61 Hours

going. The old percolator was slurping and rattling. He said, ‘I have to go out.’
    She nodded. ‘Mr Peterson told me. Will you be OK?’
    ‘I hope so.’
    ‘I don’t see how. There are a hundred people out there, and all you have is a six-shooter.’
    ‘We need information.’
    ‘Even so.’
    ‘I’ve got the Fourth Amendment. That’s all the protection I need. If I get hurt or don’t come back, the cops get probable cause for a search. The bikers don’t want that. They’ll treat me with kid gloves.’
    ‘That’s hard to imagine.’
    ‘Will you be OK here?’
    ‘I hope so.’
    ‘If the cops leave again, take your gun and lock yourself in the basement. Don’t open the door to anyone except me.’
    ‘Should we have a password?’
    ‘You can ask about my favourite book.’
    ‘You don’t have one. You told me that.’
    ‘I know. So that will be the correct answer.’ The percolator finished and Reacher poured a generous measure into one of six white mugs standing on the counter.
    Janet Salter asked, ‘Will the police leave again?’
    ‘Probably not.’
    ‘There could be another riot.’
    ‘Unlikely. Prison riots are rare. Like revolutions in a nation’s history. The conditions have to be exactly right.’
    ‘An escape, then.’
    ‘Even less likely. Escapes are hard. The prison people make sure of that.’
    ‘Are you saying my problems are over?’
    ‘It’s possible.’
    ‘So are you going to come back here or not?’
    ‘I think the highway is still closed.’
    ‘When it opens again, where will you go next?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    Janet Salter said, ‘I think you’ll head for Virginia.’
    ‘She might be married.’
    ‘You should ask her.’
    Reacher smiled. Said, ‘Maybe I will.’
    Peterson briefed him in the hallway. He said the spare unmarked car was outside, warmed up and running. It was reliable. It had been recently serviced. It had a full tank. It had chains on the back and winter tyres on the front. There was no direct route to the camp. The way to go was to head south towards the highway, but turn west a mile short of the cloverleaf on the old road that ran parallel.
    ‘The road the lawyer was killed on,’ Reacher said.
    ‘That was all the way to the east,’ Peterson said. ‘But still, perhaps you shouldn’t stop if someone tries to flag you down.’
    ‘I won’t,’ Reacher said. ‘Count on it.’
    He was to keep on the old road for five miles, and then make a right and head back north on a county two-lane that wandered a little for about eight miles before hitting the ruler-straight section that the army engineers had put in fifty years before. That section was two miles long, and it ran right up to the camp, where he would find the fifteen wooden huts and the old stone building, laid out in two neat lines of eight, running precisely east to west.
    ‘The stone building is in the back left corner,’ Peterson said.
    Five to seven in the morning.
    Twenty-one hours to go.
    Seventeen hundred miles south it was five to eight in the morning. Plato had finished his breakfast and was about to break the habit of a lifetime. He was about to cut out his middleman in the walled city villa and call his guy in the States direct.
    He dialled.
    He got an answer.
    He asked, ‘Is the witness dead yet?’
    There was a pause on the line. His guy said, ‘You know there was always going to be a delay between the two.’
    ‘How long has that delay been so far?’
    His guy knew what to say. ‘Too long.’
    ‘Correct,’ Plato said. ‘I arranged a riot at the prison last night.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Evidently you didn’t make use of it.’
    ‘There was a man in the house.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I had no instructions.’
    ‘That’s your answer? You needed instructions?’
    ‘I thought perhaps there were complexities I wasn’t grasping.’
    Plato breathed out. ‘How can I hurt you?’
    His guy knew what to say. ‘In ways I don’t want to be hurt.’
    ‘Correct,’ Plato said. ‘But I need you to be more specific. I need you to focus on what’s at stake.’
    His guy said, ‘You’ll kill the person nearest and dearest to me.’
    ‘Yes, I will, eventually. But first there will be a delay, which seems to be a concept you’re very familiar with. I’ll cripple her and mutilate her and let her live for a year or so. Then I’ll kill her. Do you understand me?’
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    ‘So for your own sake, get the job done. I don’t care about bystanders. Wipe out the