Second Son (Short Story): A Reacher Story Read online

  Praise for #1 Bestselling author Lee Child and his Reacher Series

  “Lee Child [is] the current poster-boy of American crime fiction.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Jack Reacher is a tough guy’s tough guy.”

  —Santa Monica Mirror

  “Like his hero Jack Reacher, Lee Child seems to make no wrong steps.”

  —Associated Press

  “Jack Reacher is one of the best thriller characters at work today.”

  —Newsweek

  “Reacher is Marlowe’s literary descendant, and a 21st-century knight—only tougher.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “Child has long been one of the best contemporary thriller writers.”

  —The Daily Beast

  That this Reacher is so effortlessly larger than life is evidence of how intense the overall series has become.”

  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “No one kicks butt as entertainingly as Reacher.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for WORTH DYING FOR

  “At times here, he channels Hemingway, which makes a certain sense, since Reacher is nothing if not a chiseled Hemingway hero without the self-pity. He still channels the tough-guy prose as well as anybody alive.… This series is as good as pop fiction gets.”

  —Miami Herald

  “A master craftsman of action thrillers. More than just compulsively readable, Mr. Child’s work shows a perfectly-fashioned understanding of his protagonist, dogged and moralistic. Reacher may get old some time, but he’s sure not showing any signs of it.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Don’t pick up the latest Jack Reacher novel if you don’t have some time on your hands, because Worth Dying For is difficult to put down.… Child manages to get an amazing amount of suspense into the novel.”

  —Associated Press

  Praise for 61 HOURS

  “Child’s writing is superb. Not only is this thriller believable, but the descriptions of the blizzard will make readers want to hug their furnaces. Fast paced and exciting, this is highly recommended for thriller fans.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle.… As always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reacher’s idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily.… This is Child in top form, but isn’t he always?”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Jack Reacher is much more like the heir to the Op and Marlowe than Spenser ever was.… Reacher is as appealingly misanthropic as ever.”

  —Esquire

  Praise for GONE TOMORROW

  “Hold on tight. This is No. 13 in Lee Child’s action-packed series starring ex-military cop / pit bull Jack Reacher, and it may be the best.… this novel will give you whiplash as you rabidly turn pages, packed with layers of intrigue, murder, deceit and mystery.”

  —USA Today

  “Thriller fans like books that start on the first page. This newest page-turner from Lee Child starts with the first sentence.… Child really is that good at heroic suspense writing.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Child is famous for his can’t-catch-your-breath openings, and Gone Tomorrow features one of his most provocative … edgy, nerve-wracking and thoroughly engrossing, Gone Tomorrow is so insanely fast paced that it’s simply over too soon.”

  —The Miami Herald

  Praise for NOTHING TO LOSE

  “Electrifying … utterly addictive … dazzles. Not for nothing has the cover art of his recent books depicted a bull’s-eye.”

  —The New York Times

  “Explosive and nearly impossible to put down.”

  —People, “Sizzling Summer Reads”

  “Child’s hard-boiled meal ticket shows no signs of drying up anytime soon. Thank goodness.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A-)

  Praise for BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE

  “Electrifying … A top-tier Reacher book.”

  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “As always, the action is intense, the pace unrelenting, and the violence unforgiving. Child remains the reigning master at combining breakneck yet brilliantly constructed plotting with characters who continually surprise us with their depth.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Perhaps there are action-lit writers more recognizable than Child, but the bet is that none of them will turn in a tighter-plotted, richer-peopled, faster-paced page-turner this year.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Praise for THE HARD WAY

  “The best thriller writer of the moment.”

  —The New York Times

  “Jack Reacher, the tough-minded hero of a series of bestselling noir thrillers, has all the elements that have made this genre so popular among men for decades. He travels the country dispensing his own form of justice, often violently and without remorse.… Reacher is doing something surprising: winning the hearts of many women readers.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  Praise for ONE SHOT

  “Ranks in the first tier … Before it’s all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher—smart, rootless, and brave—will not only get his man but make him suffer.”

