She drove toward Highway 36, but didn’t go past the front gate of 24900. Ortega’s entire ranch seemed to have been designed for one particular threat. He appeared to have imagined that what would come for him was a convoy of police or FBI vehicles, which would break through the gate and drive up the long, straight gravel road toward the top of the hill intending to arrest people. That was not what was coming for him. She drove to an intersection with a farm road that met Highway 36 and turned up the road.

Leah pulled off the road onto the farm to the east of Ortega’s ranch, where she had piloted on her drone reconnaissance nights. The ranch was much bigger than Ortega’s, and the acreage was almost entirely devoted to growing vegetables. She drove up the farm road to the only building, which was a one-and-a-half-story prefabricated metal rectangle, like a big garage.

She took out the drone and launched it. She piloted it upward along the rows of leafy green plants, up the hillside, and then to a higher altitude above the ridge. She made a wide left turn to bring it along the ridge to Ortega’s, then guided it in widening circles, looking for body heat. After fifteen minutes, she had found none. She brought the drone back down, put it into a black trash bag, locked it in the car, and began to walk up the hill.

She was carrying her M4 rifle with a night scope attached, her numberless Glock with its silencer screwed on, a supply of loaded magazines for both weapons, and her razor-honed marine Ka-Bar knife. She walked in the rows of vegetables, following the lines straight up the hill to the crest, where there was a dry plateau of uncultivated land occupied by stunted California oaks.

She reached the summit a few hundred yards from the house and turned toward it. The land up there was broken by rock outcroppings and a few steep depressions, so there was little mystery about why it had never been farmed. In many spots the dirt was so thin that it barely covered the bedrock. She slithered under a barbed-wire fence onto Ortega’s land, reached the water tank behind the house about ten minutes later, and sat down with her back to the tank.

She studied the house through her night scope and listened. She could hear and feel a gentle wind up here, but that was the only sound. The house was as she had feared. It had a flat roof with a wall that extended above it a little in case someone wanted to use it as a firing position. There were windows, but they were all tall and narrow, like the slit windows in a fort, and they were all closed.