17 A Wanted Man

which case, for forty opponents, they would need six hundred thousand rounds. Not eighty-eight. Alternatively they would need to be a lot smarter than an average infantryman.
    Route 65 wore its status lightly. It was three hundred miles long and it split the state, but in person it looked like any other country road. Maybe a little wider, maybe a little better surfaced, but otherwise it had nothing to recommend it. Almost immediately it crossed the mighty Missouri on an iron trestle. But that was its only point of interest. After the bridge it ran north through the darkness, anonymously, never really deviating, never really staying straight. Then Sorenson said, ‘OK, we’re about ten miles south. I don’t know which way the kid at the McDonald’s was orienting himself. I don’t know if we’re going to see the Texaco station and the Lacey’s store first, or whether we’re going to hit the McDonald’s first.’
    Delfuenso killed the strobes. Five miles after that, she started to slow. Two miles later, she killed the rest of her lights. The world shrank around them, instantly dark blue and misty. There was no Texaco sign ahead. No blaze of light from a supermarket window. No red neon, no golden arches.
    ‘Keep going,’ Sorenson said.
    Delfuenso crept onward, at maybe twenty miles an hour. Not as hard as it looked. The yellow line in the centre of the road showed up grey and kept them on course. There was some forward visibility. Not much, but enough for twenty miles an hour. People could run faster.
    Still no Texaco, no Lacey’s, no McDonald’s. Or no McDonald’s, no Lacey’s, no Texaco, depending on what the order was going to be. Reacher looked left and right, as far as he could into the fields. They were dark and flat and empty. Nothing to see. Not that he expected a neon sign saying
Last Terrorist Hideout Before the Interstate
. But twelve or forty people usually put on some kind of a show. Maybe the glow of an outhouse lamp around a warped door, or a lookout’s cigarette, or a locked car’s alarm flashing gently on the dash, or the blue haze of an insomniac’s television behind a badly drawn drape.
    But there was nothing.
    Delfuenso said, ‘We must have gone wrong somewhere.’
    Sorenson said, ‘No, this is the right road. The Lacey’s should be dead ahead.’
    ‘Are those web site maps always accurate?’
    ‘Government GPS is always accurate. Point B is dead ahead, too.’
    Reacher said, ‘So make a note, in case you have to talk to Quantico. Tell them Whiteman Air Force Base would be the best place to land.’
    ‘Talk to Quantico? You mean, if we fail to get the job done and I’m the only survivor?’
    ‘Obviously there’s a number of possible outcomes.’
    ‘And that’s one of them?’
    ‘That’s two of them. We might fail to get the job done with no survivors.’

SIXTY-SIX
    A FAST FOOD restaurant and a grocery store and a gas station put out a lot of electric light, so they had been expecting to see a glow a mile or so before they got there. But as it turned out they were already halfway past the McDonald’s before they even noticed it. It was closed for the night. As was Lacey’s, the grocery store. As was the Texaco station.
    Reacher hoped they weren’t on the blue boards on the highway. Or it would be a classic deceptive exit. The gas station looked like a ghost ship. No lights anywhere. Just a tangle of strange dark shapes rising up out of the ground. The grocery store was a sullen grey mass, as big as a hill, but angular. And without the red and yellow neon and the fluorescent tubes inside, the McDonald’s was just another small A-frame silhouette against the sky. It could have been any kind of a low-rent operation, all closed up and done for the day.
    ‘I heard the manager shouting in the background,’ Sorenson said. ‘Something about clean-up time. I guess that’s what they do when they’re about to close.’
    Reacher said, ‘So where’s point B?’
    Sorenson did her twin-phone thing again. She calibrated them against the Interstate. She got them both lined up. She scaled them the same. She took a breath and said, ‘If the grocery store web site is accurate, then point B is about a mile northwest of our current position.’
    ‘That’s out in the fields,’ Reacher said.
    ‘It’s a farm,’ Delfuenso said. ‘I knew it would be.’
    They left the car parked sideways across three spaces in Lacey’s front lot. They tracked around the dark bulk of the