Synopsis:
“You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.”
You do not mess with Jack Reacher.
He is as close to untraceable as a person can get. A loner comfortable in his anonymity and solitude. So when a member of his old Army unit finds a way to contact him, he knows this has to be serious.
You do not mess with the special investigators.
In the past, the elite team always watched each other’s backs. Now one of them has turned up dead in the California desert and six more are missing.
Reacher’s old buddies are in big trouble. And he can’t let that go.
Review:
Author Lee Child was promoting the prior installment in the Jack Reacher series when he realized that the date — June 21 — was nagging at him. Eventually, he figured out that it was the tenth anniversary of the day he was fired from his previous job as a presentation director with Granada Television, responsible for such blockbuster television series as Brideshead Revisited and Prime Suspect, at the age of forty. His dismissal served as the impetus for his subsequent career as a best-welling novelist.
Recognizing that ten years had passed since that fateful day set him thinking about his former colleagues and wondering where they all were. “What were they doing? Were they doing well, or struggling? Were they happy? What did they look like now? Pretty soon I was into full-on nostalgia mode,” he recalls. He was inspired to make his next Jack Reacher novel “about a reunion. I decided to throw him back among a bunch of old colleagues that he hadn’t seen for ten years, people that he loved fiercely and respected deeply.” And Child says he also “wanted him to wobble just a little this time, to compare his choices with theirs, to measure himself against them.” The result was Reacher: Bad Luck and Trouble, originally published in 2007.
Jack Reacher carries only a folding toothbrush and his passport with him. He doesn’t even keep a change of clothing – to press his plain t-shirt and jeans, he places them under the mattress wherever he sleeps for the night. He has no address and no cellular telephone. He knows his funds have dwindled to almost nothing. In Portland, Oregon – where the Greyhound bus he was riding stopped – he needs cash. He possesses an almost “savant ability with arithmetic.” So, just as he always knows what time it is without looking at a clock, he also knows what his bank balance should be, but still confirms it every time he withdraws cash from an ATM and has never been surprised to see a different total. Until now. Because there is one thousand and thirty dollars more in his account than there should be.
It is not a random number. “1030” is the radio code used by a military police officer who needs urgent assistance from a colleague. By calling his bank and feeding hints to a helpful customer service representative, Reacher learns the deposit was made in Chicago by Frances L. Neagley. She currently works for a private security provider in Chicago, but Reacher knew her for ten of the thirteen years he served in the U.S. Army’s military police. For two of those years, she was a member of the special investigations unit he led. In fact, he recruited her. She would only deposit that specific sum of money into his bank account for a very particular reason. It’s a call for help.
When Reacher learns Neagley has traveled to Los Angeles, he flies there, too, and finds Neagley in a Denny’s restaurant just off the 101 in Hollywood.
Neagley gives Reacher an autopsy report, telling him, “Calvin Franz is dead. I think someone threw him out of an airplane.” Reacher’s next mission has begun.
Franz was also a military police officer in the Army and a member of Reacher’s unit. Even though the team members haven’t seen each other since it was disbanded, they have never stopped caring about each other. Franz kept their names in a book and talked about his days as a special investigator. So his wife called Neagley to inform her of his death. He was a solo private investigator handling mostly background checks. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department believes he was thrown out of an airplane heading west from Las Vegas. The autopsy report tells a different story.
Neagley convinces Reacher to reassemble their old unit to find the truth about what happened to their former colleague and friend. Reacher personally selected the team that also included Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Stanley Lowrey, Manual Orozco, David O’Donnell, and Karla Dixon. O’Donnell and Neagley were captains, and the rest were majors – “talented journeymen working together, no stars, no egos, mutually supportive, and above all ruthlessly and relentlessly effective.” Their mantra? “You do not mess with the special investigators.” But someone failed to get that message and Franz is dead.
All except Reacher have established residences, jobs, families. Theoretically, they should be easier to locate. But that has not proven to be the case. Something is very wrong, and Neagley convinces Reacher to help her find answers. They owe it to Franz . . . and each other. But they are being followed and watched, their every movement reported up a chain of command. Are they all in danger? And if so, why?
Methodically, Reacher and Neagley begin following leads. They learn that Lowrey died earlier, but they set out to find the remaining five members of the team. Eventually, O’Donnell and Dixon make their way to Hollywood and assist in an investigation that also takes them to Las Vegas and other parts of the greater Los Angeles area as they learn about the ventures in which Swan, Sanchez, and Orozco became involved in their post-Army lives. Their methods are unconventional and, at times, illegal, but inarguably creative, often innovative, and, for the most part, effective.
