Johnson shook his head.
“And there’s this guy,” McGrath said. “We don’t know who he is.”
He passed over the photograph of the big guy. Johnson glanced at it, then glanced away. But then his gaze drifted back.
“You know this one?” McGrath asked him.
Johnson shrugged.
“He’s vaguely familiar,” he said. “Maybe somebody I once saw?”
“Recently?” McGrath asked.
Johnson shook his head.
“Not recently,” he said. “Probably a long time ago.”
“Military?” Webster asked.
“Probably,” Johnson said again. “Most of the people I see are military.”
His aide crowded his shoulder for a look.
“Means nothing to me,” he said. “But we should fax this to the Pentagon. If this guy is military, maybe there’ll be somebody somewhere who served with him.”
Johnson shook his head.
“Fax it to the military police,” he said. “This guy’s a criminal, right? Chances are he was in trouble before, in the service. Somebody there will remember him.”
25
THEY CAME FOR him an hour after dawn. He was dozing on his hard chair, hands cuffed in his lap, Joseph Ray awake and alert opposite him. He had spent most of the night thinking about dynamite. Old dynamite, left over from abandoned mining operations. He imagined hefting a stick in his hand. Feeling the weight. Figuring the volume of the cavity behind Holly’s walls. Picturing it packed with old dynamite. Old dynamite, rotting, the nitroglycerin sweating out, going unstable. Maybe a ton of unstable old dynamite packed in all around her, still not so far gone it would explode with random movement, but gone bad enough it would explode under the impact of a stray artillery shell. Or a stray bullet. Or even a sharp blow with a hammer.
Then there was a rattle of feet on shale as a detachment of men halted outside the hut. The door flung open and Reacher turned his head and saw six guards. The point man clattered inside and hauled him up by the arm. He was dragged outside into the bright morning sun to face five men, line abreast, automatic rifles at the slope. Camouflage fatigues, beards. He stood and squinted in the light. The rifle muzzles jerked him into rough formation and the six men marched him across the diameter of the clearing to a narrow path running away from the sun into the forest.
Fifty yards in, there was another clearing. A rough scrubby rectangle, small in area. Two plywood-and-cedar structures. Neither had any windows. The guards halted him and the point man used his rifle barrel to indicate the left-hand building.
“Command hut,” he said.
Then he pointed to the right.
“Punishment hut,” he said. “We try to avoid that one.”
The six men laughed with the secure confidence of an elite detachment and the point man knocked on the command hut door. Paused a beat and opened it. Reacher was shoved inside with a rifle muzzle in the small of his back.
The hut was blazing with light. Electric bulbs added to green daylight from mossy skylights set into the roof. There was a plain oak desk and matching chairs, big old round things like Reacher had seen in old movies about newspaper offices or country banks. There was no decor except flags and banners nailed to the walls. There was a huge red swastika behind the desk, and several similar black-and-white motifs on the other walls. There was a detailed map of Montana pinned to a board on the back wall. A tiny portion of the northwest corner of the state was outlined in black. There were bundles of pamphlets and manuals stacked on the bare floor. One was titled: Dry It, You’ll Like It. It claimed to show how food could be preserved to withstand a siege. Another claimed to show how guerrillas could derail passenger trains. There was a polished mahogany bookcase, incongruously fine, packed with books. The bar of daylight from the door fell across them and illuminated their cloth spines and gold-blocked titles. They were standard histories of the art of war, translations from German and Japanese. There was a whole shelf with texts about Pearl Harbor. Texts that Reacher himself had studied, elsewhere and a long time ago.
He stood still. Borken was behind the desk. His hair gleamed white in the light. The black uniform showed up gray. Borken was just staring silently at him. Then he waved him to a chair. Motioned the guards to wait outside.
Reacher sat heavily. Fatigue was gnawing at him and adrenaline was burning his stomach. The guards tramped across the floor and stepped outside. They closed the door quietly. Borken moved his arm and rolled open a drawer. Took out an ancient handgun. Laid it on the desktop with a loud clatter.
“I made my decision,” he said. “About whether you live or die.”
Then he pointed at the old revolver lying on the desk.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
Reacher glanced at it through the glare and nodded.
“It’s a Marshal Colt,” he said.
Borken nodded.
“You bet your ass it is,” he said. “It’s an original 1873 Marshal Colt, just like the U.S. Cavalry were given. It’s my personal weapon.”
He picked it up, right-handed, and hefted it.
“You know what it fires?” he said.
Reacher nodded again.
“Forty-fives,” he said. “Six shots.”
“Right first time,” Borken said. “Six forty-fives, nine hundred feet per second out of a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. You know what those bullets could do to you?”
Reacher shrugged.
“Depends if they hit me or not,” he said.
Borken looked blank. Then he grinned. His wet mouth curled upward and his tight cheeks nearly forced his eyes shut.
“They’d hit you,” he said. “If I’m firing, they’d hit you.”
Reacher shrugged again.
“From there, maybe,” he said.
“From anywhere,” Borken said. “From here, from fifty feet, from fifty yards, if I’m firing, they’d hit you.”
“Hold up your right hand,” Reacher said.
Borken looked blank again. Then he put the gun down and held up his huge white hand like he was waving to a vague acquaintance or taking an oath.
“Bullshit,” Reacher said.
“Bullshit?” Borken repeated.
“For sure,” Reacher said. “That gun’s reasonably accurate, but it’s not the best weapon in the world. To hit a man at fifty yards with it, you’d need to practice like crazy. And you haven’t been.”
“I haven’t?” Borken said.
“No, you haven’t,” Reacher said. “Look at the damn thing. It was designed in the 1870s, right? You seen old photographs? People were much smaller. Scrappy little guys, just immigrated from Europe, been starving for generations. Small people, small hands. Look at the stock on that thing. Tight curve, way too small for you. You grab that thing, your hand looks like a bunch of bananas around it. And that stock is hundred-and-twenty-year-old walnut. Hard as a rock. The back of the stock and the end of the frame below the hammer would be pounding you with the recoil. You used that gun a lot, you’d have a pad of callus between your thumb and forefinger I could see from here. But you haven’t, so don’t tell me you’ve been practicing with it, and don’t tell me you can be a marksman
