Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)

by Lee Child

“General O’Day calls you Sherlock Homeless.”

“SVR,” he said, which meant Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, which was their foreign intelligence service. Like the CIA, or the DGSE, or MI6 in Britain. Then he said, “But we’re all still KGB really. Old wine, new bottles.”

“You’ve got the strength of two normal boys. What are you going to do with it?” I hadn’t replied. Our silence was part of the

ritual. She answered for me. She said, “You’re going to do the right thing.”

The transmission was slower than the postal service. She rattled the selector into reverse, and all the mechanical parts inside called the roll and counted a quorum and set about deciding what to do. Which required a lengthy debate, apparently, because it was whole seconds before the truck lurched backward.

and then she jammed the selector into a forward gear, and first of all the reversing committee wound up its business and approved its minutes and exited the room, and then the forward crew signed on and got comfortable, and a motion was tabled and seconded and discussed. More whole seconds passed, and

then the truck slouched forward, slow and stuttering at first, before picking up its pace and rolling im...

Because if an American shooter turns the G8 into the G4, we’re in real big trouble as a nation.”

He must have been colossally obstinate. Better to up sticks and go buy an island.

Staring isn’t difficult. I can do it all day long.

Without blinking, if I want to, which is sometimes painful, but always useful. The trick is to not really look at them, but to focus ten yards beyond, on nothing, which produces a glassy effect, which makes them worry, mostly about what’s going on behind your empty eyes.

So I’d say it’s a one-all draw at the moment. A tie, as you would call it.”

Which leaves you isolated. It’s all down to you. But the army is different. Whatever else is wrong with it, you can trust your brother soldiers. And believe in them. That’s all there is.

“Do it once, and do it right.”

I knew she wanted to shower, so I did too, and we got to the maitre d’lectern about a yard apart.

“That’s how favors work. Like in the mob movies. Some guy says, one day I will call on

you to perform a service. You don’t get to pick and choose.

we wanted to be full of energy and good nutrition three and more hours later, and human digestion gets slower with stress, not faster.

The substance in question was aluminum oxynitride, which they claimed was a transparent polycrystalline ceramic with a cubic spinel crystal structure composed of aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Seven hundred years of ancient evolution for every year of modernity.