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ONE

EIGHT DAYS AGO ood So slow periods of nothingLike the army itself Which is how they found me You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you Not always Not completely

They started looking two days after souy took a shot at the president of France I saw it in the paper A long-range atte to do with irl I met on a bus She wanted to be an actor I didn’t So after forty-eight hours in LA she went one way and I went the other Back on the bus, first to San Francisco for a couple of days, and then to Portland, Oregon, for three more, and then onward to Seattle Which took ot out of the bus They left an Arht there on the seat across the aisle

The Are old paper It started up before World War Two and is still going strong, every week, full of yesterday’s news and sundry how-to articles, like the headline staring up at nia! Plus Four More Uniforend has it the news is yesterday’s because it’s copied secondhand from old AP summaries, but if you read the words sideways you sometimes hear a real sardonic tone between the lines The editorials are occasionally brave The obituaries are occasionally interesting

Which wasup the paper Sometimes people die and you’re happy about it Or not Either way you need to know But I never found out Because on the way to the obituaries I found the personal ads Which as alerefor other veterans Dozens of ads, all the same

Including one with my name in it

Right there, centre of the page, a boxed column inch, five words printed bold: Jack Reacher call Rick Shoemaker

Which had to be Tom O’Day’s work Which later on uy He had to be He had survived a long ti tio he already looked a hundred A tall, thin, gaunt, cadaverous ht collapse at any moment, like a broken stepladder He was no one’s idea of an arist Certainly his thinking had been sound Reacher stays under the radar, whichrooms and diners, which, coincidentally or not, is the natural economic habitat for enlisted men and women, who buy the Army Times ahead of any other publication in the PX, and who can be relied upon to spread the paper around, like birds spread seeds from berries

And he could rely on me to pick up the paper Somewhere Sooner or later Eventually Because I needed to know You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you Not co contact, frouess, then maybe he would think ten or twelve consecutive weeks of personal ads enerate a small but realistic chance of success

But it worked the first time out One day after the paper was printed Which is why I felt lame later on

I was predictable

Rick Shoemaker was Tom O’Day’s boy Probably his second in conore But I owed Shoemaker a favour Which O’Day knew about, obviously Which hy he put Shoemaker’s name in his ad

And which hy I would have to answer it

Predictable

Seattle was dry when I got out of the bus And war consuious quantities, which made it my kind of town, and in the sense that wifi hotspots and handheld devices were everywhere, which didn’t, and which made old-fashioned street-corner pay phones hard to find But there was one down by the fish market, so I stood in the salt breeze and the smell of the sea, and I dialled a toll-free nuon Not a number you’ll find in the phone book A nuencies only You don’t always have a quarter in your pocket

The operator answered and I asked for Shoe, or the country, or the world, and after a bunch of clicks and hisses and so minutes of dead air Shoemaker came on the line and said, ‘Yes?’

‘This is Jack Reacher,’ I said

‘Where are you?’

‘Don’t you have all kinds of automatic machines to tell you that?’

‘Yes,’ he said ‘You’re in Seattle, on a pay phone down by the fish market But we prefer it when people volunteer the information theo better Because they’re already cooperating They’re invested’

‘In what?’

‘In the conversation’

‘Are we having a conversation?’

‘Not really What do you see directly ahead?’

I looked

‘A street,’ I said

‘Left?’

‘Places to buy fish’

‘Right?’

‘A coffee shop across the light’

‘Name?’

I told him

He said, ‘Go in there and wait’

‘For what?’

‘For about thirtyup

No one really knohy coffee is such a big deal in Seattle It’s a port, so maybe it made sense to roast it close to where it was landed, and then to sell it close to where it was roasted, which created a ht other operators in, the same way the auto ht Or the elevation, or the temperature, or the humidity But whatever, the result is a coffee shop on every block, and a four-figure annual tab for a serious enthusiast The shop across the light from the pay phone was representative It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboardin coffee, like dairy products of various types and tes, and ot a plain house blend, black, no sugar, in the rande bucket soo with it, and I sat alone on a hard wooden chair at a table for two

The cake lasted five hteen uy showed up Which ht ht there in Seattle And his car was dark blue It was a low-spec doh shine The guy himself was nearer forty than twenty, and hard as a nail He was in civilian clothes A blue blazer over a blue polo shirt, and khaki chino pants The blazer orn thin and the shirt and the pants had been washed a thousand times A Senior Chief Petty Officer, probably Special Forces, almost certainly, a SEAL, no doubt part of some shadowy joint operation watched over by Tom O’Day

He stepped into the coffee shop with a blank-eyed all-in-one scan of the room, like he had a fifth of a second to identify friend or foe before he started shooting Obviously his briefing ht out of some old personnel file, but he had me at six-five two-fifty Everyone else in the shop was Asian, ht towards me and said, ‘Major Reacher?’

I said, ‘Not any more’

He said, ‘Mr Reacher, then?’

I said, ‘Yes’

‘Sir, General Shoemaker requests that you come with me’

I said, ‘Where to?’

/>‘Not far’

‘How many stars?’

‘Sir, I don’t follow’

‘Does General Shoemaker have?’

‘One, sir Brigadier General Richard Shoemaker, sir’

‘When?’

‘When what, sir?’

‘Did he get his promotion?’

‘Two years ago’