“Nobody’s saying anything?”
“Not a damn word. We’ve been asking, two months solid. We’ve got two dozen guys, all of them with their mouths shut tight. We figure the big guy’s really put the frighteners on.”
“He’s scary, that’s for sure,” Harper said. “From what we know about him.”
There was silence in Leighton’s office. Just the brittle patter of rain on the windows.
“If he exists,” Leighton said.
“He exists,” Harper said.
Leighton nodded. “We think so too.”
“Well, we need his name, I guess,” Reacher said.
No reply.
“I should go talk to McGuire for you,” Reacher said.
Leighton smiled. “I figured you’d be saying that before long. I was all set to say no, it’s improper. But you know what? I just changed my mind. I just decided to say yes, go ahead. Be my guest.”
s/
l\\£ cell block was underground, like it always is in a regional HQ, below a squat brick building with an iron door, standing alone on the other side of the rose bed. Leighton led them over there through the rain, their collars turned up against the damp and their chins ducked down to their chests. Leighton used an old-fashioned bellpull outside the iron door and it opened after a sec
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and to reveal a bright hallway with a huge master sergeant standing in it. The sergeant stepped aside and Leighton led them in.
Inside, the walls were made of brick faced with white porcelain glaze. The floors and the ceilings were smooth troweled concrete painted shiny green. Lights were fluorescent tubes behind thick metal grilles. Doors were iron, with square barred openings at the top. There was a cubbyhole office on the right, with a wooden rack of keys on four-inch metal hoops. There was a big desk, piled high with video recorders taping milky-gray flickering images from twelve small monitor screens. The screens showed twelve cells, eleven of them empty and one of them with a humped shape under a blanket on the bed.
“Quiet night at the Hilton,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Gets worse Saturday nights. But right now McGuire’s our only guest.”
“The video recording is a problem,” Reacher said.
“Always breaking down, though,” Leighton said.
He bent to examine the pictures on the monitors. Braced his hands on the desk. Bent closer. Rolled his right hand until his knuckle touched a switch. The recorders stopped humming and the REC legends disappeared from the corners of the screens.
“See?” he said. “Very unreliable system.”
“It’ll take a couple hours to fix,” the sergeant said. “At least.”
The sergeant was a giant, shiny skin the color of coffee. His uniform jacket was the size of a field tent. Reacher and Harper would have fitted into it together. Maybe Leighton, too. The guy was the exact ideal-issue MP noncom.
“McGuire’s got a visitor, Sergeant,” Leighton said. An off-the-record voice. “Doesn’t need to go in the log.”
Reacher took off his coat and his jacket. Folded them and left them on the sergeant’s chair. The sergeant took a hoop of keys off the wooden board and moved to the inside door. Unlocked it and swung it back. Reacher stepped through and the sergeant closed the door and locked it again behind him. Pointed to the head of a staircase.
“After you,” he said.
The staircase was built of bricks, rounded at the nose of each stair. The walls either side were the same white glaze. There was a metal handrail, bolted through to the wall every twelve inches. Another locked door at the bottom. Then a corridor, then another locked door. Then a lobby, with three locked
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doors to three blocks of cells. The sergeant unlocked the middle door. Flipped a switch and fluorescent light stuttered and flooded a bright white area forty feet by twenty. There was an access zone the length of the block and about a third of its depth. The rest of the space was divided into four cells delineated by heavy iron bars. The bars were thickly covered in shiny white enamel paint. The cells were about ten feet wide, maybe twelve deep. Each cell had a video camera opposite, mounted high on the wall. Three of the cells were empty, with their gates folded back. The fourth was locked closed. It held McGuire. He was struggling awake, sitting up, surprised by the light.