61 Hours Part 17

'And that horrifies you?'

'No, I think to be like everyone else would be comfortable and rea.s.suring. But some things just can't be done. I was born different.'

'That's your answer? You were born different?'

'I think it's clear we're not all born the same.'

Janet Salter poured the coffee, this time straight into tall china mugs, as if she thought silver trays and ceremony were inappropriate for an ascetic, and as if she had noticed his earlier discomfort with the undersized cup.

She said, 'Well, whatever your precise diagnosis might be, I'm glad to have you here. You're welcome to stay as long as you like.'

Five to six in the evening.

Thirty-four hours to go.

After the coffee was finished Janet Salter started to make dinner. Reacher offered to eat out, but she said it was as easy to cook for six as five, which told him the two cops on night watch would be getting up and forming a foursome for most of the evening. Which was rea.s.suring.

With her permission he used the food preparation time to inspect the house. He wasn't interested in the first floor or the second floor. He wanted to see the bas.e.m.e.nt. South Dakota had tornadoes, and he was pretty sure a house of any quality would have been planned with an underground safety zone. He went down a flight of stairs from a small back hallway off the kitchen and found a satisfactory situation. The prairie topsoil had been too deep for the excavation to reach bedrock, so the whole s.p.a.ce was basically a huge six-sided wooden box built from ma.s.sive baulks of timber banded with iron. The walls and floor were thick to provide stability, and the ceiling was thick to prevent the rest of the house from crashing through after a direct hit. There was a thicket of floor-to-ceiling posts throughout the s.p.a.ce, not more than six feet apart, each one hewn and smoothed from the trunk of a tree. Four of them were panelled with wallboard, to form a furnace room. The furnace was a stained green appliance. It was fed by a thin fuel line, presumably from an oil tank buried outside in the yard. It had a pump and a complicated matrix of wide iron pipes that led out and up through the ceiling. An old installation. Maybe the first in town. But it was working fine. The burner was roaring and the pump was whirring and the pipes were hissing. It was keeping the whole bas.e.m.e.nt warm.

The stairs leading upward could be closed off at the bottom with a stout door that opened outward. It could be secured from the inside with an iron bar propped across iron brackets. It was a fine tornado shelter, no question. Probably an adequate bomb shelter. Almost certainly resistant to any kind of small arms fire. Reacher had seen .50 calibre machine guns chew through most things, but hundred-year-old foot-thick close-grain hard-wood would probably hold up until their barrels overheated and warped.

He came back upstairs encouraged and found the night watch cops up and about. They were with their daytime partners in the kitchen. Janet Salter was moving around inside their cordon. There was an atmosphere of custom and comfort. Clearly the strange little household was becoming used to getting along together. The oven was on and it was warming the room. The gla.s.s in the window was fogged with moisture. Reacher stepped into the library and checked the view to the rear. Nothing to see. Just a vague sense of flat land receding into the frigid distance. The snow was easing. The falling flakes themselves seemed stunned by the cold.

Reacher turned back from the window and found Janet Salter stepping in through the door. She said, 'May we talk?'

Reacher said, 'Sure.'

She said, 'I know the real reason why you're here, of course. I know why you're inspecting the house. You have volunteered to defend me, if the siren should happen to sound, and you're making yourself familiar with the terrain. And I'm very grateful for your kindness. Even though your psychological imperatives may mean you won't be here for quite long enough. The trial might not happen for a month. How many new shirts would that be?'

'Eight,' Reacher said.

She didn't reply.

Reacher said, 'There would be no shame in bowing out, you know. No one could blame you. And those guys will get nailed for something else, sooner or later.'

'There would be considerable shame in it,' she said. 'And I won't do it.'

'Then don't talk to me about psychological imperatives,' Reacher said.

She smiled. Asked, 'Are you armed?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Do retired plumbers carry wrenches the rest of their lives?' She pointed to a low shelf. 'There's a book that might interest you. A work of history. The large volume, with the leather binding.'

It was a big old thing about a foot and a half high and about four inches thick. It had a leather spine with raised horizontal ribs and a quaint t.i.tle embossed in gold: An Accurate Ill.u.s.trated History of Mr Smith's & Mr Wesson's Hand Guns An Accurate Ill.u.s.trated History of Mr Smith's & Mr Wesson's Hand Guns. Which sounded Victorian, which did not compute. Smith & Wesson had made plenty of handguns in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but not nearly enough to fill a book four inches thick.

Janet Salter said, 'Take a look at it.'

Reacher pulled the book off the shelf. It was heavy.

She said, 'I think you should read it in bed tonight.'

It was heavy because it wasn't a book. Reacher opened the leather-bound cover and expected to see faded pages with half-tone engravings or hand-tinted line drawings, maybe alternated with tissue paper leaves to protect the art. Instead the cover was a lid and inside was a box with two moulded velvet cavities. The velvet was brown. Nested neatly in the two cavities was a matched pair of Smith & Wesson revolvers, one reversed with respect to the other, cradled b.u.t.t to muzzle, like quotation marks either end of a sentence. The revolvers were Smith & Wesson's Military and Police models. Four-inch barrels. They could have been a hundred years old, or fifty. Plain simple steel machines, chequered walnut grips, chambered for the .38 Special, lanyard eyelets on the bottom of the b.u.t.ts, put there for officers either military or civil.

