61 Hours Part 29

Twelve hours to go.

Reacher handed the phone back to Holland. The light from the window was dimming. The sun was way in the west and the stone building was casting a long shadow. They set about searching the hut. Their last chance. Every mattress, every bed frame, the toilet tank, the floorboards, the walls, the light fixtures. They did it slowly and thoroughly, and got even slower and more thorough as they approached the end of the room and started running out of options.

They found nothing.

Peterson said, 'We could get a locksmith, maybe from Pierre.'

Reacher said, 'A bank robber would be better. A safe cracker. Maybe they've got one up at the prison.'

'I can't believe they never used the place. It must have cost a fortune.'

'The defence budget was practically unlimited back then.'

'I can't believe they couldn't find an alternative use for it.'

'The design was compromised somehow.'

'Even so. Somebody could have used it.'

'Too landlocked for the navy. We're close to the geographic centre of the United States. Or so they said on the bus tour.'

'The Marines could have used it for winter training.'

'Not with South in the name of the state. Too chicken. The Marines would have insisted on North Dakota. Or the North Pole.'

'Maybe they didn't want to sleep underground.'

'Marines sleep where they're told. And when.'

'Actually I heard they do their winter training near San Diego.'

'I was in the army,' Reacher said. 'Marine training makes no sense to me.'

They braved the cold again and took a last look at the stone building and its stubborn door. Then they walked back to the car and climbed in and drove away. Two miles along the runway, where battered planes were to have spilled ragged children. Then eight miles on the old two-lane, up which no adult would have come to the rescue. The Cold War. A bad time. In retrospect, probably less dangerous than people imagined. Some Soviet missiles were mere fictions, some were painted tree trunks, some were faulty. And the Soviets had psychologists too, preparing reports in the Cyrillic alphabet about seven-year-olds of their own, and about tribalism and fighting and killing and cannibalism. But at the time things had seemed very real. Reacher had been two years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In the Pacific. He had known nothing about it. But later his mother had told him how she and his father had calculated the southern drift of the poisoned wind. Two weeks, they thought. There were guns in the house. And on the base there were corpsmen with pills.

Reacher asked, 'How accurate are your weather reports?'

Peterson said, 'Usually pretty good.'

'They're calling for snow again tomorrow.'

'That sounds about right.'

'Then someone's going to show up soon. They didn't plough that runway for nothing.'

Far to the east and a little to the south a plane was landing on another long runway, at Andrews Air Force Base in the state of Maryland. Not a large plane. A business jet, leased by the army, a.s.signed to an MP prisoner escort company. It was carrying six people. A pilot, a copilot, three prisoner escorts, and a prisoner. The prisoner was the Fourth Infantry captain from Fort Hood. He was in civilian clothes and was hobbled by standard restraint chains around his wrists and waist and ankles, all interconnected. The plane taxied and the steps were lowered and the prisoner was hustled down them to a car parked on the ap.r.o.n. He was put in the back seat. Waiting for him there was a woman officer in a Cla.s.s A army uniform. An MP major. She was a little above average height. She was slender. She had long dark hair tied back. Tanned skin, deep brown eyes. She had intelligence and authority and youth and mischief in her face, all at the same time. She was wearing ribbons for a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

There was no driver in the front of the car.

The woman said, 'Good afternoon, captain.'

The captain didn't speak.

The woman said, 'My name is Susan Turner. My rank is major, and I command the 110th MP, and I'm handling your case. You and I are going to talk for a minute, and then you're going to get back on the plane, and you're either going to head back to Texas, or straight over to Fort Leavenworth. One or the other. You understand?'

Her voice was warm. It was a little husky, a little breathy, a little intimate. All in her throat. It was the kind of voice that could tease out all kinds of confidences.

The infantry captain knew it.

He said, 'I want a lawyer.'

Susan Turner nodded.

'You'll get one,' she said. 'You'll get plenty. Believe me, before long you're going to be completely up to your a.s.s in lawyers. It's going to be like you wandered into a Bar a.s.sociation convention with a hundred dollar bill tied around your neck.'

