61 Hours

two feet in diameter. They came up about a yard and stopped, like broad chimneys on a flat roof. Directly above both of them were circular holes in the concrete ceiling. One shaft would have been planned as an intake, connected to one of the building’s fake chimneys, fitted with fans and filters and scrubbers to clean the poisoned air. The other would have been the exhaust, to be vented up and out through the second fake chimney. An incomplete installation. Never finished. Presumably the fake chimneys were cappedinternally. Some temporary fix that had lasted fifty years. There was no sign of rain or snow inside the bunker.
    Reacher stepped over to one of the pipes and shone his flash-light beam straight down. Like looking down a well. He couldn’t see bottom. The pipe was lined on the inside with stainless steel. Smooth and shiny. Efficient air movement. No turbulence. No furring, no accumulation of dirt. Regular cleaning had not been on the agenda. There would have been no one left alive to do it.
    Reacher stepped back and leaned over the stair rail and shone his flashlight beam straight down the stairwell. Saw nothing except stairs. They wound on endlessly, wrapped around a simple steel pipe. No hand rail on the outer circumference. The space was too tight.
    ‘This place is very deep,’ he said.
    His voice echoed back at him.
    ‘Probably needed to be,’ Holland said.
    The stairs had once been painted black, but their edges were worn back to dull metal by the passage of many feet. The safety rail around the opening was scuffed and greasy.
    Peterson said, ‘I’ll go first.’
    Five to ten in the evening.
    Six hours to go.
    Reacher waited until Peterson’s head was seven feet down, and then he followed. The stairs were in a perfectly round vertical shaft lined with smooth concrete. Space was cramped. There had been construction difficulties. The voice from Virginia had read him notes from faxed files:
The design was compromised several times during construction because of the kind of terrain they found
. Clearly the terrain had meant they hadn’t drilled beyond the bare minimum. The diameter was tight. Reacher’s shoulders brushed the concrete on one side and the central pipe on the other. But it was his feet that were the major problem. They were too big. A helical staircase has treads that narrow from the outside to the inside. Reacher was walking on his heels the whole way. Coming back up, he would be walking on his toes.
    They went down, and down, and down, Peterson first, thenReacher, then Holland. Fifty feet, then seventy-five, then a hundred. Their flashlight beams jerked and stabbed through the gloom. The steel under their feet clanged and boomed. The air was still and dry. And warm. Like a mine, insulated from the surface extremes.
    Reacher called, ‘See anything yet?’
    Peterson called back, ‘No.’
    They kept on going, corkscrewing down, and down, and down, their flashlight beams turning perpetually clockwise, washing the trowelled concrete wall. They passed through strange acoustic nodes where the whole shaft resonated like the bore of an oboe and the sound of their feet on the metal set up weird harmonic chords, as if the earth’s core was singing to them.
    Two hundred feet.
    Then more.
    Then Peterson called, ‘I’m there, I think.’
    Reacher clattered on after him, two more full turns.
    Then he came to a dead stop, deep underground.
    He sat down, on the second to last step.
    He used his flashlight, left, right, up, down.
    Not good.
    He heard the voice from Virginia in his head again:
Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else
.
    Damn straight they did.
    The stairwell shaft ended in an underground chamber made of concrete. It was perfectly circular. Like a hub. Maybe twenty feet in diameter. The size of a living room. But round. Like a living room in a movie about the future. It had eight open doorways leading off to eight horizontal corridors, one at each point of the compass, like bicycle spokes. The corridors were dark. Deep in shadow. The doorways were straight and square and true. The chamber’s floor was hard and flat and dry and smooth. The walls were hard and flat and dry and smooth. The ceiling was hard and flat and dry and smooth. Altogether the whole place was a neat, crisp, exact piece of construction. Well designed, well engineered, well built. Ideal for its intended purpose.
    Which was an orphanage.
    For children.
    What made it useless