and Reacher checked them all, jerking left and right again, pirouetting like a damn paramilitary ballerina. There should have been music playing, with sudden orchestral climaxes.
All the bedrooms and closets and bathrooms were empty.
There was junk, there were beds, there were clothes, there was furniture.
But there were no people.
Ground floor all clear.
Second floor all clear.
Nobody home.
Which in some small portion of everyone’s mind is a very welcome result. Human nature. Relief. Anticlimax. Peace with honour. But Reacher and Sorenson and Delfuenso met in the central hallway and admitted to nothing but frustration. If McQueen wasn’t there, he had to be somewhere else just as bad, if not worse. He had been evacuated in a hurry.
‘They must have a bigger place somewhere,’ Reacher said. ‘Surely. They’re supposed to be two medium-sized groups working together. This place is too small for them, apart from anything else. This place is just a pied-à-terre, or officers’ quarters, or guest quarters. Something like that. Some kind of extra facility.’
‘Could be a mail drop,’ Sorenson said.
‘McQueen lived here,’ Delfuenso said. ‘We know that for sure. He told us so, and we have seven months of GPS to prove it.’
Reacher walked up and down the hallway, turning lights on as he went. He lit up the dining room and he lit up the parlour. He lit up the kitchen. He said, ‘Start looking. If they’re back and forth between two places regularly, they’ll have left some kind of a trace. However well they cleaned up.’
And they had cleaned up pretty well. That was clear. They had done a decent job. But not in any conventional sense. There was considerable disarray. There were used dishes in the sink. The beds were unmade. Sofa cushions had not been plumped, old newspapers had not been removed, the trash had not been taken out. Mugs had not been washed, ashtrays had not been emptied, clothes had not been folded and put away. The occupants had gotten out fast.
But they had prioritized. They had taken a lot of stuff with them. That was where their clean-up effort had been spent. Mail, paperwork, bills, bureaucracy, officialdom. No trace of any such items had been left behind. No names. No papers large or small. No scraps. No notes, no doodles, no messages. Not that Reacher was expecting to find a treasure map with OUR HQ and an arrow on it, in bright red ink. But most people leave something behind. Some small unconsidered item. A toll receipt, a matchbook, a cinema ticket. In the trash, dropped in a corner, under a sofa cushion. These guys hadn’t. They were pretty good. Careful, meticulous, alert and aware. Very disciplined. That was clear. Disciplined on an ongoing day-to-day basis, too. Not just high days and holidays. Good security. Further progress was going to depend on a random mistake.
Then Sorenson called from the kitchen.
With the random mistake.
SIXTY-FOUR
SORENSON HAD SEVEN big-size McDonald’s paper sacks lined up on the kitchen counter. Take-out food. The bags were used and stained and crumpled. Sorenson had emptied them all. There were soda cups and milk shake cups and burger clamshells and apple pie wrappers. There were cheeseburger papers and register receipts. There was old lettuce going brown, and chopped onion going slimy, and ketchup packets going crusted.
Sorenson said, ‘They like McDonald’s.’
‘Not a crime in itself,’ Reacher said. ‘I like McDonald’s.’
‘But it’s a good plan B,’ Delfuenso said. ‘We could leave them alone and they’ll die anyway in five years from heart attacks.’
‘They like McDonald’s,’ Sorenson said again. ‘My guess is pretty much every day they sent a gofer to the nearest drive-through for a couple of sacks. I bet there’s a drive-through not more than five minutes from here.’
‘This is America, after all,’ Delfuenso said.
‘And maybe you get the taste for it. So when you’re stationed at your other camp, maybe you look for a drive-through near there, too. And maybe once in a while if you have to make the trip all the way from A to B, you stop at the drive-through near A and you load up with a little something for the ride. And then if you have to make the trip all the way back again from B to A, maybe you stop at the drive-through near B and you do the same thing.’
‘And you cross-pollute your garbage,’ Reacher said.
Sorenson nodded.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘You buy a burger and fries and a soda, and you eat it in the car along the way, except maybe you don’t finish the soda, so you carry the sack into the house at the end of the trip and you finish it right here. In this kitchen. And then you dump the sack in the trash. Which is hygienic, but the bad news is you just linked two geographic areas that should have stayed separate.’
Reacher asked, ‘What do the register receipts tell us?’
‘Six of them are from one place and the seventh is different.’
‘Where is the seventh from?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not an address. It’s a code number.’
Sorenson couldn’t go through her field office. As far as her field office was concerned she was quarantined in the motel in Kansas, at the central region’s express request. So she got on-line on Trapattoni’s phone and found a PR number for McDonald’s. She wasn’t optimistic. Any jerk could call from a cell phone and say she was with the FBI. She was expecting a long and tedious runaround.
So Reacher asked Delfuenso, ‘How is McQueen’s GPS data recorded?’
‘Screen shots,’ she said. ‘Lines and points of light on a map. You can choose the interval. A week, a day, an hour, whatever you want.’
‘Can they do seven months?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘How would you get it if you needed to see it?’
