PETERSON AND HOLLAND 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 fortune.’

‘The defence budget was practically unlimited back then.’

‘I can’t believe they couldn’t find an alternative use for it.’

‘The design was compromised somehow.’

‘Even so. Somebody could have used it.’

‘Too landlocked for the navy. We’re close to the geographic centre of the United States. Or so they said on the bus tour.’

‘The Marines could have used it for winter training.’

‘Not with South in the name of the state. Too chicken. The Marines would have insisted on North Dakota. Or the North Pole.’

‘Maybe they didn’t want to sleep underground.’

‘Marines sleep where they’re told. And when.’

‘Actually I heard they do their winter training near San Diego.’

‘I was in the army,’ Reacher said. ‘Marine training makes no sense to me.’

They braved the cold again and took a last look at the stone building and its stubborn door. Then they walked back to the car and climbed in and drove away. Two miles along the runway, where battered planes were to have spilled ragged children. Then eight miles on the old two-lane, up which no adult would have come to the rescue. The Cold War. A bad time. In retrospect, probably less dangerous than people imagined. Some Soviet missiles were mere fictions, some were painted tree trunks, some were faulty. And the Soviets had psychologists too, preparing reports in the Cyrillic alphabet about seven-year-olds of their own, and about tribalism and fighting and killing and cannibalism. But at the time things had seemed very real. Reacher had been two years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In the Pacific. He had known nothing about it. But later his mother had told him how she and his father had calculated the southern drift of the poisoned wind. Two weeks, they thought. There were guns in the house. And on the base there were corpsmen with pills.

Reacher asked, ‘How accurate are your weather reports?’

Peterson said, ‘Usually pretty good.’

‘They’re calling for snow again tomorrow.’

‘That sounds about right.’

‘Then someone’s going to show up soon. They didn’t plough that runway for nothing.’

Far to the east and a little to the south a plane was landing on another long runway, at Andrews Air Force Base in the state of Maryland. Not a large plane. A business jet, leased by the army, assigned to an MP prisoner escort company. It was carrying six people. A pilot, a copilot, three prisoner escorts, and a prisoner. The prisoner was the Fourth Infantry captain from Fort Hood. He was in civilian clothes and was hobbled by standard restraint chains around his wrists and waist and ankles, all interconnected. The plane taxied and the steps were lowered and the prisoner was hustled down them to a car parked on the apron. He was put in the back seat. Waiting for him there was a woman officer in a Class A army uniform. An MP major. She was a little above average height. She was slender. She had long dark hair tied back. Tanned skin, deep brown eyes. She had intelligence and authority and youth and mischief in her face, all at the same time. She was wearing ribbons for a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

There was no driver in the front of the car.

The woman said, ‘Good afternoon, captain.’

The captain didn’t speak.

The woman said, ‘My name is Susan Turner. My rank is major, and I command the 110th MP, and I’m handling your case. You and I are going to talk for a minute, and then you’re going to get back on the plane, and you’re either going to head back to Texas, or straight over to Fort Leavenworth. One or the other. You understand?’