'We started with a false a.s.sumption. They told me about an army facility. A small stone building with a two-mile road. I just went out there. It's not a road. It's a runway. It's an air force place, not army.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE VOICE FROM V VIRGINIA SAID, 'WELL, THAT CHANGES THINGS A little.' little.'

Reacher said, 'There's another local rumour about prosthetic faces.'

'Yes, I saw a note about that. There's a file. Apparently the Pentagon got some calls from local folks in South Dakota. County and state government. But it's bulls.h.i.t. The plastic face places were always nearer the metro areas. Why put one out in the middle of nowhere?'

'Why have them at all? If everyone is burned the same, why would anyone care?'

No reply.

Reacher asked, 'Do you know anyone in the air force?'

'Not for secrets.'

'Might not be a secret. Could be entirely routine. We're back at square one, as far as a.s.sumptions are concerned.'

'OK, I'll make some calls. But first I'm going to take a nap.'

'You can sleep when you're dead. This is urgent. The runway is ploughed. Two whole miles. n.o.body does that for fun. Therefore someone or something is due to show up. And I saw a fuel tanker. Maybe for the return trip. Maybe someone's planning on some heavy lifting.'

Silence for a beat. 'Anything else?'

He asked, 'Are you married?'

She asked, 'Are you?'

'No.'

'Were you ever?'

'No.'

'Why am I not surprised?'

She hung up.

Five minutes to ten in the morning.

Eighteen hours to go.

Peterson was two desks away, hanging up on a call of his own. He said, 'The DEA is blowing me off. Their guy wasn't interested.'

Reacher asked, 'Why not?'

'He said there's no lab out there.'

'How does he know?'

'They have satellites and thermal imaging. They've reviewed the data and can't see any heat. Therefore as far as they're concerned it's just a real estate deal. Until proved otherwise.'

'The lab is underground.'

'The DEA says not. Their imaging can see into bas.e.m.e.nts. They say there's nothing down there.'

'They're wrong.'

'You didn't see a lab.'

'They have meth, they must have a lab.'

'We don't know that there's anything under the ground at all. Not for sure.'

'We do,' Reacher said. 'n.o.body builds a two-mile runway for nothing. That's long enough to land any kind of plane. Any kind of bomber, any kind of transport. And n.o.body lands bombers or transports next to a building smaller than a house. You were right. The building is a stair head. Which means there's something under it. Probably very big and very deep.'

'But what exactly?'

Reacher pointed at his phone. 'You'll know when I know.'

A half-hour later Peterson got a call to say that the highway had reopened. The weather radar was showing nothing incoming from the west except supercooled air, and all across the state the snowploughs and the salt spreaders had finished their work, and the Highway Patrol had conferred with the Department of Transportation, and traffic was flowing again. Then Jay Knox called to say he had been told the replacement bus was about three hours out. So Peterson lit up the phone tree and set up a two o'clock rendezvous for the pa.s.sengers in the police station lobby. All twenty of them. The ladies with the broken bones were fit to travel. A two o'clock departure would get the group to Mount Rushmore a little less than two days late. Not bad, all in all, for South Dakota in the winter.

Then he looked at Reacher and asked, 'Are you going with them?'

Reacher said, 'I paid my money.'

'So are you going?'

'I'm a restless man.'

'Yes or no?'

'Depends what happens before two o'clock, I guess.'

What happened before two o'clock was that Janet Salter decided to go out for a walk.

Peterson took the call from one of the women cops in the house. Mrs Salter was going stir crazy. She had cabin fever. She felt cooped up. She was accustomed to taking walks, to the grocery, to the drugstore, to the restaurant, sometimes just for the fun of it. She had already been a prisoner in her own home for close to a week. She was taking her civic responsibilities seriously, but with responsibilities came rights, and stepping out like a free woman was one of them.

'She's crazy,' Reacher said. 'It's freezing cold.'

'She's a native,' Peterson said. 'This is nothing to her.'

'It must be twenty degrees below zero.'

Peterson smiled, like an insider against an outsider. He said, 'The coldest day we ever had was minus fifty-eight. Back in February of 1936. Then less than five months later in July we had the hottest day we ever had, a hundred and twenty exactly.'

'Whatever, she's still crazy.'

'You want to try to talk her out of it?'

Reacher tried. He drove over there with Peterson. Janet Salter was in her kitchen with the two day watch cops. Her percolator was all fired up. Reacher could smell fresh coffee and hot aluminum. She poured him a mug and said, 'The officers tell me you told Mr Peterson that the bikers are preparing to leave.'

Reacher nodded. 'That's how it looked to me.'

'Therefore it should be safe enough to take a little stroll.'

'The guy with the gun is not a biker. Never was.'

'But whoever he is, he won't be waiting outside. You said so yourself, last night. It's too cold.'

'It's also too cold to go for a walk.'

'Nonsense. If we keep up a brisk pace, we'll enjoy it.'

