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They filed into the Sequoia Suites lobby. The reception desk was dead ahead. To the left was the promised business center. Bright fluorescent light, laminate desks, padded chairs, boxy beige machines. To the right were double glass doors and a long corridor with numbered suites either side, and a fire exit all the way at the far end. The rate card was in a photo frame on the desk. Minimum one week. Not cheap. Another big bite out of their cash reserves. They asked for a suite as far as possible from the lobby. For peace and quiet and undisturbed concentration. The clerk took their money and gave them their keys. They walked down the corridor and let themselves in.

There was a bedroom and a bathroom. A washing machine and a dryer. A galley kitchen with a pod coffee machine and a microwave and a dishwasher. A welcome basket on the counter, full of coffee pods and tea bags, plus soaps and detergents, for all the various machines. There was a dining table and a desk. A living area with a sofa and an armchair, on a loud rectangular rug. Bright abstract paintings on the walls. Some mirrors. A flat screen TV. A big window with a white venetian blind tilted against a view of a parking lot.

“Perfect,” Reacher said again.

Turner stowed her suitcase in the bedroom. She opened up her shoulder bag and came out with her work phone. It was a flat glassy thing about the size of a paperback book.

“Now?” she said.

“Go for it.”

She held a button down and the screen came to life. She entered a long sequence of numbers and put her fingertip on a square. The screen lit up.

“OK, it’s transmitting,” she said.

She had messages. She scrolled through. Stopped at one, and read it.

“Shit,” she said.

“What?”

“I need to get back to D.C. tonight. I have a meeting, start of business tomorrow. With the Chief of Staff, in the Pentagon.”

“Can’t you blow him off?”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

“OK, one step at a time. We only need a couple of hours here.”

“How do we make it irresistible?”

“Give me the phone. Leave it switched on.”

She handed it over. He stepped to the kitchen. He spilled out the welcome basket. He laid the phone on the bottom and piled the coffee and the tea and the soaps and the detergents back over it. He arranged them neatly and pushed the basket back to the exact center of the countertop.

“OK,” he said. “You’re in here, working all day. Not just a five minute blip. They’ll ignore it at first, but not later. Not when it doesn’t go away.”

“I can’t lose my phone.”

“They’re looking for you, not your phone. They’ll come right back out again. They’ll assume they missed you.”

They closed the door behind them and left through the fire exit. Quicker than the lobby. The fire door was a standard-issue item. A red sign, a push bar. It let out to the parking lot they had seen from their window. It seemed to belong to the next-door establishment. They came out on the sidewalk and crossed the avenue and took a table in the deli, two from the front, well concealed, but with a decent view out.

—

Four miles southeast, a straight shot down Route 82, inside an expensive building in the expensive town of Mountain View, a young man named Saxby Cameron dialed his phone. His business partner’s private number. He said, “General Turner is on the air again.”

His business partner was an equally young man named Axel Brill. Brill was the visionary. Cameron was the know-how.

Brill asked, “Where is she?”

“The trace shows the Sequoia Suites on California Avenue in Palo Alto. Probably the end room on the east side of the building.”

“Is that a motel?”

“It describes itself as a business hotel. The data shows the average length of stay is five days. Typically Monday to Friday. Third-rate minds paying court to Hewlett Packard, I bet.”

“Stay on it, bro,” Brill said. “Tell me if she goes past fifteen minutes. I don’t want another hit and run.”