Not much, was the consensus. And it was true. But it was equally true there was even less to see in any other direction. Somehow the dark was darker due west and due north. As if there really was something there in the northwest quarter. Invisible, but there. They strained their eyes, they relaxed, they defocused, they looked away, they tried peripheral vision. They saw nothing. But it felt like a substantial kind of nothing.
Reacher said, 'Can you do Google Maps?'
Sorenson said, 'Cell service is not good enough out here.'
So they went back to the car and Reacher fiddled with Bale's GPS. He zoomed it in, and in, until he was sure all the little roads were there. Then he moved their current position to the right of the screen.
The space behind Lacey's was bounded on the right by Route 65, and on the left by a small road running parallel, and at the top by one east-west two-lane, and at the bottom by another. An empty box, more or less square, but not quite. Technically it was a parallelogram, because the roads at the top and the bottom sloped down a little from right to left. It wasn't a particularly big empty box. But it wasn't small either. Exact scale was hard to determine on the GPS screen, but worst case, the box was a mile on a side. Best case, it might have been two miles by two. Reacher said, 'That's somewhere between six hundred and forty and two thousand five hundred and sixty acres. Is that too big for a single farm?'
Sorenson said, 'There are just over two million individual farms in the United States, working almost a billion acres, for an average farm size of close to five hundred acres. Statistics. We find them useful.'
'But an average is just an average, right? If there's a bunch of moms and pops working five or ten acres, then someone is working twenty-five hundred.'
'Livestock, maybe. Or industrial corn.'
'There's livestock here. I saw the hoof marks.'
'You think it's all one farm?'
'Maximum of five,' Reacher said. 'Shouldn't take too long to check them all.'
Delfuenso's phone buzzed. The secret phone. From her bible. It was set on silent, but it didn't sound very silent to Reacher. Whatever little motor produced the vibration was whining away like a dentist's drill. Delfuenso answered and listened for a long minute. Then she acknowledged and hung up.
'My boss,' she said. 'With a new factor for my theory. He wondered if it might be pertinent.'
'What theory?' Reacher said.
'The thing I claimed to be working on to get the GPS data. The thing I had to be shy about.'
'What new factor?'
'Now the State Department spokespeople are denying the dead guy in the pumping station was anything to do with them. They're saying he was just a guy. Definitely not a consular official, or any other kind of employee. Double definitely not, fingers in their ears, la, la, la.'
'But he was fingerprinted. He's in the system now.'
'An understandable error. Forensics is always quick and dirty in the field.'
'Bullshit,' Sorenson said. 'My people are good.'
'I know they are.'
'So?'
'So maybe it's State's spin control that's quick and dirty.'
Reacher nodded. 'Why don't they just take out an ad in the paper? This way they're practically proving the guy was CIA.'
'To us, maybe. But we knew already. This way the rest of the world can sleep easy at night.'
'Or is it a legal thing? This way they can deny they were operating inside America.'
'Everyone knows they operate inside America. They gave up hiding that a long time ago.'
'Then they're proving something else, too. This guy wasn't just CIA. He was bent CIA. He wasn't undercover. He was guest starring. Why else deny him?'
'You think a CIA head of station was a double agent?'
'They can count that high over there. Being a triple agent might pose a challenge.'
'I don't like the idea of a CIA insider talking to Wadiah.'
'Didn't happen,' Reacher said. 'Your guy knifed him too soon for talking.'
'They'd been together before. They must have been. At least for a few minutes. I think they walked to that bunker as a threesome.'
Like suddenly the first guy had bolted ahead, and the other two guys were hustling to keep up.
'Probably,' Reacher said.
'So they must have talked.'
'Probably.'
'I want to know what they said.'
'We'll ask McQueen. When we find him.'
'Tell me the answer to that word game. Where you have to speak for a minute without using the letter A.'
'Is that how you want to remember me?'
'I could win a couple of bar bets.'
'That was a game with Alan King.'
'I overheard.'
'Later,' Reacher said. 'When we've found McQueen. He'll want to hear it too.'
'He was asleep.'
'I doubt he ever sleeps.'
'How many acres was it?'
'Doesn't matter about acres. This is about buildings. We'll know it when we see it.'
And they saw it and knew it exactly ten minutes later, after six hundred yards on foot.
SIXTY-SEVEN
THEY FORMED UP in back of the grocery store, where they had stood before. They aligned themselves with the road, for reference, and they turned forty-five degrees left, as before. Northwest. Reacher took a last look at McQueen's GPS tracks. At maximum magnification they hooked around an angle, like an upside-down letter J. Clearly there was a vehicle entrance off the top east-west two-lane. McQueen had driven north on Route 65, past the McDonald's, past the Lacey's store, past the Texaco station, and then he had turned left, and left again, into a driveway. He had done all that enough times to burn the evidence into a photograph. And its bright end point was just about right on the diagonal across the parallelogram. About halfway along its length. Which in terms of miles would be half of the square root of two, at the pessimistic end of the scale, or half of the square root of eight, at the optimistic end. Close to thirteen hundred yards, or close to twenty-five hundred yards. Either twenty minutes' walk, or forty. Or somewhere in between. They would be coming up on whatever it was from the rear three-quarter direction. Not bad. Better than the front, certainly, and better than head-on towards the back. Not as good as sideways on. If any house had a blank wall, it would be on the side. Or a wall with token windows, maybe with pebble glass, powder rooms or bathrooms. Like the place in the suburbs, sixty miles away.
They separated laterally as much as they dared. Delfuenso started out way to the left, and Sorenson started out way to the right. Reacher was in the middle, and he could see both of them, but only just. They couldn't see each other. Delfuenso set out first. Then minutes later Sorenson walked out into the dirt. Reacher came last. Three targets, widely separated side to side, widely separated front to back. Dark clothes, dark night. Maybe not yet smarter than the average infantryman, but not any dumber, either.
There was heavy mud underfoot, all churned up and lumpy and unreliable. Some of it felt slick and slippery. Animal dung, Reacher assumed, although he still couldn't smell anything. He kept his eyes fixed on an imaginary spot on the horizon, to keep his progress straight. He had Bale's Glock in his right hand, down by his side. Ahead of him and far to his left he could just about see Delfuenso. A shadowy figure, barely there at all. But she was making decent progress. Short steps, energetic, really working it. He could see Sorenson a little better. She wasn't so far ahead. And she was marginally paler than Delfuenso. Blonde, not dark. The moon was still out in places, but it was low in the sky and not bright.
Safe enough.
So far.
The mud kept their speed low. Reacher revised his estimates. Not twenty minutes or forty. It would take closer to thirty minutes or sixty. Frustrating, but not a disaster. The Quantico guys were still at thirty-five thousand feet. Probably somewhere over West Virginia. Still hours away. He trudged onward, slipping and sliding.