The Enemy by Lee Child

Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier's son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army's brightest stars. But in every cop's life there is one case that changes everything. For Jack Reacher, this is that case. New Year's Day, 1990. In a North Carolina motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Reacher has his orders:Control the situation. Within hours the general's wife is murdered. Then the dominoes really start to fall. Somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Reacher is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have. But Reacher won't quit. He's fighting a new kind of war-against an enemy he didn't know he had. And against a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed. Editorial Reviews Review A fabulously suspenseful prequel.... [Lee Child's] best so far.-Kirkus Reviews, starred review Textured, swift, and told in Reacher's inimitably tough voice ... Child has few peers in thrillerdom.-Publishers Weekly, starred review The best showcase of Child's talent to date. .... one of the best thriller writers at work.-Rocky Mountain News The Enemy sizzles with suspense and action. Child sets a breathless pace.-Orlando Sentinel A rip-roaring read from the first page to the last .-St. Petersburg Times [Jack Reacher is]. . .the thinking reader's action hero a surprisingly tender combination of chess master and G.I. Joe.-Seattle Times Will keep you guessing until the final page.-Playboy From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Lee Child is the author of nineteen New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers, ten of which have reached the #1 position. All have been optioned for major motion pictures; the first, Jack Reacher, was based on One Shot. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in almost a hundred territories. A native of England and a former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City. From Publishers Weekly Child (The Persuader, etc.) brings back his intrepid hero, Jack Reacher, for another excellent mystery, which steps back in time to the eventful first few weeks of 1990. The Berlin Wall has just come crashing down, marking an end to the Cold War, and as a result, the U.S. Army is facing a massive restructuring of purpose and personnel. During this turbulent time, 29-year-old Reacher, an MP major stationed to a base in North Carolina, is called on to investigate the death of a two-star general found dead in a seedy motel. Veteran reader Wolf, who has given voice to Reacher in seven previous novels, slips easily into this character; his calm, thoughtful delivery fits perfectly with Reacher's contemplative first-person narration. Wolf uses his voice to draw listeners into Reacher's investigation, as the MP ponders each clue and follows a trail of cover-ups and murder to the highest echelons of the military. Although Wolf struggles a bit with his French accents, his narration complements one of the best novels in Child's series. Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From AudioFile What's especially enjoyable about Dick Hill's reading of this Jack Reacher prequel is that Reacher even sounds younger. In Child's latest (the eighth Reacher yarn) and best since THE KILLING FLOOR, Reacher, a 29-year-old MP, is called out when a general dies, the general's wife is murdered, and two Special Forces soldiers are taken out soon after. Aside from the fast-paced action, listeners learn more about Reacher's complicated past than in all the previous books combined. Injecting extra verve, Hill sounds like he's enjoying his narration. Jack Reacher and Dick Hill are welcome friends. A.L.H. ® AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine From Booklist *Starred Review* Child's eighth Jack Reacher novel isn't a classic thriller in the mold of its predecessor, Persuader [BKL Mr 15 03], but it's just as compelling. This time Child sticks closer to the police-procedural formula, lavishing on investigatory detail and building suspense gradually rather than propelling the reader ever forward with high-octane thrills. The story, which hinges on the death of a general in a lowlife motel outside Fort Bird, North Carolina, moves back in time to the early nineties, when Reacher was an up-and-coming military policeman. Trying to recover the dead general's briefcase, which contains sensitive information regarding the army's post-cold war plans, takes Reacher and his partner, an African American female, deep into the treacherous heart of military bureaucracy--and into a tragic by-product of the don't ask-don't tell policy regarding gays in the armed forces. In a subplot involving Reacher's mother, ill with cancer, Child also incorporates some fascinating backstory regarding Reacher's childhood as an army brat. Known for his hold-your-breath action scenes, Child proves equally adept at portraying how a criminal investigation uses the smallest of building blocks (a yogurt container) to construct a compelling circumstantial case. Combine that with finely textured relationships--always an extra dimension in this series--and you have a novel that takes Child in a new direction (more Michael McGarrity than Stephen Hunter) but does so flawlessly. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One As serious as a heart attack. Maybe those were Ken Kramer's last words, like a final explosion of panic in his mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it. He was where he shouldn't have been, with someone he shouldn't have been with, carrying something he should have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right. Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all. They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms mean nothing to us. You just drop dead is what they should say. Ken Kramer certainly did. He just dropped dead, and he took his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly killed me too. I was alone in a borrowed office. There was a clock on the wall. It had no second hand. Just an hour hand, and a minute hand. It was electric. It didn't tick. It was completely silent, like the room. I was watching the minute hand, intently. It wasn't moving. I waited. It moved. It jumped ahead six degrees. Its motion was mechanical and damped and precise. It bounced once and quivered a little and came to rest. A minute. One down, one to go. Sixty more seconds. I kept on watching. The clock stayed still for a long, long time. Then the hand jumped again. Another six degrees, another minute, straight-up midnight, and 1989 was 1990. I pushed my chair back and stood up behind the desk. The phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. But it wasn't. It was a civilian cop calling because he had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off-post. I need the Military Police duty officer, he said. I sat down again, behind the desk. You got him, I said. We've got one of yours, dead. One of mine? A soldier, he said. Where? Motel, in town. Dead how? I asked. Heart attack, most likely, the guy said. I paused. Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the desk, from December 31st to January 1st. Nothing suspicious? I said. Don't see anything. You seen heart attacks before? Lots of them. OK, I said. Call post headquarters. I gave him the number. Happy New Year, I said. You don't need to come out? he said. No, I said. I put the phone down. I didn't need to go out. The army is a big institution, a little bigger than Detroit, a little smaller than Dallas, and just as unsentimental as either place. Current active strength is 930,000 men and women, and they are as representative of the general American population as you can get. Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000 population per year, and in the absence of sustained combat soldiers don't die any faster or slower than regular people. On the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at large, but they smoke more and drink more and eat worse and stress harder and do all kinds of dangerous things in training. So their life expectancy comes out about average. Soldiers die at the same speed as everyone else. Do the math with the death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents, suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver failure, kidney failure. Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas. So I didn't need to go out. I'm a cop, not a mortician. The clock moved. The hand jumped and bounced and settled. Three minutes past midnight. The phone rang again. It was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. It was the sergeant in the office outside of mine. Happy New Year, she said to me. You too, I said. You couldn't stand up and put your head in the door? You couldn't put yours out the door? I was on the phone. Who was it? Nobody, I said. Just some grunt didn't make it to the new decade. You want coffee? Sure, I said. Why not? I put the phone down again. At that point I had been in more than six years, and army coffee was one of the things that made me happy to stay in. It was the best in the world, no question. So were the sergeants. This one was a mountain woman from north Georgia. I had known her two days. She lived off-post in a trailer park somewhere in the North Carolina Badlands. She had a baby son. She had told me all about him. I had heard nothing about a husband. She was all bone and sinew and she was as hard as woodpecker lips, but she liked me. I could tell, because she brought me coffee. They don't like you, they don't bring you coffee. They knife you in the back instead. My door opened and she came in, carrying two mugs, one for her and one for me. Happy New Year, I said to her. She put the coffee down on my desk, both mugs. Will it be? she said. Don't see why not, I said. The Berlin Wall is halfway down. They showed it on the television. They were having a big party over there. I'm glad someone was, somewhere. Lots of people. Big crowds. All singing and dancing. I didn't see the news. This all was six hours ago. The time difference. They're probably still at it. They had sledgehammers. They're allowed. Their half is a free city. We spent forty-five years keeping it that way. Pretty soon we won't have an enemy anymore. I tried the coffee. Hot, black, the best in the world. We won, I said. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? Not if you depend on Uncle Sam's paycheck. She was dressed like me in standard woodland camouflage battledress uniform. Her sleeves were neatly rolled. Her MP brassard was exactly horizontal. I figured she had it safety-pinned in back where nobody could see. Her boots were gleaming. You got any desert camos? I asked her. Never been to the desert, she said. They changed the pattern. They put big brown splotches on it. Five years' research. Infantry guys are calling it chocolate chip. It's not a good pattern. They'll have to change it back. But it'll take them another five years to figure that out. So? If it takes them five years to revise a camo pattern, your kid will be through college before they figure out force reduction. So don't worry about it. OK, she said, not believing me. You think he's good for college? I never met him. She said nothing. The army hates change, I said. And we'll always have enemies. She said nothing. My phone rang again. She leaned forward and answered it for me. Listened for about eleven seconds and handed me the receiver. Colonel Garber, sir, she said. He's in D.C. She took her mug and left the room. Colonel Garber was ultimately my boss, and although he was a pleasant human being it was unlikely he was calling eight minutes into New Year's Day simply to be social. That wasn't his style. Some brass does that stuff. They come over all cheery on the big holidays, like they're really just one of the boys. But Leon Garber wouldn't have dreamed of trying that, with anyone, and least of all with me. Even if he had known I was going to be there. Reacher here, I said. There was a long pause. I thought you were in Panama, Leon Garber said. I got orders, I said. From Panama to Fort Bird? Why? Not my place to ask. When was this? Two days ago. That's a kick in the teeth, he said. Isn't it? Is it? Panama was probably more exciting. It was OK, I said. And they got you working duty officer on New Year's Eve already? I volunteered, I said. I'm trying to make people like me. That's a hopeless task, he said. A sergeant just brought me coffee. There was another pause. Someone just call you about a dead soldier in a motel? he asked. Eight minutes ago, I said. I shuffled it off to headquarters. And they shuffled it off to someone else and I just got pulled out of a party to hear all about it. Why? Because the dead soldier in question is a two-star general. The phone went quiet. I didn't think to ask, I said. The phone stayed quiet. Generals are mortal, I said. Same as anyone else. No reply. There was nothing suspicious, I said. He croaked, is all. Heart attack. Probably had gout. I didn't see a reason to get excited. It's a question of dignity, Garber said. We can't leave a two-star lying around belly-up in public without reacting. We need a presence. And that would be me? I'd prefer someone else. But you're probably the highest-ranking sober MP in the world tonight. So yes, it would be you. It'll take me an hour to get there. He's not going anywhere. He's