61 Hours

what that place is.’

TWENTY-SEVEN
    P ETERSON AND H OLLAND HAD HEARD THE THIN SQUAWK OF HER words from the earpiece. They stepped closer. Reacher sat down on the bed, where the biker girl had been. The voice on the phone said, ‘That place was built as an orphanage.’
    Reacher said, ‘Underground?’
    ‘It was fifty years ago. The height of the Cold War. Everyone was going nuts. My guy faxed me the file. The casualty predictions were horrendous. The Soviets were assumed to have missiles to spare, by the hundreds. A full-scale launch, they’d have been scratching their heads for targets. We ran scenarios, and it all came down to the day of the week and the time of the year. Saturday or Sunday or during the school vacations, it was assumed everyone would get it pretty much equally. But weekdays during the semester, they predicted a significant separation between the adult population and the juvenile, in terms of physical location. Parents would be in one place, their kids would be in another, maybe in a shelter under a school.’
    ‘Or under their desks,’ Reacher said.
    ‘Wherever,’ the voice said. ‘The point is that the survival numbers two weeks after the launch were very skewed. They showed a lot more kids than adults. Some guy on House Appropriations started obsessing about it. He wanted places for these kids to go. He figured they might be able to get to undamaged regional airports and be flown out to remote areas. He wanted combination radiation shelters and living accommodations built. He talked to the air force. He scratched their backs, they scratched his. He was from South Dakota, so that’s where they started.’
    ‘The local scuttlebutt is about a scandal,’ Reacher said. ‘Building an orphanage doesn’t sound especially scandalous.’
    ‘You don’t understand. The assumption was there would be no adults left. Maybe a sick and dying pilot or two, that’s all. Some harassed bureaucrat with a clipboard. The idea was that these kids would be dumped out of the planes and left alone to lock themselves underground and manage the best they could. On their own. Like feral animals. It wasn’t a pretty picture. They got reports from psychologists saying there would be tribalism, fighting, killing, maybe even cannibalism. And the median age of the survivors was supposed to be seven. Then the psychologists talked to the grown-ups, and it turned out that their worst fear was that they would die and their kids would live on without them. They needed to hear that things would be OK, you know, with doctors and nurses and clean sheets on the bed. They didn’t want to hear about how things were really going to be. So there was a lot of fuss and then the idea was dropped, as a matter of civilian morale.’
    ‘So this place just stood here for fifty years?’
    ‘Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else.’
    ‘Do we know what the compromises were?’
    ‘No. The plans are missing.’
    ‘So is the place empty?’
    ‘They filled it with junk they needed to store and then they forgot all about it.’
    ‘Is the stuff still in there?’
    ‘I’m assuming so.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I don’t know yet. That’s in another file. But it can’t be very exciting. It’s something that was already surplus to requirements fifty years ago.’
    ‘Are you going to find out?’
    ‘My guy has requested the file.’
    ‘How’s my weather?’
    ‘Stick your head out the door.’
    ‘I mean, what’s coming my way?’
    A pause. ‘It’ll be snowing again tomorrow. Clear and cold until then.’
    ‘Where would a bunch of bikers have hidden a key?’
    ‘I don’t know. I can’t help you.’
    Five minutes to four in the afternoon.
    Twelve hours to go.
    Reacher handed the phone back to Holland. The light from the window was dimming. The sun was way in the west and the stone building was casting a long shadow. They set about searching the hut. Their last chance. Every mattress, every bed frame, the toilet tank, the floorboards, the walls, the light fixtures. They did it slowly and thoroughly, and got even slower and more thorough as they approached the end of the room and started running out of options.
    They found nothing.
    Peterson said, ‘We could get a locksmith, maybe from Pierre.’
    Reacher said, ‘A bank robber would be better. A safe cracker. Maybe they’ve got one up at the prison.’
    ‘I can’t believe they never used the place. It must have cost a