A Wanted Man (12 page)

“Exit here.”

“You sure? Looks pretty dead.”

“Just do it.”

Reacher glanced sideways at Alan King. McQueen saw him do it. McQueen said, “Don’t look at him. He’s not in charge here. I am. And I’m telling you to take this exit.”

Chapter 25

The two counterterrorism agents from Kansas City did
not look over Sorenson’s shoulder. Not literally. They just stood with her, sometimes one on either side, sometimes in a tight collegial triangle. They introduced themselves as Robert Dawson and Andrew Mitchell, equal rank, both of them with more than fifteen years in. Dawson was a little taller than Mitchell, and Mitchell was a little heavier than Dawson, but otherwise they were very similar. Fair-haired, pink-faced, early forties, dressed in navy blue suits under their parkas, with white shirts and blue ties. Neither one of them seemed particularly tired or stressed, which Sorenson found impressive, given the nighttime hour and the pressures of their assignment.

But equally neither one of them had much to offer in terms of procedural suggestions. By that point the investigation was essentially stalled, and Sorenson was well aware of it. The perpetrators were somewhere east of Des Moines, and the hostage was already dead or close to it, and therefore a little ten-year-old girl was already a motherless child, or close to it.

Further progress would depend on luck and forensics, and resolution would be painstakingly slow and uncertain.

Not one for the show reel.

Front and center on no one’s résumé.

Sorenson said, “We should alert Chicago, I guess.”

Dawson said, “Or Milwaukee, or Madison, or Indianapolis, or Cincinnati, or Louisville.”

Mitchell said, “Or Interpol. Or NASA, maybe. By now they could be anywhere in the known universe.”

“I’m wide open to ideas, Agent Mitchell.”

“Nothing personal,” Dawson said.

Then the same sights and sounds happened all over again: the whisper of a V-8 engine, and the crunch of tires over crushed stone, and the flicker of headlight beams in the mist, and another plain sedan nosed its way north toward them. It was another Ford Crown Victoria, another government car, but not quite identical to Sorenson’s own, or Dawson and Mitchell’s own. It was built to the same specification, but it had different needle antennas on the trunk lid, and it was light in color, not dark, and it had official U.S. plates.

It came to a stop thirty feet away and the driver got out. He was wearing chino pants and a sweater and a coat. He moved closer, scanning the scene as he walked, ignoring the deputies, ignoring Goodman, ignoring the crime scene technicians, aiming straight for Sorenson and Dawson and Mitchell. Up close he looked like the kind of guy who would be more comfortable in a gray three-piece suit, but who had gotten a panic call in the middle of the night and grabbed the nearest things to hand, like a banker woken by his elderly dog whining at the bedroom door.

He stopped six feet away and pulled ID from his pocket.

Different ID.

The State Department.

The name on the ID was Lester L. Lester, Jr. The photograph showed the guy’s face below neatly combed hair and above a neatly rolled button-down collar Sorenson would have bet good money came from Brooks Brothers.

She asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Lester?”

Mitchell asked, “Is your middle name Lester too?”

The man called Lester looked at him.

He said, “As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Outstanding,” Mitchell said.

“What can I do for you?” Sorenson asked again.

“I’m here to observe,” Lester said.

“Because the victim was known to you?”

“Not to me personally.”

“But known to the Department of State?”

“That’s the gist of it.”

“Who was he?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Then turn yourself around and go back wherever the hell you came from. Because you’re not helping here.”

Lester said, “I have to stay.”

Sorenson asked, “Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then take it out and call home and get clearance to tell me what I need to know.”

Lester showed no signs of doing that.

Mitchell asked, “Are your CIA pals here too?”

Lester made a big show of looking all around, very carefully.

“I don’t see anyone else,” he said. “Do you?”

Mitchell said, “Maybe they’re hanging back in the shadows. That’s what they’re good at, right?”

Lester didn’t reply. Then Sorenson’s phone started ringing. The plain electronic sound. She answered and listened. She said, “OK, got that, thank you, sir.” She clicked off the call. She looked straight at Lester and smiled. She said, “You must have driven out here pretty fast.”