Janet Salter said, 'They were my grandfather's.'

Reacher asked, 'Did he serve?'

'He was an honorary commissioner, back when Bolton first got a police department. He was presented with the guns. Do you think they still work?'

Reacher nodded. Revolvers were usually reliable for ever. They had to be seriously banged up or rusted solid to fail. He asked, 'Have they ever been used?'

'I don't think so.'

'Do you have any oil?'

'I have sewing-machine oil.'

'That will do.'

'Do we need anything else?'

'Ammunition would help.'

'I have some.'

'How old?'

'About a week.'

'You're well prepared.'

'It seemed the right time to be.'

'How many rounds?'

'A box of a hundred.'

'Good work.'

'Put the book back now,' she said. 'The policewomen need not know. In my experience professionals are offended by amateur plans.'

After dinner the phone rang. It was Peterson, at the police station. He told Janet Salter that the phone on the back corner desk had rung. The 110th MP. The woman wouldn't talk to him. She wanted Reacher to call her back.

Janet Salter's phone was in the hallway. It was newer than the house, but not recently installed. It had a push-b.u.t.ton dial, but it also had a cord and was about the size of a portable typewriter. It was on a small table with a chair next to it. Like phones used to be, back when one instrument was enough for a household and using it was a kind of ceremony.

Reacher dialled the number he remembered. He waited for the recording and dialled 110.

'Yes?'

'Amanda, please.'

There was a click. Then the voice. No dial tone. She already had the phone in her hand. She said, 'Either you're crazy or the world is.'

Reacher said, 'Or both.'

'Whichever, I'm about ready to give up on you.'

'Why?'

'Because the place you're pestering me about doesn't exist.'

Five to seven in the evening.

Thirty-three hours to go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

REACHER MOVED ON THE HALLWAY CHAIR AND SAID, 'THE PLACE exists. For sure. I'd believe stone and eyewitness reports before I believed army paperwork.' exists. For sure. I'd believe stone and eyewitness reports before I believed army paperwork.'

The voice said, 'But you haven't actually seen the stone for yourself.'

'Not yet. But why would anyone invent a story like that?'

'Then the place must have been unbelievably secret. They built it but never listed it anywhere.'

'And then they let a construction camp get built right over it? How does that work?'

'Everything changed, that's how. It was top secret fifty years ago, and it was totally defunct by five years ago. Typical Cold War scenario. Probably decla.s.sified in the early nineties.'

'I don't care when it was decla.s.sified. I just want to know what it is.'

'I could get on a plane. But you're closer.'

Reacher asked, 'How's your case?'

'Still waiting. Which doesn't encourage me. It will probably fall apart by morning.'

'You working all night?'

'You know how it is.'

'So use the down time. Check Congressional appropriations for me. The purpose will be redacted, but the money will be listed. It always is. We can make a start that way.'

'You know how big the defence budget was fifty years ago? You know how many line items there were?'

'You've got all night. Look for South Dakota involvement, House or Senate. I don't see any real strategic value up here, so it could have been a pork barrel project.'

'Checking those records is a lot of work.'

'What did you expect? A life of leisure? You should have joined the navy.'

'We have a deal, Reacher. Remember? So tell me about the one-star general.'

'You're wasting time.'

'I've got time to waste. Sounds like you're the one who hasn't.'

'It's a long story.'

'The best stories always are. Summarize if you like, but make sure you hit all the main points.'

'I'm on someone else's phone here. I can't run up a big bill.'

The voice said, 'Wait one.' There was a click and a second of dead air and then the voice came back. 'Now you're on the government's dime.'

'You could be working the money for me.'

'I am. I already put a guy on it thirty-five minutes ago. I maintain standards here, believe me. However good you were, I'm better.'

'I sincerely hope so.'

'So, once upon a time, what happened?'

Reacher paused.

'I went to Russia,' he said. 'Well after the fall of communism. We got a weird invitation to go inspect their military prisons. n.o.body had the faintest idea why. But the general feeling was, why not? So we flew to Moscow and took a train way east. It was a big old Soviet-era thing with bunks and a dining car. We were on it for days. The food was awful. But awful in a way that felt familiar. So one night I went for a stroll up and down the train and stopped in at the kitchen. They were serving us American MREs. Our very own meals, ready to eat.'

'U.S. Army rations? On a Soviet train?'

'A Russian train by then, technically. They had coal-fired stoves in the kitchen car. Samovars and everything. They were heating pans of water and ripping open MRE packs and mixing them together. They had boxes and boxes of them.'

'Did they try to hide them?'

'The cooks didn't know what they were. They couldn't read English. Probably couldn't read anything.'