Lee Child - 61 Hours

The psychologists agreed that to recoil from a source of extreme danger was a rational response derived from evolution. But they knew about mutation. Giraffes were sometimes born with longer or shorter necks than their parents’, for instance. Either useful or not, depending on circumstances. Time would tell. Evolution would judge. So they wondered if children were ever born without the recoil reflex. Counterproductive, in terms of the survival of the species. But possibly useful to the military.

They sent prints of the movie to remote bases in the Pacific. Army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps, because they wanted the largest possible test sample. The Pacific, because they wanted children not yet exposed to the movie, or even rumours of it. They set up inconspicuous cameras above the cinema screens. The cameras were focused on the front rows of the audience. The shutters were triggered by the film sprockets, timed to snap just after the monster emerged from the murk. Hundreds of children were invited to showings in batches, four- to seven-year-olds, which was an age group apparently considered mature in terms of emotional response but not yet socialized out of honest and unguarded expression.

There was a long illustrative sequence of still photographs in the document. A little blurred, a little dark, but they all showed the same thing. Small children, eyes wide, mouths open, slamming back against their seats, some of them launching themselves right over their seat backs, arms thrown up around their heads, ducking away in fear and panic.

Then came an exception.

One photograph was focused on a front row of fifteen seats. Fifteen children. All boys. They all looked about six years old. Fourteen of them were slamming backward. One was jumping forward. He was larger than the others. He had short tousled hair, light in colour. He was diving up and out, trying to get to the screen. His right arm was raised aggressively. There was something in his hand.

Susan Turner was pretty sure it was an open switchblade.

The aggressive boy was not formally named in the document. He had been studied briefly but then his father had been cut new orders and the boy had gotten lost in the system. The experiment had petered out shortly afterwards. But the results gleaned to that point had been retained as a completed file. The aggressive boy had been labelled with long words, none of which meant anything to Susan.

The last page of the file was its own cross-reference index. There were no backward links to any other personnel file than Reacher’s.

Susan returned to the technical preamble. The delay between the appearance of the monster and the click of the shutter had been set at eighteen frames, which was three-quarters of a second. She was impressed. Not so much with the forward leap. She knew people like that. She was one herself. But for a six-year-old to have gotten a switchblade up and open in his hand in less than a second was something else.

Janet Salter’s house stayed all quiet for less than ten seconds. Then first one, then two, then three, then four police radios burst to life with loud static and codes and urgent words, and cell phones rang, and the hall phone rang, and stumbling footsteps crossed the floor in the day watch’s bedroom, and doors opened, and there were tramping feet on the stairs, and people started talking all at once, loud and scared and horrified.

Reacher stepped out of his room and hustled down to the hallway. The four women cops were standing all together on the rug, two in uniform, two in night clothes, all talking on phones, all white and shocked and looking around wide-eyed in helpless restless panic, all full of adrenalin, all with nowhere to go.

Reacher said, ‘What?’

One of the cops said, ‘It’s Andrew Peterson.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s been shot and killed.’

THE GUY FROM THE CAR ON THE STREET CAME IN AND JOINED the confusion. Reacher had no doubt the guys in the other two cars were equally distracted. For the moment Janet Salter’s security was worth exactly less than jack shit. So he kept half his attention on the parlour window and used the other half to piece the story together from the babble of voices. It wasn’t difficult. The hard facts seemed to be: following Chief Holland’s most recent orders, the department was still on high alert. Therefore mobile patrols were constant, and vigilance was high. No street was visited less than every twenty minutes. Every pedestrian was eyeballed, as was every car and every truck. Every lot was checked regularly, every alley, every approach.

A unit driven solo by the new guy Montgomery had nosed into a snowbound parking lot north and east of downtown and Montgomery had seen Peterson’s car apparently empty and idling with its driver’s window all the way down and its nudge bars pushed up hard against a blank brick wall. On closer inspection Montgomery had found the car not to be empty. Peterson was sprawled across the front seats, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Reacher stayed at the parlour window, watching the silent street, thinking about Peterson, leaving the cops to their private grief in the hallway. He could hear their voices. They were passing through a short phase of denial. Maybe the story was wrong. Which Reacher considered theoretically plausible, but very unlikely. Operational reports called in from the field were occasionally unreliable. And head wounds sometimes produced misleading impressions. Deep comas could be mistaken for death. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred hoping for the best was a waste of time. Reacher knew that. He was an optimist, but not a fool.

The bad news was confirmed five minutes later by Chief Holland himself. He drove up and parked and came in through the cold. Three items on his agenda. First, he wanted to break the news to his crew personally. Second, he wanted to make sure they got their minds back on their job. He sent the lone male officer back to his car on the street, he sent the day watch women back to bed, he sent one of the night watch women back to the library, and he told the other to focus hard on the front door. His voice was quiet and firm and his manner was controlled. He was a decent CO. Out of his league, perhaps, in over his head, no question, but he was still walking and talking. Which was more than Reacher had seen from some COs he had known, when the shit had hit the fan.

The third item on Holland’s agenda was something halfway between an invitation and a command. He stepped into the parlour and looked straight at Reacher and asked him to come out and take a look at the crime scene.

Janet Salter had gotten up because of the noise and was hiding out in the kitchen. Reacher found her there. She was still fully dressed. She had her gun in her pocket. She knew exactly what he was about to tell her. She waved it away impatiently and said, ‘I know what to do.’

He said, ‘Do you?’

She nodded. ‘The basement, the gun, the password.’

‘When?’

‘Immediately anything happens.’ Then she said, ‘Or before. Perhaps now.’

‘Not a bad idea,’ Reacher said. ‘The guy is out there, and close by.’

‘I know what to do,’ she said again.

Reacher climbed into the front passenger seat of Holland’s unmarked sedan. Holland backed up and turned and drove towards town. He made a left at the park and a right that led past the coffee shop and onward past the clothing store that Reacher had used. Then he threaded right and left and right again through back streets to a long block of two-storey brick buildings. They were plain and square. Maybe once they had been stores or offices or warehouses. Maybe once they had been the hub of Bolton’s commercial district. Now they were decrepit. Most of them looked abandoned. Three in a line had been demolished to make an empty space. A gap, perhaps a hundred feet by forty. It seemed to be in use as a temporary parking lot, maybe busy by day but now empty at night. It was humped with frozen snow and rutted by tyre tracks made days ago when the surface had still been soft.