The Enemy

by Lee Child

The world is changing. I had always been a loner, but at that point I started to feel lonely. And I had always been a cynic, but at that point I began to feel hopelessly naive.

‘You won’t even see it coming,’ he said. I said nothing. ‘Believe me,’ he said. I looked away. I believed him. If Delta put a hit on me, I wouldn’t see it coming. That was for sure. Weeks from now or months from now or years from now I would walk into a dark alley somewhere and a shadow would step out and a K-bar would slip between my ribs or my neck would snap with a loud crack that would echo off the bricks around me, and that would be the end of it. ‘You’ve got a week,’ the guy said. ‘To do what?’ ‘To show us it wasn’t you.’ I said nothing. ‘Your choice,’ the guy said. ‘Show us, or make those seven days count. Make sure you cover all your lifetime ambitions. Don’t start a long book.’

‘You disobeyed my direct order,’ I said. She said nothing. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you give me the order?’ ‘Why do you think?’ ‘Because you’re toeing Willard’s line.’ ‘He’s the CO,’ I said. ‘It’s a good line to toe.’ ‘I don’t agree.’ ‘You’re in the army now, Summer. You don’t obey orders just because you agree with them.’ ‘We don’t cover things up just because we’re told to, either.’ ‘We do,’ I said. ‘We do that all the time. We always have.’

We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We saw nothing. Then I saw something. It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis. And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct. Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said no snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.

‘If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to know which it was.’

and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.

Legislation limited Parisians to a 35-hour work week, and they spent a lot of the remaining 133 taking great pleasure in not doing very much of anything. It was relaxing just to watch them.

I knew my strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s equal.

I never went back to Paris, either. I meant to. I thought I might go climb down under the Pont des Invalides, late at night, and just sniff the air. But it never happened. I was in the army, and I was always where someone else told me to be.