Without Fail

bell chamber. The bell chamber was not the same as the one in Bismarck. It had a clock added into it. There was a four-foot cube of brass machinery mounted centrally on iron girders just above the bells themselves. The clock had two faces, both driven simultaneously by the same gears inside the cube. Long iron shafts ran straight out from the cube, through the walls, through the backs of the faces, all the way to the external hands. The faces were mounted in the openings where the louvers had been, to the east and the west. The machinery was ticking loudly. Gear wheels and ratchets were clicking. They were setting up tiny sympathetic resonances in the bells themselves.
    “We’ve got no view east or west,” Reacher said.
    Neagley shrugged.
    “North and south is all we need,” she said. “That’s where the road runs.”
    “I guess,” he said. “You take the south.”
    He ducked under the girders and the iron shafts and crawled over to the louver facing north. Knelt up and looked out. Got a perfect view. He could see the bridge and the river. He could see the whole town. He could see the dirt road leading north. Maybe ten straight miles of it. It was completely empty.
    “You OK?” he called.
    “Excellent,” Neagley called back. “I can almost see Colorado.”
    “Shout when you spot something.”
    “You too.”
    The clock ticked thunk, thunk, thunk , once a second. The sound was loud and precise and tireless. He glanced back at the mechanism and wondered whether it would drive him crazy before it sent him to sleep. He heard expensive alloy touching wood ten feet behind him as Neagley put her submachine gun down. He laid his M16 on the boards next to his knees. Squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was going to get. Then he settled in to watch and wait.

18
    The air was cold and seventy feet above ground the breeze was a wind. It came in through the louvers and scoured his eyes and made them water. They had been there two hours, and nothing had happened. They had seen nothing and heard nothing except the clock. They had learned its sound. Each thunk was made up of a bundle of separate metallic frequencies, starting low down with the muted bass ring of the bigger gears, ranging upward to the tiny treble click of the escapement lever, and finishing with a faint time-delayed ding resonating off the smallest bell. It was the sound of madness.
    “I got something,” Neagley called. “SUV, I think, coming in from the south.”
    He took a quick look north and got up off his knees. He was stiff and cold and very uncomfortable. He picked up the bird-watcher’s scope.
    “Catch,” he called.
    He tossed it in an upward loop over the clock shaft. Neagley twisted and caught it one-handed and turned back to the louver panel. Put the scope to her eye.
    “Might be a new model Chevy Tahoe,” she called. “Light gold metallic. Sun is on the windshield. No ID on the occupants.”
    Reacher looked north again. The road was still empty. He could see ten miles. It would take ten minutes to cover ten miles even at a fast cruise. He stood up straight and stretched. Ducked under the clock shafts and crawled over next to Neagley. She moved to her right and he wiped his eyes and stared out south. There was a tiny gold speck on the road, all alone, maybe five miles away.
    “Not exactly busy,” she said. “Is it?”
    She passed him the scope. He refocused it and propped its weight on a louver and squinted through it. The telephoto compression held the truck motionless. It looked like it was bouncing and swaying on the road but making absolutely no forward progress at all. It looked dirty and travel-stained. It had a big chrome front fender all smeared with mud and salt. The windshield was streaked. The sun’s reflection made it impossible to see who was riding in it.
    “Why is it still sunny?” he said. “I thought it was going to snow.”
    “Look to the west,” Neagley said.
    He put the scope down and turned and put the left side of his face tight against the louvers. Closed his right eye and looked out sideways with his left. The sky was split in two. In the west it was almost black with clouds. In the east it was pale blue and hazy. Giant multiple shafts of sunlight blazed down through mist where the two weather systems met.
    “Unbelievable,” he said.
    “Some kind of inversion,” Neagley said. “I hope it stays where it is or we’ll freeze our asses off up here.”
    “It’s about fifty miles