61 Hours

and rolled down his window. He ignored Reacher completely. Looked straight at Janet Salter, some kind of concern in his face. She stopped and faced him. She said, ‘I’m out for a walk. That’s all. Nothing to worry about. Mr Peterson is doing a fine job.’
    Holland said, ‘You heading home now?’
    ‘We’re on our way.’
    ‘Can I offer you a ride?’
    ‘Thank you, but I would rather walk. A measure of fresh air and exercise was the point of this little adventure.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘But please join us back at the house, for coffee, if you like.’
    ‘OK,’ Holland said again.
    He checked his mirrors and U-turned across the width of the road. Frozen ruts splintered under his wheels. He got lined up in the southbound lane but didn’t race on ahead. He kept pace instead, crawling slowly, holding a lateral line with himself on the left behind the wheel, then his empty passenger seat, then the berm of ploughed snow, then Reacher, then Janet Salter. His front tyres were made of hard winter compound, and they crunched and scrabbled slowly. He had chains on the back. Each link rotated into position and made its own distinct sound. He put his flashing lights on, to warn the traffic behind him of hislow speed. He had strobes concealed in the rear parcel shelf, matched by more behind the radiator grille. Reacher guessed they would do the job. From a distance the unmarked car would look like a regular police cruiser.
    Janet Salter said, ‘This is ridiculous.’
    Reacher said, ‘He’s just doing his job.’
    ‘I don’t like the attention.’
    ‘You’re important to him.’
    ‘Only because he can use me.’
    ‘You’re a prominent citizen. You’re the kind of person a chief of police worries about.’
    Janet Salter said, ‘The only prominent citizens in this town are the prison staff. Believe me. That’s how it works now.’
    They walked on, with the idling car crunching slowly alongside them. Where there were no buildings on their right the wind blew in hard and strong and uninterrupted, a mass of frozen air whistling relentlessly over the flat land, with nothing in its path to roil it up or make it turbulent. It was still carrying tiny spicules of ice. They came in horizontal and pattered against the side of Reacher’s hood. They could have been airborne for hundreds of miles, maybe all the way from the Rocky Mountains.
    Janet Salter asked, ‘Are you cold?’
    Reacher smiled, as much as his numb face would let him.
    ‘I know,’ he said. ‘This is nothing.’
    They got back in the house and peeled off layers and endured the pain of thawing. Reacher’s ears burned and his nose and chin prickled and itched. Peterson and the two women cops had to have been feeling the same, but they showed no signs of distress. Probably a matter of local South Dakota pride. Chief Holland was entirely OK. He had been riding in a heated car, out of the wind. But still he gave a theatrical shiver as soon as he stepped into the hallway. Relief, Reacher figured, now that Janet Salter’s exposure was over and they had gotten away with it.
    The two women cops took up their established positions. Janet Salter went to work with her percolator. Reacher and Peterson and Holland watched her from the hallway. Then the phonerang. Janet Salter asked someone to pick it up. Peterson got it. He listened for a second and held the receiver out to Reacher.
    ‘For you,’ he said. ‘It’s the woman from the 110th MP.’
    Reacher took the phone. Peterson and Holland trooped into the kitchen and left him alone. Instinctive politeness. Reacher put the phone to his ear and the voice from Virginia said, ‘I called a guy in the air force.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘We’re getting there. Slowly, but not because it’s a secret. Quite the opposite. Because the place was abandoned and forgotten years ago. It fell off the active list when God’s dog was still a puppy. Nobody can remember a thing about it.’
    ‘Not even what it was?’
    ‘All the details are archived. All my guy has seen so far is a report about how hard it was to build. The design was compromised several times during construction because of the kind of terrain they found. Some kind of schist. You know what that is?’
    ‘Bedrock, I guess,’ Reacher said. ‘Probably hard, if it caused difficulties.’
    ‘It proves they were excavating underground.’
    ‘That’s for sure. Not a bad result, for the first two hours.’
    ‘One hour,’ the voice said. ‘I took a nap