Reacher asked, 'Why are you here?'
Holland looked at him. 'Because I figured out where the key is.'
'Good work.'
'Not really. Anyone with a brain could figure it out on a night like this.'
'Where is it?' Peterson asked.
It was inside the paraffin stove in the first hut. A fine hiding place, with built-in time-delayed access. Too hot to think about searching earlier, now cool to the touch. Like Peterson's own banked wood stove. The voice from Virginia had said, Burn the place down and sift the ashes. An air force key is probably made of the same stuff as warheads. It would survive, easy. And the voice had been right. The key had survived. It was fine. It had been dropped on the burner core and it had heated and cooled with no bad consequences. It was a large T-shaped device about three inches across. Complex teeth, the dull glitter of rare and exotic metal. Titanium, maybe.
From way back, when paranoia permitted no sceptical questions about cost.
Reacher fished it out of the stove. He handed it to Holland. Holland carried it to the stone building's door. He slipped it into the lock. Turned it. The lock sprang back.
Chapter Thirty-Three
REACHER TRIED THE HANDLE. IT TURNED DOWNWARD SIXTY degrees with a hefty motion that was halfway between precise and physical. Like an old-fashioned bank vault. The door itself was very heavy. It felt like it weighed a ton, literally. Its outer skin was a two-inch-thick steel plate. Inset by two inches in every direction on the back was a ten-inch-deep rectangular protuberance that socketed home between the jambs and the lintel and the floor saddle. The protuberance was like a welded steel box. Probably packed with ceramics. When closed, the whole thing would make a seamless foot-thick part of the wall. The hinges were massive. But not recently oiled. They shrieked and squeaked and protested. But the door came open. Reacher hauled it through a short two-foot arc and then slipped in behind it and leaned into it and pushed it the rest of the way. Like pushing a broken-down truck.
Nothing but darkness inside the stone building.
'Flashlights,' Holland said.
Peterson hustled back and visited both cars and returned with three flashlights. They clicked on one after the other and beams played around and showed a bare concrete bunker maybe twenty feet deep and thirty feet wide. Two storeys high. The stone was outside veneer only. For appearances. Underneath it the building was brutal and utilitarian and simple and to the point. In the centre of the space it had the head of a spiral stair that dropped straight down through the floor into a round vertical shaft. The air coming up out of it smelled still and dry and ancient. Like a tomb. Like a pharaoh's chamber in a pyramid. The hole for the stairwell was perfectly circular. The floor was cast from concrete two feet thick. The stairs themselves were welded from simple steel profiles. They wound round and down into distant blackness.
'No elevator,' Peterson said.
'Takes too much power,' Reacher said. He was fighting the pedantic part of his brain that was busy pointing out that a spiral was a plane figure. Two dimensions only. Thus a spiral staircase was a contradiction in terms. It was a helical staircase. A helix was a three-dimensional figure. But he didn't say so. He had learned not to. Maybe Susan in Virginia would have understood. Or maybe not.
'Can you imagine?' Holland said, in the silence. 'You're seven years old and you're looking to head down there and you know you won't be coming back up until you're grown?'
'If you got here at all,' Reacher said. 'Which you wouldn't have. The whole concept was crazy. They built the world's most expensive storage facility, that's all.'
Close to the stairwell shaft there were two wide metal ventilation pipes coming up through the floor. Maybe two feet in diameter. They came up about a yard and stopped, like broad chimneys on a flat roof. Directly above both of them were circular holes in the concrete ceiling. One shaft would have been planned as an intake, connected to one of the building's fake chimneys, fitted with fans and filters and scrubbers to clean the poisoned air. The other would have been the exhaust, to be vented up and out through the second fake chimney. An incomplete installation. Never finished. Presumably the fake chimneys were capped internally. Some temporary fix that had lasted fifty years. There was no sign of rain or snow inside the bunker.
Reacher stepped over to one of the pipes and shone his flash-light beam straight down. Like looking down a well. He couldn't see bottom. The pipe was lined on the inside with stainless steel. Smooth and shiny. Efficient air movement. No turbulence. No furring, no accumulation of dirt. Regular cleaning had not been on the agenda. There would have been no one left alive to do it.
Reacher stepped back and leaned over the stair rail and shone his flashlight beam straight down the stairwell. Saw nothing except stairs. They wound on endlessly, wrapped around a simple steel pipe. No hand rail on the outer circumference. The space was too tight.
'This place is very deep,' he said.
His voice echoed back at him.
'Probably needed to be,' Holland said.
The stairs had once been painted black, but their edges were worn back to dull metal by the passage of many feet. The safety rail around the opening was scuffed and greasy.
Peterson said, 'I'll go first.'
Five to ten in the evening.
Six hours to go.
Reacher waited until Peterson's head was seven feet down, and then he followed. The stairs were in a perfectly round vertical shaft lined with smooth concrete. Space was cramped. There had been construction difficulties. The voice from Virginia had read him notes from faxed files: The design was compromised several times during construction because of the kind of terrain they found. Clearly the terrain had meant they hadn't drilled beyond the bare minimum. The diameter was tight. Reacher's shoulders brushed the concrete on one side and the central pipe on the other. But it was his feet that were the major problem. They were too big. A helical staircase has treads that narrow from the outside to the inside. Reacher was walking on his heels the whole way. Coming back up, he would be walking on his toes.
They went down, and down, and down, Peterson first, then Reacher, then Holland. Fifty feet, then seventy-five, then a hundred. Their flashlight beams jerked and stabbed through the gloom. The steel under their feet clanged and boomed. The air was still and dry. And warm. Like a mine, insulated from the surface extremes.
Reacher called, 'See anything yet?'
Peterson called back, 'No.'
They kept on going, corkscrewing down, and down, and down, their flashlight beams turning perpetually clockwise, washing the trowelled concrete wall. They passed through strange acoustic nodes where the whole shaft resonated like the bore of an oboe and the sound of their feet on the metal set up weird harmonic chords, as if the earth's core was singing to them.
Two hundred feet.
Then more.
Then Peterson called, 'I'm there, I think.'
Reacher clattered on after him, two more full turns.
Then he came to a dead stop, deep underground.
He sat down, on the second to last step.
He used his flashlight, left, right, up, down.
Not good.
He heard the voice from Virginia in his head again: Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else.
Damn straight they did.
The stairwell shaft ended in an underground chamber made of concrete. It was perfectly circular. Like a hub. Maybe twenty feet in diameter. The size of a living room. But round. Like a living room in a movie about the future. It had eight open doorways leading off to eight horizontal corridors, one at each point of the compass, like bicycle spokes. The corridors were dark. Deep in shadow. The doorways were straight and square and true. The chamber's floor was hard and flat and dry and smooth. The walls were hard and flat and dry and smooth. The ceiling was hard and flat and dry and smooth. Altogether the whole place was a neat, crisp, exact piece of construction. Well designed, well engineered, well built. Ideal for its intended purpose.