17 A Wanted Man

where there had to be a window, which would be closed against the weather, but he could plunge through it elbows first, because cuts and bruises were better than a bullet in the head.
    Fight or flight.
    But neither thing was necessary.
    The blast of the shot peaked and started to die and Reacher heard the scrape and scrabble of feet on vinyl and he grabbed the end of the counter low down near the floor and jerked himself overhand to his right, one powerful instantaneous stroke, and he got his head out in the gap, and he saw McQueen more or less falling out through the lobby door, and then sprinting back along the neat little path, and hurling himself back into the car, and the car howling away with spinning wheels and blue tyre smoke. Reacher scrambled up to his knees and got there in time to see McQueen slam his door and the car rock through a wild 180 turn, back on to the road, facing south again, and then it accelerated away, hard, nose high, tail low, wheels spinning and scrabbling for grip and pouring smoke. The last thing Reacher saw through the haze was a brief flash of white in the Chevy’s rear window, which was Karen Delfuenso’s pale face, turning back in horror, her mouth wide open.
    Reacher stayed on his knees. Silence came back. White gypsum powder drifted down on him, slowly, weightless, like talc, on his shoulders, in his hair. Tyre smoke hung in the night air under the porte cochère, and it rolled slowly forward in a ghostly dissipating cloud, which followed the trajectory of the 180 turn, like a description, like an explanation, like proof, and then it disappeared completely, like it had never been there at all.
    Then the office door opened a crack and a short fat man stuck his head out and looked around and said, ‘Just so you know, I already called the cops on you.’
    Julia Sorenson heard her phone ping over the noise of her speeding car and she opened her e-mail and found an audio attachment from the emergency operator in D.C. Her phone cradle was hooked up to her car’s stereo system, which was the base Ford option and therefore nothing fancy, but it was plenty loud and clear. She turned the volume up and hit Play and heard a short fifteen-second recording, of two voices on the telephone, one in the Hoover Building and the other allegedly in Iowa.
    This is the FBI. What is the nature of your emergency?
    I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska
.
    What is the nature of your information?
    Just connect me, now
.
    Sir, what is your name?
    Then there was a short pause, just a beat really, and then:
Connect me now or you’ll lose your job
.
    Then there was another short pause, then dead air, then a new dial tone.
    Then nothing.
    She played it again, and listened exclusively to the caller, not the operator.
    I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska
.
    Just connect me, now
.
    Connect me now or you’ll lose your job
.
    Six seconds. Twenty-three words, spoken with urgency but also with a certain weird patience. A very nasal intonation, full of breath sounds, entirely consistent with a badly broken nose, the
M
sounds shading towards
B
sounds,
information
more like
inforbation
, and
Omaha
more like
Obaha
.
    She played it again, zeroing in.
    Probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska
.
    Or you’ll lose your job
.
    Clearly the strange urgent-but-patient blend meant the guy was accustomed to making important operational calls, or issuing instructions of some kind, and that he knew even alert and intelligent listeners needed a chance to get from zero to sixty. But he wasn’t just a businessman. Even a high-level guy used to trading millions on the phone would get a little more freaked about calling an FBI emergency line in the middle of the night. This guy sounded like it was routine to him. The
your
in
your field office
meant he wasn’t actually FBI himself, at least not currently, but he seemed to know how things worked, and in a sense the
your
sounded like he considered himself a peer, or a part of the same world.
Your field office, my field office
.
    The
probably
was intriguing. It was measured, and considered, and intelligent. As if the guy was in reality almost a hundred per cent certain he wanted Omaha, but didn’t want to derail the process with an initial assumption that could conceivably prove faulty later on. Or as if he wanted to recruit the emergency operator as a kind of partner, to let the operator own some component of