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 butt 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 butts, 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-button 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.'
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 declassified in the early nineties.'
'I don't care when it was declassified. 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. Nobody 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.'
'So how had our MREs gotten there?'
'That's tomorrow's instalment. You need to get back to work.'
'I'm just waiting on a call.'
'From where?'
'I can't say.'
'You know you want to tell me.'
'Fort Hood.'
'What about?'
'An infantry captain killed his wife. Which happens. But this wasn't any old wife. She had a job with Homeland Security. It's possible the guy has ties overseas. It's possible he was stealing documents from her and killed her to cover it up.'
'Where overseas?'
'What we call non-state actors.'
'Terrorists?'
'Terrorist organizations, anyway.'
'Nice. That's a Bronze Star right there.'
'If I get the guy. Right now he's in the wind.'
'Tell me if he heads for South Dakota.'
She laughed. 'How old are you, anyway?'
'Younger than your desk.'
***
Five miles away in the prison mess hall all traces of the evening meal had been cleared away. But more than fifty men were still seated on the long benches. Some were white, some were brown, and some were black. All wore orange jumpsuits. They were sitting in three segregated groups, far from each other, like three island nations in a sea of linoleum.
Until a white man got up and walked across the room and spoke to a black man.
The white man was white in name only. His skin was mostly blue with tattoos. He was built like a house. He had hair to his waist and a beard that reached his chest. The black man was a little shorter, but probably heavier. He had biceps the size of footballs and a scalp shaved so close it gleamed.