17 A Wanted Man

his own career was coming to an end. A systemic problem. In which case Whiteman Air Force Base would be the only alternative, sixty miles to the east. Then would come more trucks or helicopters, and then painstaking tactical preparations, and then finally action.
    Eight hours. It’s a big country. There’s a lot to organize
.
    The choice of airport would depend on where McQueen was. Sorenson was still talking her way through a corporate maze. Delfuenso was staring at her phone, willing an e-mail to arrive. Time was ticking away. Reacher figured they might end up doing nothing more than guiding the Quantico team in on target. Like forward observers. Like Peter King.
    Better than nothing.
    Sorenson got her information first. Such as it was. There had been no real opposition from the McDonald’s main office. No real secrecy or obfuscation. Just confusion, and a certain amount of incompetence, and a lot of hold music and phone tag. Eventually she had ended up talking to a minimum-wage server at the franchise in question. A burger flipper. On a wall phone, probably. She could hear tile echo and raw fries being plunged into hot oil. She asked the server for his location.
    ‘I’m in the kitchen,’ the boy said.
    ‘No, I mean, where is your restaurant?’
    The boy didn’t answer. Like he didn’t know how. Sorenson thought she could hear him chewing his lip. She thought he wanted to say,
Well, the restaurant is on the other side of the counter. You know, like, from the kitchen
.
    She asked him, ‘What is your mailing address?’
    He said, ‘Mine?’
    ‘No, the restaurant’s.’
    ‘I don’t know. I never mailed anything to the restaurant.’
    ‘Where is it located?’
    ‘The restaurant?’
    ‘Yes, the restaurant.’
    ‘Just past Lacey’s. You can’t miss it.’
    ‘Where is Lacey’s?’
    ‘Just past the Texaco.’
    ‘On what road?’
    ‘Right here on Route 65.’
    ‘What’s the name of the town you’re in?’
    ‘I don’t think it has a name.’
    ‘Unincorporated land?’
    ‘I don’t know what that is.’
    ‘OK, what’s the nearest town with a name?’
    ‘Big town?’
    ‘We could start with that.’
    ‘That would be Kansas City, I guess.’
    Then there was some yelling. A manager, Sorenson thought. Something about clean-up time.
    The kid said, ‘Ma’am, I got to go,’ and hung up the phone.
    Sorenson put her phone on the kitchen counter and Reacher looked a question at her and she said, ‘Route 65, near something called Lacey’s, just past a Texaco station.’
    Reacher said nothing.
    Sorenson got back on-line on her phone and called up a map. She made all kinds of pinching and spreading and wiping motions with her fingertips. On and on. Her face was falling all the time. She said, ‘Terrific. Route 65 runs all the way through the state, north to south, from Iowa to Arkansas. It’s nearly three hundred miles long.’
    ‘Any sign of Lacey’s?’
    ‘This is a map. Not the business pages. Lacey’s is probably a store of some kind. Or a bait shop. Or a bar.’ But she stayed with it. She went ahead and searched on-line. She typed
Lacey’s
+
Kansas City
. Nothing. Then
Lacey’s
+
Missouri
.
    She said, ‘It’s a small grocery chain.’
    She dabbed her finger against the glass to follow a link. The phone was slow. Then the site came up and she started with the wiping and the pinching and the spreading again. She said, ‘They have three locations on Route 65. Each one about twenty miles apart. Like an arc. They’re all about sixty miles from the city.’
    Two hours and forty minutes into it.
    ‘Making progress,’ Reacher said.
    Then Delfuenso’s phone pinged, for an incoming e-mail.

SIXTY-FIVE
    THE SEVEN-MONTH SCREEN shot was laid over a greyed-out satellite image of five contiguous central states. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. More than three hundred and forty thousand square miles. More than twenty-six million people.
    McQueen’s movements among those miles and those people were recorded as thin amber lines. His recent jaunt up from Kansas to Nebraska to Iowa and back again to Kansas showed up as a faint jagged rectangle. There were some other long spidery lines. But not many. He had made very few other long-haul trips. Most of his movements had been concentrated close to Kansas City itself. At that position on the map the amber lines overlaid one another like a manic scribble. Almost a solid mass. The lines were bright where they repeated one over the