‘By e-mail. To my phone, if necessary.’
‘We need to see it.’
‘They think I’m holed up in that motel.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to tell them you aren’t. Just tell them you’re going crazy doing nothing and you want to help out. Tell them you have a theory and you want to work on it. Tell them you might as well do something while you’re sitting there. Tell them you’ll get right back to them if it pans out.’
‘What theory?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Be shy about it. Just tell them you need the data.’
Delfuenso dialled her phone, and Sorenson got put on hold for the second time.
By that point they were two hours and nearly thirty minutes into it. Reacher figured Quantico would be well into the process of gearing up. He wasn’t exactly sure how FBI SWAT teams worked. Maybe they had pre-packed trucks ready for the drive out to Andrews Air Force Base. Or maybe they used helicopters. Or maybe they stored their stuff at Andrews permanently, all ready to go. Then would come the long flight west. Well over a thousand miles. In an Air Force C-17, he figured. He doubted that the FBI had heavy jets of its own. Then the landing, at Kansas City’s own municipal airport, way to the northwest, or at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, about twenty miles south. If Richards-Gebaur was still in business. He wasn’t sure. Plenty of places had been abandoned, right at the time his own career was coming to an end. A systemic problem. In which case Whiteman Air Force Base would be the only alternative, sixty miles to the east. Then would come more trucks or helicopters, and then painstaking tactical preparations, and then finally action.
Eight hours. It’s a big country. There’s a lot to organize.
The choice of airport would depend on where McQueen was. Sorenson was still talking her way through a corporate maze. Delfuenso was staring at her phone, willing an e-mail to arrive. Time was ticking away. Reacher figured they might end up doing nothing more than guiding the Quantico team in on target. Like forward observers. Like Peter King.
Better than nothing.
Sorenson got her information first. Such as it was. There had been no real opposition from the McDonald’s main office. No real secrecy or obfuscation. Just confusion, and a certa
in amount of incompetence, and a lot of hold music and phone tag. Eventually she had ended up talking to a minimum-wage server at the franchise in question. A burger flipper. On a wall phone, probably. She could hear tile echo and raw fries being plunged into hot oil. She asked the server for his location.
‘I’m in the kitchen,’ the boy said.
‘No, I mean, where is your restaurant?’
The boy didn’t answer. Like he didn’t know how. Sorenson thought she could hear him chewing his lip. She thought he wanted to say, Well, the restaurant is on the other side of the counter. You know, like, from the kitchen.
She asked him, ‘What is your mailing address?’
He said, ‘Mine?’
‘No, the restaurant’s.’
‘I don’t know. I never mailed anything to the restaurant.’
‘Where is it located?’
‘The restaurant?’
‘Yes, the restaurant.’
‘Just past Lacey’s. You can’t miss it.’
‘Where is Lacey’s?’
‘Just past the Texaco.’
‘On what road?’
‘Right here on Route 65.’
‘What’s the name of the town you’re in?’
‘I don’t think it has a name.’
‘Unincorporated land?’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘OK, what’s the nearest town with a name?’
‘Big town?’
‘We could start with that.’
‘That would be Kansas City, I guess.’
Then there was some yelling. A manager, Sorenson thought. Something about clean-up time.
The kid said, ‘Ma’am, I got to go,’ and hung up the phone.
Sorenson put her phone on the kitchen counter and Reacher looked a question at her and she said, ‘Route 65, near something called Lacey’s, just past a Texaco station.’
Reacher said nothing.
Sorenson got back on-line on her phone and called up a map. She made all kinds of pinching and spreading and wiping motions with her fingertips. On and on. Her face was falling all the time. She said, ‘Terrific. Route 65 runs all the way through the state, north to south, from Iowa to Arkansas. It’s nearly three hundred miles long.’
‘Any sign of Lacey’s?’
‘This is a map. Not the business pages. Lacey’s is probably a store of some kind. Or a bait shop. Or a bar.’ But she stayed with it. She went ahead and searched on-line. She typed Lacey’s + Kansas City. Nothing. Then Lacey’s + Missouri.
She said, ‘It’s a small grocery chain.’
She dabbed her finger against the glass to follow a link. The phone was slow. Then the site came up and she started with the wiping and the pinching and the spreading again. She said, ‘They have three locations on Route 65. Each one about twenty miles apart. Like an arc. They’re all about sixty miles from the city.’
Two hours and forty minutes into it.
‘Making progress,’ Reacher said.
Then Delfuenso’s phone pinged, for an incoming e-mail.
SIXTY-FIVE
THE SEVEN-MONTH SCREEN shot was laid over a greyed-out satellite image of five contiguous central states. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. More than three hundred and forty thousand square miles. More than twenty-six million people.
McQueen’s movements among those miles and those people were recorded as thin amber lines. His recent jaunt up from Kansas to Nebraska to Iowa and back again to Kansas showed up as a faint jagged rectangle. There were some other long spidery lines. But not many. He had made very few other long-haul trips. Most of his movements had been concentrated close to Kansas City itself. At that position on the map the amber lines overlaid one another like a manic scribble. Almost a solid mass. The lines were bright where they repeated one over the other. Some spots looked like holes burned in the screen.
