61 Hours

yours.’
    ‘I mean, we’re not using it.’
    ‘You shouldn’t be using anything.’
    ‘Squatters’ rights. It’s an abandoned facility. We know the law.’
    Reacher said nothing. Just stepped left and skirted the crowd. They all stood still and let him by. No move to block him. A policy decision. He glanced at the corner hut. It was a plain, utilitarian structure. Maybe fifty feet long, its blank slab siding pierced only by two small square windows. It had a door in its narrow end. All around it the snow had been cleared away meticulously. Directly behind it was the stone building. There was no snow around it, either. Just clear, swept paths.
    Reacher turned around.
    He said, ‘If you’re not using it, why clear the snow?’
    The same guy came out of the crowd again.
    He said, ‘For the satisfaction of a job well done.’
    The stone building was a strange little thing. It could have been copied from the plans for a small but fairly ornate and old-fashioned suburban house. It had all kinds of details and mouldings and curlicues and gables and rain gutters and eaves. Like a Gothic folly a rich man might put in his garden for guests.
    But there were crucial differences, too. Where a guest house in a garden would have windows, the stone building had recesses only. Like an optical illusion. The right size and shape, but not filled with glass. Filled instead by unbroken expanses of stone, the same neat mortared blocks as the rest of the walls. There was a portico, but the front door under it made no attempt at illusion. It was just a meaty steel slab, completely plain. It had huge hinges. It would open outward, not inward. Like a blast door. A pressure wave outside would hold it shut, not burst it open. It had a handle and a keyhole. Reacher tried the handle. It didn’t move. The keyhole was large. Smaller than the hole for a church key, bigger than the hole for a house key. The steel around it was rimed with frost. Reacher rubbed it away withhis gloved thumb, and saw no nicks or scratches in the metal. The lock was not in regular use. No key had been inserted and withdrawn, day in and day out.
    He asked, ‘You know what this place is?’
    The guy who had followed him said, ‘Don’t you?’
    ‘Of course I do. But I need to know how our security is holding up.’
    The guy said, ‘We heard things.’
    ‘From who?’
    ‘The construction guys that were here before.’
    ‘What things?’
    ‘About atomic bombs.’
    ‘They said there were nuclear weapons in here?’
    ‘No. They said it was a clinic.’
    ‘What kind of a clinic?’
    ‘They said if we had been attacked in winter, in a city, like New York or Chicago, people would have been in coats and gloves, so only their faces would have been burned. You know, miles from the centre. Closer in, you would have been vaporized. But if you survived, you could come here and get a new face.’
    ‘Like plastic surgery?’
    ‘No, like prosthetics. Like masks. They said that’s what’s in there, thousands and thousands of plastic faces.’
    Reacher walked on around the strange little structure. It was the same on all four sides. Heavy stone, fake windows, details, mouldings. A bizarre parody. Entertaining, but not instructive without getting inside. Which wasn’t going to happen.
    He walked away. Then on a sudden whim he stopped at the nearest hut. The first in the back row, which was in line with the second in the front row. The crowd had followed him in a long untidy straggle that looped all the way back to where he had started. Like a thin question mark, curling through the gaps and the passages. Steam hung above it. Nearest to him was the guy who had done all the talking. He was about six feet away.
    Reacher pushed the hut’s door. It swung halfway open.
    The guy close to him said, ‘That’s not yours.’
    ‘It’s bolted down on army concrete. That’s good enough for me.’
    ‘You got no warrant.’
    Reacher didn’t answer. He was all done talking. It was too cold. His face was numb and his teeth were hurting. He just pushed the door all the way open and took a look inside.
    The hut was dark. And warm. There was a paraffin stove going. Reacher could smell the sweet wet kerosene. There were twelve cots in the room, six to a side, and a boxed-in section at the far end that might have been a bathroom. Plain grey blankets on the cots, cardboard shipping cartons filled with folded clothes, burlap drapes at the small square windows.
    There was a young