61 Hours

slotting suitcases into the hold under the floor. The old folks were detouring around him one after the other and gripping the handrails carefully and climbing slowly up the step. Reacher saw them inside through the windows, white cotton-ball heads moving down the aisle, pausing, choosing their places, getting settled.
    Last aboard was Jay Knox himself, once the driver, now just a passenger. He walked down the aisle and dumped himself in a window seat three rows behind the last of the seniors. Reacher’s seat. Near the rear wheels, where the ride was roughest. No point in travelling, if you’re not feeling it.
    The new driver latched the hold compartments and bounced up the step. A second later the door sucked shut behind him. The engine started. Reacher heard the heavy diesel rattle. Heard theair brake release and the snick of a gear. The engine roared and the bus moved away, out of the lot, on to the road. The icy wind battered at it. It headed south towards the highway. Reacher watched it go, until it was lost to sight.
    Peterson clapped him on the back.
    Reacher said, ‘A viable mode of transportation just left town without me on it. I just broke the habit of a lifetime.’
    Plato dialled his guy again. Direct. A risk, but he was enough of an analyst to know that caution sometimes had to be abandoned. To know that chronology couldn’t be beaten. To know that timing was everything. The clock ticked on, whoever you were. Even if you were Plato.
    His guy answered.
    Plato asked, ‘Do you have news for me?’
    ‘Not yet. I’m sorry.’
    Plato paused. ‘It almost seems like it would be easier just to do the job than find new ways of delaying it.’
    ‘It’s not like that.’
    ‘It seems like you’re working very hard to save the wrong life.’
    ‘I’m not.’
    ‘Focus on the life you really want to save.’
    ‘I will. I am.’
    ‘You have a deadline. Please don’t let me down.’
    Reacher walked back to the station. Peterson drove. They met in the silent lobby and stood there for a second. They had nothing to do, and both of them knew it. Then Holland came out of his office and said, ‘We should go up to the camp. To take a look around. Now that it’s empty. While we’ve still got daylight.’

TWENTY-SIX
    T HEY WENT IN H OLLAND’S CAR . I T WAS A BET TER FIT FOR THREE people than Peterson’s cruiser, because it had no security screen between the front seats and the rear. Reacher rode in the back, sprawled sideways, comfortable, watching the roads he had driven that morning. Conditions were still bad. The wind was still strong. The snow was frozen so hard it looked like part of the earth, and it was being scoured into long sharp ridges and runnels. It was blinding white under the pale afternoon sun. Like the Ice Age.
    They turned on to the old road parallel with the highway and again on to the wandering two-lane up towards the camp. The first eight miles were as bad as before. Icy humps and dips, reversed cambers, constant deviations from straight. Then, as before, the horizon changed. The clear grey concrete, massively wide, infinitely long, the aerodynamic berms of snow, the visible wind howling above the surface.
    Holland slowed and bumped up on the new level and stopped and kept his foot on the brake, like a plane waiting to launch. Hesaid, ‘You see what you want to see, don’t you? I was here a dozen times in my life and thought this was just a road. Kind of fancy, maybe, but I guess I figured hey, that’s the military for you.’
    ‘It used to be narrower,’ Peterson said. ‘That’s what made it hard to see. The winds put dirt all over it. Only the middle part was ever used. These guys ploughed it for the first time in fifty years. Not just snow. They pushed the dirt off.’
    ‘It’s a piece of work,’ Holland said. ‘That’s for sure.’
    ‘That’s for damn sure,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s got to be a yard thick. By volume it’s probably the largest manmade object in South Dakota.’
    They all looked a minute longer and then Holland took his foot off the brake and the snow chains chattered and the car rolled on. Two whole miles. The tan shapes of the huts loomed up, with the slate roof of the stone building standing tall behind them, under its cap of snow. Holland parked about where Reacher had. The scene ahead was different. No people. No trucks. No bikes. Just the empty ploughed spaces, and the wooden huts all forlorn and abandoned among them.
    They all got out of the