Page 54 of Chain Reaction

They planned the hit on a laptop computer. Street view, the satellite map, real estate listings, DMV records, voter rolls. All five sources brought bad news. In isolation the house itself would present no real challenge. A new-built four-bedroom Tudor, a profit-driven penny-pinching developer. A dozen ways in. You could huff and you could puff and you could blow the door down.

But there was no point thinking about the house in isolation, because it wasn’t isolated. It was surrounded. Street view and the satellite map showed it shoehorned onto a narrow lot, with close neighbors either side, like beads on a necklace. Same on the other side of the street. Another necklace, curving left and right in a random tangle of bending roads and lollipop cul-de-sacs. Either some designer’s attempt to make the place less boring, or a software program told to cram as many units as possible onto whatever rectangular acreage the developer had gotten ahold of.

Every house would have a doorbell camera. An expected amenity in that section of the market. The curving streets meant every inch of everywhere would be covered multiple times from multiple angles.

It got worse. The real estate listings showed the place had nothing for sale and nothing to rent. Occupancy was a hundred percent. But the DMV showed about half of the residents didn’t have driver’s licenses. The voter rolls showed about half of them weren’t registered to vote. Which meant, given the location in prime commuter Virginia, the place was full of government people, not yet long enough in post to have officially changed their domiciles, or perhaps foreign diplomats from the embassies and the missions, who couldn’t vote anyway, and who used their home-country licenses. Or both. Or a mixture. It wasn’t Georgetown, but even so the listings showed the rents were pretty high, so the residents would be at least B-plus or A-minus people. They would be directors of humdrum agencies no one paid much attention to, or trade attachés or assistant undersecretaries from first-world nations. Not insubstantial people.

Which meant, because of vanity or policy or an excess of caution, a lot of houses would have more than a doorbell camera. There could be serious security systems, proximity sensors, full backyard coverage, automatic police alerts. Official handymen could have been sent over to beef up the doors and fit better locks. Would a brigadier general’s house be given that kind of treatment? Their unanimous answer was yes, of course it would, given who she was. The army’s own FBI. The top dog.

They concluded there was only one available tactic. It had to be a disguised plain-sight operation, and it had to be a solo mission. It couldn’t work any other way.

—

Reacher’s burner rang on the bedside table. Turner, obviously. He answered and she said, “I forgot to ask where you’re staying tonight.”

“North of our Swiss mountain chalet,” he said. “A place with palm trees and rock landscaping. Like it was out in the Mojave Desert.”

“What’s it called?”

He told her, and she said, “I’m going to look it up online.” He heard keyboard clicks, and then she said, “It looks very nice.”

“It’s adequate in several respects.”

“Two stories,” she said.

“I’m upstairs, second room from the end on the right.”

“I wish I was.”

“Me too.”

“Elwood called me. He made it to Denver OK. His ETA in San Francisco is eight in the morning. He’s going to rent a car. I gave him your number. He’ll make contact when he sets out for Palo Alto.”

“When are you getting here?”

“Mid-afternoon West Coast time, I hope. I plan to leave here as soon as I can.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Drinking tea, trying to decide whether I should go to the office. I only just got out of the shower.”

“What are you wearing?”

“A towel.”

“Damn,” he said.

“I could model the look tomorrow, if you like.”

“Get some sleep.”

“I can nap on the plane if I need to.”

Reacher paused a beat.

He said, “Wait.”

I’m going to look it up online.