Five minutes to four in the afternoon.
Twelve hours to go.
Reacher handed the phone back to Holland. The light from the window was dimming. The sun was way in the west and the stone building was casting a long shadow. They set about searching the hut. Their last chance. Every mattress, every bed frame, the toilet tank, the floorboards, the walls, the light fixtures. They did it slowly and thoroughly, and got even slower and more thorough as they approached the end of the room and started running out of options.
They found nothing.
Peterson said, ‘We could get a locksmith, maybe from Pierre.’
Reacher said, ‘A bank robber would be better. A safe cracker. Maybe they’ve got one up at the prison.’
‘I can’t believe they never used the place. It must have cost a fortune.’
‘The defence budget was practically unlimited back then.’
‘I can’t believe they couldn’t find an alternative use for it.’
‘The design was compromised somehow.’
‘Even so. Somebody could have used it.’
‘Too landlocked for the navy. We’re close to the geographic centre of the United States. Or so they said on the bus tour.’
‘The Marines could have used it for winter training.’
‘Not with South in the name of the state. Too chicken. The Marines would have insisted on North Dakota. Or the North Pole.’
‘Maybe they didn’t want to sleep underground.’
‘Marines sleep where they’re told. And when.’
‘Actually I heard they do their winter training near San Diego.’
‘I was in the army,’ Reacher said. ‘Marine training makes no sense to me.’
They braved the cold again and took a last look at the stone building and its stubborn door. Then they walked back to the car and climbed in and drove away. Two miles along the runway, where battered planes were to have spilled ragged children. Then eight miles on the old two-lane, up which no adult would have come to the rescue. The Cold War. A bad time. In retrospect, probably less dangerous than people imagined. Some Soviet missiles were mere fictions, some were painted tree trunks, some were faulty. And the Soviets had psychologists too, preparing reports in the Cyrillic alphabet about seven-year-olds of their own, and about tribalism and fighting and killing and cannibalism. But at the time things had seemed very real. Reacher had been two years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In the Pacific. He had known nothing about it. But later his mother had told him how she and his father had calculated the southern drift of the poisoned wind. Two weeks, they thought. There were guns in the house. And on the base there were corpsmen with pills.
Reacher asked, ‘How accurate are your weather reports?’
Peterson said, ‘Usually pretty good.’
‘They’re calling for snow again tomorrow.’
‘That sounds about right.’
‘Then someone’s going to show up soon. They didn’t plough that runway for nothing.’
Far to the east and a little to the south a plane was landing on another long runway, at Andrews Air Force Base in the state of Maryland. Not a large plane. A business jet, leased by the army, assigned to an MP prisoner escort company. It was carrying six people. A pilot, a copilot, three prisoner escorts, and a prisoner. The prisoner was the Fourth Infantry captain from Fort Hood. He was in civilian clothes and was hobbled by standard restraint chains around his wrists and waist and ankles, all interconnected. The plane taxied and the steps were lowered and the prisoner was hustled down them to a car parked on the apron. He was put in the back seat. Waiting for him there was a woman officer in a Class A army uniform. An MP major. She was a little above average height. She was slender. She had long dark hair tied back. Tanned skin, deep brown eyes. She had intelligence and authority and youth and mischief in her face, all at the same time. She was wearing ribbons for a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
There was no driver in the front of the car.
The woman said, ‘Good afternoon, captain.’
The captain didn’t speak.
The woman said, ‘My name is Susan Turner. My rank is major, and I command the 110th MP, and I’m handling your case. You and I are going to talk for a minute, and then you’re going to get back on the plane, and you’re either going to head back to Texas, or straight over to Fort Leavenworth. One or the other. You understand?’
Her voice was warm. It was a little husky, a little breathy, a little intimate. All in her throat. It was the kind of voice that could tease out all kinds of confidences.
The infantry captain knew it.
He said, ‘I want a lawyer.’
Susan Turner nodded.
‘You’ll get one,’ she said. ‘You’ll get plenty. Believe me, before long you’re going to be completely up to your ass in lawyers. It’s going to be like you wandered into a Bar Association convention with a hundred dollar bill tied around your neck.’
‘You can’t talk to me without a lawyer.’
