14 61 Hours

by Lee Child

‘You’re still in the army, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’ve been out for years.’

  ‘In your head, I mean.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t you miss it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I heard you on the phone, with the woman in Virginia. You sounded alive.’

  ‘That was because of her. Not the army. She’s got a great voice.’

  ‘You’re lonely.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  She didn’t answer. The clock ticked on. Nobody approached the house.

  After an hour and a half Reacher had made four security sweeps and felt he knew the house pretty well. It had been built for an earlier generation, which had been in some ways tougher, and in some ways gentler. The windows had catches and the doors had locks, all solid well-machined pieces of brass, but nothing like the armour on sale at any modern hardware store. Which meant that there were forty-three possible ways in, of which fifteen were realistically practical, of which eight might be anticipated by a solo opponent of normal intelligence, of which six would be easy to defeat. The remaining two would be difficult to beat, but feasible, made harder by Janet Salter’s wandering presence. Lines of fire were always complicated. He thought again about insisting she lock herself downstairs, but she saw him thinking and started talking again, as if to head him off. He was at the parlour window, craning left, craning right, and she asked, ‘Was it your mother or your father who was a Marine?’

  He said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You told me you grew up on Marine Corps bases. I was wondering which of your parents made that necessary. Although I suppose it could have been both of them. Was that permitted? A husband and wife serving together?’

  ‘I don’t imagine so.’

  ‘So which one was it?’

  ‘It was my father.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘Not much to tell. Nice guy, but busy.’

  ‘Distant?’

  ‘He probably thought I was. There were a hundred kids on every base. We ran around all day. We were in a world of our own.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘He died a long time ago. My mother, too.’

  ‘It was the same for me,’ Janet Salter said. ‘I made myself distant. I was always reading.’

  He didn’t reply, and she went quiet again. He watched the street. Nothing happening. He moved to the library and checked the yard. Nothing happening. The last of the cloud was moving away and the moon was brightening. It was a blue, cold, empty world out there.

  Except that it wasn’t empty.

  But nobody came.

  Hide and seek. Maybe the oldest game in the world. Because of ancient thrills and fears buried deep in the back of every human’s brain. Predator and prey. The irresistible shiver of delight, crouching in the dark, hearing the footsteps pass by. The rush of pleasure in doubling back and wrenching open the closet door and discovering the victim. The instant translation of primeval terrors into modern-day laughter.

  This was different.

  There would be no laughter. There would be short seconds of furious gunfire and the stink of smoke and blood and then sudden deafened silence and a world-stands-still pause to look down and check yourself for damage. Then another pause to check your people. Then the shakes and the gulps and the need to throw up.

  No laughter.

  And this wasn’t hide and seek. Nobody was really hiding, and nobody was really seeking. Whoever was out there knew full well where Janet Salter was. An exact address would have been provided. Maybe turn-by-turn directions, maybe GPS coordinates. And she was just sitting right there, waiting for him. No art. Just brutality. Which disappointed Reacher a little. He was good at hide and seek. The real-world version, not the children’s game. Good at hiding, better at seeking. His former professional obligations had led him in that direction. He had been a good hunter of people. Fugitives, mainly. He had learned that empathy was the key. Understand their motives, their circumstances, their goals, their aims, their fears, their needs. Think like them. See what they see. Be them. He had gotten to the point where he could spend an hour with a case file, a second hour thinking, a third with maps and phone books, and then predict pretty much the exact building the guy would be found in.

  He checked the view to the front.

  No one there.

  Just an empty white world that seemed to be frozen solid.

  He glanced back at Janet Salter and said, ‘I need you to watch the front for me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll be in the hallway for a spell. Anyone comes in through the kitchen or the library, I can get them in the corridor.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Stay back in the shadows, but keep your eyes peeled.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You see anything at all, you call out to me, loud and clear, with concise information. Numbers, location, direction, and description.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And do it standing up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So if you fall asleep on the job I’ll hear you fall down.’

  She took up a good position, well back in the room, invisible from outside, but with a decent angle. Her hand was still on the gun in her pocket. He stepped out to the hallway and moved the chair to the other side of the telephone table, so he could sit facing the rear of the house. He put his gun in his lap. Picked up the phone. Dialled the number he remembered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Amanda, please.’

  A pause. A click. The voice. It said, ‘You have got to be kidding me. Two hours ago you gave me two weeks’ worth of work, and already you’re calling me for a result?’

  ‘No, I’m not, but I can’t give you two weeks anyway. I need something by tomorrow at the latest.’

  ‘What are you, nuts?’

  ‘You said you were better than me, and I could have done it in a day. So a night should be good enough for you.’

  ‘What is that, psychology? You took motivation classes up at West Point?’

  Reacher kept his hand on his gun and his eyes on the kitchen door. He asked, ‘Did you catch your guy yet?’

  ‘No, can’t you tell?’

  ‘Where are you looking?’

  ‘All the airports, plus boats on the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and New Orleans.’

