by Lee Child
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 gray lines. He saw how Route 65 dog-legged north of where they were. It jogged east toward 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 tires.
“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 center of the road showed up gray 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.”
Chapter 66
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 gray 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.
Chapter 67
They formed up in back of the grocery store, where they had stood before. They aligned themselves with the road, for reference, and they turned forty-five degrees left, as before. Northwest. Reacher took a last look at McQueen’s GPS tracks. At maximum magnification they hooked around an angle, like an upside-down letter J. Clearly there was a vehicle entrance off the top east-west two-lane. McQueen had driven north on Route 65, past the McDonald’s, past the Lacey’s store, past the Texaco station, and then he had turned left, and left again, into a driveway. He had done all that enough times to burn the evidence into a photograph. And its bright end point was just about right on the diagonal across the parallelogram. About halfway along its length. Which in terms of miles would be half of the square root of two, at the pessimistic end of the scale, or half of the square root of eight, at the optimistic end. Close to thirteen hundred yards, or close to twenty-five hundred. Either twenty minutes’ walk, or forty. Or somewhere in between. They would be coming up on whatever it was from the rear three-quarter direction. Not bad. Better than the front, certainly, and better than head-on toward the back. Not as good as sideways-on. If any house had a blank wall, it would be on the side. Or a wall with token windows, maybe with pebble glass, powder rooms or bathrooms. Like the place in the suburbs, sixty miles away.
They separated laterally as much as they dared. Delfuenso started out way to the left, and Sorenson started out way to the right. Reacher was in the middle, and he could see both of them, but only just. They couldn’t see each other. Delfuenso set out first. Then minutes later Sorenson walked out into the dirt. Reacher came last. Three targets, widely separated side to side, widely separated front to back. Dark clothes, dark night. Maybe not yet smarter than the average infantryman, but not any dumber, either.
There was heavy mud underfoot, all churned up and lumpy and unreliable. Some of it felt slick and slippery. Animal dung, Reacher assumed, although he still couldn’t smell anything. He kept his eyes fixed on an imaginary spot on the horizon, to keep his progress straight. He had Bale’s Glock in his right hand, down by his side. Ahead of him and far to his left he could just about see Delfuenso. A shadowy figure, barely there at all. But she was making decent progress. Short steps, energetic, really working it. He could see Sorenson a little better. She wasn’t so far ahead. And she was marginally paler than Delfuenso. Blonde, not dark. The moon was still out in places, but it was low in the sky and not bright.
Safe enough.
So far.
The mud kept their speed low. Reacher revised his estimates. Not twenty minutes or forty. It would take closer to thirty minutes or sixty. Frustrating, but not a disaster. The Quantico guys were still at thirty-five thousand feet. Probably somewhere over West Virginia. Still hours away. He trudged onward, slipping and sliding.
Then he began to slow. Because the blank view ahead of him seemed to be solidifying. Just a sense. There was some kind of substance there. Still invisible. Not a small distant farmhouse, presumably. Something bulkier. Maybe a giant barn. Sheet metal, or corrugated tin. Painted black. Blacker than the night itself.
On his left Delfuenso was slowing too. She was sensing the same thing. And on his right Sorenson was altering course a little. Her line was drifting closer to his. Delfuenso was edging in, too. There was something ahead of them, and instinct was telling them not to face it alone.
Reacher walked on, staring ahead. Seeing nothing. His vision was as good as anyone else’s. He had never worn eyeglasses. He could read in dim light. And in the black of night the human eye was supposed to be able to see a candle flame a mile away. Maybe more. And initial adaptation to the dark was supposed to happen within four seconds. The iris was supposed to open wide. To the max. And then retinal chemistry was supposed to kick in over the next few minutes. Like turning up a volume knob. But Reacher could see nothing ahead. It was like he was blind. Except that in this case seeing nothing felt like a version of seeing something. There was something there.
A breeze came up an
d flapped his pants. The air felt suddenly cold. Ahead on his right Sorenson was waiting for him. And Delfuenso was cutting in toward him. They were abandoning their separation. They were making one big target. Bad tactics. They met up a minute later. They regrouped. All three of them together, way out in the field, like they had been at the beginning, behind Lacey’s loading dock.
“This is weird,” Sorenson whispered. “There’s a big shape out there.”
“What shape?” Reacher asked. Maybe her eyes were better than his.
“Like a big patch of nothing. Like a hole in the air.”
“That’s what I’m seeing,” Reacher said. “A big patch of nothing.”
“But a low patch of nothing,” Delfuenso said. The breeze blew again and she shivered. She said, “Start high. Look at the sky. Then move down. You can see an edge. Where one kind of nothing changes to another kind of nothing.”
Reacher looked at the sky. Ahead of them in the north and the west it was padded with thick black cloud. No light at all. Way behind them in the southeast was a patch of thinner gray. Sullen moonlight, through a fissure. Not much. But there was wind up there. The thinner clouds were moving. Maybe the fissure would open wider. Or maybe it would close up altogether.
He faced front again and started high and moved his gaze down. Looking for Delfuenso’s edge. Looking hard. But not seeing it. There was no other kind of nothing. It was all the same kind of nothing to him.
He asked, “How low?”
“Above the horizon, but not by much.”
“I can’t even see the horizon.”
“I’m not imagining it.”