Jack Reacher's Rules Read online

  Jack Reacher's Rules

  Lee Child

  The novels of Lee Child are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lee Child

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Published in the United Kingdom as Reacher’s Rules by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, A Random House Group Company.

  All photographs courtesy of Shutterstock, except for this page, which is courtesy of Wikipedia.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Child, Lee.

  Jack Reacher's rules / with an introduction by Lee Child.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-345-54429-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-0-345-54430-8

  1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers—Fiction.

  3. Police—Handbooks, manuals, etc.—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H4838J33 2012

  813'.54—dc23 2012038282

  Compiled by Val Hudson

  Designed by Nick Avery Design

  Original research by Dot Youngs

  Cover design and illustration: Carlos Beltrán

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Jack Reacher, of no fixed address, is a former major in the U.S. Military Police. Since leaving the army, the authorities have not been able to locate his whereabouts, although his name mysteriously crops up from time to time in connection with investigations into murders, terrorist threats, and other breaches of the law.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by LEE CHILD

  Be Prepared

  Breaking and Entering

  Choose Your Weapons

  The United States Army Military Police

  The Rules of Coffee

  Conquer Your Fear

  Confronting Death

  Cracking Codes and Passwords

  Dogs

  Fighting

  Fighting Tips

  Food

  First Aid

  Getting Mad

  Hand-to-Hand Combat

  How to Shake Hands

  The Wimbledon Cup

  Hitchhiking—the Rules

  How to Extract Information

  Know How to Find Your Way Around a City

  West Point

  Keep on the Move

  Codes Used by the Military Police

  Lessons Learned in the Military

  Live off the Grid

  Hogan’s Alley

  On Walking Through a Thirty-Inch Doorway

  How to Tell if They’re Lying

  Learn to Read Their Body Language

  Man Walks into a Bar—the Rules

  A Medley of Military Acronyms

  Respect Your Opponent

  Noticing Stuff

  The Twelve Signs of a Suicide Bomber

  The U.S. Army Military Police Code of Ethics

  Reacher’s Moral Code

  Military Police Training

  How to Open a Locked Iron Gate with a Chrysler

  The Science of … The Perfect Shot

  Personal Grooming

  The Pentagon

  Why It’s Not Smart to Have a Phone

  Potential Aliases for Use When Booking a Motel

  Use Your Wits—Psychology

  Miranda

  The Science of … Burning Down a Building

  Sleep

  Knowing the Time

  Travel Light

  What to Do in the Face of:

  When to Speak

  Blind Blake

  How to Win the Battle

  How to Win the War

  Man’s Toys

  Women

  How to Sleep in a $350-a-Night Hotel Room for $50

  How to Leave Town

  INTRODUCTION

  If you’ve been paying attention long enough, you know one thing for sure: the defining human characteristic is tribalism. We all slice and dice the world’s population into ever smaller fragments until we find a group where we feel comfortable, where we feel we truly belong.

  And having arrived there, we make rules governing that group’s behavior. We want a reliable guide to how to act, we want to build bulwarks against outsiders, we want to provide a secure mechanism for belonging, we want to reassure ourselves that continuing membership is guaranteed if only we conform.

  Some rules are official. We form clubs and societies and associations and give them procedures and bylaws more complex than those of government bodies.

  Some rules are only semiofficial. Hit on your friend’s best girl? No way. Rat out an accomplice? Not going to happen. Break a strike? You’d rather die.

  Some rules are just slogans, consoling and emboldening. Maybe as a kid, your gang—part of your street in part of your city in your country in the big, bewildering world—was, like kids are, told by your parents and teachers to be scared of strangers. No, you said. Strangers should be told to be scared of us.

  Jack Reacher has always followed his own rules. He grew up in a fractured way, six months here, three months there, always moving, never stable, never belonging. Then he was a soldier, but too wise to buy into all the nonsense. He obeyed only the rules that made sense to him. Then he was cut loose and became a true outsider, profoundly comfortable with solitude. Does he have a tribe? You bet. He’s human. But in his case he kept on slicing and dicing until he got all the way down to a tribe with just one member—himself. But that tribe still needs rules, to guide, and embolden, and simplify, and reassure.

  What follows are some of them.

  LEE CHILD

  “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

  Never count on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger.

  Ring doorbells with your knuckles or elbows to avoid leaving fingerprints.

