Page 29 of Chain Reaction

“Easier to do it the old-fashioned way. Hacking an NSA system is either impossible or serious hard work. With an uncertain outcome. Much better to bribe someone, or blackmail them, or threaten them.”

“Does Elwood need money?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Would he be vulnerable to threats or blackmail?”

“Certainly not blackmail. He has no skeletons in his closet. I checked, believe me. Threats? No more vulnerable than anyone else. Less than most, probably. He doesn’t scare easy. But he has family. Children, nieces and nephews, cousins, all that stuff. All of them hostages to fortune. So who really knows?”

“Could he track you if he was outside of D.C.?”

“Ideally he would want to be inside our building with full access to our system. It’s walled off. Which is why hacking would be hard work. Outside the building he would need the cell network or encrypted military wifi. He could set up a basic alert on his own work phone.”

“OK, we need to run an experiment. To put our minds at rest. Send Elwood somewhere far away on a wild goose chase. Somewhere that would involve a long plane ride on a commercial flight. See what happens. Like playing Clue. Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe. In this case Colonel Elwood in the building with the computer. What would happen if he wasn’t in the building and didn’t have the computer and had to keep his work phone in airplane mode? Would the tips keep on coming?”

Turner didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “You should pack your bag. We can’t stay here. We should take out the trash and move on to someplace else.”

Chapter 13

Turner opened the car’s rear hatch and backed it up all the way to room ten’s door. Reacher wrestled the dead guy off the floor and piled him into the load space. Still not leaking. Heavy, but hygienic. They moved on to room twelve and did the same things. Reacher collected his toothbrush. Turner fetched her suitcase. She put the Glocks and the suppressors in her shoulder bag. They climbed in the front seats and drove away.

They went north to Redwood City, and then west to Woodside, which as its name suggested was the last stop before the forested ravines that split the peninsula. Up ahead the GPS map showed tangled trails and switchback fire roads full of hairpin turns, lacing through a blank green background. Some kind of preserve. It was pitch dark. They nosed into a fire road. Their headlights showed massive trees all around. Oaks or redwoods, infinitely tall in the darkness. They creaked and lurched onward for a quarter mile. They stopped on a hairpin bend with a steep slope on their right. A crooked ravine. It looked deep. They couldn’t see bottom. Good enough.

Turner popped the hatch and Reacher hauled the two guys out one at a time and carried them to the edge. He lifted the first guy by his belt and his collar and threw him down the drop. There was a lot of crashing through undergrowth and then a dull pneumatic thump as the guy came to rest far below. Against a tree trunk, maybe, or a rock. Hopefully well out of sight. The second guy joined the first, maybe going further. More crashing, a later thump. Good for a couple of days. Maybe longer, if the local critters and varmints came out and got to work. Maybe forever, if coyotes and mountain lions got involved.

The fire road was too narrow to turn around, so they had to back up a hundred yards. Turner drove. Reacher was realistic about his skills behind the wheel. They made it to a wider spot and turned around. They crept and bumped their way back to the pavement. They drove back to Route 82. North was left, south was right. San Francisco, or Palo Alto.

“Let’s go north,” Reacher said. “Dump the car at the airport. Take a cab to the city. Find some big hotel.”

“Gives us a longer journey in the morning,” Turner said.

“We may need to rethink the morning. Our man at Lazarus Lorenzo is expecting a call from those guys, right about now, saying mission accomplished. He ain’t going to get it, which he’ll report on in the morning meeting, so everyone in the office will be uptight from coffee and donuts onward. The guys they sent have disappeared. That’s never a good feeling. They probably have a picture of you. There must be plenty in your file. Or in the newspapers. You wouldn’t even get in the door. Just showing up there is a risk now. They sent two men to kill you in your sleep. Their next move won’t be pretty.”

“We don’t have a choice. Lazarus Lorenzo is a bottleneck we need to go through. There is no alternative.”

“I could go alone.”

“I can’t allow that.”

“Pretend I don’t work for you.”

“They watched us come back from the restaurant. We saw them, they saw us. They could have been watching us for a hundred yards. Maybe they snapped your picture. Or at least called in your description. Maybe they had to. Maybe they needed authorization to up the job to a twofer. Or else they wanted to renegotiate their rate. Either way, you wouldn’t get in the door either. They know you now. They’re passing the word around, watch out for the Yeti, only bigger, wearing a terrible plaid shirt.”

“It was the only one I could find. All the others had writing on.”

“It’s not so terrible, really. But it stands out.”

“So what’s your command decision about tomorrow?”

“We’ll go north for now,” she said. “The rest of it, I’ll decide by morning.”

Reacher said nothing.

—

They left the car in a short-stay garage inside SFO, all wiped clean, unlocked, key in the cupholder. They walked to departures, and took the stairs down to arrivals, and came out again to join the taxi line. There were six people ahead of them. Some flights were still coming in. Late-night departures from the East Coast, delayed short-hauls, long-haul arrivals from all around the world. They had a five minute wait. Then their turn came. The next cab to show up rolled to a stop beside them. A Toyota Prius, but many model years older than Bisley’s recent rental.