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Chapter 1

PEOPLE SAY THAT knowledge is power Thenuuessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to the store You would mark those numbers on the play card And you would win

Saoing to go way up? You're not talking about a hunch or a gut feeling You're not talking about a trend or a percentage gae Real, hard knowledge Suppose you had it? What would you do? You would call your broker You would buy Then later you'd sell, and you'd be rich

Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever Football, hockey, next year's World Series, any kind of sports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd be home free No question Same for the Oscars, same for the Nobel prize, sa

Sa people

Suppose you wanted to kill people You would need to know ahead of time how to do it That part is not too difficult There are many ways Some of them are better than others Most of theot, and you invent a neay You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method

You pay a lot of attention to the setup Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important But that stuff is meat and potatoes to you You have no problem with careful preparation No probleence? After all your training?

You know the big probleet aith it? You use your knowledge You know more than most people about how the cops work You've seen them on duty, many times, sometimes close-up You knohat they look for So you don't leave anything for theh it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully Just as carefully as you wouldto win you a fortune

People say that knowledge is power The e, the more power Which makes you just about thepeople And then getting aith it

LIFE IS FULL of decisions and judgets to the point where you're so accusto theet into a what if thing, and you start speculating about what you would do if soets to be a habit It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades Which hy he was sitting alone at a restaurant table and gazing at the backs of two guys twenty feet away and wondering if it would be enough just to warn theo the extra mile and break their arms

It was a question of dynamics From the start the dynamics of the city meant that a brand-new Italian place in Tribeca like the one Reacher was in was going to stay pretty euy from the New York Times wrote it up or an Observer coluhts in a row But neither thing had happened yet and the place was still uncrowded, whichto eat dinner near his girlfriend's apartment while she worked late at the office The dynamics of the city They made it inevitable Reacher would be in there Theywould be in there, too Because the dynaht new coet a visit on behalf of soe for not sending his boys in to smash it up with baseball bats and ax handles

The two guys Reacher atching were standing close to the bar, talking quietly to the owner The bar was a token affair built across the corner of the rooht feet on a side It was not really a bar in the sense that anybody was ever going to sit there and drink anything It was just a focal point It was somewhere to keep the liquor bottles They were crowded three-deep on glass shelves in front of sandblasted ister and the credit card machine were on the bottouy and he had backed away into the point of the triangle and was standing with his backside jaht across his chest, defensively Reacher could see his eyes They were showing so halfway between disbelief and panic and they were darting all around the room

It was a large roo was high, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet It was low The building was more than a hundred years old, and the roo, one time or another Maybe it had started out as a factory The ere certainly large enough and nuh to illuminate some kind of an industrial operation back when the city was only five stories tall Then maybe it had beco enough Noas an Italian restaurant Not a checked-red-tablecloth and Mama's-sauce type of Italian restaurant, but the type of place which has three hundred thousand dollars invested up front in bleached avant-garde decor and which gives you seven or eight hande plate and calls them a meal Reacher had eaten there ten times in the four weeks it had been open and he always left feeling hungry But the quality was so good he was telling people about it, which really had to ourmet The place was named Mostro's, which as far as he understood Italian translated as monster's He wasn't sure what the name referred to Certainly not the size of the portions But it had some kind of a resonance, and the whole place with its pale maple and white walls and dull aluminum accents was an attractive space The people orked there were a to end through excellent loudspeakers placed high on the walls In Reacher's inexpert opinion he atching the start of a big reputation

But the big reputation was obviously slow to spread The spare avant-garde decor made it OK to have only twenty tables in a sixty-by-sixty space, but in four weeks he had never seen more than three of the the whole ninety-ht there was just one other couple eating, five tables away They were sitting face-to-face across frouy was ht brown suit, brown shoes The woman was thin and dark, in a skirt and a jacket There was an i next to her right foot They were both htly dowdy They were co much

The two guys at the bar were talking That was for sure They were leaning over, bending forward fro hard The oas against the register, bending backward by an equal amount It was like the three of theh the rooer than medium-sized They were dressed in identical dark wool coats which gave them breadth and bulk Reacher could see their faces in the dull mirrors behind the liquor bottles Olive skin, dark eyes Not Italians Syrians or Lebanese eneration of living in Auy on the right was esture with his hand It was easy to see it represented a bat plowing through the bottles on the shelf Then the hand was chopping up and down The guy was de how the shelves could be smashed One blow could s The oas going pale He was glancing sideways at his shel

ves

Then the guy on the left shot his cuff and tapped the face of his watch and turned to leave His partner straightened up and followed him He trailed his hand over the nearest table and knocked a plate to the floor It shattered on the tile, loud and dissonant against the opera floating in the air The sandy guy and the dark wouys walked slowly to the door, heads up, confident Reacher watched them all the way out to the sidewalk Then the owner cah the fragertips

"You OK?" Reacher called to him

Soon as the words were out, he kneas a dued and put an all-purpose miserable look on his face He cupped his hands on the floor and started butting the shards into a pile Reacher slid out of his chair and stepped away from the table and squared his napkin on the tile next to hi the debris into it The couple five tables aatching him

"When are they co back?" Reacher asked

"An hour," the guy said

"How much do they want?"

The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile

"I get a start-up discount," he said "Two hundred a week, goes to four when the place picks up "

"You want to pay?"