Page 136 of Chain Reaction

“Sure.”

“How many guests did you have?”

“We were full. We had the curb crew, and a big bunch of engineers.”

“Did they all sleep late the next morning?”

“Very.”

“Get the plow,” Reacher said. “We need to figure this out once and for all.”

—

The kid bumped the plow up the brand-new curb and centered it on the channel between EEF’s building and the next in line. Reacher scraped gravel away with his shoe, all along the length of the blade, to see where the desert started. Three inches down, more or less exactly. The sisters in Aurora had delivered full value. The kid lowered the blade slowly and precisely, until Reacher stopped him with a sign, half a pebble’s height above the native sand.

The kid set off slowly. The plow blade was set at a sideways angle, so the gravel rattled along it like a chute and bermed up high where it spilled out the end. Reacher walked behind the truck, still carrying the baby, with Turner on one side and Julia on the other, and Elwood bringing up the rear. The plowed area at their feet had plenty of pebbles left behind, but they were random and scattered, so the view of the desert crust was clear enough. The channel was maybe three hundred feet long. Nothing happened for the first hundred. They walked on slowly, listening to the wet burble of the exhaust pipes, smelling the sweet smell of benzine, staring at the ground. Nothing doing. Nothing there.

They walked on.

Twenty feet later they saw it.

Chapter 46

The plow had cleared a lane about seven feet side to side. Running all the way across it was a thin scar, less than an inch wide, dead straight, in some places sunken down a fraction, as if the dirt below had compacted, in other places standing proud, like a pale rope laid across the desert surface, the thickness of Reacher’s finger.

“Like the golf course,” Turner said. “In Mountain View. It’s exactly the same.”

Reacher nodded.

“Made with a chainsaw attachment on a backhoe,” he said. “The curb crew had a backhoe. The sisters in Aurora told us that. The golf course in Mountain View was a practice run. They hoped the cuts would come out invisible. But they didn’t. Hence the last-minute decision to use gravel to hide them.”

“Unbelievable,” Elwood said. “What’s down there exactly?”

“At least two fiber-optic cables,” Julia said. “Probably three or four. For redundancy. You don’t want to go to all this trouble and then lose your signal because your cable got nicked by a stone. So you hook up more than one path, just in case. Man, we were dumb. We drove ourselves crazy trying to figure this out. But we never left the software bubble. This is so bold. So physical. Someone cut a trench and dropped cables in it. We never even thought of that.”

Then she went quiet. The baby stared at her in alarm. Picking up the vibes.

“What?” Reacher said.

“Which building is stealing data?”

Reacher jerked his thumb.

“The middle one,” he said.

“Who owns it?”

“An A.I. start-up named Everything Everywhere Forever. They bought it four months ago. Nine months ago they were in a garage.”

“Seriously?” Julia said. “Everyone in my business knows EEF. Unbelievable growth. Absolute superstars. Are you saying those guys are bent?”

“As pretzels.”

“Are you sure?”

“Your husband was.”

“But it makes no logical sense.”