A Wanted Man

FORTY-FOUR

REACHER SPENT A long minute revisiting a variation on an earlier problem: it was technically challenging to take out a driver from the front passenger seat, while that driver was busy doing eighty miles an hour on a public highway. More than challenging. Impossible, almost certainly, even with seat belts and air bags. Too much risk. Too many innocent parties around. People driving to work, old folks dropping in on family.

Sorenson said, ‘I’m sorry.’

Reacher said, ‘My mom always told me I shouldn’t put myself first. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to this time. How much trouble will you be in if you don’t deliver me?’

‘A lot,’ she said.

Which was not the answer he wanted to hear. He said, ‘Then I need you to swear something for me. Raise your right hand.’

She did. She took it off the wheel and brought it up near her shoulder, palm out, halfway between slow and snappy, a familiar move for a public official. Reacher swivelled in his seat and caught her wrist with his left hand, one, and then he leaned over and snaked his right hand under her jacket and took her Glock out of the holster on her hip, two. Then he sat back in his seat with the gun in the gap between his leg and the door.

Three.

Sorenson said, ‘That was sneaky.’

‘I apologize,’ Reacher said. ‘To you and my mom.’

‘It was also a crime.’

‘Probably.’

‘Are you going to shoot me?’

‘Probably not.’

‘So how are we going to play this out?’

‘You’re going to let me out a block from your building. But you’re going to tell them you lost me twenty miles back. So they start looking in the wrong place. Maybe we stopped at a gas station. Maybe I went to use the bathroom, and ran.’

‘Do I get my gun back?’

‘Yes,’ Reacher said. ‘A block from your building.’

Sorenson drove on and said nothing. Reacher sat quiet beside her, thinking about the feel of the skin on her wrist, and the warmth of her stomach and hip. He had brushed them with the heel of his hand, on his way to her holster. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft.

They stayed on the Interstate through the southern part of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and they crossed the Missouri River on a bridge, and then they were back in the state of Nebraska, right in the city of Omaha itself. The highway speared through its heart, past a sign for a zoo, past a sign for a park, with residential quarters to the north and a ragged tightly packed strip of industrial enterprises to the south. Then eventually the highway curved away to the left and Sorenson came off on a street that continued straight onward east to west through the centre of the commercial zone. But by that point the zone had changed. It had become more like a retail park. Or an office park. There were broad lawns and trees and landscaping. Buildings were low and white, hundreds of yards apart. There were huge flat parking lots in between. Reacher had been expecting something more central and more urban. He had pictured narrow streets and brick walls and corners and alleys and doorways. He had been anticipating a regular downtown maze.

He asked, ‘Where exactly is your place?’

Sorenson pointed beyond the next light, diagonally, west and a little north.

‘Right there,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

Two hundred yards away Reacher saw the back of a sprawling white building, pretty new, four or five storeys high. Behind it and to the right and left of it were wide grassy areas. Beyond it was a gigantic parking lot for the next enterprise in line. Everything was flat and empty. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.

‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘This is no good.’

Sorenson had already slowed the car. She said, ‘You told me a block away.’

‘These aren’t blocks. These are football fields.’

She rolled through the light. Directly behind the white building Reacher saw a small parking lot with staff vehicles and unmarked cars in neat lines. But there was a navy blue Crown Vic all alone some yards from them, waiting at an angle, and a black panel van next to it. There were four men stumping around in the space between the two, hunched in coats, sipping coffee, shooting the shit, just waiting.

For him, presumably.

He asked, ‘Do you know them?’

‘Two of them,’ Sorenson said. ‘They’re the counterterrorism guys that came up from Kansas City last night. Their names are Dawson and Mitchell.’

‘And the other two?’

‘Never saw them before.’

‘Keep going.’

‘Couldn’t you at least talk to them?’

‘Not a good idea.’

‘They can’t really do anything to you.’

‘Have you read the Patriot Act?’

‘No,’ Sorenson said.

‘Has your boss?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Therefore they can do whatever the hell they want to me. Because who’s going to tell them otherwise?’

Sorenson slowed some more.

Reacher said, ‘Don’t turn in, Julia. Keep on going.’

‘I gave them an ETA. Pretty soon they’re going to come out and start looking for me.’

‘Call them and tell them you’re broken down on the shoulder somewhere. Tell them you got a flat tyre. Tell them we’re still in Iowa. Or tell them we took a wrong turn and went to Wisconsin by mistake.’

‘They’ll track my cell. Maybe they already are.’

‘Keep on going,’ Reacher said.

Sorenson accelerated gently. They passed the side of the white building. It was about a hundred yards away. It had a wide looping driveway in front of it. Its facade was modern and impressive. There was a lot of plate glass. There was no obvious activity going on. All was quiet. Reacher turned his head and watched as the building fell away behind them.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Where do you want to go now?’ Sorenson asked.

‘A mile away will do it.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then we say goodbye.’

But they didn’t get a mile away, and they didn’t say goodbye. Because Sorenson’s phone rang in its cradle and she answered and Reacher heard a man’s voice, urgent and loud and panicked. It said, ‘Ms Sorenson? This is Sheriff Victor Goodman. Karen Delfuenso’s daughter is gone. She was taken away by some men.’