‘Where?’
‘In back of the old pumping station. I didn’t tell them that part, either.’
Reacher nodded. Things you were doing that you shouldn’t have been doing. Public urination, and drunk driving. Illegal in every town in America. He said, ‘So you didn’t really see them. Not if you were behind the building.’
The guy said, ‘No, I saw them real close. I was all done by then. I was all zipped up and coming out.’
‘Did they see you?’
‘I don’t think so. It was pretty dark. There was a shadow.’
‘How far away were you?’
‘Ten feet, maybe.’
Reacher asked, ‘What did you notice?’
‘I told the sheriff,’ the guy said. ‘And the blonde lady.’
‘You answered their questions. That’s not the same thing.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Concentrate.’
The guy closed his eyes. He swayed back and forth on his heels. He raised his hand and held it palm out, as if he was steadying himself against the old concrete building. He was using physical cues. He was thinking himself back into the moment.
He said, ‘The first guy was hurrying. He wanted to get in there first. He was unzipping his coat.’
‘Had they been in a group of three before that? Walking together?’
‘I can’t be sure. But I think so. It felt like that. Like suddenly the first guy had bolted ahead, and the other two guys were hustling to keep up.’
‘Suits, right?’
‘No coats at all.’
‘Anything in their hands?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did you do when all three of them were inside?’
‘I headed back across the road.’
‘Why?’
‘I needed to find my truck. And I didn’t want to stick around.’
‘Why not?’
‘Bad feeling.’
‘From the guys in the suits?’
‘More from the first guy. In the green coat. I didn’t like him.’
Reacher asked, ‘Did you hear anything?’
The guy said, ‘A little shouting and yelling. Like they were fighting.’
‘Where were you when the guys in the suits came out again?’
‘On the other sidewalk.’
‘Anything else?’
The guy said, ‘I shouldn’t be talking about this. They told me not to.’ And then he stepped around Reacher, carefully and elaborately and precisely, and he carried on along the path. Reacher started after him, and then he stopped. Because he heard the soft whisper of a car on the road. A quarter-mile away, maybe. He turned and saw lights in the distance, vague diffuse beams bouncing and stabbing through the mist.
Then the gate began to open, not fast, not slow, and silent.
FIFTY-EIGHT
EVIDENTLY JULIA SORENSON had not gotten her phone back. Or her car. Or her reputation. She had not become a hero. Reacher saw a shiny black Crown Vic pull in off the two-lane and drive through the still-moving gate. Its headlight beams turned in a wide arc and it hissed over the concrete roadway and came to a stop on the circle near the main office door. A guy Reacher hadn’t seen before got out of the front passenger seat and opened the rear passenger door. He didn’t seem to say anything. He just pointed with his chin. Like Dawson had.
Julia Sorenson slid out of the back and stood up and stood still. She looked tired in the low light, and a little defeated. A little round-shouldered. The night breeze caught her coat and flapped it open. She was still wearing the new shirt. But her holster was empty. She had surrendered her weapon.
The guy from the front closed her door behind her and slid back in his seat. The car drove off and left her standing there alone. The gate started to open again. The car drove through it, and paused a beat, and turned right, and drove back the way it had come.
The gate closed again behind it. Reacher watched the car until its lights were gone and its whisper had died away to silence. Then he turned around and watched Sorenson.
She stood still for a moment more, and then she went inside. Reacher counted out time in his head, for the greeting from the motherly type at the reception desk, and the smile and the welcome, and the kings and the queens and the twins, and the armchairs, and the floor space, and the majority preferences. All that kind of stuff. We’ve been expecting you. Four minutes, he figured. Maybe less, if the conversation went faster, which he figured it might, because it would be one agent to another. Or maybe more than four minutes, if Sorenson was up on her high horse and asking all kinds of outraged and resentful questions.
It took four minutes exactly. Sorenson came out with a key in her hand. She looked resigned. She checked the numbers on the low fingerposts and set off in Reacher’s direction. Then she checked again at the next fork and headed off at a shallow angle down a different path.
‘Julia,’ Reacher called, softly.
She stopped walking.
She called, ‘Reacher?’
‘Over here.’
She stepped off the path and walked over the crushed stone to him. He asked, ‘What happened with you?’
She said, ‘We’re not supposed to communicate.’
‘Or what? They’re going to lock us up?’
‘Well, we can’t talk out here. Where can we go?’