  —The New Yorker

  By Lee Child

  Killing Floor

  Die Trying

  Tripwire

  Running Blind

  Echo Burning

  Without Fail

  Persuader

  The Enemy

  One Shot

  The Hard Way

  Bad Luck and Trouble

  Nothing to Lose

  Gone Tomorrow

  61 Hours

  Worth Dying For

  And look for

  THE AFFAIR

  Coming in hardcover and eBook

  September 2011 from Delacorte Press

  Read an excerpt at the end of this eBook

  Second Son is a work 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.

  2011 Delacorte Press eBook Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

  Excerpt from The Affair © 2011 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.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52972-5

  Cover design: Carlos Beltran

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two


  Excerpt from The Affair

  CHAPTER ONE

  On a hot August Thursday in 1974, an old man in Paris did something he had never done before: he woke up in the morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t. His name was Laurent Moutier, and he had felt pretty bad for ten days and really lousy for seven. His arms and legs felt thin and weak and his chest felt like it was full of setting concrete. He knew what was happening. He had been a furniture repairman by trade, and he had become what customers sometimes brought him: a wormy old heirloom weakened and rotted beyond hope. There was no single thing wrong with him. Everything was failing all at once. Nothing to be done. Inevitable. So he lay patient and wheezing and waited for his housekeeper.

  She came in at ten o’clock and showed no great shock or surprise. Most of her clients were old, and they came and went with regularity. She called the doctor, and at one point, clearly in answer to a question about his age, Moutier heard her say “Ninety,” in a resigned yet satisfied way, a way that spoke volumes, as if it was a whole paragraph in one word. It reminded him of standing in his workshop, breathing dust and glue and varnish, looking at some abject crumbly cabinet and saying, “Well now, let’s see,” when really his mind had already moved on to getting rid of it.

  A house call was arranged for later in the day, but then as if to confirm the unspoken diagnosis the housekeeper asked Moutier for his address book, so she could call his immediate family. Moutier had an address book but no immediate family beyond his only daughter Josephine, but even so she filled most of the book by herself, because she moved a lot. Page after page was full of crossed-out box numbers and long strange foreign phone numbers. The housekeeper dialed the last of them and heard the whine and echo of great distances, and then she heard a voice speaking English, a language she couldn’t understand, so she hung up again. Moutier saw her dither for a moment, but then as if to confirm the diagnosis once again, she left in search of the retired schoolteacher two floors below, a soft old man who Moutier usually dismissed as practically a cretin, but then, how good did a linguist need to be to translate ton père va mourir into your dad is going to die?

  The housekeeper came back with the schoolteacher, both of them pink and flushed from the stairs, and the guy dialed the same long number over again, and asked to speak to Josephine Moutier.

  “No, Reacher, you idiot,” Moutier said, in a voice that should have been a roar, but in fact came out as a breathy tubercular plea. “Her married name is Reacher. They won’t know who Josephine Moutier is.”

  The schoolteacher apologized and corrected himself and asked for Josephine Reacher. He listened for a moment and covered the receiver with his palm and looked at Moutier and asked, “What’s her husband’s name? Your son-in-law?”

  “Stan,” Moutier said, “Not Stanley, either. Just Stan. Stan is on his birth certificate. I saw it. He’s Captain Stan Reacher, of the United States Marine Corps.”

