Second Son by Lee Child Read Free Book Online Page B

down double quick. Which is a lot of work, right?”
    “Always.”
    “And what’s the last phase of that work?”
    “Revising the code books to match the updated plans.”
    “What’s the deadline?”
    “Theoretically we have to be ready to go at midnight tonight, should the president order it.”
    “So maybe somewhere there’s a guy who worked on the codes all through the night. A rear echelon guy who got here about a week ago.”
    “I’m sure there is. But we already checked all over the base. That’s the first thing we did.”
    “Maybe he worked off post.”
    “That would be unauthorized.”
    “But it happens.”
    “I know. But even if it did in this case, he would have been back on the base hours ago, and the book would have been back in the safe hours ago.”
    “Suppose he wore himself out and fell asleep? Suppose he hasn’t gotten up yet? Suppose the code book is still on his kitchen table?”
    “Where?”
    “Across the street,” Reacher said. “Knock on the door and ask for Helen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    Joe got back from his long walk an hour later and he and his brother and his father headed for the beach and took a swim. The water was warm, the sand was white, and the palms were swaying. They loitered and strolled until the sun dipped low, and then they headed home to the hot little house at the top of the concrete street, where an hour later the new phone rang again and Josie told them that her father had died. Old Laurent Moutier was gone, at the age of ninety, taking with him like everyone does a lifetime of unknown private hopes and dreams and fears and experiences, and leaving behind him like most people do a thin trace of himself in his living descendants. He had never had a clear idea of what would become of his beautiful mop-haired daughter and his two handsome grandsons, nor did he really want one, but like every other twentieth-century male human in Europe he hoped they would live lives of peace, prosperity, and plenty, while simultaneously knowing they almost certainly wouldn’t. So he hoped they would bear their burdens with grace and good humor, and he was comforted in his final moments by the knowledge that so far they always had, and probably always would.

Read on for an excerpt from Lee Child’s
    The Affair

Chapter 1
    The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it was built with just three street doors, each one of them opening into a guarded pedestrian lobby. I chose the southeast option, the main concourse entrance, the one nearest the Metro and the bus station, because it was the busiest and the most popular with civilian workers, and I wanted plenty of civilian workers around, preferably a whole long unending stream of them, for insurance purposes, mostly against getting shot on sight. Arrests go bad all the time, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, so I wanted witnesses. I wanted independent eyeballs on me, at least at the beginning. I remember the date, of course. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of March, 1997, and it was the last day I walked into that place as a legal employee of the people who built it.
    A long time ago.
    The eleventh of March 1997 was also by chance exactly four and a half years before the world changed, on that other future Tuesday, and so like a lot of things in the old days the security at the main concourse entrance was serious without being hysterical. Not that I invited hysteria. Not from a distance. I was wearing my Class A uniform, all of it clean, pressed, polished, and spit-shined, all of it covered with thirteen years’ worth of medal ribbons, badges, insignia, and citations.I was thirty-six years old, standing tall and walking ramrod straight, a totally squared away U.S. Army Military Police major in every respect, except that my hair was too long and I hadn’t shaved for five days.
    Back then Pentagon security was