dead. And they haven't found a sober medical examiner yet. OK, I said. Be respectful, Garber said. OK, I said again. And be polite. Off-post, we're in their hands. It's a civilian jurisdiction. I'm familiar with civilians. I met one, once. But control the situation, he said. You know, if it needs controlling. He probably died in bed, I said. Like people do. Call me, he said. If you need to. Was it a good party? Excellent. My daughter is visiting. He clicked off and I called the civilian dispatcher back and got the name and the address of the motel. Then I left my coffee on my desk and told my sergeant what was up and headed back to my quarters to change. I figured a presence required Class A greens, not woodland-pattern BDUs. I took a Humvee from the MP motor pool and was logged out through the main gate. I found the motel inside fifty minutes. It was thirty miles due north of Fort Bird through dark undistinguished North Carolina countryside that was equal parts strip malls and scrubby forest and what I figured were dormant sweet potato fields. It was all new to me. I had never served there before. The roads were very quiet. Everyone was still inside, partying. I hoped I would be back at Bird before they all came out and started driving home. Although I really liked the Humvee's chances, head-on against a civilian ride. The motel was part of a knot of low commercial structures clustered in the darkness near a big highway interchange. There was a truck stop as a centerpiece. It had a greasy spoon that was open on the holidays and a gas station big enough to take eighteen-wheelers. There was a no-name cinder-block lounge bar with lots of neon and no windows. It had an Exotic Dancers sign lit up in pink and a parking lot the size of a football field. There were diesel spills and rainbow puddles all over it. I could hear loud music coming out of the bar. There were cars parked three-deep all around it. The whole area was glowing sulfurous yellow from the streetlights. The night air was cold and full of fog. The motel itself was directly across the street from the gas station. It was a run-down swaybacked affair about twenty rooms long. It had a lot of peeling paint. It looked empty. There was an office at the left-hand end with a token vehicle porch and a buzzing Coke machine. First question: Why would a two-star general use a place like this? I was pretty sure there wouldn't have been a DoD inquiry if he had checked into a Holiday Inn. There were two town police cruisers parked at careless angles outside the motel's last-but-one room. There was a small plain sedan sandwiched between them. It was cold and misted over. It was a base-model Ford, red, four cylinder. It had skinny tires and plastic hubcaps. A rental, for sure. I put the Humvee next to the right-hand police cruiser and slid out into the chill. I heard the music from across the street, louder. The last-but-one room's lights were off and its door was open. I figured the cops were trying to keep the interior temperature low. Trying to stop the old guy from getting too ripe. I was anxious to take a look at him. I was pretty sure I had never seen a dead general before. Three cops stayed in their cars and one got out to meet me. He was wearing tan uniform pants and a short leather jacket zipped to his chin. No hat. The jacket had badges pinned to it that told me his name was Stockton and his rank was deputy chief. He was gray, about fifty. He was medium height and a little soft and heavy but the way he was reading the badges on my coat told me he was probably a veteran, like a lot of cops are. Major, he said, as a greeting. I nodded. A veteran, for sure. A major gets a little gold-colored oak leaf on the epaulette, one inch across, one on each side. This guy was looking upward and sideways at mine, which wasn't the clearest angle of view. But he knew what they were. So he was familiar with rank designations. And I recognized his voice. He was the guy who had called me, at five seconds past midnight. I'm Rick Stockton, he said. Deputy Chief. He was calm. He had seen heart attacks before. I'm Jack Reacher. MP duty officer tonight. He recognized my voice in turn. Smiled. You decided to come out, he said. After all. You didn't tell me the DOA was a two-star. Well, he is. I've never seen a dead general, I said. Not many people have, he said, and the way he said it made me think he had been an enlisted man. Army? I asked. Marine Corps, he said. First sergeant. My old man was a Marine, I said. I always make that point, talking to Marines. It gives me some kind of genetic legitimacy. Stops them from thinking of me as a pure army dogface. But I keep it vague. I don't tell them my old man had made captain. Enlisted men and officers don't automatically see eye to eye. From the Inside Flap Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier?s son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army?s brightest stars. But in every cop?s life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case. New Year?s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina ?hot-sheets? motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation can?t be controlled. Within hours the general?s wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall. Two Special Forces soldiers?the toughest of the tough?are taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacher?an ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unit?is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have. But Reacher won?t quit. He?s fighting a new kind of war. And he?s taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didn?t know he had. With his French-born mother dying?and divulging to her son one last, stunning secret?Reacher is forced to question everything he once believed?about his family, his career, his loyalties?and himself. Because this soldier?s son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent death?and a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed. From Bookmarks Magazine Child continues to knock out his action sequences with flair, but in The Enemy, he takes time to depict the piecemeal construction of a criminal investigation. He also spends energy on the hero's relationship with his mother and brother, an effort that further fills in Reacher's background and will surely please long-time fans of the character. It's true, Child throws in some clichéd elements to this otherwise first-rate story. But most reviewers easily looked past that flaw. After reading these books for so many years, I'm not easily kept in the dark, claims the St. Petersburg Times, so it's always fun when I'm still guessing toward the end. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.