the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.
The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil. The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition. Reacher could smell the new brass and the crisp cardboard and faint traces of powder.
"I'm impressed," he said.
"Take what you need," Eddie said.
"Where do the serial numbers lead to?"
"The Austrian Army," Eddie said. "They kind of fizzle out after that."
Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Reacher's new jacket carefully spread out in the Yukon's load space over two nine-millimeter Steyr GBs, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 unsilenced machine gun, an M16 rifle, and boxes full of two hundred rounds for each weapon.
They entered Wyoming after dark, driving north on I-25. They turned left at Cheyenne and picked up I-80. They rolled west to Laramie and then headed north. The town called Grace was still five hours away, well beyond Casper. The map showed it nestled in the middle of nowhere between towering mountains on one side and infinite grasslands on the other.
"We'll stop in Medicine Bow," Reacher said. "Sounds like a cool place. We'll aim to get to Grace at dawn tomorrow."
Medicine Bow didn't look like much of a cool place in the dark, but it had a motel about two miles out with rooms available. Neagley paid for them. Then they found a steakhouse a mile in the other direction and ate twelve-ounce sirloins that cost less than a drink in D.C. The place closed up around them so they took the hint and headed back to their rooms. Reacher left his coat in the truck, to hide the firepower from curious eyes. They said goodnight in the lot. Reacher went straight to bed. He heard Neagley in the shower. She was singing to herself. He could hear it, through the wall.
He woke up at four in the morning, Saturday. Neagley was showering again, and still singing. He thought: When the hell does she sleep? He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Turned his shower on hot, which must have made hers run cold, because he heard a muffled scream through the wall. So he turned it off again and waited until he heard her finish. Then he showered and dressed and met her out by the car. It was still pitch dark. Still very cold. There were flakes of snow blowing in from the west. They were drifting slowly through the parking lot lights.
"Can't find any coffee," Neagley said.
They found some an hour north. A roadside diner was opening for breakfast. They saw its lights a mile away. It was next to the mouth of a dirt road leading down through the darkness to the Medicine Bow National Forest. The diner looked like a barn, long and low, made out of red boards. Cold outside, warm inside. They sat at a table by a curtained window and ate eggs and bacon and toast and drank strong bitter coffee.
"OK, we'll call them one and two," Neagley said. "One is the Bismarck guy. You'll recognize him. Two is the guy from the garage video. We might recognize him from his build. But we don't really know what he looks like."
Reacher nodded. "So we'll look for the Bismarck guy hanging out with some other guy. No point planning it to death."
"You don't sound very enthusiastic."
"You should go home."
"Now that I've gotten you here?"
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
"You're uptight that Froelich was killed. That's all. Doesn't mean anything's going to happen to me."
He said nothing.
"We're two against two," Neagley said. "You and me against two bozos, and you're worried about it?"
"Not very," he said.
"Maybe they won't even show. Bannon figured they'd know it was a trap."
"They'll show," Reacher said. "They've been challenged. It's a testosterone thing. And they've got more than enough screws