I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless.
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?
They’re trying to carve gaps in society that are too big to bridge.
It’s been running for years. On social media. Conspiracy theories. Attempts to undermine the mainstream media.
He found people respond to crises in two ways. Some get to work fixing the problem. Others, proving the problem wasn’t their fault. Reacher liked the first kind. Rutherford seemed like the first kind. It was nice to see someone not dumping on him for a change.
You don’t let an armed man ride behind you unless you know him.
I never volunteer for anything,” I said. “Soldier’s basic rule.
The Devil’s favorite part of hell.
Fiction comprises stories about things that never happened to people who didn’t exist.
Because all those places have got stuff that we want. There’s oil, and diamonds, and uranium. Alcoa needs tin and bauxite and copper. Halliburton wants to get in there and make a buck. Corporations from Texas want to get in there and run those same damn jails.
Wrong place,” Reacher said. “Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.