He held his thumb up.
Yes.
She nodded. She took a breath. She held her palms out to him, both hands, including the gun, and she spread all her fingers: In ten.
She curled a finger down: In nine.
Another finger: In eight.
Then she scooted sideways out of the picture, towards the front door, and Reacher did the same thing, towards the back.
Seven. Six. Five. Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Delfuenso had been counting faster than Reacher. He heard a hammering on the front door while his foot was still in the air. The hammering sounded like the butt of a Glock on a steel plate. A steel front door. Reinforced. A security measure. He wondered what kind of resistance the back door was about to offer him.
Not much, as it turned out.
He smashed his boot heel an inch above the knob, accelerating all the way, punching hard through the last final fraction, and the door burst inward and then Reacher was right there in the kitchen, a little fast, but otherwise with no more trouble than stepping over some kind of small hurdle in his way. The hammering continued at the front. The kitchen was cold and empty. Recently used, but currently deserted. Reacher stepped into the hallway, ready to find someone on the way to answer the door, ready to shoot that someone in the back.
The hallway was deserted.
The hammering continued. Loud enough to wake the dead. Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle. There was a dining room on the left. It was full of stuff and full of furniture. But it was empty of people.
There was a parlour on the right.
Full of stuff. Full of furniture.
Empty of people.
There were two more doors off the hallway. One had a bar of light under it. The pebble-glass window. The powder room. Occupied, possibly. Reacher took a long step and raised his boot and smashed it through the lock. The lock proved no stronger than the kitchen's. The door crashed open and Reacher stepped back with his finger tight on the trigger.
The powder room was empty.
The light was on, but there was no one home.
Then Sorenson stepped in through the final door, leading with her Glock.
'Don't shoot,' Reacher said. 'It's me.'
He saw the cellar stairs behind her. Empty. No one there.
Ground floor all clear.
He said, 'Let Delfuenso in. I'm going to check upstairs.'
He went up. His least favourite situation. He hated the stairs. Everyone did. Everything was against you, including gravity. Your enemy had the high ground and the better angle. And the limitless possibilities of concealment. And the immense satisfaction of seeing you lead with your head.
Not good, but Reacher went up those particular stairs happily enough, because by that point he was certain the house was empty. He had busted into houses before. The vibe was wrong. There was no heartbeat. It felt still and quiet. It felt abandoned.
And it was.
There were four bedrooms with four walk-in closets and two bathrooms, and Reacher checked them all, jerking left and right again, pirouetting like a damn paramilitary ballerina. There should have been music playing, with sudden orchestral climaxes.
All the bedrooms and closets and bathrooms were empty.
There was junk, there were beds, there were clothes, there was furniture.
But there were no people.
Ground floor all clear.
Second floor all clear.
Nobody home.
Which in some small portion of everyone's mind is a very welcome result. Human nature. Relief. Anticlimax. Peace with honour. But Reacher and Sorenson and Delfuenso met in the central hallway and admitted to nothing but frustration. If McQueen wasn't there, he had to be somewhere else just as bad, if not worse. He had been evacuated in a hurry.
'They must have a bigger place somewhere,' Reacher said. 'Surely. They're supposed to be two medium-sized groups working together. This place is too small for them, apart from anything else. This place is just a pied-a-terre, or officers' quarters, or guest quarters. Something like that. Some kind of extra facility.'
'Could be a mail drop,' Sorenson said.
'McQueen lived here,' Delfuenso said. 'We know that for sure. He told us so, and we have seven months of GPS to prove it.'
Reacher walked up and down the hallway, turning lights on as he went. He lit up the dining room and he lit up the parlour. He lit up the kitchen. He said, 'Start looking. If they're back and forth between two places regularly, they'll have left some kind of a trace. However well they cleaned up.'
And they had cleaned up pretty well. That was clear. They had done a decent job. But not in any conventional sense. There was considerable disarray. There were used dishes in the sink. The beds were unmade. Sofa cushions had not been plumped, old newspapers had not been removed, the trash had not been taken out. Mugs had not been washed, ashtrays had not been emptied, clothes had not been folded and put away. The occupants had gotten out fast.
But they had prioritized. They had taken a lot of stuff with them. That was where their clean-up effort had been spent. Mail, paperwork, bills, bureaucracy, officialdom. No trace of any such items had been left behind. No names. No papers large or small. No scraps. No notes, no doodles, no messages. Not that Reacher was expecting to find a treasure map with OUR HQ and an arrow on it, in bright red ink. But most people leave something behind. Some small unconsidered item. A toll receipt, a matchbook, a cinema ticket. In the trash, dropped in a corner, under a sofa cushion. These guys hadn't. They were pretty good. Careful, meticulous, alert and aware. Very disciplined. That was clear. Disciplined on an ongoing day-to-day basis, too. Not just high days and holidays. Good security. Further progress was going to depend on a random mistake.
Then Sorenson called from the kitchen.
With the random mistake.
SIXTY-FOUR
SORENSON HAD SEVEN big-size McDonald's paper sacks lined up on the kitchen counter. Take-out food. The bags were used and stained and crumpled. Sorenson had emptied them all. There were soda cups and milk shake cups and burger clamshells and apple pie wrappers. There were cheeseburger papers and register receipts. There was old lettuce going brown, and chopped onion going slimy, and ketchup packets going crusted.
Sorenson said, 'They like McDonald's.'
'Not a crime in itself,' Reacher said. 'I like McDonald's.'
'But it's a good plan B,' Delfuenso said. 'We could leave them alone and they'll die anyway in five years from heart attacks.'
'They like McDonald's,' Sorenson said again. 'My guess is pretty much every day they sent a gofer to the nearest drive-through for a couple of sacks. I bet there's a drive-through not more than five minutes from here.'
'This is America, after all,' Delfuenso said.
'And maybe you get the taste for it. So when you're stationed at your other camp, maybe you look for a drive-through near there, too. And maybe once in a while if you have to make the trip all the way from A to B, you stop at the drive-through near A and you load up with a little something for the ride. And then if you have to make the trip all the way back again from B to A, maybe you stop at the drive-through near B and you do the same thing.'
'And you cross-pollute your garbage,' Reacher said.
Sorenson nodded.
'Exactly,' she said. 'You buy a burger and fries and a soda, and you eat it in the car along the way, except maybe you don't finish the soda, so you carry the sack into the house at the end of the trip and you finish it right here. In this kitchen. And then you dump the sack in the trash. Which is hygienic, but the bad news is you just linked two geographic areas that should have stayed separate.'