Without Fail

“They won’t come back,” Neagley said. “They’d have to be insane to try anything here.”

“I think they are insane,” Reacher said.

He watched and waited, and listened to the clock. He had had enough just before four o’clock. He used the blade of his knife to cut through the accumulation of old white paint and lifted one of the louvers out of the frame. It was a simple length of wood, maybe three feet long, maybe four inches wide, maybe an inch thick. He held it out in front of him like a spear and crawled over and pushed it into the clock mechanism. The gear wheels jammed on it and the clock stopped. He pulled the wood out again and crawled away and slotted it back in the frame. The silence was suddenly deafening.

They watched and waited. It got colder, to the point where they both started shivering. But the silence helped. Suddenly, it helped a lot. Reacher crawled over and checked his partial view to the west again and then crawled back and picked up the map. Stared at it hard, lost in thought. He used his finger and thumb like a compass and measured distances. Forty, eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty miles. Slow, faster, fast, slow. Overall average speed maybe forty. That’s four hours.

“Sun sets in the west,” he said. “Rises in the east.”

“On this planet,” Neagley said.

Then they heard the staircase creak below them. They heard feet on the ladder. The trapdoor lifted an inch and fell back and then crashed all the way open and the vicar put his head up into the bell chamber and stared at the submachine gun pointing at him from one side and the M16 rifle from the other.

“I need to talk to you about those things,” he said. “You can’t expect me to be happy about having weapons in my church.”

He stood there on the ladder, looking like a severed head. Reacher laid the M16 back on the floor. The vicar stepped up another rung.

“I understand the need for security,” he said. “And we’re honored to host the Vice President-elect, but I really can’t permit engines of destruction in a hallowed building. I would have expected somebody to discuss it with me.”

“Engines of destruction?” Neagley repeated.

“What time does the sun set?” Reacher asked.

The vicar looked a little surprised by the change of subject. But he answered very politely.

“Soon,” he said. “It falls behind the mountains quite early here. But you won’t see it happen today. There are clouds. There’s a snowstorm coming in from the west.”

“And when does it rise?”

“This time of year? A little before seven o’clock, I suppose.”

“You heard a weather report for tomorrow?”

“They say much the same as today.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”

“Did you stop the clock?”

“It was driving me nuts.”

“That’s why I came up. Do you mind if I set it going again?”

Reacher shrugged. “It’s your clock.”

“I know the noise must be bothersome.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Reacher said. “We’ll be out of here as soon as the sun sets. Weapons and all.”

The vicar hauled himself all the way up into the chamber and leaned over the iron girders and fiddled with the mechanism. There was a setting device linked to a separate miniature clock that Reacher hadn’t noticed before. It was buried within the gear wheels. It had an adjustment lever attached to it. The vicar checked his wristwatch and used the lever to force the exterior hands around to the correct time. The miniature clock hands moved with them. Then he simply turned a gear wheel with his hand until the mechanism picked up the momentum for itself and started again on its own. The heavy thunk, thunk, thunk came back. The smallest bell rang in sympathy, one tiny resonance for every second that passed.

“Thank you,” the vicar said.

“An hour at most,” Reacher said. “Then we’ll be gone.”

The vicar nodded like his point was made and threaded himself down through the trapdoor. Pulled it closed after him.

“We can’t leave here,” Neagley said. “Are you crazy? They could come in at night easy as anything. Maybe that’s exactly what they’re waiting for. They could drive back in without headlights.”

Reacher glanced at his watch.

“They’re already here,” he said. “Or almost here.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you.”

He pulled the louver out of the frame again and handed it to her. Crawled under the clock shaft to the bottom of the next ladder that led up through the roof to the outside. Climbed up it and eased the roof trapdoor open.

“Stay low,” he called.

He swam out, keeping his stomach flat on the roof. The construction was just about identical to the Bismarck roof. There was soldered lead sheathing built up into a shallow box. Drains in the corners. A substantial anchor for the flagpole and the weather vane and the lightning rod. And a three-foot wall all around the edge. He turned a circle on his stomach and leaned down and took the louver from Neagley. Then he got out of her way and let her crawl up next to him. The wind was strong and the air was bitterly cold.

“Now we kind of kneel low,” he said. “Close together, facing west.”

They knelt together, shoulder to shoulder, hunched down. He was on the left, she was on the right. He could still hear the clock. He could feel it, through the lead and the heavy wooden boards.

“OK, like this,” he said. He held the louver in front of his face, with his left hand holding the left end. She took the right end in her right hand. They shuffled forward on their knees until they were tight against the low wall. He eased his end of the louver level with the top of the wall. She did the same.

“More,” he said. “Until we’ve got a slit to see through.”

They raised it higher in concert until it was horizontal with an inch of space between its lower edge and the top of the wall. They gazed out through the gap. They would be visible if somebody was watching the tower very carefully, but overall it was a pretty unobtrusive tactic. As good as he could improvise, anyway.

“Look west,” he said. “Maybe a little bit south of west.”

They squinted into the setting sun. They could see forty miles of waving grass. It was like an ocean, bright and golden in the evening backlight. Beyond it was the darkening snowstorm. The area between was misty and sheets of late sunlight speared backward through it right at them. There were shifting curtains of sun and shadow and color and rainbows that started nowhere and ended nowhere.

“Watch the grassland,” he said.

“What am I looking for?”

“You’ll see it.”

They knelt there for minutes. The sun inched lower. The last rays tilted flatter into their eyes. Then they saw it. They saw it together. About a mile out into the sea of grass the dying sun flashed gold once on the roof of the Tahoe. It was crawling east through the grassland, very slowly, coming directly toward them, bouncing gently over the rough terrain, lurching up and down through the dips and the hollows at walking speed.

“They were smart,” Reacher said. “They read the map and had the same idea you did, to exit across open country to the west. But then they looked at the town and knew they had to come in that way, too.”

The sun slid into the low clouds fifty miles west and the resulting shadow raced east across the grassland and the golden light died. Twilight came down like a circuit breaker had popped open and then there was nothing more to be seen. They lowered the louver screen and ducked away flat to the roof. Crawled across the lead and back down into the bell chamber. Neagley threaded her way under the clock shaft and picked up the Heckler amp; Koch.

“Not yet,” Reacher said.

“So when?”

“What will they do now?”

“I guess they’ll get as close as they dare. Then they’ll set up and wait.”

Reacher nodded. “They’ll turn the truck around and park it facing west in the best hollow they can find about a hundred, two hundred yards out. They’ll check their sightlines to the east and make sure they can see but can’t be seen. Then they’ll sit tight and wait for Armstrong to show.”