A Wanted Man

SIXTY-SIX

A FAST FOOD restaurant and a grocery store and a gas station put out a lot of electric light, so they had been expecting to see a glow a mile or so before they got there. But as it turned out they were already halfway past the McDonald’s before they even noticed it. It was closed for the night. As was Lacey’s, the grocery store. As was the Texaco station.

Reacher hoped they weren’t on the blue boards on the highway. Or it would be a classic deceptive exit. The gas station looked like a ghost ship. No lights anywhere. Just a tangle of strange dark shapes rising up out of the ground. The grocery store was a sullen grey mass, as big as a hill, but angular. And without the red and yellow neon and the fluorescent tubes inside, the McDonald’s was just another small A-frame silhouette against the sky. It could have been any kind of a low-rent operation, all closed up and done for the day.

‘I heard the manager shouting in the background,’ Sorenson said. ‘Something about clean-up time. I guess that’s what they do when they’re about to close.’

Reacher said, ‘So where’s point B?’

Sorenson did her twin-phone thing again. She calibrated them against the Interstate. She got them both lined up. She scaled them the same. She took a breath and said, ‘If the grocery store web site is accurate, then point B is about a mile northwest of our current position.’

‘That’s out in the fields,’ Reacher said.

‘It’s a farm,’ Delfuenso said. ‘I knew it would be.’

They left the car parked sideways across three spaces in Lacey’s front lot. They tracked around the dark bulk of the building and came out at the back. Just reconnaissance at that point. Just purely. Strictly a preliminary survey. An immediate attack would have been pinning a lot of hopes on a grocery store’s web site. For one thing, the symbol the web site had used to mark the spot would scale up to about a mile wide.

Reacher had seen from Bale’s GPS that Route 65 was strictly a north-south deal. So he lined himself up with it and faced the way they had been driving. Then he made a forty-five degree turn to his left and pointed. He said, ‘That’s northwest. What do you see?’

Not much, was the consensus. And it was true. But it was equally true there was even less to see in any other direction. Somehow the dark was darker due west and due north. As if there really was something there in the northwest quarter. Invisible, but there. They strained their eyes, they relaxed, they defocused, they looked away, they tried peripheral vision. They saw nothing. But it felt like a substantial kind of nothing.

Reacher said, ‘Can you do Google Maps?’

Sorenson said, ‘Cell service is not good enough out here.’

So they went back to the car and Reacher fiddled with Bale’s GPS. He zoomed it in, and in, until he was sure all the little roads were there. Then he moved their current position to the right of the screen.

The space behind Lacey’s was bounded on the right by Route 65, and on the left by a small road running parallel, and at the top by one east-west two-lane, and at the bottom by another. An empty box, more or less square, but not quite. Technically it was a parallelogram, because the roads at the top and the bottom sloped down a little from right to left. It wasn’t a particularly big empty box. But it wasn’t small either. Exact scale was hard to determine on the GPS screen, but worst case, the box was a mile on a side. Best case, it might have been two miles by two. Reacher said, ‘That’s somewhere between six hundred and forty and two thousand five hundred and sixty acres. Is that too big for a single farm?’

Sorenson said, ‘There are just over two million individual farms in the United States, working almost a billion acres, for an average farm size of close to five hundred acres. Statistics. We find them useful.’

‘But an average is just an average, right? If there’s a bunch of moms and pops working five or ten acres, then someone is working twenty-five hundred.’

‘Livestock, maybe. Or industrial corn.’

‘There’s livestock here. I saw the hoof marks.’

‘You think it’s all one farm?’

‘Maximum of five,’ Reacher said. ‘Shouldn’t take too long to check them all.’

Delfuenso’s phone buzzed. The secret phone. From her bible. It was set on silent, but it didn’t sound very silent to Reacher. Whatever little motor produced the vibration was whining away like a dentist’s drill. Delfuenso answered and listened for a long minute. Then she acknowledged and hung up.

‘My boss,’ she said. ‘With a new factor for my theory. He wondered if it might be pertinent.’

‘What theory?’ Reacher said.

‘The thing I claimed to be working on to get the GPS data. The thing I had to be shy about.’

‘What new factor?’

‘Now the State Department spokespeople are denying the dead guy in the pumping station was anything to do with them. They’re saying he was just a guy. Definitely not a consular official, or any other kind of employee. Double definitely not, fingers in their ears, la, la, la.’

‘But he was fingerprinted. He’s in the system now.’

‘An understandable error. Forensics is always quick and dirty in the field.’

‘Bullshit,’ Sorenson said. ‘My people are good.’

‘I know they are.’

‘So?’

‘So maybe it’s State’s spin control that’s quick and dirty.’

Reacher nodded. ‘Why don’t they just take out an ad in the paper? This way they’re practically proving the guy was CIA.’

‘To us, maybe. But we knew already. This way the rest of the world can sleep easy at night.’

‘Or is it a legal thing? This way they can deny they were operating inside America.’

‘Everyone knows they operate inside America. They gave up hiding that a long time ago.’

‘Then they’re proving something else, too. This guy wasn’t just CIA. He was bent CIA. He wasn’t undercover. He was guest starring. Why else deny him?’

‘You think a CIA head of station was a double agent?’

‘They can count that high over there. Being a triple agent might pose a challenge.’

‘I don’t like the idea of a CIA insider talking to Wadiah.’

‘Didn’t happen,’ Reacher said. ‘Your guy knifed him too soon for talking.’

‘They’d been together before. They must have been. At least for a few minutes. I think they walked to that bunker as a threesome.’

Like suddenly the first guy had bolted ahead, and the other two guys were hustling to keep up.

‘Probably,’ Reacher said.

‘So they must have talked.’

‘Probably.’

‘I want to know what they said.’

‘We’ll ask McQueen. When we find him.’

‘Tell me the answer to that word game. Where you have to speak for a minute without using the letter A.’

‘Is that how you want to remember me?’

‘I could win a couple of bar bets.’

‘That was a game with Alan King.’

‘I overheard.’

‘Later,’ Reacher said. ‘When we’ve found McQueen. He’ll want to hear it too.’

‘He was asleep.’

‘I doubt he ever sleeps.’

‘How many acres was it?’

‘Doesn’t matter about acres. This is about buildings. We’ll know it when we see it.’

And they saw it and knew it exactly ten minutes later, after six hundred yards on foot.