Meanwhile, in New York City, forty-year-old Azhari Mahmoud has begun making his way west using passports bearing several other Western names. What is his connection, if any, to Franz?
Reacher: Bad Luck and Trouble is a fast-paced, tautly constructed mystery that keeps readers guessing as Reacher and his teammates painstakingly examine the available evidence, struggling to understand why Franz was killed in such a specific and brutal manner. The unit members still function cohesively, anticipating each other’s thoughts and finishing each other’s sentences. They have never lost the skills they honed as part of the special investigations unit, and the other members insist that Reacher again serve as their leader, even though he is reluctant to do so. His physical size and strength are both an asset and a hindrance – he reacts and runs slower than the others, but his intellect and capacity to extrapolate information is unmatched. Still, the clues they locate are inconclusive and, at some junctures, downright confusing. They find themselves stymied more than once and are fallible. They fail to appreciate the significance of some evidence, overlook significant details, and even trust outsiders when they should not, their humanity endearing them to readers. Child skillfully brings the missing team members to life which, coupled with the team’s devotion to them, compels readers to become invested in their futures and cheer for Reacher, et al. to find them in time. Alas, there are some heartbreaking moments for Reacher, the surviving team members, and readers as Mahmoud navigates toward his destination and goal, and Reacher and the others manage to unravel what turns out to be a fairly complex and decidedly sinister scheme. The only remaining questions then are whether Reacher and his team can devise and implement evasive maneuvers quickly enough to save Mahmoud’s would-be targets . . . and each other.
Reacher: Bad Luck and Trouble is a riveting, action-packed thriller that resonates emotionally as Child showcases how intensely personal the mission is for Reacher. He and his team were “like a family.” As Neagley reminds him, “We had one another’s back. Then. Now and always. It’s a karma thing. Someone killed Franz and we can’t just let it go.” Child deftly and entertainingly proves that what Reacher and the rest of the unit told themselves was and remains true: “You do not mess with the special investigators.”
Excerpt from Reacher: Bad Luck and Trouble
Chapter One
The man was called Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a Bell 222. Franz had two broken legs, so he had to be loaded on board strapped to a stretcher. Not a difficult maneuver. The Bell was a roomy aircraft, twin-engined, designed for corporate travel and police departments, with space for seven passengers. The rear doors were as big as a panel van’s and they opened wide. The middle row of seats had been removed. There was plenty of room for Franz on the floor.
The helicopter was idling. Two men were carrying the stretcher. They ducked low under the rotor wash and hurried, one backward, one forward. When they reached the open door the guy who had been walking backward got one handle up on the sill and ducked away. The other guy stepped forward and shoved hard and slid the stretcher all the way inside. Franz was awake and hurting. He cried out and jerked around a little, but not much, because the straps across his chest and thighs were buckled tight. The two men climbed in after him and got in their seats behind the missing row and slammed the doors.
Then they waited.
The pilot waited.
A third man came out a gray door and walked across the concrete. He bent low under the rotor and held a hand flat on his chest to stop his necktie whipping in the wind. The gesture made him look like a guilty man proclaiming his innocence. He tracked around the Bell’s long nose and got in the forward seat, next to the pilot.
“Go,” he said, and then he bent his head to concentrate on his harness buckle.
The pilot goosed the turbines and the lazy whop-whop of the idling blade slid up the scale to an urgent centripetal whip-whip-whip and then disappeared behind the treble blast of the exhaust. The Bell lifted straight off the ground, drifted left a little, rotated slightly, and then retracted its wheels and climbed a thousand feet. Then it dipped its nose and hammered north, high and fast. Below it, roads and science parks and small factories and neat isolated suburban communities slid past. Brick walls and metal siding blazed red in the late sun. Tiny emerald lawns and turquoise swimming pools winked in the last of the light.
The man in the forward seat said, “You know where we’re going?”
The pilot nodded and said nothing.
The Bell clattered onward, turning east of north, climbing a little higher, heading for darkness. It crossed a highway far below, a river of white lights crawling west and red lights crawling east. A minute north of the highway the last developed acres gave way to low hills, barren and scrubby and uninhabited. They glowed orange on the slopes that faced the setting sun and showed dull tan in the valleys and the shadows. Then the low hills gave way in turn to small rounded mountains. The Bell sped on, rising and falling, following the contours below. The man in the forward seat twisted around and looked down at Franz on the floor behind him. Smiled briefly and said, “Twenty more minutes, maybe.”
Franz didn’t reply. He was in too much pain.
***
The Bell was rated for a 161-mph cruise, so twenty more minutes took it almost fifty-four miles, beyond the mountains, well out over the empty desert. The pilot flared the nose and slowed a little. The man in the forward seat pressed his forehead against the window and stared down into the darkness.
