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“Summertown, Colorado,” she said. “The victim was a military officer who worked for me. I approved his trip.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They made it look like a mugging gone wrong.”
“I see. Like the burglary gone wrong last night.”
“My investigator was a cybercrime specialist. It’s possible he stumbled over something completely unrelated, but the assumption has to be his investigation was technical. Are data centers connected together?”
“Sure,” Tow said. “Of course they are. All kinds of ways, through hundreds of fiberoptic cables to hundreds of hubs and nodes and switchers. And then back again, and up and down from the cloud. It’s a rat’s nest, all over the world. Everything is interconnected. Data is always in motion.”
“My investigator’s concern seemed to be that data was being stolen. Could that happen?”
“Not really,” Tow said. “Not anymore. There were whistleblower hacks a few years ago, so everyone tightened up to a degree you wouldn’t believe. Anything worth stealing goes by super-private connections, which they call dark fiber, which has firewalls and intrusion detection all over it. Plus the data itself is totally encrypted. No point stealing it, because you won’t be able to read it. I’m afraid your investigator was wrong.”
“So Cameron isn’t stealing someone else’s algorithms?”
“I don’t see how. I wish I did. I’m not a fan of the guy.”
“Why not?”
“He always looks numb inside. Like he’s conflicted. He must know Brill is crazy half the time. Yet he aids and abets. Some of the talk is nuts. Brill says every second of everyone’s day will soon belong to him. The whole world over.”
Elwood was typing notes on his phone, both thumbs.
He asked, “What is Cameron’s first name?”
“Saxby.”
Elwood’s thumbs stopped moving.
He said, “I never heard that name before.”
“Old Norse,” Reacher said. “The by means a farm settlement and the Sax means Saxon origin. The name means the Saxon guy from the farm. Must have been a common name. There were a lot of Saxons and they all had farms.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Turner asked.
“I went to college.”
“You went to West Point.”
“It had a library.”
Tow said, “How does the second homicide fit this story? The lawyer in Menlo Park?”
Turner said, “On behalf of a client he called a couple of widowmakers in Denver and sent them to Summertown to kill my guy.”
“A lawyer would do that?”
“Shameful, I know. He seemed to be the local Valley go-between for such matters. Like a middleman or a matchmaker, presumably taking a cut. Subsequently he sent people after us four more times, but they all failed. As a result his client fired him for poor performance.”
“Who was his client?”
“He told us his client was Axel Brill.”
“Unbelievable,” Tow said. “When was this?”
“Last night,” Turner said.
