17 A Wanted Man

someone from somewhere urban.’
    ‘With taxi companies and car services and offices and an airport,’ Reacher said. ‘And maybe with a metro-area population around a million and a half. That’s something Alan King let slip. He said a million and a half people live where he lives.’
    ‘That’s potentially interesting. Unless it was misdirection.’
    ‘I don’t think it was. I don’t think they had a script. They were generally fast and smart, but it was a random question and an instant answer. No thinking time. Too fluid for a lie. Their other lies were slower and more clumsy.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘At one point McQueen used what I felt was an odd word choice. I was sceptical about the gas station being where the highway sign said it was, and when we got there McQueen said
You should have trusted me
. I think most people would have said
believed
instead. Don’t you think? You should have
believed
me?’
    ‘What does it mean?’
    ‘I’m not sure. In the service we were taught to listen out for odd words. The Russians had language schools, with perfect accents, and slang and so on and so forth, and sometimes the only tells were odd words. So for a minute I wondered if McQueen was foreign.’
    Sorenson drove on and said nothing.
    She was thinking:
The shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East
. She asked, ‘Did McQueen have an accent?’
    Reacher answered, ‘None at all. Very generic American.’
    ‘Did he look foreign?’
    ‘Not really. Caucasian, six feet, maybe one-sixty, fair hair, pale blue eyes, slender, long arms and legs, kind of gangly, but when it came to pulling the gun out of his pocket and running up the path and jumping in the car he turned out to be plenty athletic. Gymnastic, even.’
    ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘So the word choice was probably innocent.’
    ‘Except you have to look at the victim. He will have had dealings with foreigners.’
    ‘As a trade attaché? I suppose that’s the point.’
    ‘Have you ever met a trade attaché?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Me neither,’ Reacher said. ‘But I met a few folks who claimed they were trade attachés.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘How much help does Coca-Cola really need to sell its stuff around the world? Not very much, right? Generally speaking American products speak for themselves. Yet every embassy has a trade attaché.’
    ‘What are you saying?’
    ‘Have you ever seen a trade attaché’s office? I’ve been in two. Both had courtyard windows, not street windows, both were lined with lead and Faraday cages, and both were swept for bugs four times a day. I know the Coke formula is a secret, but that’s ridiculous.’
    ‘Cover for something?’
    ‘Exactly,’ Reacher said. ‘Every CIA head of station on the planet calls himself a trade attaché.’
    Sheriff Goodman was dog tired. And he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to take Delfuenso’s daughter out of school for the day. Or for a couple of days, or a week, or a month, or whatever Special Agent Sorenson might have in mind. His attitude was the opposite. He felt work and structure and familiarity were useful crutches in stressful times. He encouraged his own people to come in as normal no matter what had happened. Bereavement, divorce, illness in the family, whatever. In his experience routine helped people cope. Obviously he had to go through the compassionate motions, telling people to take all the time they needed, stuff like that, but he always added that no one would think less of them if they stuck to their tasks. And most of them seemed grateful for it. Most of them worked on as usual, and they seemed to benefit in the long term.
    But those were grown-ups, and Delfuenso’s kid was a kid.
    He drove out to the short row of ranch houses slowly and reluctantly. Four times in his career he had been required to tell a parent a child had died. He had never had to tell a child its parent had died. Not a ten-year-old, anyway. He didn’t really know how.
Just the facts
, Sorenson had said, in an earlier conversation.
Don’t say anything more until we know for sure
. Not very helpful. The facts were tough.
Hey kid, guess what? Your mom burned to death in a car
. There was no easy way to say it. Because there was no easy way for the kid to face it. She goes to bed one night all hunky dory, and she wakes up the next morning with a different life.
    Although:
Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure
.
    What were the facts? What