61 Hours
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.’
Chapter 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 there 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?’