The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, #10)

by Lee Child

He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City. Especially at night. He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people.

twenty blocks later he was at Bryant Park, eating a hot dog from a street vendor. Twenty minutes and twenty blocks after that he was in Central Park,

reveal a tall slim sliver of New York City at night. The famous view. A hundred thousand lit windows glittering against the darkness like tiny diamonds on a field of black velvet. Like nowhere else in the world.

“Mercenaries,” Pauling said. “We’re supposed to be against them. We signed all kinds of treaties.” “The Pentagon loves mercenaries. It employs them all the time.” “But it likes them to go where it sends them. It doesn’t like them to fill their down time with unauthorized sideshows.”

The coffee shop was one of those mostly brown places that survive on equal parts counter trade, booth trade, and to-go coffee in cardboard cups with Greek decoration on them.

so NY

State Department can’t admit that there are bunches of renegade American mercenaries running wild in Africa.

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.”

Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into.

Reacher liked New York more than most places. He liked the casual indifference of it all and the frantic hustle and the total anonymity.

Strawberry Field. The John Lennon memorial, in the park. Near where Lennon was killed. Like most guys his age Reacher felt that The Beatles were part of his life. They were its soundtrack, its background.

England was a lit-up country. That was for damn sure. Every inch of the highway was bathed in bright vapor glow. And people drove fast. The limit was posted at seventy miles an hour, but it was widely ignored. High eighties, low nineties seemed to be the norm. Lane discipline was good. Nobody passed on the inside.

Why don’t you shut the hell up and sit still like normal human beings?

The kind of semi-serious off-road tires a prestige SUV would wear. The kind of tires a rented Toyota Land Cruiser would wear.

The Toyota was a very capable off-road vehicle. Reacher knew that. It was one of the best in the world.