  ‘He’s in a motel a little ways north of Austin. Almost certainly Georgetown. Almost certainly the second motel north of the bus depot.’

  ‘What, he’s wearing a secret ankle bracelet I don’t know about?’

  ‘No, he’s scared and alone. He needs help. Can’t get it anyplace except the overseas folks he’s in bed with. But he’s waiting to call them. They’ll help him if he’s clean, they’ll ditch him if he’s compromised. Maybe they’ll even kill him. He knows that. A fugitive from the law, that’s OK with them. A political fugitive, not so much. They’d worry about us tracking him all the way home, wherever home is. So he needs to know the news. He needs a media market that covers Fort Hood’s business. If it stays a plain vanilla domestic homicide, he’ll make the call. If it doesn’t, he’ll end up putting his gun in his mouth.’

  ‘We haven’t released the background.’

  ‘Then he’ll take a day or two to be sure, and then he’ll call them.’

  ‘But he could have gone anywhere for that. Waco, Dallas, Abilene, even.’

  ‘No, he made a careful choice. Abilene is too far and too small. And Waco and Dallas are too patriotic. He thinks that TV and radio there might sit on the espionage angle. What is he, Fourth Infantry? Audiences in Waco and Dallas don’t want to hear about a Fourth Infantry captain going bad. He knows that. But Austin is much more liberal. And it’s the state capital, so the news stations are a little looser. He needs the real skinny, and he knows that Austin is where he’s going to get it.’

  ‘You said Georgetown.’

  ‘He’s afraid of the actual city. Too many cops, too much going on. He didn’t drive
, did he? Too afraid of cops on the highway. His car is still on the post, right?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘So he took the bus from Hood and stopped short. Georgetown is right there, close to Austin, but not too close. He watched out the window, all the way in. One motel after another. He mapped them in his head. He got out at the depot and walked back the way he came. Didn’t want unfamiliar territory. Didn’t want to walk too far, either. Too exposed. Too vulnerable. But even so he didn’t like the place nearest the depot. It felt too obvious. So he picked the second place. He’s there right now, in his room with the chain on, watching all the local channels.’

  The voice didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, ‘Wait one.’ He laid the phone gently on the table and got up. Checked the kitchen, checked the library. Nothing doing. He checked the parlour. Janet Salter was still on her feet, rock solid, deep in the shadows.

  Nothing to see on the street.

  No one coming.

  Reacher went back to the hallway and sat down again in the chair and picked up the phone. The voice asked, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not that it matters, but he sat in the front third of the bus.’

  ‘You’re full of shit.’

  ‘It was a kind of camouflage. He didn’t want to give himself away as a fugitive. He thinks bad boys sit in back. He’s a Fourth Infantry captain. Probably a strait-laced kind of a guy. He remembers his school bus. The greasers sat in back. He didn’t.’

  No answer. ‘Georgetown,’ Reacher said. ‘Second motel north of the bus depot. Check it out.’

  No answer.

  Reacher asked, ‘Where are your nearest people?’

  ‘I have people at Hood.’

  ‘So send them down. It’s about fifty miles. What can it cost you?’

  No answer.

  Reacher said, ‘And don’t forget, I need my information by tomorrow.’

  He hung up. He put the chair back where it was supposed to be and stepped across the hallway and into the parlour. He checked the window.

  Nothing to see.

  No one coming.

  Five to ten in the evening.

  Thirty hours to go.

  TWENTY

  The clock ticked on. Reacher took every completed minute to be a small victory. A prison riot could not last for ever. Its initial phase would be relatively short. Hostages would be taken, territory would be seized, a standoff would ensue. Tactical adjustments would be made. The corrections officers would regroup. The cops would be released from duty. Reacher knew that.

  Therefore the guy knew that, too.

  Reacher didn’t understand why he didn’t come. His target was an old woman in a house. What was he waiting for?

  At half past ten Janet Salter volunteered to make coffee. Reacher wouldn’t let her. Maybe that was what the guy was waiting for. The percolator needed water. Water came from the faucet. The faucet was over the sink. The sink was under the window. A preoccupied grey head two feet the other side of the glass might be a tempting target. So he made the coffee himself, after a duly cautious inspection of the vicinity. An unnecessary inspection, as it turned out. He stepped out the back door without coat, gloves, or hat. The cold hit him like a fist. It was raging. It was searching. It stunned him. Way below zero. Too far below to even guess at a number.

  He stepped back in. Nobody was waiting out there for a target of opportunity. Impossible. After a minute you would be shaking too hard to see, let alone shoot. After an hour you would be in a coma. After two, you would be dead.

  Which thoughts clarified things a little. There would be no long stealthy approach on foot through the snow. The danger would come from the front. The guy would have to drive up, jump out, and move fast. So after the percolator finished gulping and hissing Reacher poured two mugs and carried them back to the parlour, where he told Janet Salter they would alternate spells at the window, ten minutes on, ten minutes off, all through the next hour.