Lester said, “Must I have?”

Sorenson nodded. “That was my SAC on the phone. He told me you were on your way. The grapevine is still working, apparently. He told me to expect you within the next ten or so minutes.”

Lester said, “There wasn’t much traffic on the roads.”

“And my SAC told me who the dead guy was.”

Lester didn’t reply.

Dawson asked Sorenson, “So who was the dead guy?”

“An embassy worker, apparently.”

“One of ours?”

“Yes.”

“Like a diplomat?”

“An attaché of some kind.”

“Senior?”

“I didn’t get that impression. But probably not junior, either. Judging by the tone of voice.”

“Age?”

“Forty-two.”

“Important?”

“My SAC didn’t specify.”

Mitchell said, “If a Special Agent-in-Charge is wide awake and on the telephone in the middle of the night, then the guy was important. Wouldn’t you say?”

Dawson asked, “Where did he serve? What region? What responsibilities?”

“My SAC didn’t specify. I don’t think he’s been told. Which might mean somewhere and something sensitive.”

The shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East
.

Dawson asked, “Why was he here?”

“I don’t know.”

Dawson looked at Lester, and asked the same question.

Lester said, “I don’t know why he was here.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. That’s why I’m here. Because we don’t know.”

Then twenty feet away Sheriff Goodman’s phone started ringing, muffled in his pocket but still loud in the silent night. All four people in the impromptu cluster turned toward the sound. Goodman answered and listened and his eyes sought Sorenson’s and he started walking toward her, as if instinctively, as if compelled, finishing his call and folding his phone when he was ten feet away, and not speaking until he was another five feet closer.

“That was my dispatcher,” he said. “The eyewitness is missing. The guy you talked to tonight. He never made it home.”

The short discussion
with McQueen had eaten up some time and distance, so Reacher had to take the ramp pretty fast. Then he had to
brake pretty hard ahead of a tight curve. For a split second he considered hitting Alan King in the throat. He was fairly well braced in his seat, with his right foot hard on the pedal and his left hand tight on the wheel. King was waking up because of the abrupt turn and the sudden deceleration. Chances were good his neck would be in the right place at the right time.

But McQueen was still a problem, even at twenty miles an hour. Theoretically Reacher could find the lever and jam the seat back into him, and maybe swing an elbow, but the headrest was in the way, and there was collateral damage just waiting to happen, right there next to the guy on the rear bench.

A mother, separated from her child.

Two feet from McQueen, on his right. And the guy was probably right-handed. Most people were.

They have guns
.

So Reacher just coasted onward, through the curve, to the turn at the end of the ramp. Repeats of the gas board and the motel board faced him on the far shoulder of a narrow two-lane road. Both had arrows pointing right.

Alan King yawned and said, “We’re getting off here?”

Don McQueen said, “This is as good a place as any.”

“For what?” Reacher said.

“For gas,” McQueen said. “What else? Turn right. Follow the sign.”

Chapter 26

Reacher turned right and followed the sign. The road was
narrow and dark. And dead straight, like a lot of roads in Iowa. The surrounding landscape was invisible, but it felt flat. Dormant winter fields, left and right, as far as the mind could sense. There was nothing up ahead. Just darkness. And then Missouri, presumably, a hundred miles away. Maybe a river first. The Des Moines, Reacher thought. He had studied geography in school. The river called the Des Moines met the mighty Mississippi a couple hundred miles southeast of the city called Des Moines.

He said, “This is a complete waste of time, guys. We’re going to drive twenty miles and find a gas station that went out of business before they invented unleaded.”

McQueen said, “There was a sign. Has to mean something.”

“It means there was gas here back when you were in grade school. Thirty cents a gallon. And Luckies at thirty cents a pack.”

“I’m sure they keep those signs updated.”

“You’re a very trusting person.”

“Not really,” McQueen said.

Reacher drove on. The road surface was pitted and pot-holed and the car bounced and swayed. Not its natural element, as a vehicle. Or Reacher’s, as a driver. Both had been better on the highway.

