I have the ‘thing’ worked out – the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.
There was nothing else in Carbone’s six-by-eight cell. Nothing significant, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing explanatory. Nothing that revealed his history, his nature, his passions, or his interests. He had lived his life in secret, buttoned down, like his Saturday-night shirts.
In their armory,” Summer said. “Cleaned, oiled, and loaded. They check their personal weapons in and out. They’ve got a cage inside their hangar. You should see that place. It’s like Santa’s grotto. Special armored Humvees wall to wall, trucks, explosives, grenade launchers, claymores, night vision stuff. They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by themselves.
He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.
She set out toward the stairs, and the Cadillac driver anticipated her coming predicament, and he threw out a Wait gesture, and went up to meet her. He collapsed her bag’s handle and carried it down, ahead of her, as if showing her the way. He put the bag in the trunk, and she got in the rear seat, and he got back behind the wheel, and the car pulled out and drove away.
Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter.
Human motivation is very complex. Most people don’t really know why they do things.
I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone’s office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I’d have to do is drop a name.
Reacher knocked on the door, and the voices fell silent. He opened the door, and saw a break room, very municipal, full of inoffensive colors and low chairs with fabric upholstery. In the chairs were five people, two men, three women, different ages, different types.
For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate.
Details. Evidence gathering. Surveillance. It’s the basis of everything. You’ve got to settle down and watch long enough and hard enough to get what you need.
The whole point of drifting was happy passive acceptance of no alternatives. Having alternatives ruined it.
They had a choice. They could have been upstanding human beings. But they chose not to be. Then they chose to mess with me, which was the final straw, and they got what they got. So I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
It had been everything he had dreamed it would be, multiplied by a million. She wasn’t a myth. She was a living breathing creature, hard and strong and sinewy and perfumed, warm and shy and giving.
Combat is about time and space and opposing forces. Like a huge four-dimensional diagram. First step is to misinform the enemy. Let him think your diagram is a completely different shape. You assume all communications are penetrated, and then you use them to spread lies and deceit. You buy yourself an advantage.
It’s a big complex muscle, it beats and it beats, thirty million times a year. If it lasts twenty-seven hundred million beats, which is ninety years, we call it old age. If it lasts only eighteen hundred million beats, sixty years, we call it premature heart disease. We call it America’s biggest health problem, but really all we’re saying is sooner or later, it just stops going.
He lay and felt the old anger inside him grinding like gears. Cold, implacable anger. Uncontrollable. They had made a mistake. They had changed him from a spectator into an enemy. A bad mistake to make. They had pushed open the forbidden door, not knowing what would come bursting back out at them.
A visitor from outer space would assume the viability of the United States depended entirely on the ability of the citizenry to carry eight-by-four sheets of board, safely and in vast quantities.
But, you know, nobody lives forever. Conceptually these things don’t come as a surprise.
We live in strange times. Poor people are fat, and rich people are thin. That never happened before.
Why me? Why didn’t you do it?” “Like they say in England, why buy a dog and bark yourself?