Page 32 of Chain Reaction

“What if there was a fire?”

“Most of them are false alarms.”

“How late can we hang it on the door?”

“Pretty late, I imagine. This is the Four Seasons, after all.”

“OK, we’ll divide the responsibilities. I’ll write it, you hang it on the door.”

“When?”

“As soon as we can.”

—

They woke up late, but earlier than they had predicted. Turner was still on East Coast time, and Reacher was alert to the opportunity. Ever optimistic. They were showered and dressed before their breakfast arrived. They ate it at the window. Turner had chosen something modest but unidentifiable. She had checked plenty of boxes for him, some of them unexpected, but he enjoyed them all. There were two jugs of coffee.

The window was at the front of the hotel, twenty floors above the lobby, looking across the street. Way down below on the opposite side was a short row of boutique stores. One of them had male mannequins in the window, wearing casual clothes. Next to it was a coffee shop that looked to be about directly opposite the lobby. It was all dark green paint and stained wood inside. Pleasantly dim.

“I decided to try your experiment,” Turner said. “I’m going to send Elwood to Colorado this morning. First available flight. I’ll tell him to investigate the vehicle fire in Summertown. It’s a plausible mission. He knows Bisley used the motel. It’s the kind of connection that should be checked. He won’t guess we’re playing Clue. The only question is, where should I be when I switch my phone on?”

“I think right here could be good,” Reacher said. “In Palo Alto it took them about half an hour to respond. Could be quicker here. So you could switch your phone on now and send the message, and then we could spend ten minutes buying me a shirt at the store across the street, and then we could hide out in the coffee shop next door to it. This building is more than thirty feet wide, so they know exactly where they’re going. We’ll see them run up the steps into the lobby, right in front of us. That will prove the baseline proposition. Either Elwood or their own hack is giving them your location. Then later when Elwood is in the air, we’ll do it again somewhere else, and if anyone shows up, then Elwood is in the clear. The hack is doing it. But if no one shows up, then yeah, Elwood is the bad guy.”

“This feels like a very high-stakes game of Clue.”

“I’m voting for the MP lifer against a bunch of weird kids who haven’t seen daylight since college.”

“Only one problem,” she said.

“Which is?”

“It takes longer than ten minutes to buy a shirt.”

“How could it?”

“Believe me.”

—

It took eleven minutes. Push and pull. Reacher would have taken two, Turner would have wanted twenty. He got a washed-canvas item in a faded tan color. A weighty fabric. It would replace both his old T-shirt and the loud plaid flannel. It was maybe an inch tight in the chest and a half-inch short in the arms, but apart from that it was entirely satisfactory. Near enough perfect. And who cared anyway? He assumed it wasn’t the last shirt he was ever going to wear. She paid and he bit off the tags and changed right there in front of the register. He asked the clerk to dump his old shirts. Two minutes later they were in the coffee shop, watching out the window.

Chapter 14

By then the business day was well under way. There was plenty of traffic on the street. Some of it pulled in and stopped at the Four Seasons lobby. Taxis, Ubers, black sedans, limousines, some of them picking up, some of them dropping off. The passengers getting in and out looked normal in every way. Luggage, briefcases, tourist guides, some excited expressions, some travel fatigue. Tips were peeled off pocket cash, and politely offered, and politely accepted. Some private cars pulled up, and were unloaded by bell staff, their keys handed off to valet parkers. Ten minutes passed. Reacher drank coffee from a mug. Turner drank a thick green liquid from a tall container. Some kind of a smoothie. She watched the window.

“Look,” she said. “Who’s this?”

A black SUV pulled in. Smoked glass, but not dark. Two men in the front, one in the back. Therefore not an Uber or a car service. The driver would be alone in the front, and the passengers would be side by side in the back. No paying customers would ride any other way. And they wouldn’t all be dressed the same, either. Usually the driver would look like he was on his way to a funeral, and the passengers would look like anything they wanted. Especially in San Francisco.

The two passengers got out. The driver stayed in. He moved on twenty yards and parked on a hydrant. He sat still and kept the engine running. The passengers were dressed in cargo pants and bomber jackets over button shirts. All tan colored, darker than Reacher’s new garment. Nothing tactical, no ballistic nylon. No straps or loops. Just plain workaday outfits, like a tech would wear to fix your AC. They went in through the brass-framed doors, and were lost to sight.

Turner checked her watch.

“Exactly twenty minutes,” she said. “The theory holds so far. The baseline proposition is proven. They won’t stay long. They don’t expect to find us. Who stays in a hotel room all day?”

“We could have,” Reacher said. “We could have dozed a bit. And woken up from time to time. That would have been the best part.”

“Not if armed men burst in. Do you think they have master keys?”