'You can't talk to me without a lawyer.'

'That's not quite accurate. You don't have to say anything to me without a lawyer. I can talk to you all I want. See the difference?'

The guy said nothing.

'I have some bad news,' Susan Turner said. 'You're going to die. You know that, right? You are completely busted. You are more busted than the most busted person who ever lived. There's no way anyone can save you. That's exactly what you're going to hear from the lawyers. No matter how many you get. They're all going to say the same thing. You're going to be executed, and probably very soon. I won't give you false hope. You're a dead man walking.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, 'Actually you're a dead man sitting, at this point. Sitting in a car, and listening to me. Which you should do, because you've got two very important choices coming up. The second is what you eat for your last meal. Steak and ice cream are the most popular picks. I don't know why. Not that I give a s.h.i.t about dietary issues. It's your first choice I'm interested in. Want to guess what that is?'

The guy said nothing.

'Your first choice is what you go down for. Either Texas will kill you for killing your wife, or Leavenworth will kill you for betraying your country. I'll be frank with you, in my opinion neither one does you much credit. But the Texas issue, maybe people will understand it a little bit. Combat stress, multiple tours of duty, all that kind of thing. All that post-traumatic stuff. Some people might even call you a kind of victim.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, 'But the treason issue, that's different. There's no excuse for that. Your mom and your dad, they're going to have to sell their house and move. Maybe change their name. Maybe they won't be able to sell, and they'll just hang themselves in the bas.e.m.e.nt.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, 'Not much ceiling height in a bas.e.m.e.nt. It'll be slow. Like strangulation. Maybe they'll hold hands.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner moved in her seat. Long legs, sheathed in dark nylon. 'And think about your kid brother. All those years of looking up to you? All gone. He'll have to leave the navy. Who would trust him on their team? The brother of a traitor? That's a life sentence for him, too. He'll end up working construction. He'll drink. He'll curse your rotten name every day of his life. Maybe he'll kill himself too. Gunshot, probably. In the mouth or behind the ear.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, 'So here's the deal. Talk to me now, answer all my questions, full and complete disclosure, all the details, and we'll keep the treason absolutely private.'

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, 'But if you don't talk to me, we'll do the investigation in public. Right out in the open. We'll tell CNN where your folks live, and we'll call the navy about your brother. Not the officers. We'll call his buddies first.'

Silence for a long moment.

Then the guy said, 'OK.'

'OK what?'

'OK, I'll talk to you.'

'OK you'll talk to me what?'

'OK, I'll talk to you, ma'am.'

Turner rolled her window down. She called out, 'Tell the pilot to go get his dinner.'

Plato put the phone down on his pilot. The guy had called to say the weather in the north was due to take a turn for the worse at some point within the next twenty-four hours. More snow. Which Plato already knew. He had satellite television. He had a huge mesh dish bolted to a concrete pad right next to his house. The dish was connected to a box, and the box was connected to an enormous Sony LCD screen on the end wall of the living room. It was tuned to the Weather Channel.

The Sony screen was not the only thing on the end wall. There were eighteen oil paintings next to it, all jostling for s.p.a.ce. There were forty-three more on the two long walls. Twenty on the other end wall. A total of eighty-one works of art. Mostly second-rate pieces by fourth-rate painters. Or third-rate pieces by third-rate painters. Or fourth-rate pieces by second-rate painters. One was a Monet, supposedly, but Plato knew it had to be a forgery. Monet was a prolific artist. Widely distributed, often copied. Someone had once said that of the two thousand pictures Monet had painted in his lifetime, six thousand were in the United States alone. Plato wasn't a fool. He knew what he had. And he knew why he had it. He didn't much care for art. Not his thing. Each canvas was a souvenir, that was all, of a ruined life.