  Sit in diners or bars with your back to the wall so you cannot be surprised from behind.

  Keep all exits in view.

  Walk up the edge of stairs to minimize the chances of loud creaks. Stairs squeak at their centers where they’re weakest.

  Go to bed fully clothed so you are always ready for action.

  Never look through peepholes in doors. Someone could be on the other side, waiting to see the glass darken and shoot you in the eye.

  “We’re making an omelette here … we’re going to have to break some eggs.”

  “Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.”

  Always lift a door handle upward. If a door

  squeaks, it’s because it’s dropped on its hinges.

  Upward pressure helps.

  Climb through a hole feetfirst. If there’s an ax or a bullet waiting, better to take it in the legs than in the head.

  If someone’s likely to shoot at you, plant yourself in the middle of a restaurant full of innocent people.

  “Most guys who don’t check new equipment are still alive, but by no means all of them.”

  Never trust a weapon you haven’t personally test-fired.

  After you use a car to commit a crime, get it cleaned thoroughly, inside and out, twice, then make sure you leave no DNA.

  Always have a penny in your pocket—you never know when you’re going to need it to unscrew a pair of license plates.

  If you are climbing up tow
ard a trapdoor into an uncertain situation, catapult yourself up the last eighteen feet as fast as you can.

  “The less I relax, the luckier I get.”

  THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY

  Sorry, I’ve forgotten my watch.

  First thing to do before attacking a lock is to check that it’s not already open. Nothing will make you feel stupider than picking a lock that’s not locked.

  The bigger and more ornate the lock, the easier it is to pick.

  “Get a problem, solve a problem.”

  Iron bars protecting a window can be forced open with a tire iron. Force it into the siding next to one of the screws. Make a shallow dent in the metal, shove the iron in sideways and under the bars, and haul on it until it gives.

  For a door with a glass panel, use the sole of your shoe to break a hole in the glass, then reach through to the handle.

  To kick a door down: take a run toward the door, making sure to stay upright, and with your dominant leg kick the area below the doorknob hard, using your sole or your heel.

  (NB: All these techniques are most successful when there’s no one home.)

  “A magazine he knew to be full, in a gun he knew to be working. A sensible step for a man who planned to live through the next five minutes.”

  Next to a shotgun, a pool cue is the best weapon in a fight.

  A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.

  No point in having a weapon at all unless it’s ready for instant use.

  Don’t trust a .38-caliber revolver. You can’t rely on them to put a guy down.

  A chisel plunged into the back of your head is going to seriously ruin your day.

  >>HOW TO USE A CIGARETTE AS AN EFFECTIVE WEAPON

  Take quick, deep pulls to heat the coal on the end of the cigarette up to a couple thousand degrees. When it has lengthened to a point like an arrow, apply quickly to a vulnerable part of the body. Such as an eye.

  Rolls of quarters in your fists—good old- fashioned technology.

  Choose the weapon you know for sure is in working order.

  The longer a barrel, the straighter it shoots.

  A cup of hot coffee is also a weapon in the right hands.

  “Twelve-gauge lead shots settle most disputes at the first time of asking.”

  The best way to get hold of a random untraceable gun is to steal it from someone who already stole it. That way there are no official comebacks.

  Keep a gun with a single shell locked in the chamber and all the other bullets loose. More jams are caused by tired magazine springs than any other single reason.

  >>CREATING A WEAPON FROM A CERAMIC BATHROOM TILE

  Sharpen it into the shape of a knife. A bathroom tile, being entirely ceramic, is harder than anything except a diamond. Harder than steel, sharper than steel. And it won’t trigger a metal detector.

  THINGS YOU’LL NEVER SEE REACHER DO

  Fill in an insurance form

  THE UNITED STATES ARMY

  MILITARY POLICE

  Law-enforcement branch of the United States Army, established to:

  • maintain discipline and security in the Army

  • protect supply routes and guard prisoners

  • act as a fighting force in combat

  • act as peacekeepers at war’s end

  • aid disaster relief

  • manage internal security

  • uphold democracy

  It is one of the most deployed branches of the Army.

  “I don’t come from anywhere. I come from a place called Military.”

  “If in doubt, drink coffee.”

  Nothing’s too urgent for coffee.

  A bad coffee mug has a thick lip—too wide, too shallow, too much mass—it will cool the drink too fast.