“Where are we?” he asked.
The pilot said, “Where we were before.”
“Exactly?”
“Roughly.”
“What’s below us now?”
“Sand.”
“Height?”
“Three thousand feet.”
“What’s the air like up here?”
“Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”
“Safe?”
“Aeronautically.”
“So let’s do it.”
The pilot slowed more and turned and came to a stationary hover, three thousand feet above the desert floor. The man in the forward seat twisted around again and signaled to the two guys way in back. Both unlocked their safety harnesses. One crouched forward, avoiding Franz’s feet, and held his loose harness tight in one hand and unlatched the door with the other. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching, and he tilted the Bell a little so the door fell all the way open under its own weight. Then he brought the craft level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and air pressure held the door wide. The second guy from the rear crouched near Franz’s head and jacked the stretcher upward to a forty-five degree slope. The first guy jammed his shoe against the free end of the stretcher rail to stop the whole thing sliding across the floor. The second guy jerked like a weightlifter and brought the stretcher almost vertical. Franz sagged down against the straps. He was a big guy, and heavy. And determined. His legs were useless but his upper body was powerful and straining hard. His head was snapping from side to side.
The first guy took out a gravity knife and popped the blade. Used it to saw through the strap around Franz’s thighs. Then he paused a beat and sliced the strap around Franz’s chest. One quick motion. At the exact same time the second guy jerked the stretcher fully upright. Franz took an involuntary step forward. Onto his broken right leg. He screamed once, briefly, and then took a second instinctive step. Onto his broken left leg. His arms flailed and he collapsed forward and his upper-body momentum levered him over the locked pivot of his immobile hips and took him straight out through the open door, into the noisy darkness, into the gale-force rotor wash, into the night.
Three thousand feet above the desert floor.
For a moment there was silence. Even the engine noise seemed to fade. Then the pilot reversed the Bell’s rotation and rocked the other way and the door slammed neatly shut. The turbines spun up again and the rotor bit the air and the nose dropped.
The two guys clambered back to their seats.
The man in front said, “Let’s go home now.”
***
Seventeen days later Jack Reacher was in Portland, Oregon, short of money. In Portland, because he had to be somewhere and the bus he had ridden two days previously had stopped there. Short of money, because he had met an assistant district attorney called Samantha in a cop bar, and had twice bought her dinner before twice spending the night at her place. Now she had gone to work and he was walking away from her house, nine o’clock in the morning, heading back to the downtown bus depot, hair still wet from her shower, sated, relaxed, destination as yet unclear, with a very thin wad of bills in his pocket.
The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, had changed Reacher’s life in two practical ways. Firstly, in addition to his folding toothbrush he now carried his passport with him. Too many things in the new era required photo ID, including most forms of travel. Reacher was a drifter, not a hermit, restless, not dysfunctional, and so he had yielded gracefully.
And secondly, he had changed his banking methods. For many years after leaving the army he had operated a system whereby he would call his bank in Virginia and ask for a Western Union wire transfer to wherever he happened to be. But new worries about terrorist financing had pretty much killed telephone banking. So Reacher had gotten an ATM card. He carried it inside his passport and used 8197 as his PIN. He considered himself a man of very few talents but some varied abilities, most of which were physical and related to his abnormal size and strength, but one of which was always knowing what time it was without looking, and another of which was some kind of a junior-idiot-savant facility with arithmetic. Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.
His arithmetic awareness and his inherent cynicism about financial institutions always compelled him to check his balance every time he withdrew cash. He always remembered to deduct the ATM fees and every quarter he remembered to add in the bank’s paltry interest payment. And despite his suspicions, he had never been ripped off. Every time his balance came up exactly as he predicted. He had never been surprised or dismayed.
Until that morning in Portland, where he was surprised, but not exactly dismayed. Because his balance was more than a thousand dollars bigger than it should have been.
Exactly one thousand and thirty dollars bigger, according to Reacher’s own blind calculation. A mistake, obviously. By the bank. A deposit into the wrong account. A mistake that would be rectified. He wouldn’t be keeping the money. He was an optimist, but not a fool. He pressed another button and requested something called a mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. It had faint gray printing on it, listing the last five transactions against his account. Three of them were ATM cash withdrawals that he remembered clearly. One of them was the bank’s most recent interest payment. The last was a deposit in the sum of one thousand and thirty dollars, made three days previously. So there it was. The slip of paper was too narrow to have separate staggered columns for debits and credits, so the deposit was noted inside parentheses to indicate its positive nature: (1030.00).
One thousand and thirty dollars.
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