In the s.p.a.ces between the paintings he had nailed small inverted horseshoe-shaped arrays of thin bra.s.s pins. Dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. He hadn't counted for a long time. Over each array was draped as many necklaces or bracelets as would fit. He had diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Gold chains, silver chains, platinum chains. He had earrings hung from single pins. He had finger rings looped over single pins. Wedding bands, engagement rings, signet rings, cla.s.s rings, big diamond solitaires.

Hundreds and hundreds of them.

Maybe even thousands.

It was all a question of time.

It was a subject that interested him. It was dominated by cla.s.s. How long could people last, after running out of cash, before they had to start selling their bodies? How many layers did people have, between defeat and surrender, between problem and ruin? For poor people, really no time at all, and no layers at all. They needed his product, so as soon as their meagre paycheques ran out, which was usually payday itself, they would start fighting and stealing and cheating, and then they would take to the streets, and they would do whatever it was they had to do. He got nothing but money from them.

Rich people were different. Bigger paycheques, which lasted longer, but not for ever. Then would start the slow depletion of savings accounts, stocks, bonds, investments of all kinds. Then desperate hands would root through drawers and jewellery boxes. First would come forgotten pieces, pieces that were not liked, pieces that had been inherited. Those items would find their way to him after long slow journeys, from nice suburbs in Chicago and Minneapolis and Milwaukee and Des Moines and Indianapolis. They would be followed by paintings s.n.a.t.c.hed from walls, rings pulled from fingers, chains unlatched from necks. A second wave would follow, as parents were looted, then a third, as grandparents were visited. When nothing was left, the rich people would succ.u.mb, too. Maybe at first in hotels, fooling themselves, but always eventually out on the street, in the cold, kneeling in filthy alleyways, men and women alike, doing what needed to be done.

All a matter of time.

Holland parked in the lot and headed for his office. Peterson and Reacher headed for the squad room. It was deserted, as usual. No messages on the back corner desk, nothing in voice mail. Reacher picked up the phone and then put it back. He tapped the s.p.a.ce bar on the keyboard and the computer screen lit up and showed a graphic of a police shield that had Bolton Police Department Bolton Police Department written across it. The graphic was large and a little ragged. A little digital. A tower unit a yard away was humming and whirring and chattering. A hard drive, getting up to speed. written across it. The graphic was large and a little ragged. A little digital. A tower unit a yard away was humming and whirring and chattering. A hard drive, getting up to speed.

Reacher asked, 'Have you got databases in here?'

Peterson asked, 'Why?'

'We could check on Plato. He seems to be the prime mover here, whoever he is.'

Peterson sat down at the next desk along and tapped his own keyboard. Clicked here, clicked there, typed a pa.s.sword. Then some kind of dialogue box must have come up, because Reacher saw him use his left forefinger on the shift key, his right forefinger on a capital P P, then on a lower case l l, then an a a, a t t, and an o o.

Plato.

'Nothing,' Peterson said. 'Just a redirect to Google, who says he's a Greek philosopher.'

'Got a list of known aliases?'

Peterson typed some more. Nine keystrokes. Presumably aka aka, then a s.p.a.ce, then Plato Plato.

'South American,' he said. 'Citizenship unknown. Real name unknown. Age unknown. Believed to live in Mexico. Believed to own p.a.w.n shops in five United States cities, suspected narcotics trafficker, suspected involvement in prost.i.tution.'

'Nice guy.'

'No arrest record. Nothing in Mexico, either.'

'Is that it?'

'The federal databases will have more. But I can't access them.'

Reacher picked up the phone again, and then put it back. Rock Creek had more on its plate than his trivial business. He wondered if he was becoming an embarra.s.sment. Or a bore. Like the grizzled old noncoms who still lived close to army posts and sat in grunt bars all night, full of p.i.s.s and wind and out-of-date bulls.h.i.t and nonsense. Or like retired city cops, the ones who hadn't saved enough to move south, still patronizing the same old saloons and b.u.t.ting in on every conversation.

Peterson said, 'We could go up to the prison. It's in the federal system. They've got computers. I know some of the guys there.'

