Part 25 (1/2)

'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.'