They went to Reacher’s room. Sorenson took a good look around it and said, ‘This is completely bizarre. It’s just like a regular motel.’
Reacher said, ‘It is a regular motel. Or it was. The Kansas City field office bought it three years ago. They told me. You never heard about it?’
‘Not a word. Are the others here too?’
Reacher nodded. ‘Delfuenso and her kid, and the eyewitness. Safe and sound. They’re all having a good time, actually.’
‘Even though they’re locked up?’
‘They’ve been told they’re sequestered. Like a jury. For their own good. Not the same thing as being locked up. They’re all treating it like a vacation. Mini golf and free beer.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. But it probably is. Except that it probably shouldn’t be. You know how these things are.’
‘Who brought them here?’ she said. ‘Who burned in the car?’
‘Alan King burned in the car,’ Reacher said. ‘But he was shot in the heart first. By McQueen. McQueen is one of you, undercover. Out of Kansas City. Which is why Dawson and Mitchell came straight up to babysit you at the pumping station. They were doing damage control. McQueen burned the car and he and Delfuenso were picked up by part of his Bureau support team. In a Bureau sedan, like the tyre marks showed, again out of Kansas City. McQueen came here with them but left again immediately. Apparently he said he had to get back in position.’
‘Poor guy. He’s going to be under a hell of a lot of pressure. With King dead? How is he going to explain that?’
‘With great difficulty, I would think.’
‘But you were right. He missed you deliberately. He fired over your head.’
‘But there was nothing he could fake when it came time to punch Delfuenso’s ticket. So he offed King instead.’
‘Good man. I hope he’s OK.’
‘What happened with you?’ Reacher asked again.
Sorenson sat down on the bed. She said, ‘Me? It started out OK. In fact it started out just fine. I drove back to Delfuenso’s place and got my phone and got back in my own car and called my SAC. I told him I had managed to overpower you and hand you over to the Kansas City boys. My SAC was very impressed. And he was very pleased. But I couldn’t quite let it go. I asked a few too many questions. He didn’t like that so much. I could tell. Then at one point he changed completely. He wasn’t pleased any more. Not pleased at all. I could hear it in his voice.’
‘At what point?’
‘I checked the glove box when I locked up Goodman’s car. Purely out of habit. I didn’t want any unsecured weapons
left in it, and who knows what a country sheriff keeps in his glove box? But as it happened there was nothing in there except a notebook and a pen. So I looked through the notebook, naturally. Turns out Sheriff Goodman was a very thorough guy. He’d been doing his research overnight, and he’d been making notes about Karen Delfuenso. I guess he figured the more the merrier, when it came to information. I guess he thought it would help, if we didn’t get her back fast, although I can’t see how it would.’
‘And?’
‘There was something in there that struck me as odd, so I asked my SAC about it. Except I didn’t actually ask about it. I just mentioned it, really. But whichever, that was when he went all weird on me.’
‘What something was odd?’
‘I took Delfuenso to be a long-term resident. Maybe not necessarily a fourth generation farm girl or anything, but I got the impression she’d been there a good long time. Certainly I figured Lucy would have been born and raised there.’
‘But she wasn’t?’
‘They’ve only been there seven months. The neighbour on the other side said they moved there after a divorce. So it seems to have been a much more recent divorce than I thought.’
‘Are we even sure she was married in the first place?’ Reacher said.
‘There’s a kid.’
‘That doesn’t confirm marriage.’
‘Why wouldn’t she have been married?’
‘She copes on her own,’ Reacher said. ‘She copes really well. Like she’s always been obliged to. And she’s smart. Looking after some guy would drive her crazy.’
‘Smart women shouldn’t get married?’
‘Are you married?’
She didn’t answer that. She said, ‘I don’t care if it was a wedding with a thousand guests on a beach in Hawaii or a one-night stand in a motel in New Jersey. The point wasn’t that she was a single mom. The point is she’s a single mom who moved to town just seven months ago.’
Reacher said, ‘The Kansas City boys told me this operation is seven months old.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Why would they lie?’
‘No, I mean Delfuenso can’t be connected. How could she be? It has to be a coincidence. It has to be. Because we’ve already got one coincidence.’
Reacher said, ‘So now we have two coincidences?’
‘Which is one too many.’
‘What’s the first coincidence?’
Sorenson said, ‘You remember Alan King’s brother?’
‘Peter King? The fister?’
