61 Hours

he was only four feet eleven inches tall.
    Fifty-fifty.
    Live or die.
    Plato stayed.
    He called, ‘Holland? Where are you?’
    A trace of worry in his voice.
    Reacher put his mouth close to the curved concrete and said, ‘Holland’s dead.’
    The sound rode the walls and went all around and came back to him, a quiet-spoken sentence, everywhere and nowhere, conversational, but full of menace. Reacher heard Plato’s feet scuffling on the concrete floor. He was spinning in place, trying to locate the voice.
    Plato’s feet went quiet and he called out, ‘What did you say?’
    Reacher moved along an empty spoke into the C-ring. A slow, silent shuffle. No sound at all, except the whisper of fabric when the seat of his pants hit the floor. Which didn’t matter anyway. All sounds were everywhere. They hissed and sang and branched and travelled.
    Reacher put his mouth to the wall and said, ‘I shot Holland in the head. Now I’m coming for you.’
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘Tell me.’
    ‘I was a friend of Janet Salter’s.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The witness. Didn’t you even know her name?’
    ‘Are you the military cop?’
    ‘You’re about to find out who I am.’
    A smart guy would have run for the stairs.
    Plato stayed.
    He called out, ‘Do you think you can beat me?’
    Reacher called back, ‘Do you think bears shit in the woods?’
    ‘You think you can beat me down here?’
    ‘I can beat you anywhere.’
    A long pause.
    ‘Where are you?’ Plato called.
    ‘Right behind you,’ Reacher said. Loud voice, booming echo. Fast feet scuffling on concrete. No answer. Reacher moved on, in the dark, his flashlight off. He heard Plato enter a corridor. A straight spoke. The sound of his feet narrowed and then bloomed and the tap of his heels came back from the right and the left simultaneously. Reacher scooted left, then right. Into a straight spoke of his own. Adjacent to Plato’s, apparently. He saw the glow of Plato’s flashlight as it passed the mouth of the C-ring. He moved on and stopped and lay down on his side, curled like a letter S, in the mouth of the straight spoke, just three feet from the main chamber. Down on the floor, to show a small target. Away from the vertical surfaces, because bullets rode walls, too. Not just sound. Any combat veteran would say the same. Narrow alleys, confined spaces, near-misses didn’t ricochet at gaudy angles. They buzzed and burrowed close to the brick or the stone. Flattening yourself against a hard surface did the other guy a favour, not you. Counterintuitive, and difficult to resist, but true.
    He heard Plato stop in the mouth of his corridor. Saw the glow from his light. He was facing into the main chamber. Two possibilities. One, he would turn right, away from the tunnel where Reacher was waiting. Or two, he would turn left, towards it.
    Hide and seek. Maybe the oldest game in the world.
    The guy from seat 4A walked the second hose into the stone building. He wrestled it across the floor and around the stair head and pulled it over to the same ventilation shaft the first hose was in. He put it up on his shoulder again and faced the void and kicked with his knee until the nozzle fell into the shaft.
    Then he fed the hose down after it, yard by yard, ten feet, twenty, thirty, forty, like he was chinning himself backward along an endless monkey bar. When he had a good sixty feet in the shaft he ducked out from under it and laid it down against the lip. He kicked it straight on the floor and checked it for kinks.
    All good.
    Up the shaft from the tank, through the pump, and straight back down the same shaft again.
    A simple, linear proposition.
    Do it
.
    He walked back out to the cold and found his friend. Asked him, ‘Can you hit the sentry from here?’
    The guy from seat 4B looked down at his H&K. A four and a half inch barrel. A great weapon, but no more accurate than a fine handgun. And he was shivering hard. And not just from the cold.
    He said, ‘No.’
    ‘So sneak up on him. If he sees you, tell him you’re there to relieve him. Keep him talking. I’ll hit the others as soon as they come this way out of the plane. Wait until you hear me fire, and let him have it.’
    The guy from seat 4B said nothing.
    ‘For your mother. And your sisters. And the daughters you’ll have one day.’
    The guy from seat 4B nodded. He turned around. He headed south. Slowly at first, and then faster.
    Plato turned right. Away from where Reacher was