'We?'

'I certainly hope you'll accompany me.'

Five to eleven in the morning.

Seventeen hours to go.

Peterson improvised a plan that looked a lot like the Secret Service taking the president for a walk. He deployed the three stake-out cars to the town's southern, western, and eastern approaches, and told them to stand by to move like a rolling cordon if necessary. He and the two day watch women would be on foot, boxing in Mrs Salter at an appropriate tactical distance. Reacher would walk with her, always keeping himself between her and any pa.s.sing traffic. A human shield, although Peterson didn't put it that way.

They all wrapped up in all the clothes they had and stepped through the door. The wind was steady out of the west. All the way from Wyoming. It was bitter. Reacher had been in Wyoming in the winter, and survived. He made a mental note never to risk it again. Peterson ranged ahead and one of the day watch women trailed behind and the other kept pace on the opposite sidewalk. Reacher stayed at Janet Salter's shoulder. She had a scarf wrapped around the lower portion of her face. Reacher didn't. As long as the wind was on his back, the situation was tolerable. But when they turned and headed north to town, his nose and cheeks and chin went numb and his eyes started to water. He pulled his hood forward and shielded his face as much as was prudent. He felt he needed some kind of peripheral vision. The sidewalk was humped and ridged with glazed snow. Walking on it was difficult.

Janet Salter asked him, 'What are you thinking about?'

Her voice was m.u.f.fled, literally. Her words came out thick and soft and then froze and whipped away on the wind.

'I'm thinking about February of 1936,' Reacher said. 'Minus fifty-eight degrees, the height of the Depression, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, why the h.e.l.l didn't you all move to California?'

'Lots of folks did. The others had no choice but to stay. And that year had a warm summer, anyway.'

'Peterson told me. A hundred-seventy-eight-degree swing.'

'Did he tell you about the chinooks?'

'No.'

'Chinooks are hot winds out of the Black Hills. One day in January of 1943 it was minus four degrees, and then literally two minutes later it was plus forty-five. A forty-nine-degree swing in a hundred and twenty seconds. The most dramatic ever recorded in America. Everyone had broken windows from the thermal shock.'

'Wartime,' Reacher said.

'The hinge of fate,' Janet Salter said. 'That exact day the Germans lost control of the airfields at Stalingrad, many thousands of miles away. It was the beginning of the end for them. Maybe the wind knew.'

They trudged onward. Peterson stayed well ahead, one of the women cops stayed well behind, the other kept pace directly across the street. They got level with the restaurant parking lot. It was full of people heading in and out. Most of them were inadequately dressed and all of them looked thoroughly miserable.

'Prison visitors,' Janet Salter said. 'We seem to get more pa.s.sing trade now than anywhere in the state except Mount Rushmore.' Which made Reacher think about the replacement bus from Minneapolis, due to leave town at two o'clock. He had no particular interest in oversized sculptures, but he knew there was a road there that led south. And south was Nebraska, then Kansas, then Oklahoma, then Texas, where it was warm. Or alternatively a person could turn left in Kansas, and then cross Missouri, and the southern tip of Illinois, and Kentucky, and end up in Virginia.

Janet Salter said, 'You're thinking about her, aren't you?'

Reacher said, 'No.'

He turned left and right from the waist. Scanned all around. There were more people up ahead than he had seen in a long time. And more cars. They were snuffling slowly along the frozen roads. Huge sheets of ice were creaking and cracking under their weight. Multiple threats, but all of them were trapped into ponderous slow motion by the weather. And there were cop cars among them. Every tenth or twelfth vehicle was a police cruiser, driving slow on a random endless loop, cautious and vigilant.

Reacher asked, 'Where are we going?'

Janet Salter asked, 'Where would you like to go?'

'This is your trip.'

'Bolton is a relatively dull town. We lack exciting destinations.'

'We could get lunch.'

'It's too early.'

'Brunch, then.'

'Brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch, and I've already had breakfast. Therefore brunch is no longer an option today.'

'Cup of coffee?'

'Everywhere is full up. Visiting days are difficult. We'd never get a table for five.'

'Then let's head back.'

'Already?'

Reacher didn't answer. For a moment it looked like she would keep on going, maybe for ever, but then she stopped and nodded. Reacher tried to whistle ahead to Peterson, but his lips were too cold and cracked to make a sound. So they waited side by side until Peterson turned around to check. Reacher waved, everyone turned back, and the little procession retraced its steps, with the woman cop now in the lead and Peterson trailing behind.

Five minutes to noon.

Sixteen hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles south it was lunch time. For the second day in succession Plato wasn't eating. And for the second time in succession he was breaking the habit of a lifetime. He was dialling his guy in South Dakota. And his guy was answering. Which annoyed Plato considerably, because it meant his guy had his phone switched on, which meant his guy wasn't at that very moment in the act of killing the d.a.m.n witness.