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 attache of some kind.'
'Senior?'
'I didn't get that impression. But probably not junior either, 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 towards the sound. Goodman answered and listened and his eyes sought Sorenson's and he started walking towards 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 coming 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.'
TWENTY-SIX
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 paracetamol, or ibuprofen.'
'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 night-time 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.