Five minutes to five in the afternoon.

Eleven hours to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE PRISON WAS FIVE MILES DUE NORTH, AT THE END OF A continuation of the same road that led up to town from the highway. The road was straight, as if a planner had laid a ruler on a map. It was ploughed and salted and pretty much clear from constant use. Visiting day. The shuttle buses had been busy. continuation of the same road that led up to town from the highway. The road was straight, as if a planner had laid a ruler on a map. It was ploughed and salted and pretty much clear from constant use. Visiting day. The shuttle buses had been busy.

The five miles took eight minutes. For the first seven Reacher saw nothing ahead except a late gloomy sky and ice in the air. Then he saw the prison. There was a diffuse glow on the far horizon that resolved itself into hundreds of separate puffb.a.l.l.s of blue-white light high above a glittering razor-wire fence. The fence was long and maybe twelve feet tall. Maybe twelve feet thick. It had inner and outer screens of taut wire. The s.p.a.ce in between was piled high with loose coils. More loose coils were fixed along the top. They were moving and swaying in the wind, flashing and winking in the light. The light came from stadium fixtures on tall poles set every thirty feet. Huge upside-down metal bowls in groups of four, with powerful bulbs in them. There were watchtowers set every hundred feet, tall splay-legged structures with lit-up gla.s.sed-in cabins and outside walkways. There were searchlights on the walkways. The lights on the poles were blazing, and their glow came back up off the undisturbed snow seemingly twice as bright. Behind the fence was a three-hundred-yard expanse of lit-up snow-covered yard, and then huddled in the centre of the giant rectangle was a cl.u.s.ter of new concrete buildings. They covered an area the size of a large village. Or a small town. The buildings were all lit up, inside and out. They had small mean windows in heavy blank facades, like the portholes in the side of a ship. Their roofs were all covered with snow, like a thick uniform blanket.

'The gift horse,' Peterson said. 'The cash cow.'

'Impressive,' Reacher said.

And it was. As a whole the place was huge. Many hundreds of acres. The vast pool of bright light set against the prairie darkness made it look like an alien s.p.a.cecraft, just hovering there, unsure whether to land or to whisk away again to a more hospitable location.

At its far end the road broadened out into a wide square plaza in front of the main gate. The plaza was lined at its edges with bus benches and trash cans. Peterson drove straight through it. The gate was really a tunnel, walled and roofed with wire, tall enough for prison buses, wide enough to form two separated lanes, one in, one out. Each lane had three gates forming two pens. Peterson drove into the first and was momentarily locked in, a closed gate behind him, a closed gate ahead. A guard in cold-weather gear came out of a door, looked them over, stepped back inside, and the gate ahead opened. Peterson rolled forward thirty feet. The whole procedure was repeated. Then the last gate opened and Peterson drove out and headed for the buildings on a thoroughfare that was both rutted by vehicles and beaten flat by footsteps. Clearly the shuttle buses discharged their pa.s.sengers outside the gate. Reacher pictured the woman and the child he had seen at the coffee shop, wrapped in their borrowed motel comforters, trudging through the snow, trudging back.

Peterson parked as close to the visitor door as he could get. Behind the door was an empty lobby, sad and inst.i.tutional, with wet linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There was an idle X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around and not doing much of anything. Peterson knew them. They knew him. A minute later he and Reacher had been hustled through a side door into a ready room. New construction, but it was already a little trashed and battered. It was hot. It smelled of old coffee, and new sweat, and wet wool coats, and cheap polyester uniforms. There were five low chairs in it, and a desk with a computer on it. A guard fired it up and typed in a pa.s.sword and then left the room.

'Federal prison, federal databases,' Peterson said. Those databases were evidently a little unfamiliar to him, because it took a whole lot of pointing and clicking and typing before he got anywhere. A whole lot of pursed lips and sudden inhalations and exhalations. But eventually he took his hands off the keyboard and sat back to read.