of the forest again and over to the large white building. They had not
spoken to her. Just marched her in and pushed her up the stairs to the
second floor. They had pulled open the stout new door and pushed her
up the step into the room. The step was more than a foot high, because
the floor inside the room was built up higher than the floor in the
hallway outside. She crawled up and in and heard the door slamming and
the key turning loudly behind her. There were no windows. A bulb in
the ceiling behind a wire grille lit the room with a vivid, hot yellow
light. All four walls, the floor and the ceiling were made from new
pine boards, unfinished, smelling strongly of fresh lumber. At the far
end of the room was a bed. It had a simple iron frame and a thin
crushed mattress. Like an army bed, or a prison cot. On the bed were
two sets of clothing. Two pairs of fatigue pants and two shirts. Dull
green, like the four silent women had been wearing. She limped over to
the bed and touched them. Old and worn, but clean. Pressed. The
creases in the pants were like razors.
She turned back and inspected the room closely. It was not small.
Maybe sixteen feet square. But she sensed it was smaller than it
should have been. The proportions were odd. She had noticed the
raised floor. It was more than a foot higher than it should have been.
She guessed the walls and the ceiling were the same. She limped to the
wall and tapped the new boarding. There was a dull sound. A cavity
behind. Somebody had built this simple timber shell right inside a
bigger room. And they had built it well. The new boards were tight
and straight. But there was damp in the tiny cracks between them. She
stared at the damp and sniffed the air. She shivered. The room
smelled of fear.
One corner was walled off. There was a door set in a simple diagonal
partition. She limped over to it and pulled it open. A bathroom. A
John, a sink. A trashcan, with a new plastic liner. And a shower over
a tub. Cheap white ceramic, but brand new. Carefully installed. Neat
tiling. Soap and shampoo on a shelf. She leaned on the doorjamb and
stared at the shower. She stared at it for a long time. Then she
shrugged off her filthy Armani suit. She balled it up and threw it in
the trashcan. She started the shower running and stepped under the
torrent of water. She washed her hair three times. She scrubbed her
aching body all over. She stood in the shower for the best part of an
hour.
Then she limped back to the bed and selected a set of the old fatigues.
They fitted her just about perfectly. She lay down on the bed and
stared at the pine ceiling and listened to the silence. For the first
time in more than sixty hours she was alone.
Readier was not alone. He was still in the forest clearing. He was
twenty feet from the white Econoline, chained to a tree, guarded by six
silent men with machine guns. Dogs were padding free through the
clearing. Reacher was leaning back on the rough bark, waiting,
watching his guards. He was cold. He could feel pine resin sticking
to his thin shirt. The guards were cautious. They were standing in a
line, six feet away from him, weapons pointed at him, eyes gleaming
white out of darkened faces. They were dressed in olive fatigues.
There were some kind of semicircular flashes on their shoulders. It
was too dark for Reacher to read them.
The six men were all maybe forty years old. They were lean and
bearded. Comfortable with their weapons. Alert. Silent. Accustomed
to night duty. Reacher could see that. They looked like the survivors
of a small infantry platoon. Like they had stepped into the forest on
night patrol twenty years ago as young recruits and had never come back
out again.
They snapped to attention at the sound of footsteps approaching behind