‘That’s not quite accurate. You don’t have to say anything to me without a lawyer. I can talk to you all I want. See the difference?’
The guy said nothing.
‘I have some bad news,’ Susan Turner said. ‘You’re going to die. You know that, right? You are completely busted. You are more busted than the most busted person who ever lived. There’s no way anyone can save you. That’s exactly what you’re going to hear from the lawyers. No matter how many you get. They’re all going to say the same thing. You’re going to be executed, and probably very soon. I won’t give you false hope. You’re a dead man walking.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner said, ‘Actually you’re a dead man sitting, at this point. Sitting in a car, and listening to me. Which you should do, because you’ve got two very important choices coming up. The second is what you eat for your last meal. Steak and ice cream are the most popular picks. I don’t know why. Not that I give a shit about dietary issues. It’s your first choice I’m interested in. Want to guess what that is?’
The guy said nothing.
‘Your first choice is what you go down for. Either Texas will kill you for killing your wife, or Leavenworth will kill you for betraying your country. I’ll be frank with you, in my opinion neither one does you much credit. But the Texas issue, maybe people will understand it a little bit. Combat stress, multiple tours of duty, all that kind of thing. All that post-traumatic stuff. Some people might even call you a kind of victim.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner said, ‘But the treason issue, that’s different. There’s no excuse for that. Your mom and your dad, they’re going to have to sell their house and move. Maybe change their name. Maybe they won’t be able to sell, and they’ll just hang themselves in the basement.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner said, ‘Not much ceiling height in a basement. It’ll be slow. Like strangulation. Maybe they’ll hold hands.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner moved in her seat. Long legs, sheathed in dark nylon. ‘And think about your kid brother. All those years of looking up to you? All gone. He’ll have to leave the navy. Who would trust him on their team? The brother of a traitor? That’s a life sentence for him, too. He’ll end up working construction. He’ll drink. He’ll curse your rotten name every day of his life. Maybe he’ll kill himself too. Gunshot, probably. In the mouth or behind the ear.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner said, ‘So here’s the deal. Talk to me now, answer all my questions, full and complete disclosure, all the details, and we’ll keep the treason absolutely private.’
The guy said nothing.
Turner said, ‘But if you don’t talk to me, we’ll do the investigation in public. Right out in the open. We’ll tell CNN where your folks live, and we’ll call the navy about your brother. Not the officers. We’ll call his buddies first.’
Silence for a long moment.
Then the guy said, ‘OK.’
‘OK what?’
‘OK, I’ll talk to you.’
‘OK you’ll talk to me what?’
‘OK, I’ll talk to you, ma’am.’
Turner rolled her window down. She called out, ‘Tell the pilot to go get his dinner.’
Plato put the phone down on his pilot. The guy had called to say the weather in the north was due to take a turn for the worse at some point within the next twenty-four hours. More snow. Which Plato already knew. He had satellite television. He had a huge mesh dish bolted to a concrete pad right next to his house. The dish was connected to a box, and the box was connected to an enormous Sony LCD screen on the end wall of the living room. It was tuned to the Weather Channel.
The Sony screen was not the only thing on the end wall. There were eighteen oil paintings next to it, all jostling for space. There were forty-three more on the two long walls. Twenty on the other end wall. A total of eighty-one works of art. Mostly second-rate pieces by fourth-rate painters. Or third-rate pieces by third-rate painters. Or fourth-rate pieces by second-rate painters. One was a Monet, supposedly, but Plato knew it had to be a forgery. Monet was a prolific artist. Widely distributed, often copied. Someone had once said that of the two thousand pictures Monet had painted in his lifetime, six thousand were in the United States alone. Plato wasn’t a fool. He knew what he had. And he knew why he had it. He didn’t much care for art. Not his thing. Each canvas was a souvenir, that was all, of a ruined life.
In the spaces between the paintings he had nailed small inverted horseshoe-shaped arrays of thin brass pins. Dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. He hadn’t counted for a long time. Over each array was draped as many necklaces or bracelets as would fit. He had diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Gold chains, silver chains, platinum chains. He had earrings hung from single pins. He had finger rings looped over single pins. Wedding bands, engagement rings, signet rings, class rings, big diamond solitaires.
Hundreds and hundreds of them.
Maybe even thousands.
