17 A Wanted Man

security. And we’re required to think primarily of your own personal safety.’
    ‘Safety from what?’
    ‘You’re tangled up with things you don’t understand.’
    ‘So really you’re doing me a favour?’
    Dawson said, ‘That’s exactly what we’re doing.’
    Reacher got in their car. In the back. Loose, not handcuffed, not restrained in any way except for the seat belt they made him wear. They said it was Bureau policy to follow best practices for driver and passenger safety. He was pretty sure the rear doors wouldn’t open from the inside, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on jumping out.
    Mitchell drove, east to the crossroads and then south into the hinterland. Dawson sat quiet alongside him. Reacher watched out the window. He wanted to study the route they were taking. The county two-lane heading south was pretty much the same as it was heading north. There was no direct equivalent of Sin City, but otherwise the terrain was familiar. Fallow winter fields, some trees, a few old barns, an occasional grocery store, an untidy yard with used tractor tyres for sale. There was even a repeat of the sad quarter-mile of fourth-hand farm machinery, equally lame, equally rusted. There was clearly a glut on the pre-owned market.
    ‘Where are we going?’ Reacher asked, because he thought he should, sooner or later, strictly for the sake of appearances.
    Dawson roused himself from a stupor and said, ‘You’ll see.’
    What Reacher saw was the rest of Nebraska and a good part of Kansas. Almost three hundred miles in total, the first half of that distance due south from where they had started, just shy of Nebraska’s east-west Interstate, all the way down to Kansas’s own east-west Interstate. They stopped and got very late lunches at a McDonald’s just over the state line. Dawson insisted on drive-through. The same way Sorenson had wanted to eat in Iowa. Reacher figured the FBI had an official policy. Probably a recommendation from a committee.
Don’t let your prisoner starve, but don’t let him get out of the car, either
. He ordered the same meal as the last time, twin cheeseburgers and apple pies and a twenty-ounce cup of coffee. He was a creature of habit where McDonald’s was concerned. The meal was passed in through Mitchell’s window and then passed over Mitchell’s shoulder to him and he ate it quite comfortably on the back seat. There was even a cup holder there. Cop cars had gotten a lot more civilized since his day. That was for sure.
    He slumbered through the rest of the two-lane mileage.
Slumber
was his word for a not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake state of semiconsciousness he liked a lot. Even if he hadn’t, it would have been hard to resist. He was tired, the car was warm, the seat was comfortable, the ride was soft. And neither Dawson nor Mitchell was talking. Neither one said a single word. There was no big three-way conversation. Not that Reacher wanted one. Silence was golden, in his opinion.
    Then they turned east on the Interstate, towards Kansas City, Missouri. Reacher knew his American history. Kansas City was first settled by Americans in 1831. It was first incorporated in 1853. It was called the City of Fountains, or the Paris of the Plains. It had a decent baseball team. World Champions in 1985. George Brett, Frank White, Bret Saberhagen.
    Its area code was 816.
    Its population was counted several different ways. Local boosters liked to bump it up by ranging far and wide.
    But most agreed its metro area was home to about a million and a half people.

FIFTY-FIVE
    THE INTERSTATE’S ARCHITECTURE and its appearance and its grammar were the same as its parallel twin a hundred and fifty miles to the north. It was equally straight and wide and level. Its exits were equally infrequent. They were preceded by the same blue boards, part information, part temptation. Some exits were for real, and some were deceptive. The blue Crown Vic hummed along. Dawson and Mitchell stayed resolutely silent. Reacher sat straight and comfortable, held in place by his belt. He watched the shoulder, and he watched the road ahead. It was getting dark in the east. The day was nearly over. The sun had come up over the burned-out Impala, and now it was disappearing somewhere far behind him.
    Then he felt the car slow fractionally ahead of an exit sign to a place with a name he didn’t recognize. The blue boards showed gas and food but no accommodation. But that deficiency was recent. The