61 Hours

car. Put their hats on, put their gloves on, zipped up their coats. The temperature was still dropping. Way below zero degrees, and the wind made it worse. The cold struck upward through the soles of Reacher’s boots. His face went numb after seconds. Holland and Peterson were putting on a show of taking it in their stride, but Reacher knew they had to be hurting. Their faces were mottled red and white, and they were blinking, and they were coughing and gasping a little.
    They all headed straight for the stone building. It looked no different from how it had in the morning. Partly forbidding, partly just plain weird. Peterson tried the door. It didn’t move. He rubbed the new frost off the keyhole with his thumb, the same way Reacher had. He said, ‘There are no scratches here. The lock wasn’t in regular use.’
    ‘Didn’t need to be,’ Reacher said. ‘They unlocked it a year ago and relocked it this morning.’
    ‘So where’s the key?’
    ‘That’s a good question.’
    Holland said, ‘They took it with them.’
    Reacher said, ‘I don’t think they did.’
    ‘Why wouldn’t they?’
    ‘Because this place is getting sold. Wouldn’t they have been told to leave the key for the new owner?’
    ‘So where is it?’
    ‘Under the mat, probably.’
    ‘There is no mat.’
    ‘Under a flowerpot, then.’
    ‘What flowerpot?’
    ‘Figure of speech,’ Reacher said. ‘People leave keys in prearranged locations.’
    All three of them turned a slow circle, looking at everything there was to see. Which wasn’t much. Just snow, and concrete, and the huts, and the building itself.
    ‘What’s it going to look like?’ Peterson asked. ‘Just a key?’
    ‘Big,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s a blast door, so the lock will be complex. Lots of moving parts. Hard to turn. So the key will be big and strong. Probably T-shaped, like a clock key, probably made out of some kind of fancy steel. Probably cost the Pentagon a thousand bucks all on its own.’
    ‘Maybe they buried it in the snow. We have a metal detector in the car.’
    ‘But I’m guessing the Russian guy from Brooklyn doesn’t. Which means it isn’t in the snow. That’s no kind of customer relations. You can’t ask a guy to dig around in a snow bank for an hour.’
    ‘So where is it?’
    There were stone ledges and carved mouldings and Gothic features all over the building. Eye-level and below was too obvious. Reacher walked a circuit and ran his hands along everything up to about eight feet off the ground. Nothing there. And anything higher would be inaccessible, unless the Russian was figuring on bringing a folding ladder.
    Reacher stopped walking and looked around all over again and said, ‘It has to be somewhere definite. Like under the third thing from the left or the fourth thing from the right.’
    Peterson said, ‘What kind of thing?’
    ‘Hut, bed, anything.’
    ‘Can’t we just jimmy the door with a tyre iron?’
    ‘It’s a blast door. Designed to stand up to a big pressure wave.’
    ‘But we’d be pulling outward, not pushing inward.’
    ‘Pressure waves are followed by vacuums. Compression and then rarefaction. Compression pushes in, rarefaction sucks back out, and just as hard. Both ways around, that’s a strong door.’
    Peterson said, ‘So we better start searching.’
    ‘What’s your lucky number?’
    ‘Three.’
    ‘So start with the third hut, under the third mattress.’
    ‘Counting from where?’
    Reacher paused. ‘That’s another good question. Front row, from the left, probably. But ultimately any counting system could be called subjective. And therefore potentially confusing. The only real objectivity would be in saying the nearest or the farthest.’
    ‘From where?’
    ‘Here. The locked door.’
    ‘That’s assuming it’s in a hut at all.’
    ‘It’s not in the snow and it can’t be in the building itself. What else is there?’
    Peterson headed for the nearest hut. The first in the back row, opposite the second in the front row. The first one Reacher had checked that morning. The door was unlocked. Peterson pushed it open and stepped inside. Reacher and Holland followed him. The burlap drapes were still at the windows. Everything else portable was gone. There was nothing to see except the twelve cots, now stripped back to striped blue mattress ticking and dull iron frames. The place looked sad and abandoned and empty.
    But it was warm.
    The paraffin heater had its burner turned to the off position,