‘Apparently my night guy put a search on him. Just to be helpful. Right after he got off the phone with Mother Sill, the first time. DMVs, the postal service, the banks, the credit card companies. The cell phone companies, if we can get away with it, which is usually always. And the results came back this evening.’
‘And what were they?’
‘It looks like Peter King left Denver and moved to Kansas City.’
‘When?’
‘Seven months ago.’
FIFTY-NINE
REACHER MOVED IN his chair and ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘Alan King told me his brother wasn’t speaking to him.’
Sorenson said, ‘Did Alan King live in Kansas City?’
‘I think so.’
‘Maybe he didn’t. And even if he did, maybe they never met. Kansas City is a big enough place.’
‘I know,’ Reacher said. ‘Metro area population is a million and a half.’
‘Is it?’
‘Area code is 816.’
‘OK.’
Reacher said, ‘So now we have three coincidences. Seven months ago Delfuenso moved to the back of beyond in Nebraska, and simultaneously Peter King moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where his brother might or might not have been living, and where his brother might or might not have been even speaking to him, and simultaneously your central region counterterrorism people, who are based in Kansas City, Missouri, decided to start up a complex undercover operation that seems to be centred on a spot very close to Delfuenso’s new quarters in the back of beyond in Nebraska.’
‘We can’t have three coincidences. That’s too many.’
‘I would agree,’ Reacher said. ‘Theoretically. But we don’t have three coincidences. We have two proven links.’
‘Proven how?’
Reacher leaned forward in his chair and put his palm on the bed. He pressed down and tested the mattress for softness and yield.
He said, ‘First, Peter King was definitely Alan King’s brother. And Alan King was definitely a bad guy. Because an undercover FBI agent found it necessary to shoot him in the heart and burn him up in a fire. Which is a pretty basic definition for being a bad guy, wouldn’t you say?’
‘And second?’
Reacher said, ‘Your SAC had you brought here because you found out about Delfuenso’s move seven months ago. And this place is for people who stumble on evidence of undercover operations. Therefore Delfuenso’s move was part of an undercover operation.’
‘What part?’
Reacher said, ‘Let’s go ask her.’
Reacher stopped short of Delfuenso’s door, and Sorenson stepped up and knocked softly. There was a long minute’s delay, and then there was the rattle of a chain. The door opened a crack on dim light inside and Delfuenso’s voice whispered, ‘Who is it?’
Reacher figured she was whispering because her kid had just gone to sleep.
Sorenson said, ‘Karen Delfuenso?’
Delfuenso whispered, ‘Yes?’
Sorenson said, ‘I’m Julia Sorenson from the FBI field office in Omaha. I was working on getting you back last night.’
And then Delfuenso shushed her, quite impatiently, like Reacher knew she would. Because her ten-year-old had just gotten to sleep. Delfuenso came out and bustled Sorenson away from the door, like Reacher knew she would, over to a place more than ten feet away, where it was safe to make a noise.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sorenson said. ‘I didn’t mean to be a nuisance. I just wanted to introduce myself. I just wanted to see you were OK.’
‘I’m fine,’ Delfuenso said, and more than ten feet behind her Reacher slipped into the room.
He had been in the room once before, so he was safely familiar with its layout, even in the dark, and it was dark. There was no light anywhere except an orange neon bulb inside a light switch in the bathroom. Its faint glow showed Lucy asleep in the bed farther from the door. She was on her side, fetal, rolled into the blankets. The sheet was up to her chin. Her hair was spilled on the pillow, black on white. Reacher found Delfuenso’s bag on the other bed. Nearer the door, nearer the armchairs. He had seen her lift it off the chair and dump it on the bed. It had looked heavy. And the mattresses were soft and yielding. Not like trampolines. Not like drum skins. But even so the bag had bounced. Like she still had her bottle of water in it.
He stepped slow and quiet on the carpet and carried the bag to the bathroom. He spread a folded bath towel on the vanity counter, one handed, patting it into place directly under the dim glow from the light switch. He emptied the bag on the towel. A precaution against noise, which worked to some extent, but not completely. There was no loud clattering, but there were plenty of sharp thumps.
He waited. And listened. Lucy slept on, breathing low and quiet.
He raked through the things on the towel. There was all kinds of stuff. Make-up, a hairbrush, two plastic combs. A slim glass bottle of scent. Two packs of gum, both half gone. A wallet, containing three