Reacher asked, ‘Can you zoom in?’
Delfuenso did the spreading thing with her fingers, like Sorenson had. She expanded the manic scribble. She centred it on the screen. She zoomed it some more. She centred it again. The solid mass became a knotted tangle of movements. The bright lines dimmed as they separated.
But two spots still burned stubbornly hot. Two locations, each one visited maybe hundreds of times. The inch of space between them was a river of light. A journey back and forth, made maybe hundreds of times. One spot was southwest of the other. Like a seven on a clock face, and a two.
‘Point A and point B,’ Reacher said. ‘Can’t be anything else.’
Sorenson got the map back on her screen. She put her phone next to Delfuenso’s. She zoomed and wiped until she matched the state line, where the die-straight border between Kansas and Missouri suddenly looped off course, to follow the banks of the Missouri river. She said, ‘OK, point A is right here, on this street, basically. In this house, obviously.’ Then she scrolled north and east, both phones at once, both index fingers moving in lockstep, precise and delicate. She said, ‘And point B is very close to the northernmost Lacey’s store.’
Sixty miles. Through mazy suburbs, and along dark country roads.
Two hours and fifty minutes into it.
Plus another hour, now.
Maybe more.
‘Let’s go,’ Reacher said.
Bale’s car had GPS, which helped. Sorenson read the address for the northernmost Lacey’s off her phone, and Delfuenso entered it in the machine. Then she lit up the strobes and took off, loud and fast. No more need for stealth. Not around point A, anyway. Point B would be a different matter. She said she would deal with that when they got there.
The same satellites that had tracked McQueen got the car out of town after almost no time at all in the mazy suburbs. Score one for technology, Reacher thought. The cold hard logic in the circuits sent them what he was sure was the wrong way, down a bland street he was certain was a dead end. But then a concealed right and a shallow left brought them to one of the beltway on-ramps, and six fast miles after that they turned east on I-70, along the southern edge of Independence, Missouri. President Harry S. Truman’s home town. Reacher’s favourite president. The highway was straight and empty, and a hundred miles an hour was easy. Reacher began to feel a little more optimistic. They were going to make it to point B within about fifty minutes, total. Which was good. Because even if the Quantico guys were already in the air by then, which they had to be, they still had a long way to come.
They left the highway at a small road in the middle of nowhere, but by that point Reacher was trusting the system. He was watching the arrow, and the grey lines. He saw how Route 65 dog-legged north of where they were. It jogged east towards a town called Marshall. Some historical reason, presumably. The GPS was cutting the corner. It was going to join Route 65 right after a famous Civil War battlefield site. Reacher knew his American history. That particular field had seen a nine-hour artillery duel. The Kings of Battle. With observers. And crude incendiary rounds. The Confederate gunners had heated their cannonballs in fires, hoping to set things ablaze. The Union gunners had worn red stripes on their pants.
Out his window the moonlight showed fields on both sides of the road, all churned up by animals, all fenced in with wire. There were gates and water troughs and giant piles of feed covered over with tarpaulins, and weighted down with old car tyres.
‘Farm country again,’ Sorenson said. ‘Is that what it’s going to be? A farm?’
‘A farm would make sense,’ Reacher said. ‘Somewhere isolated. With barns, and so on. For vehicles. And for storage. And for dormitories, maybe. For many dormitories, possibly. I don’t know how many people there are in two medium-sized groups.’
‘Not too many,’ Delfuenso said. ‘Not necessarily. Half a dozen is called medium. Up to maybe fifteen or twenty. So it’ll be somewhere between twelve and forty.’
‘That’s enough,’ Sorenson said. ‘Don’t you think?’
Reacher said nothing. They had eighty-eight rounds of ammunition. The last figures h
e had seen in the army showed that an average infantryman records one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended. In which case, for forty opponents, they would need six hundred thousand rounds. Not eighty-eight. Alternatively they would need to be a lot smarter than an average infantryman.
Route 65 wore its status lightly. It was three hundred miles long and it split the state, but in person it looked like any other country road. Maybe a little wider, maybe a little better surfaced, but otherwise it had nothing to recommend it. Almost immediately it crossed the mighty Missouri on an iron trestle. But that was its only point of interest. After the bridge it ran north through the darkness, anonymously, never really deviating, never really staying straight. Then Sorenson said, ‘OK, we’re about ten miles south. I don’t know which way the kid at the McDonald’s was orienting himself. I don’t know if we’re going to see the Texaco station and the Lacey’s store first, or whether we’re going to hit the McDonald’s first.’
Delfuenso killed the strobes. Five miles after that, she started to slow. Two miles later, she killed the rest of her lights. The world shrank around them, instantly dark blue and misty. There was no Texaco sign ahead. No blaze of light from a supermarket window. No red neon, no golden arches.