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“You think it will?”

“The glory days of journalism are long gone. We all know that. Ancient history now. But that’s where my heart is. A.I. knows what it knows, but what about the stuff people hide from it? Can it ask the tough questions? Can it smell bullshit? That’s what humans bring to the party. Can’t replace that.” He dug in his pocket and came out with a business card. He slid it across the table. He said, “My name is Adam Tow. Spelled like hauling a trailer, not the thing on your foot. Check out my podcast. If you like it, subscribe.”

Reacher took the card. He put it in an inside pocket, next to a Glock 17 magazine full of nine-millimeter Parabellums. He said, “OK, I’ll give it a try. Best of luck with the story.” He drained his cup and stood up to go. He said, “Nice to meet you,” and stepped back out to the street.

—

Seven miles away, in the neighboring town of Mountain View, up on the glossy, glassy executive floor of Axel Brill’s expensive building, his flip phone rang. The concierge, obviously. He alone had the number. Brill answered and the concierge said, “I have a first-rate crew standing by. They know the location. They understand the mission. They will execute at their discretion, but before six o’clock tomorrow morning. All I need is your authorization for the payment.”

Brill said, “I like that word.”

“Which word?”

“Execute.”

“Do I have your go-ahead?”

“How much do they want?”

The concierge named a figure. Enough to buy a decent house in most parts of the country, or a brand-new Rolls-Royce Phantom, or a round trip to Beijing on a Gulfstream G650 at near supersonic speeds.

Brill said, “Whatever, bro. Tell them to get it done.”

—

Reacher crossed California Avenue and walked west on a long side street, toward El Camino Real. The street was lined with restaurants of every kind. Reacher needed one with no coat check. He figured handing over his borrowed Carhartt would result first in a sprained wrist for the coat check attendant, and second in a call to the police department. He needed the kind of place where it was acceptable to hook a coat over the back of a chair. Recognizable food was a minor consideration.

In the end he found a retro boutique burger joint carefully gussied up to look like it would have anyway, if it had been real and left alone for fifty years. He went in and was pointed toward a table. He ordered. His food arrived. He lingered over it, and then lingered some more over dessert, and then coffee. He liked solitude. He liked being left alone. But right then he felt lonely. He missed Turner’s company. His waitress did her best to help. She came by to refill his cup more often than she needed to. Each time she smiled a warm, encouraging smile, like deep down she was worried about him.

Eventually he paid and left and walked west in the mid-evening dark to the motel he had picked out from the taxi. It was a desert-themed place with plenty of stones and up-lit palm trees, two stories high, ten rooms long. Not the Four Seasons, but not his usual kind of dive, either. The Chief of Staff could afford it. He got a second-floor room. He put his coat in the closet and his toothbrush in the bathroom and his burner phone on the nightstand next to the bed. He figured Turner would be home soon. She would call Elwood first, and then she would call him. He lay down on the bed to wait.

—

More than twelve hundred miles to the east, in Summertown, Colorado, where it was an hour later, Colonel Dexter Elwood was ready for bed. He had largely concluded his investigation. He had driven the mile and a half through the gathering dark to the patch of scorched blacktop and the hoop of buckled solar panels. He had talked to the clerk at the motel desk, who had been happy to cooperate. The kid was in a lighthearted mood, like he had just gotten some good news. He showed Elwood the video from the previous morning. The light was bright and the quality was excellent. Vivid color, high definition, sixty frames a second. The wide-angle camera on the car portico was the most dispositive. It showed a large man leave the motel and walk toward the diner directly opposite. Then in the far distance the large man had a brief altercation with the driver of a white pickup truck in the diner’s parking lot. Both men entered the diner itself. The large man came out alone. He drove away in the white pickup and turned west on the two-lane. Later a big black off-road truck flashed east to west through the camera’s field of view. Not long after that the white pickup passed by in the opposite direction. The kid at the desk said the large man was a corporate security consultant.

Elwood wrote up his notes and changed into pajamas.

—

A phone rang in Reacher’s second-floor room. But it was the wrong phone, still in his coat, hung in the closet. The tall guy’s burner, from Denver. Hugo, presumably, impatient to know if the Summertown job was finished yet. Reacher let it ring out and go to voicemail. Uncertainty and doubt are our friends right now. He made a mental note of the time. As of then the clock was ticking. Hugo might hire a substitute crew immediately. Reaction time in that part of the world seems to be about ninety minutes.

Then four minutes later Turner called, on the burner next to the bed. Reacher answered, and asked her, “Did you get home OK?”

“Ten minutes ago,” she said. “I just spoke to Elwood. So did you, apparently.”

“I thought I should. Hugo just called the Denver guy’s burner. Didn’t get an answer. He might not wait till morning. He might be calling someone else right now. He’s got ninety-nine to choose from.”

“Good call. I was thinking the same. So I told Elwood to head back to Denver immediately. I think he was already in bed. I told him to use the airport hotel for the rest of the night and then get the first flight out to SFO. Better safe than sorry.”

“He’ll be grumpy when he gets here. Colonels like their full eight hours of beauty sleep, as I recall.”

“Any progress?”

“I got a pretty good description of Hugo.”

“How?”

“From an acupuncturist.”