‘So did I.’

‘Then maybe you did know him.’

‘We were half a million strong. Everyone went. Biggest deal you ever saw.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Didn’t your brother tell you?’

‘We don’t talk.’

‘It was hot,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s most of what I remember.’

‘What branch were you in?’

‘I was a cop,’ Reacher said. ‘Military Police. Criminal Investigation Division, man and boy.’

King half shrugged, half nodded, and said nothing more. He faced front again and stared out into the darkness.

On the shoulder a sign flashed by: Welcome to Iowa.

Sheriff Goodman aimed his car into the lounge’s rear lot and put his headlights on bright. The parked import was not a Toyota, or a Honda, or a Hyundai, or a Kia. It was a Mazda. A Mazda 6, to be precise. A five-door hatch, but the rear profile was sleek, so it looked pretty much like a regular four-door sedan. It was a late model. It was fire-engine red. It was empty, but not yet dewed over. It hadn’t been parked for long.

Next to it on both sides were plenty of empty spaces. Behind it was fifty yards of weedy gravel, and then basically nothing all the way to the Denver suburbs seven hundred miles to the west. In front of it was the lounge’s rear door, which was a plain steel rectangle set in a mud-coloured stucco wall.

A good spot. Not overlooked. No witnesses. Goodman pictured the two guys climbing out of the Mazda, shucking their suit coats, stepping across to their new ride, getting in, taking off.

What new ride?

No idea.

Taking off to where?

Not east or west, because they couldn’t get out of the county east or west without first driving south, back to the crossroads, and no one drives a getaway vehicle back towards the scene of the crime. So they had carried on north, obviously. Because the Interstate was up in that direction, just waiting there for them beyond the dark horizon, like a big anonymous magnet.

Therefore they were long gone. Either they had gotten out of the county minutes before the local northern roadblock had been set up, or they had gotten through it undetected minutes afterwards because at that point the deputies were still looking for a bright red car.

Goodman’s own fault, and he knew it.

He got on his radio and told his guys to close down their local roadblocks. He told them exactly why. He told two of them to secure the area behind the cocktail lounge, and he told the rest of them to resume their general duties. He called the highway patrol’s dispatcher, and got no good news. He checked his watch and calculated time and speed and distance, and he breathed in and breathed out, and he put his car in gear, and he set off back to the crime scene again, ready for his appointment with Special Agent Julia Sorenson.

His fault.

The two men were out of the state already.

It was the FBI’s problem now.

SEVEN

JULIA SORENSON FOUND the crossroads easily enough, which was not surprising, because her GPS showed it to be the only cartographical singularity for miles around. She made the right turn, as instructed, and she drove west a hundred yards towards a pool of light, and she saw a concrete bunker with a sheriff’s car and a deputy’s cruiser parked right next to it.

The crime scene, exactly as described.

She understood the cars better than the bunker. The cars were Crown Vics like her own, but painted up in county colours and fitted with push bars front and rear and light bars on their roofs. The bunker was harder to explain. It was rectangular, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep and ten feet tall. It had a flat concrete roof and no windows. Its door was metal, bowed and scuffed and dented. The whole structure looked old and tired and settled. The concrete itself was worn by wind and weather, spalled and pitted, hollowed out here and there into fist-sized holes. Brown flinty stones had been exposed, some of them smooth, some of them split and shattered.

She parked behind the deputy’s car and climbed out. She was a tall woman, clearly Scandinavian, handsome rather than pretty, with long ash blonde hair, most of which colour was natural. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She had solid black shoes on her feet, and she had a black pear-shaped shoulder bag which carried all her stuff except her gun, which was in a holster on her left hip, and her ID wallet, which was in her pocket.

She took out the wallet and flipped it open and walked towards the sheriff. She judged him to be about twenty years older than she was. He was very solid but not tall, like three-quarters of a football player. Not bad for an old guy. He was wearing a winter jacket over his uniform shirt. No gloves, even though the night was cold. They shook hands and stood quiet for a second, facing the concrete bunker, as if wondering where to start.

‘First question,’ Sorenson said. ‘What is this place?’

Goodman said, ‘It’s an old pumping station. It brought water up from the aquifer.’

‘Abandoned now?’

Goodman nodded. ‘The water table fell. We had to dig a deeper hole. The new pump is about a mile from here.’

‘Is the dead guy still in there?’

Goodman nodded again. ‘We waited for you.’

‘Who has been in there so far?’

‘Just me and the doctor.’

‘There’s a lot of blood.’

‘Yes,’ Goodman said. ‘There is.’

‘Did you step in it?’

‘We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.’

‘What did you touch?’

‘Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.’

Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.

‘There’s a light inside,’ Goodman said.

She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years ground water had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of ground water a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.

She moved on.

Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.

The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a grey sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his ribcage.