Lee Child - A Wanted Man

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 he 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.

‘Keep going,’ Sorenson said.

Delfuenso crept onward, at maybe twenty miles an hour. Not as hard as it looked. The yellow line in the centre of the road showed up grey and kept them on course. There was some forward visibility. Not much, but enough for twenty miles an hour. People could run faster.

Still no Texaco, no Lacey’s, no McDonald’s. Or no McDonald’s, no Lacey’s, no Texaco, depending on what the order was going to be. Reacher looked left and right, as far as he could into the fields. They were dark and flat and empty. Nothing to see. Not that he expected a neon sign saying Last Terrorist Hideout Before the Interstate . But twelve or forty people usually put on some kind of a show. Maybe the glow of an outhouse lamp around a warped door, or a lookout’s cigarette, or a locked car’s alarm flashing gently on the dash, or the blue haze of an insomniac’s television behind a badly drawn drape.

But there was nothing.

Delfuenso said, ‘We must have gone wrong somewhere.’

Sorenson said, ‘No, this is the right road. The Lacey’s should be dead ahead.’

‘Are those web site maps always accurate?’

‘Government GPS is always accurate. Point B is dead ahead, too.’

Reacher said, ‘So make a note, in case you have to talk to Quantico. Tell them Whiteman Air Force Base would be the best place to land.’

‘Talk to Quantico? You mean, if we fail to get the job done and I’m the only survivor?’

‘Obviously there’s a number of possible outcomes.’

‘And that’s one of them?’

‘That’s two of them. We might fail to get the job done with no survivors.’