McQueen asked, “How’s your head?”

Reacher said, “My head is fine. It’s my nose that’s busted, not my skull.”

“You need another aspirin?”

“I already had that discussion with Mr. King. While you were asleep.”

King said, “He elected to soldier on without. He seems very protective of Karen’s personal supply.”

“Aspirin is not a prescription drug,” McQueen said. “She could get more at the gas station. Or Tylenol, or Advil.”

“Or leeches,” Reacher said. “We might find some under a dusty old pile of inner tubes and buggy whips. After we bust the padlock the bank put on thirty years ago.”

“Just keep going,” McQueen said. “Be patient.”

So Reacher drove on, slowly south on the lumpy road, and two miles later he was proved wrong, and McQueen was proved right. They all saw a faint yellow glow in the nighttime mist, way far ahead in the distance, on the horizon, like a beacon, which grew stronger as they approached it, and which finally resolved itself into the fierce neon glare of a brand new Shell station, all crisp white and yellow and orange, sitting like a mirage or a landed UFO on a quarter-acre bite out of a fallow cornfield. It had hi-tech pumps on two gondola islands, and lube bays, and a glassed-in store lit up so bright it must have been visible from outer space.

And it was open for business.

“You should have trusted me,” McQueen said.

Reacher slowed the car to a walk and turned in. He chose the pumps farther from the store and nearer the road and eased to a stop. He put the transmission in Park and shut down the motor. He pulled the key, casually, like a reflex, like a rote habit, and dropped it in his pocket.

Alan King saw him do it, but said nothing.

Reacher said, “Same system? I get the coffee, you get the gas?”

“Works for me,” McQueen said.

So Reacher opened his door and got out. He stood and stretched and arched his back and then looped around the pump islands and headed for the bright lights. He could see a kid on a stool behind the
register, watching him, staring at his face. The busted nose. A universal attraction, apparently. The guy wasn’t much more than twenty years old, and he looked sleepy and slow.

Reacher paused before going in, and checked back. Alan King had dipped a credit card and was getting ready to pump the gas. McQueen was still in the rear seat. Delfuenso was still next to him.

Reacher went inside. The kid behind the register looked up and nodded a cautious greeting. Reacher waited until the door sucked shut and said, “Got a pay phone?”

The kid blinked and opened his mouth and closed it again, like a goldfish.

“Not a difficult question,” Reacher said. “A simple yes or no answer will suffice.”

“Yes,” the kid said. “We have a pay phone.”

“Where is it?”

“By the restrooms,” the kid said.

“Which are where?”

The kid pointed.

“In back,” he said.

Reacher looked the other way, out the window.

Don McQueen’s door was open.

But he was still in the car. Just sitting there, facing forward.

Reacher turned back and saw a door in the rear wall of the store. It had two stick figures on it, one in a skirt and one in pants. He stepped over to it and pulled it open. Behind it was a small lobby, with two more doors, one with the pants figure on it, and the other with the skirt. On the wall between the two was a pay phone, shiny and new, with an acoustic hood over it.

Reacher checked back. King was pumping the gas. McQueen was twisted sideways in his seat. He had both feet out of the car. They were planted on the ground. But that was all. He was stretching his legs. For comfort. He wasn’t moving.

Not yet, anyway.

Reacher checked the ladies’ room. No windows. No alternate exit.

He checked the men’s room. No windows. No alternate exit. He pulled a wad of towels from the dispenser and came back out to the
lobby and folded the towels twice and jammed them between the lobby door and its frame, on the hinge side, so that the door held itself open a few inches. A little less than four inches, to be exact. Reacher ducked back and checked the view from the phone. He could see a small sliver of the store. He could see a tiny slice of the main door. Not much, but he would know if it opened.

He hoped.

He lifted the receiver and dialed 911.

More or less instantly a dispatcher asked, “What is your current location?”

Reacher said, “Give me the FBI.”

“Sir, what is your current location?”

“Don’t waste time.”

“Do you need fire, police, or ambulance?”

“I need the FBI.”

“Sir, this is the 911 emergency service.”