'So should I do it? Should I call them in?'
'I would,' Reacher said. 'It's any police department's basic duty. Get criminals off the streets.'
Holland made the calls. First came seven individual conversations, with the four women and the three men stationed with Mrs Salter. The subtext was awkward. One of your fellow officers is a killer. Trust no one except yourselves. Then he made a general all-points call on the radio net and ordered all other officers, whoever they were, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, on duty or not, to report to base exactly thirty minutes from then. Which Reacher thought was a minor tactical error. Better to have required their immediate presence. Which might not have gotten them there any faster in practice, but to set even a short deadline gave the bad guy the sense he still had time and space to act, to finish his work, and in ideal conditions of chaos and confusion, too, with cops running around all over the place. It was going to be a risky half-hour.
Holland put the microphone back on its rest, and picked up the phone again. He said, 'Kim Peterson hasn't been informed yet.'
Reacher said, 'Don't do it by phone. That's not right.'
'I know. I'm calling the front desk. Because I want you to do it. The desk guy can drive you. He can pick you up again in an hour. An hour should do it.'
'Are you serious?'
'I don't have time to do it myself. I'll be busy here.'
'I don't have standing,' Reacher said. 'I'm just a stranger passing through.'
'You met her,' Holland said. 'You spent a night in her house.'
'It's your job, not mine.'
'I'm sure you've done it before.'
'That's not the point.'
'I'm sure you were good at it.'
'Not very.'
'You have to do it,' Holland said. 'I just can't, OK? Don't make me, OK?'
***
Plato spent an hour in seat 1A, front of the cabin, left hand side, and then he got restless. Air travel at night bored him. By day there was a view, even from seven miles up. Mostly empty and brown, to be sure, but with enough roads and houses and towns to remind him there were new customers down there, just waiting to be recruited and served. But at night he couldn't see them. There was nothing except darkness and strings of distant lights.
He got up and walked down the aisle, past his men, past the last first class seat, into the empty space where economy class had been. He looked at the equipment on the floor. His men had checked it. He checked it again, because he was Plato and they weren't.
Food, water, all uninteresting. Seven coats, seven hats, seven pairs of gloves. All new, all adequate. The coats were big puffy things filled with goose feathers. North Face, a popular make, all black. Six were medium, and one was a boy's size. The sub-machine guns were H &K MP5Ks. Short, stubby, futuristic, lethal. His favourite. There were seven small backpacks, each containing spare magazines and flashlights.
Immediately Plato diagnosed a problem. The backpack straps would have to be let out close to their maximum length, to fit over the bulky coats. An obvious conclusion. Simply a question of thinking ahead. But it hadn't been done.
He was Plato, and they weren't.
The ladders were made by an American company called Werner. Aluminum, thirty-two feet long at their maximum extension, rated for two hundred and fifty pounds. They were all plastered with yellow warning stickers. They rattled slightly. They were picking up vibrations from the engines. They probably weighed about twenty pounds each. There were four of them. Eighty pounds. They would be left behind. Better to use the airlift capacity for forty extra glassine bricks than four useless ladders.
The same with the six useless men, of course. They would be left behind too. Nine hundred pounds of replaceable flesh and blood, versus four hundred and fifty extra bricks of meth? No contest.
Plato was already visualizing the return trip. He knew he would succeed. He had many advantages. Most of them were innate and overwhelming. His man on the ground was insurance, nothing more.
Caleb Carter was considered low man on the totem pole. Which he thought was richly ironic. He knew a little about totem poles, and Native American culture in general. He knew a little about a lot of things, but in a random unstructured way that had paid no dividends in terms of high school grades or employment opportunities. So he had turned to the Department of Corrections. The default choice, for his graduating class. Probably the default choice for many graduating classes to come. He had been trained and equipped with a radio and a polyester uniform and assigned to the night watch at the county lock-up. He was the youngest and newest member of a four-man team. Hence, low man on the totem pole.
Except that calling a new guy the low man on the totem pole was completely ass-backward. Totem poles were what? Twenty, thirty feet high? Native Americans weren't dumb. They put the most important guy at the bottom. At eye level. What important guy wanted to be twenty or thirty feet off the ground, where no one could see him? Like supermarkets. The eye-level shelf was reserved for the best stuff. The high-margin items. The big corporations hired experts to figure out stuff like that. Eye level was what it was all about. Thus the low man was really the high man, and the high man was really the low man. In a manner of speaking. A common misperception. A kind of linguistic inversion. Caleb Carter didn't know how it had come about.
Night watch was an easy job. The cells were locked before they came on duty, and weren't unlocked until after they had left. In practice Caleb's team had only one real responsibility, which was to monitor the population for medical emergencies. Guys could start foaming at the mouth or banging their heads on the wall. Some of them weren't fully aware of what prescriptions they should be taking. Some of them tried to hang themselves with jumpsuit legs, all twisted up and knotted. They were a sorry bunch.
The monitoring process involved ten tours of inspection, one every hour. Naturally most of them got blown off. Sometimes all of them. Easier to sit in the ready room, playing poker for pennies or looking at porn on the computer or chilling with the ear buds in. At first Caleb had been disconcerted by the negligence. New job, new life, he had started out with a measure of energy and drive. He had been prepared to take it seriously. But any new guy's first duty was to fit in. So he did. After a month he couldn't remember what he had been upset about. What did the department want, for their lousy ten bucks per?
But the riot in the big house the night before had shaken things up a little. The watch leader had mandated three tours in the aftermath. He had even done one of them himself. Tonight he was looking for two, but four hours into the shift they hadn't even done the first of them, so clearly they were really on track for one only. Which was about due right then, and naturally Caleb would get to do it, because he was high man on the totem pole. Which he was OK with. He would do it, real soon, but not immediately, because right then he was occupied with clicking through a bunch of sites featuring naked fat girls and barnyard animals. Work could wait.
Reacher slipped out of a battered sedan at the end of the Petersons' driveway and stood and watched the desk guy drive away. Then he headed for the house. It was like walking into a white tunnel. Ploughed snow was piled five feet high, left and right. Up ahead was the Y-shaped junction, right to the barn, left to the house. The wind was strong. The land was flat and open. Reacher had never been colder. He knew that with certainty. A superlative had been achieved. One day in Saudi Arabia at the start of Desert Shield the noontime temperature had hit a hundred and forty degrees. Now in South Dakota he was suffering through minus thirty, which was more like minus fifty with the wind chill. Neither extreme had been comfortable. But he knew which one he preferred.