61 Hours

‘It’s bolted down on army concrete. That’s good enough for me.’

‘You got no warrant.’

Reacher didn’t answer. He was all done talking. It was too cold. His face was numb and his teeth were hurting. He just pushed the door all the way open and took a look inside.

The hut was dark. And warm. There was a paraffin stove going. Reacher could smell the sweet wet kerosene. There were twelve cots in the room, six to a side, and a boxed-in section at the far end that might have been a bathroom. Plain grey blankets on the cots, cardboard shipping cartons filled with folded clothes, burlap drapes at the small square windows.

There was a young woman sitting on the furthest cot on the right. No coat, because of the heat. No hat. She was maybe eighteen or twenty. She looked a little sullen and grimy, but behind that she was pretty. Long fair hair, strong vivid features. Tall, and slender. For a second Reacher thought he had seen her before. But he hadn’t. She was a type, that was all. Like Kim Peterson. A South Dakotan. Wherever this bunch was from, they had picked up local recruits.

Reacher backed out and pulled the door shut behind him. Turned to the guy six feet away and said, ‘Want to show me the other huts?’

‘Whatever.’ No reluctance. The guy just started his limbs moving inside his heavy clothing and trudged on down the paths and pushed open one door after another. Fourteen of the fifteen huts were the same. Rows of cots, crude drapes, paraffin stoves, grey blankets, shipping boxes, folded clothes. No benches, no work tables, no glass vessels, no gas rings, no laboratory equipment of any kind. No people, either. The girl in the first hut was the only one not outside and working. Maybe she was sick.

The last hut in the back row was a kitchen. It had two domestic stoves shoved side by side for cooking, and plain deal tables pushed against the walls for use as work surfaces, and crude shelves stacked with plates and bowls and mugs, and more shelves lined with a few meagre supplies. Jars almost empty of flour and sugar and coffee, single boxes of cereal and pasta standing alone in spaces that could have taken dozens.

There was no laboratory equipment.

Reacher hunched down in his coat and came out between two huts. His car was still there, idling faithfully. Beyond it the ploughed road narrowed into the distance, high, wide, and handsome. As flat as glass. Fifty summers, fifty winters, it hadn’t heaved or cracked at all. The voice from Virginia had asked: You know how big the defence budget was fifty years ago? They had poured maybe four hundred thousand yards of concrete, and then forgotten all about them.

‘Have a nice day,’ Reacher said, and headed for his car.

Five minutes to nine in the morning.

Nineteen hours to go.

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE DRIVE BACK WAS THE SAME AS THE DRIVE OUT, EXCEPT FOR A strange slow-motion near-collision at the first turn. Reacher had driven the wide ploughed road fast and the next eight narrow snow-bound miles slow, and then he had coasted and tried to work out a trajectory to get himself through the left turn and into the eastbound ruts on the old road that ran parallel with the highway. But at the same time a fuel tanker was trying to get out of those same ruts for a left turn of its own up towards the camp. It was a squat vehicle with a company name painted along its flank. Paraffin for the heaters, maybe, or gasoline for the pick-up trucks, or diesel for a generator. It changed down to a low gear and turned very early and came right across Reacher’s lane. He braked hard, hoping his chains would bite, but the Crown Vic’s onboard electronics wouldn’t allow the wheels to lock. The car rolled on with all kinds of thumping and banging coming from the brake pistons. The fuel truck kept on coming. Reacher yanked the wheel. The front tyres lost their grip and skated. The Crown Vic’s front left corner missed the back of the truck by an inch. The truck roared on, low gear, walking pace, oblivious. Reacher watched it go in his mirror. He had ended up stationary at a right angle across the old road, with his front wheels in one of the eastbound ruts and his back wheels in one of the westbound. He had to rock between Drive and Reverse and hit the gas hard to break free.

But after that it was plain sailing all the way.

The cop in the stake-out car at the end of Janet Salter’s street was Kapler. Better than Montgomery, from the day before. Kapler looked Reacher over very carefully and then backed up to let him by. Reacher parked nose to tail with the second stake-out car and hustled up the driveway. The day watch cop in the hallway let him in. He asked, ‘All quiet?’

She said, ‘So far.’

‘Is Mrs Salter OK?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Let me see her.’ Just like Chief Holland the night before, and just as pointless. If anything bad had happened, the cops wouldn’t be sitting around doing nothing.

The day watch woman said, ‘She’s in the library.’

Reacher found her there, in her usual chair. This time she was reading, an old book with no dust jacket and a title too small to read from a distance. Her gun was still in her pocket. Reacher could make out its shape. She looked up and said, ‘Kid gloves?’

He said, ‘Plastic. Less classy than kid. But nothing to complain about.’

‘Did you learn anything?’

‘Plenty.’

He got back in the car and headed for the police station. Found Peterson in the squad room. Reacher said, ‘Holland was right. They weren’t coming over here. They were bluffing. Or someone was bluffing on their behalf. We have no idea who actually called here. Could have been the shooter himself, trying to create time and space, trying to point you in the wrong direction.’

‘Well, whoever, they failed. And now we’re going to bust them all.’

‘Then you better do it quickly. They’re about to move out.’

‘They told you that?’

‘Think back to that call from the DEA. Have you ever sold a house?’

‘Once.’

‘You cleaned it up, right? Made it look real good?’

‘I painted the siding.’

‘They’ve got the snow all ploughed. Everything is immaculate. They’ve got their stuff in shipping boxes. They’ve run down their food supplies to nothing. Whoever owns the place is selling it out from under them.’

‘When are they going?’

‘Soon.’

‘Did they give you any trouble?’

‘Not really.’

‘Did they believe you were from the army?’

‘Not for a minute. But they’ve been told to keep their noses clean, as of right now. The place needs to be a controversy-free zone. Whoever owns the place doesn’t want the title damaged. So they didn’t give me a hard time.’

‘Nobody owns that place. It’s all public land.’

‘It makes a profit for somebody. Therefore somebody thinks he owns it. The bikers are his employees, that’s all. Worker bees. And now they’ve got their marching orders. They’re moving on to the next project.’

‘Plato the Mexican.’

‘Whoever.’

Peterson asked, ‘Did you find a lab?’

Reacher said, ‘I want to see the product from the restaurant parking lot.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s the way my mind works. One step at a time.’ Peterson shrugged and led the way back to the corridor, around a corner, to an evidence room. There was a half-width counter outside it, unoccupied. Peterson stepped past it and took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door.

‘Wait there,’ he said.

He went in and came out ten seconds later with a clear plastic evidence bag. It was big. Stapled to it was a chain-of-custody form with four separate dates and times and locations and signatures on it. Inside it was the package that Janet Salter had described. The brick of white powder, hard and smooth under the wax paper wrap. The picture stencilled on it, the crown, the headband, the three points, the three balls representing jewels.

Reacher asked, ‘Did you test it?’

‘Of course,’ Peterson said. ‘It’s meth. No question. Just short of a kilo, very high purity, almost clinical. Good stuff, if you like that kind of thing.’