Page 89 of Chain Reaction

“An emergency meeting,” Turner said. “Zero dark thirty tomorrow morning. Some big panic. We need to get back right now.”

“We’ll leave in twenty minutes,” Reacher said. “First we need EEF to see you transmitting.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Fifteen. Use them to check where Julia Bisley went to school.”

“Why now?”

“If they were classmates, I’ll come with you.”

“Why?”

“I should talk to her.”

“Why you?”

“I can tell her I killed the men who killed her husband. I can tell her how, if she really wants to know. In my experience widows find that kind of information very comforting, deep down inside. Human nature.”

Turner was quiet a beat.

“Deal,” she said. “Fifteen minutes.”

She typed a lot of stuff with her thumbs, and tapped, and swiped, and selected, and read. Eventually she looked up and said, “They were classmates. Four years in Cambridge as boyfriend and girlfriend, then a young career couple living together, then eventually husband and wife when they got settled. She’s a software engineer.”

Chapter 32

Down on the nerd floor Saxby Cameron dialed Axel Brill’s private number. Brill answered and Cameron said, “General Turner and Colonel Elwood are back on the air.”

“Where this time?”

“Lazarus Lorenzo’s office in Palo Alto.”

“What the hell, bro?”

“They’re sending us a message,” Cameron said. “They know what we did.”

“How could they know? They never heard of Hugo Blackwell. He’s not in their system, right?”

“Not a word.”

“We were triple-insulated. We only ever spoke on burner phones. We never even met the guy. What the hell is happening?”

“Only one conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“Think about the decoys and the hit and runs. They’re leading us by the nose. They’re working off the books and putting nothing in their system for us to find. Because they’ve figured out we’re hacking them.”

“How could they? You said we leave no trace.”

“Lateral thinking. Circumstantial evidence. How else did we know Bisley was going to Summertown?”

“You said they bought the mugging story.”

“I said there was nothing in their system that disputed it. Because they’re off the books. They’re bypassing their own damn system, bro. Because they know we’re reading it.”

“What are we going to do?”