  The schoolteacher relayed that information and listened again. Then he hung up. He turned and said, “They just left. Really just days ago, apparently. The whole family. Captain Reacher has been posted elsewhere.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The retired schoolteacher in Paris had been talking to a duty lieutenant at the Navy base on Guam in the Pacific, where Stan Reacher had been deployed for three months as Marine Corps liaison. That pleasant posting had come to an end and he had been sent to Okinawa. His family had followed three days later, on a passenger plane via Manila, his wife Josephine and his two sons, fifteen-year-old Joe and thirteen-year-old Jack. Josephine Reacher was a bright, spirited, energetic woman, at forty-four still curious about the world and happy to be seeing so much of it, still tolerant of the ceaseless moves and the poor accommodations. Joe Reacher at fifteen was already almost full grown, already well over six feet and well over two hundred pounds, a giant next to his mother, but still quiet and studious, still very much Clark Kent, not Superman. Jack Reacher at thirteen looked like an engineer’s napkin sketch for something even bigger and even more ambitious, his huge bony frame like the scaffolding around a major construction project. Six more inches and a final eighty pounds of beef would finish the job, and they were all on their way. He had big hands and watchful eyes. He was quiet like his brother, but not studious. Unlike his brother he was always called by his last name only. No one knew why, but the family was Stan and Josie, Joe and Reacher, and it always had been.

  Stan met his family off the plane at the Futenma air station and they took a taxi to a bungalow he had found half a mile from the beach. It was hot and still inside and it fronted on a narrow concrete street with ditches either side. The street was dead straight and lined with small houses set close together, and at the end of it was a blue patch of ocean. By that point the family had lived in maybe forty different places, and the move-in routine was second nature. The boys found the second bedroom and it was up to them to decide whether it needed cleaning. If so, they cleaned it themselves, and if not, they didn’t. In this case, as usual, Joe found something to worry about, and Reacher found nothing. So he left Joe to it, and he headed for the kitchen, where first he got a drink of water, and then he got the bad news.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Reacher’s parents were side by side at the kitchen counter, studying a letter his mother had carried all the way from Guam. Reacher had seen the envelope. It was something to do with the education system. His mother said, “You and Joe have to take a test before you start school here.”

  Reacher said, “Why?”

  “Placement,” his father said. “They need to know how well you’re doing.”

  “Tell them we’re doing fine. Tell them thanks, but no thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m happy where I am. I don’t need to skip a grade. I’m sure Joe feels the same.”

  “You think this is about skipping a grade?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No,” his father said. “It’s about holding you back a grade.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “New policy,” his mother said. “You’ve had very fragmented schooling. They need to check you’re ready to advance.”

  “They never did that before.”

  “That’s why it’s called a new policy. As opposed to an old policy.”

  “They want Joe to take a test? To prove he’s ready for the next grade? He’ll freak out.”

  “He’ll do OK. He’s good with tests.”

  “That’s not the point, mom. You know what he’s like. He’ll be insulted. So he’ll make himself score a hundred percent. Or a hundred and ten. He’ll drive himself nuts.”

  “Nobody can score a hundred and ten percent. It’s not possible.”

  “Exactly. His head will explode.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? I’ll be OK.”

  “Will you try hard?”

  “What’s the pass mark?”

  “Fifty percent, probably.”

  “Then I’ll aim for fifty-one. No point wasting effort. When is it?”

  “Three days from now. Before the semester starts.”

  “Terrific,” Reacher said. “What kind of an education system doesn’t know the meaning of a simple word like vacation?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reacher went out to the concrete street and looked at the patch of ocean in the distance up ahead. The East China Sea, not the Pacific. The Pacific lay in the other direction. Okinawa was one of the Ryuku Islands, and the Ryuku Islands separated the two bodies of water.

  There were maybe forty homes between Reacher and the water on the left hand side of the street, and another forty on the right. He figured the homes closer to him and further from the sea would be off-post housing for Marine families, and the homes further from him and nearer the water would be locally owned, by Japanese families who lived there full-time. He knew how real estate worked. Just steps to the beach. People competed for places like that, and generally the military let the locals h
ave the best stuff. The DoD always worried about friction. Especially on Okinawa. The air station was right in the center of Genowan, which was a fair-sized city. Every time a transport plane took off, the schools had to stop teaching for a minute or two, because of the noise.