'Should we have a password?'
'You can ask about my favourite book.'
'You don't have one. You told me that.'
'I know. So that will be the correct answer.' The percolator finished and Reacher poured a generous measure into one of six white mugs standing on the counter.
Janet Salter asked, 'Will the police leave again?'
'Probably not.'
'There could be another riot.'
'Unlikely. Prison riots are rare. Like revolutions in a nation's history. The conditions have to be exactly right.'
'An escape, then.'
'Even less likely. Escapes are hard. The prison people make sure of that.'
'Are you saying my problems are over?'
'It's possible.'
'So are you going to come back here or not?'
'I think the highway is still closed.'
'When it opens again, where will you go next?'
'I don't know.'
Janet Salter said, 'I think you'll head for Virginia.'
'She might be married.'
'You should ask her.'
Reacher smiled. Said, 'Maybe I will.'
Peterson briefed him in the hallway. He said the spare unmarked car was outside, warmed up and running. It was reliable. It had been recently serviced. It had a full tank. It had chains on the back and winter tyres on the front. There was no direct route to the camp. The way to go was to head south towards the highway, but turn west a mile short of the cloverleaf on the old road that ran parallel.
'The road the lawyer was killed on,' Reacher said.
'That was all the way to the east,' Peterson said. 'But still, perhaps you shouldn't stop if someone tries to flag you down.'
'I won't,' Reacher said. 'Count on it.'
He was to keep on the old road for five miles, and then make a right and head back north on a county two-lane that wandered a little for about eight miles before hitting the ruler-straight section that the army engineers had put in fifty years before. That section was two miles long, and it ran right up to the camp, where he would find the fifteen wooden huts and the old stone building, laid out in two neat lines of eight, running precisely east to west.
'The stone building is in the back left corner,' Peterson said.
Five to seven in the morning.
Twenty-one hours to go.
Seventeen hundred miles south it was five to eight in the morning. Plato had finished his breakfast and was about to break the habit of a lifetime. He was about to cut out his middleman in the walled city villa and call his guy in the States direct.
He dialled.
He got an answer.
He asked, 'Is the witness dead yet?'
There was a pause on the line. His guy said, 'You know there was always going to be a delay between the two.'
'How long has that delay been so far?'
His guy knew what to say. 'Too long.'
'Correct,' Plato said. 'I arranged a riot at the prison last night.'
'I know.'
'Evidently you didn't make use of it.'
'There was a man in the house.'
'And?'
'I had no instructions.'
'That's your answer? You needed instructions?'
'I thought perhaps there were complexities I wasn't grasping.'
Plato breathed out. 'How can I hurt you?'
His guy knew what to say. 'In ways I don't want to be hurt.'
'Correct,' Plato said. 'But I need you to be more specific. I need you to focus on what's at stake.'
His guy said, 'You'll kill the person nearest and dearest to me.'
'Yes, I will, eventually. But first there will be a delay, which seems to be a concept you're very familiar with. I'll cripple her and mutilate her and let her live for a year or so. Then I'll kill her. Do you understand me?'
'Yes, I do.'
'So for your own sake, get the job done. I don't care about bystanders. Wipe out the entire damn town if you have to. The entire state, for all I care. How many people live in South Dakota anyway?'
'About eight hundred thousand.'
'OK. That's your upper limit for collateral damage. Get it done.'
'I will. I promise.'
Plato hung up and poured himself another cup of coffee.
The spare unmarked was another dark Crown Vic. It smelled dusty and tired inside. Its heater was set to seventy degrees and the fan was blowing hard in a desperate attempt to get there. The weather was way down in a whole new dimension. The temperature was dropping fast. The ground was bone hard and the air was solid with microscopic nubs of snowflakes borne on the wind. They were chilled and shrivelled to sharp fragments. They hurled themselves against the windshield and made complex frozen traceries. The wipers wouldn't shift them. The blades just scraped over them. Reacher set the heater on defrost and waited until the blown air melted oval holes of clarity.
Then he left.
He K-turned across the width of Janet Salter's street. The ruts were frozen solid. The Crown Vic's tyres bumped up and down. The stake-out car at the end of the road backed up to let him squeeze by. He turned right and drove away from town. The wheel ruts that had been soft the day before were now as hard as concrete trenches. It was like driving a train on a track. He didn't need to steer. The chains on the back dug in and splintered the ice and the front tyres hammered left and right and kept him basically straight. The world outside was entirely white. There was pale light in the sky but no sun. The air was too full of ice. It was like dust. Like mist. The wind was blowing right to left in front of him. Small streamlined drifts had built up and frozen solid, against fence posts and power poles. The weird shapes on the power lines had shifted to the east, as if the whole world was tilted.
Reacher found the turn a mile short of the cloverleaf. Getting out of the frozen ruts was difficult. He had to slow to a walk and turn the wheel way over and churn his way out one tyre at a time, four separate climbs, four separate drops. He found new ruts running west and settled in for five more miles of autopilot. He repeated the escape manoeuvre at the next turn and headed north towards the camp. The new road was different. It hadn't seen much traffic. There were no established ruts. It was just a narrow ribbon of frozen snow. The front wheels skated and wandered a little. The blowing ice pattered left to right against the driver's window. The road humped and dipped and curved left and right for no apparent reason. The camber tilted one way, then the other. Not a great piece of civil engineering. Reacher slowed a little and concentrated hard. To slide into a ditch would be fatal. No chance of a tow before he froze. Even a blown tyre would be a disaster. The wheel nuts were probably frozen solid.
Five slow careful miles, then six, then seven. Then the horizon changed. Up ahead the road widened and straightened and flattened. Dramatically. Radically. In the murky distance it looked as broad and flat as a freeway. Maybe even broader and flatter. It looked like a sixteen-lane superhighway. It was a magnificent, surreal piece of road. It was built up slightly proud of the land around it, it was absolutely flat, and it was absolutely straight, for two whole miles.
And it was ploughed.
There was not a speck of snow on it. Just smooth grey concrete, scraped and brushed and salted. High piles of snow had been pushed to the sides, and smoothed, and shaped, so that the frozen prairie wind was launching off the western berm and not landing again until it was past the eastern. The tiny fragments of ice were howling past five feet in the air. The road surface itself was clear and dry, like the middle of summer.
Reacher slowed and bumped up on to it. The chains thumped and chattered. The front end tracked straight and true. He kept to a steady thirty and peered ahead. He could make out blond smudges on the horizon. Wooden huts, in a neat row. Two miles away. The car pattered and juddered. The chains were not good on dry concrete.
He kept on going.
Half a mile out he saw activity ahead. A hundred yards out he saw what it was. Pick-up trucks with plough blades lowered were grinding back and forth. A lot of them. Maybe thirty or forty. Beyond them bulky black-clad figures with shovels were working in a line. Other bulky figures were walking backwards, hurling stuff from their cupped hands in long arcs, like farm labourers feeding chaff to chickens. Salt, presumably. Or grit, or sand, or some other kind of de-icing chemical. Or all of the above. They were clearing the whole camp. They wanted the whole place immaculate. As good as the road.