the memory of Mary Ellen Froelich. Reacher checked his watch
and shivered in the cold.
i’wenty-two hours,’ he said. q’ime to lock and load.’
They brought the Yukon nearer to the church and opened
the tailgate. Bent over together and loaded all four weapons.
They took a Steyr each. Neagley took the H&K and Reacher
took the M16. They distributed the spare rounds between
them, as appropriate. Then they locked the car and left it.
‘Is it OK to bring guns into a church?’ Neagley asked.
‘It’s OK in Texas,’ Reacher said. ‘Probably compulsory here.’
They hauled the oak door open and stepped inside. It was
very similar to the Bismarck building. Reacher wondered
briefly whether rural communities had bought their churches
by mail order, the same as everything else. It had the same
parchment-white paint, the same shiny pews, the same pulpit.
The same three bell ropes hanging down inside the tower. The
same staircase. They went all the way up to the high ledge and
found a ladder bolted to the wall, with a trapdoor above it.
‘Home sweet home,’ Reacher said.
He led the way up the ladder and through the trapdoor and
into the 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
363
girders just above the bells. 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
louvres 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.
Fhat’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 louvre 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 sub-machine
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.
364
EIGHTEEN
T
HE AIR WAS COLD AND SEVENTY FEET ABOVE GROUND THE BREEZE was a wind. It came in through the louvres 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 for 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 louvre
panel. Put the scope to her eye.
‘Might be a new model Chevy Tahoe,’ she called. ‘Light gold