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“He was killed last night.”

“He was alive the last time we saw him. He was in a park near Woodside.”

“So what do you think happened to him?”

“He told us Brill had replaced him with a permanent crew on staff. Serious people, by all accounts. We assume their professional advice was to tie up the loose ends without delay.”

“Unbelievable,” Tow said again.

Turner looked first at Elwood, and then at Reacher. She said, “Is there anything else we need to ask Mr. Tow?”

Elwood shook his head no.

Reacher said, “Do you know where Brill and Cameron live?”

“No idea,” Tow said.

Chapter 29

They got back in Elwood’s rental. Turner sat up front. Reacher sprawled sideways in the back. Elwood said, “Where now?”

“Let’s go see Mountain View,” Reacher said. “We should get the lay of the land. We should find EEF’s building. To get a sense of what we’re dealing with.”

Elwood said, “Ma’am?”

“OK with me,” Turner said.

Elwood set his phone to maps and propped it in the cupholder. It showed their current location was pretty much dead center in Palo Alto. North was Menlo Park, and south was Mountain View. The three-part vertical stack that the world called Silicon Valley. That Reacher called fifty square miles surrounded by reality. Elwood threaded west to Route 82, where he turned south. His phone showed them passing the city limit, where Palo Alto became Mountain View, but out the window nothing changed. It was seamless. Same look, same purpose, always more and more. Like old-time Detroit, Reacher thought, except that instead of dirty red brick and belching chimneys and deafening assembly lines it had pastel stucco and air-conditioned hush and the quiet patter of keyboards. Otherwise it was the exact same proposition, except it was changing the world fifty times faster than the automobile ever did.

—

Finding EEF’s building was not difficult. A blind person might have missed it, but no one else could. It was a prominent glass cube on a rise above a golf course. Top to bottom and side to side the entire front face was covered with a see-through plastic banner with Everything Everywhere Forever printed on it in giant red letters. Three words, three lines. Each line was as wide as the building and more than four stories high. Each letter was more than forty feet tall. All the lights were on inside the building, which made the letters glow hot, like they had some kind of manic energy all their own. They were the biggest thing in the landscape. They were dead ahead. Elwood was driving slowly toward them.

He said, “I guess now we have a sense of what we’re dealing with.”

“Is that just crazy ego?” Turner said. “Or is that great marketing?”

“It’s both,” Reacher said. “Which is a bad combination. One day they want the whole world to look like that.”

“We need to figure out how we’re going to fix this.”

“You want tactical input?”

“All three of us. We should go someplace.”

“We should talk right here, with the consequences of failure staring at us through the windshield. I’m sick of those three words.”

“Ma’am?” Elwood asked, because there was a parking spot up ahead.

“Take it,” Turner said.

—

Elwood killed the engine and they got as comfortable as they could. They all looked straight ahead, through the windshield, partly to contemplate the price of failure, but mostly to make it easier to disagree. No face to face, no eye contact, no visual triggers. Necessary, for two-way communication up and down the chain of command.

“OK,” Turner said. “What do we know now?”

“More than we did,” Reacher said. “Less than we want to.”