then six, then seven. Then the horizon changed. Up ahead the road widened and straightened and flattened. Dramatically. Radically. In the murky distance it looked as broad and flat as a freeway. Maybe even broader and flatter. It looked like a sixteen-lane superhighway. It was a magnificent, surreal piece of road. It was built up slightly proud of the land around it, it was absolutely flat, and it was absolutely straight, for two whole miles.
And it was plowed.
There was not a speck of snow on it. Just smooth gray concrete, scraped and brushed and salted. High piles of snow had been pushed to the sides, and smoothed, and shaped, so that the frozen prairie wind was launching off the western berm and not landing again until it was past the eastern. The tiny fragments of ice were howling past five feet in the air. The road surface itself was clear and dry, like the middle of summer.
Reacher slowed and bumped up onto it. The chains thumped and chattered. The front end tracked straight and true. He kept to a steady thirty and peered ahead. He could make out blond smudges on the horizon. Wooden huts, in a neat row. Two miles away. The car pattered and juddered. The chains were not good on dry concrete.
He kept on going.
Half a mile out he saw activity ahead. A hundred yards out he saw what it was. Pick-up trucks with plow blades lowered were grinding back and forth. A lot of them. Maybe thirty or forty of them. Beyond them bulky black-clad figures with shovels were working in a line. Other bulky figures were walking backward, hurling stuff from their cupped hands in long arcs, like farm laborers feeding chaff to chickens. Salt, presumably. Or grit, or sand, or some other kind of de-icing chemical. Or all of the above. They were clearing the whole camp. They wanted the whole place immaculate. As good as the road.
The huts were raw lumber, bleached and faded a little, but not much. Not brand new, but not old, either. On the left behind the first row of huts Reacher saw the roof of the old stone building. It was tall and peaked and made of slate. It was covered with a foot of snow. It had twin ornate chimneys. The huts themselves were roofed with tarpaper. They had stovepipe vents. There were power lines running from gable to gable. There were concrete paths running from door to door. All were swept clear of snow. What had not been removed completely was piled neatly left and right. In front of the huts was a long line of shapes under black tarpaulins, side by side, like dominoes. Motorcycles, presumably. Big ones. Maybe thirty of them. Harleys, probably, laid up for winter.
Reacher slowed and came to a stop fifty yards out. People had stopped working and were staring at his car. Gloved hands were stacked on shovel handles. Chins were resting on the hands. The salt throwers had paused. One after the other the pick-up trucks came to rest. Their idling exhaust was carried away on the wind.
Reacher took his foot off the brake and inched forward. Nobody moved. Reacher kept on coming, ten yards, then twenty. He stopped again. He was close enough. He didn’t switch off. The Crown Vic’s dash was showing the outside temperature at twelve degrees below zero. If he switched the engine off he might never get it started again. He had read a book set above the Arctic Circle where you had to thaw the engine block with blowlamps.
He jammed his watch cap down on his ears and pulled his hood up. Zipped his coat to his chin. Put his gloves on, left and then right.
He climbed out of the car.
Twenty yards ahead the crowd had gotten larger. Men, women, and children. Maybe a hundred people in total. As advertised. They were all shapeless and hidden in coats and hats and mufflers. Their breath was condensing around their heads, an unbroken cloud that hung motionless and then rose and
whipped away in the wind. The cold was stunning. It was getting worse. It seemed to attack from the inside out. Reacher was shivering after five seconds of exposure. His face was numb after ten. He walked ten paces and stopped. Olive green pants, a tan coat, an obvious police car behind him, South Dakota plates. Not even remotely convincing.
Twenty yards ahead a guy threaded through the crowd. Sidestepping, shuffling, leading with his left shoulder, then his right. Black coat, hat, gloves. His body language was like every interrupted workman in the world. Irritated, but curious. He swiped his padded forearm across his brow and paused and thought and moved forward again. He stepped out of the ranks and stopped a yard in front of the crowd.
Reacher said, “Who the hell are you?”
The guy said, “Piss off.”
Reacher stepped forward. One pace, two, three.
“You’re not very polite,” he said.
“Show me where it says I have to be.”
“Well, you’re walking around on my property.”
“How so?”
“I’m from the army. I’m here to check on our real estate. A two-year maintenance inspection. Your tax dollars at work.”
“That’s a joke.”
Reacher said, “Whatever, I need to take a look around.”
“I told you to piss off.”
“I know. But what are the odds I’m going to take you seriously?”
“You can’t fight a hundred people.”
“I won’t need to. Looks like two-thirds of you are women and children. That leaves maybe thirty guys. Or forty, say. But half of them look too fat to move. They pitch in, they’re going to get all kinds of coronaries. The others, maybe half of them are pussies. They’ll run away. That leaves maybe eight or ten guys, max. And one of me is worth eight or ten of you, easy.”
No answer.
“Plus, I’m from the army. You mess with me, the next guy you see will be driving a tank.”
Silence for a beat. Just the scouring howl of the wind, and the rattle of ice particles against wood. The guy in front looked at Reacher, at his clothes, at his car, and came to some kind of a decision. He asked, “What do you need to see?”