17 A Wanted Man

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.’
    Reacher asked, ‘What do the register receipts tell us?’
    ‘Six of them are from one place and the seventh is different.’
    ‘Where is the seventh from?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s not an address. It’s a code number.’
    Sorenson couldn’t go through her field office. As far as her field office was concerned she was quarantined in the motel in Kansas, at the central region’s express request. So she got on-line on Trapattoni’s phone and found a PR number for McDonald’s. She wasn’t optimistic. Any jerk could call from a cell phone and say she was with the FBI. She was expecting a long and tedious runaround.
    So Reacher asked Delfuenso, ‘How is McQueen’s GPS data recorded?’
    ‘Screen shots,’ she said. ‘Lines and points of light on a map. You can choose the interval. A week, a day, an hour, whatever you want.’
    ‘Can they do seven months?’
    ‘I don’t see why not.’
    ‘How would you get it if you needed to see it?’
    ‘By e-mail. To my phone, if necessary.’
    ‘We need to see it.’
    ‘They think I’m holed up in that motel.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to tell them you aren’t. Just tell them you’re going crazy doing nothing and you want to help out. Tell them you have a theory and you want to work on it. Tell them you might as well do something while you’re sitting there. Tell them you’ll get right back to them if it pans out.’
    ‘What theory?’
    ‘Doesn’t matter. Be shy about it. Just tell them you need the data.’
    Delfuenso dialled her phone, and Sorenson got put on hold for the second time.
    By that point they were two hours and nearly thirty minutes into it. Reacher figured Quantico would be well into the process of gearing up. He wasn’t exactly sure how FBI SWAT teams worked. Maybe they had pre-packed trucks ready for the drive out to Andrews Air Force Base. Or maybe they used helicopters. Or maybe they stored their stuff at Andrews permanently, all ready to go. Then would come the long flight west. Well over a thousand miles. In an Air Force C-17, he figured. He doubted that the FBI had heavy jets of its own. Then the landing, at Kansas City’s own municipal airport, way to the northwest, or at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, about twenty miles south. If Richards-Gebaur was still in business. He wasn’t sure. Plenty of places had been abandoned, right at the time