  The next hour passed slowly. No one approached the house. The world outside was dead. Deep frozen. Nothing was moving, except the wind. It was blowing steadily out of the west. It was scouring powder into small stunted drifts and exposing ridges of ice that glittered blue in the moonlight. A spectral, elemental scene. Janet Salter did something with a dial on a wall and turned the heat up. Not good, in Reacher’s opinion. Warmth made people sleepy. But he didn’t want her to freeze. He had read about old folks, dead in their homes, overcome by hypothermia.

  She asked, ‘Have you ever been here in winter before?’

  He said, ‘I’ve never been here in any season.’

  ‘North Dakota, perhaps?’

  ‘I’ve been in the Dakota Building in New York City.’

  ‘Which was named for here,’ she said. ‘At the time it was built, the city didn’t extend much past 34th Street. It seemed lunatic to build fancy apartments all the way up on 72nd Street, and on the West Side, too. People said, you might as well put them in the Dakota Territory. The name stuck. The man who built it owned part of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which brings us full circle, really, doesn’t it, back to that can of oil.’

  She was talking for the sake of talking. Reacher let her. He kept his eye on the street and filtered most of it out. She got into a long disquisition on the state’s history. Explorers and traders, Lewis and Clark, the Sioux Nation, Fort Pierre, sodbusters and pioneers, the gold rush, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Custer, the Black Hills, Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl, some guy called Brokaw she claimed had been on network TV.

  Five to eleven in the evening.

  Twenty-nine hours to go.

  Reacher completed his eighth circuit of the interior perimeter. He saw nothing to get concerned about. Nothing to see from any window except frozen moonlit emptiness. Nothing to hear except the rush of water in the heating pipes and a faint creaking as the ice outside got colder. It was clamping down. The earth was in its grip. He thought back to the sodbusters and the pioneers that Janet Salter had talked about. Why the hell had they stayed?

  He was on his way back down the stairs when she called out.

  She said, ‘Someone’s coming.’

  She spoke loud and clear. But she added no information. No numbers, no location, no direction, no description. He stepped into the parlour and eased past her to the window. Saw a guy approaching on foot in the middle of the road, from the left. He was small, but swaddled in an enormous coat with a hood. He had a ski mask on. Plus a muffler, plus gloves, plus boots. Nothing in his hands. His hands were held out to the sides, for balance, and they were empty.

  The guy moved on, slowly, tentatively, unsure of his footing. He stopped directly opposite the end of Janet Salter’s driveway. Just stood there.

  Reacher asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’

  She said, ‘Wait.’

  The guy turned around, a stiff and ungainly half-circle, and faced the other way. A dog trotted up to him. A big white thing. Lots of fur. The guy turned around again, and man and dog walked on.

  Janet Salter said, ‘A neighbour. A she, actually. Mrs Lowell. But it was hard to be sure, the way she was dressed.’

  Reacher breathed out and said, ‘Is she the cop’s wife?’

  ‘Ex-wife. Officer Lowell moved out a year ago. There was some kind of unpleasantness.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I saw Lowell today. Peterson called him an odd duck. Said he read books.’

  ‘He does. He comes over and borrows some of mine from time to time. My family and his go way back.’

  ‘Do you know his partner?’

  ‘Officer Kapler? I’ve met him, certainly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He moved here from Florida. Which struck me as odd.’

  ‘Me too,’ Reacher said. He stayed at the window and watched Mrs Lowell and her dog round a curve and move out of sight.

  They didn’t speak again for thirty minutes. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked on towards midnight
. He asked, ‘Are you tired?’

  Janet Salter said, ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘You could go to bed, if you like. I can take care of things down here.’

  ‘Would you take care of things standing up? So if you fell asleep I would hear you fall down?’

  Reacher smiled. ‘I won’t fall asleep.’

  ‘And I won’t go to bed. This is my responsibility. I shouldn’t be involving you at all.’

  ‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’

  ‘You could be killed.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  She asked, ‘Are you married?’

  Reacher kept his eyes on the window and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Were you ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you an only child?’

  ‘I had a brother two years older. He worked for the Treasury Department. He was killed in the line of duty.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘Do you always deflect sympathy that way?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘So you’re the last of your family’s line.’

  ‘I suppose so. But it wasn’t much of a line in the first place.’

  ‘Just like me. Scoundrels, all of them.’

  ‘Where were your gold mines?’

  ‘The Black Hills. Why?’

  ‘Peterson thinks the army place west of here could be mostly underground. I was wondering if there were old workings they could have used.’

  ‘No mines here. Just prairie topsoil and rock.’

  ‘Were your parents alive when you went off to college?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if they were, they probably wrote you with all the local news. Maybe rumour and gossip, too. They must have told you something about that place. Maybe not exact enough for your scholarly mind to pass on as fact, but you must have heard some little thing.’

  ‘Nothing worth repeating.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘All I know is that it was built and never used. Apparently because its purpose was too revolting. There was a minor scandal about it.’

  ‘What was its purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know. No one spoke of it to me.’

  Five minutes to midnight.