Without Fail - Lee Child [166]
“Twenty-two hours,” he said. “Time 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 girders just above the bells themselves. 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 louvers 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. “That’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 louver 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 submachine 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.
18
The air was cold and seventy feet above ground the breeze was a wind. It came in through the louvers 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 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