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By Root 789 0

in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading toward what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two gray panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.

The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward toward a long low one-story building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defense plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe center of a landmass, away from coastal shelling and marauding airplanes and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished before the ink was dry on the armistice papers.

The kid called John said, “This is it. We live in the office building.”

The building had a flat roof with a brick parapet, and a long line of identical windows, small panes framed with white-painted steel. In the center was an unimpressive double door with a lobby behind it and dim bulkhead lights either side of it. In front of the doors was a short concrete path that led from an empty rectangle made of cracked and weedy paving stones, the size of two tennis courts laid end to end. Managerial parking, presumably, back in the day. There were no lights on inside the building. It just stood there, dead to the world.

Reacher asked, “Where are the bedrooms?”

John said, “To the right.”

“And your buddies are in there now?”

“Yes. Five of them.”

“Plus you, that’s six legs to break. Let’s go do it.”

Chapter 38

Reacher made the guy get out of the truck the same way he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, “Where are all the harvest trucks?”

The guy said, “They’re in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They’re specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.”

“What are the two gray vans for?”

“This and that. Service and repairs, tires, things like that.”

“Are there supposed to be three?”

“One is out. It’s been gone a few days.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

Reacher asked, “When do the big trucks get back?”

The guy said, “Spring.”

“What’s this place like in the early summer?”

“Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There’s a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterward. This place is humming.”

“Five days a week?”

“Seven, usually. We’re talking forty thousand acres here. That’s a lot of output.” The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.

Reacher asked, “Where do you normally park your truck, John?”

“Right out front there, by the doors.”

“Where do your buddies park?”

“Same place.”

“So where are they?”

The nighttime silence clamped down and the young man’s mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like