  A good coffee mug is cylindrical in shape, narrow in relation to its height and with a thin lip.

  “I love coffee. Give me the chance and I drink coffee like an alcoholic drinks vodka.”

  Coffee tastes better if the latrines are dug downstream from an encampment.

  U.S. Army Field Regulations, 1861

  “The Reacher brothers’ need for caffeine made heroin addiction look like a little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.”

  Ignore the fancy brews and get a tall house blend, black, no cream.

  It’s all about the caffeine.

  Coffee keeps you awake. Until you want to go to sleep.

  Never say no to a cup of coffee.

  THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY

  No more coffee for me.

  >>FIVE FACTS ABOUT COFFEE

  The earliest recorded evidence of coffee drinking was in the middle of the fifteenth century in Yemen.

  Drinking coffee increases short-term recall, and decreases the risk of gout in men over the age of forty.

  After petroleum, coffee is the second most traded product in the world.

  In North America and Europe the quantity of coffee drunk is about a third of that of tap water.

  Finland consumes more coffee per head than any other country.

  “I’m not scared of anybody … But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”

  Some things are worth being afraid of. And some things are not.

  To be afraid of a survivable thing is irrational.

  Focus on the job at hand.

  “Reacher didn’t like crowds. He was a mild agoraphobic—from agora, the Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds … organized crowds … riots and revolutions. A crowd is like the largest animal on earth—the heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop.”

  A courageous guy is someone who feels the fear but conquers it.

  “Why are you going back?”

  “Because they told me not to.”

  “Sometimes if you want to know if the stove is hot the only way to find out is to touch it.”

  Try not to get trapped in the dark in close, tight spaces.

  “He was a guy who survived most things, and he was a guy who was rarely afraid. But he had known since his early boyhood that he was terrified of being trapped in the dark in a space too small to turn his giant frame. All his damp childhood nightmares had been about being closed into tight spaces.”

  Confront your enemies.

  Take things exactly as they come, for exactly what they are.

  Analyze your fear; it’s probably not rational.

  Turn your fear into aggression.

  “You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it.

  Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.”

  THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY

  My knees are trembling and my hands are shaking.

  “I’m not afraid of death, death’s afraid of me.”

  It’s a part of life, missing the dead.

  “People live and then they die, and as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret.”

  Life’s a bitch and then you die.

  Soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. But deep down they want it to be fair.

  “In his head Reacher had always known he would die. Every human does. But in his heart he had never really imagined it.”

  The meaning of life is that it ends.

  Get into their minds, think like them.

  Try birthdays, wedding anniversaries, house numbers; these are the passwords most people use.

  Most people can’t remember all their passwords. If you look, you can find where they’ve written them down.

  Try two-digit prime numbers, or the number whose square root is the sum of its digits.

  Watch the position of their fingers when keying in a code so you can copy it.

  The perfect PIN:

  “I’d probably write out my birthday, month, day, year, and find the nearest prime number. Actually that would be a problem, because there would be two equally close, o
ne exactly seven less and one exactly seven more. So I guess I’d use the square root instead, rounded to three decimal places. Ignore the decimal point; that would give me six numbers, all different.”

  “I like dogs. If I lived anywhere I’d have three or four.”

  Don’t leave dogs out overnight in a place where there are mountain lions. That’s a sure way of having no dogs in the morning.

  Remember, dogs are different from people, no free will, easily misled. But on reflection—not that different.

  “You don’t buy a dog and bark yourself.”

  Never show fear when facing fighting dogs.

  Don’t run away from dogs, walk.

  Dogs trained to attack will attack anything that moves—including you.

  When confronted by two or more dogs, be aware that like people, dogs have a pecking order. With two dogs, one of them has to be superior to the other, and will attack first.

  You can intimidate a dog and show him who’s boss by baring your teeth.

  “You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.”

  Hit early, hit hard.

  Stand with your back to the sun so that it’s in your enemy’s eyes.

  Make the first shot count.

  Get your retaliation in first; show them who they’re dealing with.

  Say you’ll count to three—then throw your punch at two.

  Never revive a guy who has just pulled a gun on you.

  Train yourself to use aggression in the face of danger.

  “Soon as he was neutralized, it was two against one. And I’ve never had a problem with those kind of odds.”