lab. Bureau techs ran out, white coats flapping in the fierce
downdraft, and dragged the platform in through the roller door. They
winched the wreck off the platform and pulled it into the center of the
large shed. They rolled arc lights into a rough circle around it and
lit them up. Then they stood there for a second, looking exactly like
a team of pathologists getting ready to go to work on a corpse.
General Johnson retraced his steps exactly. He made it down 9th
Street, past Natural History, past American History, his mouth forced
into a tense rigid oval, breathing hard. He walked the length of the
reflecting pool with his throat clamping and gagging. He swung left
into Constitution Avenue and made it as far as the Vietnam Wall. Then
he stopped. There was a fair crowd, stunned and quiet, as always. He
looked at them. He looked at himself in the black granite. He didn’t
stand out. He was in a lightweight gray suit. It was OK. So he let
his vision blur with his tears and he moved forward and turned and sat
against the base of the wall, sobbing and crying with his back pressed
against the golden names of boys who had died thirty years ago.
NINETEEN
REACHER BALLED HIS LOOSE CHAIN INTO HIS HAND AND SLIPPED OUT of the
barn into the pre-dawn twilight. He walked twenty paces and stopped.
Freedom. The night air was soft and infinite around him. He was
unconfined. But he had no idea where he was. The barn stood alone,
isolated fifty yards from a clutch of farm buildings of similar old
vintage. There was a house, and a couple of small sheds, and an open
structure with a new pickup parked in it. Next to the pickup was a
tractor. Next to the tractor, ghostly white in the moonlight, was the
truck. Reacher walked over , the rocky track toward it. The front
doors were locked. The rear doors were locked. He ran back to the
horse barn and searched through the dead driver’s pockets. Nothing
except the padlock key from the barn door. No keys to the truck.
He ran back, squeezing the mass of chain to keep it from making a
sound, past the tractor barn, and looked at the house. Walked right
around it. The front door was locked tight. The back door was locked
tight. And there was a dog behind it. Reacher heard it move in its
sleep. He heard a low, sleepy growl. He walked away.
He stood on the track, halfway back to the horse barn, and looked
around. He trained his eyes on the indistinct horizon and turned a
full circle in the dark. Some kind of a huge, empty landscape.
Flat, endless, no discernible features. The damp night smell of a
million acres of something growing. A pale streak of dawn in the east.
He shrugged and ducked back inside. Holly raised herself on one elbow
and looked a question at him.
“Problems,” he said. “The handcuff keys are in the house. So are the
truck keys. I can’t go in for them because there’s a dog in there.
It’s going to bark and wake everybody up. There’s more than the two
others in there. This is some kind of a working farm. There’s a
pickup and a tractor. Could be four or five armed men in there. When
that damn dog barks, I’ve had it. And it’s nearly daylight.”
“Problems,” Holly said.
“Right,” he said. “We can’t get at a vehicle, and we can’t just walk
away because you’re chained up and you can’t walk and we’re about a
million miles from anywhere, anyway.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“No idea,” he said.
“I want to see,” she said. “I want to see outside. I’m sick of being
closed in. Can’t you get this chain off?”
Reacher ducked behind her and looked at the iron ring in her wall. The
timber looked a little better than his had been. Closer grained. He
shook the ring and he knew it was hopeless. She nodded, reluctantly.
“We wait,” she said. “We wait for a better chance.”
He hurried back to the middle stalls and checked the walls, low down,