Page 45 of Chain Reaction

Turner bent down and picked up a coin from the pile on the floor. A quarter. She looked at it, both sides. She said, “OK, George Washington is your elbow. The eagle is your knee.”

“I think his first name might be Hugo.”

“Might be, or is?”

“He was on the phone with me. From his office. I heard someone in the background knock at his door and call out Hugo, are you in there? Like someone needed something from him but didn’t realize he was on a call.”

“Second name?”

“I don’t know, I swear. Doesn’t work that way.”

“Who’s the client?”

“Same answer. Are you kidding? We never know.”

“You’re a smart guy. You must be curious. You must make educated guesses.”

“This one pays through the nose. This is Silicon Valley. Easy guess is some big new tech guy with more money than sense.”

“Why new?”

“Because the old tech guys have people like us on staff. They don’t need the freelance market.”

“We’re leaving now,” Turner said. “You’re staying. Another four hours. We’re going to take your phones. You’ll have to get new. My advice is don’t give Hugo the number. Safer to cut all contact. Find an honest job.”

She loaded all six of their phones in her bag, plus the magazines from their guns. She went to get her suitcase from the bedroom. Reacher took the cash money from their wallets. He added it to the Chief of Staff’s roll. He looked at the big guy leaning on the upturned armchair. He said, “Give me your jacket.”

The guy said, “What?”

“You heard.”

The guy struggled out of it, awkwardly, full of aches and pains. Reacher took it from him. Turner came out of the bedroom with her suitcase. She said, “Let’s go.”

Outside the door they added their own guns to the load in Turner’s bag. She took out her work phone. She entered a long string of numbers. She put her fingertip on a square.

“It’s off,” she said.

The screen went blank.

They walked down the corridor and through the lobby and out to the sidewalk. The desert tan SUV was still there. Its driver was still asleep. No one was paying any attention to him.

Turner asked, “Why did you want that guy’s jacket?”

“You’re flying tonight,” Reacher said. “You have two Glocks, two suppressors, and three spare magazines, none of which you can take on the plane. I’m going to need a lot of pockets.”

Chapter 19

They got a cab outside the shopping mall and asked for domestic departures up at SFO. They spent the ride time taking things out of her bag and putting them into his pockets. Of which he now had many. At first he appreciated their versatility. And their capacity. Then he worried about them, because there had to be a theoretical point where a jacket became luggage, and he didn’t like luggage.

Turner said, “I’m going to tell Elwood about our computer breach. I think I have to. You would have, right?”

“We barely had computers.”

“Pretend you did.”

“I told my number two most things. Usually she fixed them for me.”

“Maybe Elwood will for me.”