How is that possible?'
'I don't know,' Cassano said.
'I thought at first maybe it's a limo. You know, like a car service. But it isn't. I saw the little squirt driving it himself. Not a car service driver. Just a glimpse, but it was him. The one who mouthed off at you.'
Cassano said, 'I didn't like him.'
'Me either. And even less now. They're way bigger than we are. Way bigger than we thought. I mean, they have their own cars on standby in every state? They fly in on the casino plane, and there's a car there for them, wherever? What's that about?'
'I don't know,' Cassano said again.
'Is it a funeral car? Do the Iranians run funeral parlours now? That could work, right? Mahmeini could call the nearest parlour and say, send us one of your cars.'
'I don't think the Iranians took over the funeral business.'
'So what else? I mean, how many states are there? Fifty, right? That's at least fifty cars standing by.'
'Not even Mahmeini can be active in all fifty states.'
'Maybe not Alaska and Hawaii. But he's got cars in Nebraska, apparently. How far up the list is Nebraska likely to be?'
'I don't know,' Cassano said again.
'OK,' Mancini said. 'You're right. It has to be a rental.'
'I told you it's not a rental,' Cassano said. 'It can't be. It's not a current model.'
'Times are tough. Maybe they rent older cars now.'
'It's not even last year's model. Or the year before. That's practically an antique. That's an old-guy car. That's your neighbour's granddad's Cadillac.'
'Maybe they have rent-a-wreck here.'
'Why would Mahmeini need that?'
'So what is it?'
'It doesn't really matter what it is. You're not looking at the big picture. You're missing the point.'
'Which is what?'
'That car was already at the hotel. We parked right next to it, remember? Late afternoon, when we got back. Those guys were there before us. And you know what that means? It means they were on their way before Mahmeini was even asked to send them. Something really weird is going on here.'
The metallic gold GMC Yukon turned left off the north-south two-lane and headed west towards Wyoming on another two-lane that was just as straight and featureless as the first. Reacher pictured planners and engineers a century before, hard at work, leaning over parchment maps and charts with long rulers and sharp pencils, drawing roads, dispatching crews, opening up the interior. He asked, 'How far now, John?'
The kid said, 'We're real close,' which as always turned out to be a relative statement. Real close in some places meant fifty yards, or a hundred. In Nebraska it meant ten miles and fifteen minutes. Then Reacher saw a group of dim lights, off to the right, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The truck slowed and turned, another precise ninety-degree right angle, and headed north on a blacktop strip engineered in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading towards what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two grey panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.
The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward towards a long low one-storey building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defence plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe centre of a land mass, away from coastal shelling and marauding aircraft and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished