He came up and over on the north side of the property, landing in a patch of overgrown moonshadow that had once been Aunt Abbie’s azalea bed, with the family’s small greenhouse situated between him and the mansion. He crouched there for a while, in case he had been seen. The half moon hanging over the house cast a light that was both useful and dangerous.

No one came to chase him, so he moved slowly and more or less silently along the base of the wall until he could see the front of the house. Two carriages stood in the drive. They were flashy and expensive-looking, just the kind of conveyances Roscoe Candy favored. How many men could he have brought with him in these two vehicles? Not more than ten, Jesse thought, probably fewer, but he made ten his provisional assessment. Say ten criminals including Candy himself, which—if Abbie, Phoebe, Soo Yee, and Randal were all present—made fourteen people in the house. Ten villains and four hostages. (Assuming Candy kept the hostages alive, a traitorous fraction of his thoughts reminded him.)

Where exactly were the hostages? To answer that question he would have to get inside the house. He checked his pocket watch, but in the pale moonlight it was all but unreadable. He guessed at least five of his allotted thirty minutes had passed, and he wished he’d held out for forty.

Years ago, when he had first taught himself to sneak in and out of this house, Aunt Abbie had been a sterner presence in his life. It had been no secret that she thought of her niece and nephew as half savages, raised amid corruption by a drunkard. Jesse’s habit of roaming the streets at will had been anathema to her, as her Bostonian sense of propriety had been to him. Prevented from leaving by the customary exists, he had been obliged to resort to other means.

He had been younger then, and less well fed. The years he had spent as an employee of the City of Futurity had put weight and muscle on him, not that he had been small to begin with. He doubted he could shinny up a drainpipe without tearing it free of its moorings. But there were many ways inside, some of which involved the kind of climbing that turned his strength into an asset. The easiest of these was the one that looked most difficult: by way of the high turret of the house.

Mr. Hauser had hired a prominent San Francisco architect to design his home, which was to say he had hired someone who combined the skills and sensibilities of a stonemason and a lunatic. Aunt Abbie once told him the building’s “elements” had been copied from European architectural history, including the turret, a miniature tower that projected from the second story and poked its cap above the highest roof. The turret housed two circular rooms, one above the other, and the uppermost of the rooms opened onto a narrow balcony, the widow’s walk, that formed a half circle where the turret projected from the flat stone walls.

The turret looked as unassailable as the medieval towers it was meant to emulate. But looks were deceptive. The turret route had been Jesse’s most reliable way in and out when he wanted to go undetected, precisely because everyone assumed it was unclimbable. In fact the route was perfectly simple: from the top of the greenhouse to the crenellated stone wall, where gaps in the masonry made for natural foot- and handholds, to the gently sloping roof of the stables, to the angle where that roof met the innermost point of the widow’s walk, then up and over the railing and through the door. No harder now than it had ever been, but there was a complication: It seemed that Roscoe Candy had posted a guard on the widow’s walk.

Jesse spent a couple of minutes watching as the guard did a lazy tour of the walk and stopped to light a cigar. A stupid move, but the behavior of Candy’s men had always reflected their leader’s cockiness. The flare of the man’s match showed a bearded face, a slouched hat. As soon as the guard turned to walk the other way, Jesse crossed the exposed patch of lawn to the corner where the greenhouse met the wall of the mansion, deep enough under the contours of the turret to conceal him from sight. The greenhouse was a low structure, barely tall enough to stand up in, once used to winter perennials but now empty. It was an arrangement of iron struts supporting sheets of leaded glass; the trick, he had learned, was to put your weight where the struts were. Jesse stood on his toes and reached until he got a grip on the outer edge of the greenhouse roof; then he used the adjoining wall to help lever himself up.

The next part of the climb was safely hidden from the widow’s walk but exposed to anyone who might step out onto the lawn, so he moved up the wall as quickly and quietly as he could. The quarried stone had been crudely cut, and his shoes dislodged cascades of pebbles, an unavoidable noise, though the street sounds helped to conceal it. Jesse was obliged to freeze in place when one such pebble rang against a pane of greenhouse glass below him. The guard paused, peered into the shadowed garden, and eventually went back to his rounds—no harm done, but it cost time.

Jesse’s arms and thighs were burning with fatigue by the time he gained the lower end of the sloped roof, but from there he made fast progress: across the shingles to the place where the widow’s walk met the wall, a quick vault over the ironwork railing, then he was behind Candy’s guard, who sensed his presence and began to turn at the same time Jesse put an arm around his throat and tightened it into a choke hold he had learned in his City training.

Jesse’s father had taught him never to kill an enemy, unless his enemy was the kind of snake that could be rendered harmless no other way. Jesse figured all of Candy’s hatchetmen qualified as snakes. He wrestled to the man to the floor and planted a knee on his back and wrenched the man’s head sideways until something broke. When he was sure the man was dead, he took the guard’s revolver and added it to his own arsenal, consisting of a Glock tucked under his belt, spare clips in one pocket of his pants, and a flash-bang grenade in another—everything he could carry without weighing himself down or leaving Elizabeth defenseless.

Time was passing. Jesse saw through the windows that the upper turret room was empty. He stepped inside and shut out the night behind him.

*   *   *

Elizabeth checked her watch.

Fifteen minutes had passed since Jesse had left. Half the time allotted for his scouting expedition. Long enough to plan her next move. She climbed down from the driver’s seat of the carriage and opened the door to the enclosed cab where Mercy and Theo were sitting.

All she had told them was that the trip to the docks had been delayed and that Jesse needed to “clean up a problem” before they could leave San Francisco. Probably they assumed it was something connected with the riots in Chinatown. She guessed they’d be willing to sit tight while Jesse and Elizabeth tried to secure the hostages, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure of that. Theo was a professional troublemaker, after all. So she climbed into the carriage and locked eyes with him. “Take off your pants,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I need something to wear that won’t get in my way, unlike this fucking dress. And I need you and Mercy to stay put and not leave the carriage. So, two birds with one stone. Give me your pants, Theo.”

Theo blinked and said, “I’m not sure they’ll fit you.”

Theo was built like a prep-school tennis player, so the remark might have had some warrant. But he bought his clothes locally and they didn’t look especially close-fitting or well tailored. Plus, he was pissing her off. “I’ll risk it.”

“Look, I promise I won’t—”

“I’m not negotiating here. This is not a request.”

For a moment she thought he was going to resist, which might have required physical persuasion, perhaps at Taser-point, but Theo seemed to run that scenario through his mind and realize how well it was likely to go. So Elizabeth ended up with the trousers and Theo ended up in a pair of cotton shorts, huddled in a corner of the carriage and glaring indignantly.