A Wanted Man

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 certain 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.