17 A Wanted Man

like some impressions from you. Or informed opinion, or whatever else they taught you to call it in Cover Your Ass 101.’
    ‘What kind of informed opinion?’
    ‘Age?’
    ‘Forty-something, possibly,’ the guy said.
    ‘Nationality?’
    ‘He was American, probably,’ the guy said.
    ‘Because?’
    ‘His dentistry looks American. His clothing is mostly American.’
    ‘Mostly?’
    ‘I think his shirt is foreign. But his underwear is American. And most people stick to underwear from their country of origin.’
    ‘Do they?’
    ‘As a general rule. It’s a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And an intimacy issue. It’s a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.’
    ‘That’s science?’
    ‘Psychology is a science.’
    ‘Where is the shirt from?’
    ‘Hard to say. There’s no label in it.’
    ‘But it looks foreign?’
    ‘Well, basically all cotton clothing is foreign now. Almost all of it comes from somewhere in Asia. But quality and cut and colour and pattern all tend to be market-specific.’
    ‘Which market?’
    ‘The fabric is thin, the colour is cream rather than white, the collar points are long and narrow, the design of the checks is purely graphic rather than imitative of a traditional weave. I would say the shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.’

TWENTY-FOUR
    ALAN KING JACKED himself upright and craned to his left. He took a good long look at the fuel gauge. He said, ‘I think we’ll be OK for a spell more. Let me know when it hits the three-quarter mark.’
    ‘Won’t be long,’ Reacher said. ‘It seems to be going down awful fast.’
    ‘That’s because you’re driving awful fast.’
    ‘No faster than Mr McQueen was.’
    ‘Then maybe the fault has corrected itself. Maybe it was only intermittent.’
    ‘We don’t want to run out of gas. Not out here. It’s pretty lonely. Can’t count on getting help. The cops are all back at that roadblock.’
    ‘Give it another thirty minutes,’ King said. ‘Then perhaps we’ll start to think about it.’
    ‘OK,’ Reacher said.
    ‘Tell me about that thing with the letter A.’
    ‘Later.’
    ‘No, now.’
    ‘I said later. What part of that is hard to understand?’
    ‘You don’t like to be pushed around, do you, Mr Reacher?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been pushed around. If it ever happens, you’ll be the first to find out whether I like it or not.’
    King turned his head away and gazed forward into the darkness for a full minute more, completely silent, and then he slid down in his seat and tucked his chin back down and closed his eyes again. Reacher checked the mirror. McQueen was still out cold. Delfuenso was still awake.
    And she was blinking again.
    Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, backward two.
    T-H-E-Y,
they
.
    Forward eight, forward one, backward five, forward five.
    H-A-V-E,
have
.
    Forward seven, backward six, backward thirteen, backward eight.
    G-U-N-S,
guns
.
    They have guns
.
    Reacher nodded in the mirror, and drove on.
    The scene behind the cocktail lounge stayed quiet for five more minutes. The lab guys took a long sequence of close-up photographs inside the Mazda, using strobes. The car’s misty glass lit up from within with irregular flashes, like a thunderstorm viewed from a great distance, or a battle on the other side of a hill. Goodman’s deputies searched the ground and found nothing of significance. Sorenson interrogated federal and state databases by phone, looking for large men with recent facial injuries. She came up empty.
    Then came the sounds of a whispering V-8 engine and tyres on crushed stone, and the dip and bounce of headlight beams in the mist, and a dark sedan nosed its way north towards them. It was a navy blue Crown Vic, identical to Sorenson’s own, same specification, same needle antennas on the back deck, but with Missouri plates. It came to a stop at a respectful distance and two men got out. They were wearing dark suits. They stood in the lee of their open doors and struggled into heavy down parkas. Then they closed their doors and moved closer, scanning the scene as they walked, noticing and dismissing the county deputies, noticing and dismissing Sheriff Goodman, noticing and dismissing the crime scene technicians, before settling their attention on Sorenson. They stopped six feet from her and pulled IDs from their pockets.
    The same IDs as hers.
    FBI.
    The agent on the right said, ‘We’re from