No Plan B (Jack Reacher, #27)

by Lee Child

Together this nest of rooms formed the command hub of Unit S2 at the Minerva Correctional Facility in Winson, Mississippi.

Bruno Hix, Minerva’s Chief Executive and joint founder, at the head of the table. Damon Brockman, Chief Operating Officer and the other joint founder, to Hix’s right. And Curtis Riverdale, the prison’s warden, next to Brockman. The man next to Riverdale, the last one on that side of the table, was wearing a uniform. He was Rod Moseley, Chief of the Winson Police Department.

Reacher was the only one who saw the whole picture.

For the first fifteen years of his life Jed Starmer didn’t give much thought to the concept of the law.

Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s what Lev Emerson was told by his father, years ago when he was still in high school.

The jobs Emerson carried out personally fell into two categories. Those that looked like accidents. And those that didn’t.

Talmadge Memorial Bridge in Georgia, nearly six hundred feet above the Savannah River, midway between the mainland and Hutchinson Island. The strip of land that split the waterway that separated Georgia from South Carolina.

If the body count went up, so did his price. It was a basic principle.

He didn’t want to look like a kid.

“Call Shevchenko. He owes us, big-time. Tell him we need a plane. Today. And maybe a chopper, tomorrow or the next day. Then meet me at the warehouse. In two hours. Bring the others. And pack a bag.” “Where are we going?” “To find the people who sold the thing that killed my son.”

Bruno Hix and Damon Brockman were operating on the assumption that there were four categories of prisoner at Winson. That’s what they expected because that’s what they had mandated. What they didn’t realize was that there were actually five.

Damon Brockman was not the kind of guy who readily changed his mind.

“Take care of? Don’t you mean avoid?” Reacher shook his head. “Basic tactics. If you have the opportunity to degrade the enemy’s capability, you take it.”

A big heap of cash is the biggest red flag there is. You’d have the IRS so far up your ass you’d see them when you brush your teeth.

Five words were ringing in Jed Starmer’s ears as he crouched between a pair of dumpsters in an alley on the other side of the Greyhound station: I’m a law enforcement officer.

“No Plan B,” he said. “It’s confirmed. Reacher will be nowhere near the ceremony.”

“It’s a universal principle. If something seems too good to be true, it is too good to be true.”