Without Fail - Couverture rigide

Child, Lee

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0399148612 ISBN 13 : 9780399148613

Editeur : Putnam Pub Group, 2002

Synopsis

Book by Child Lee

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

“When the going gets tough, the tough reach for Jack—Jack Reacher.”*

Praise for
WITHOUT FAIL

“Lee Child is a pro at evoking a sense of place . . . If you haven’t read a Reacher story, do yourself an exciting and engrossing favor and pick one up. Grade A.”

—Rocky Mountain News

 

“Reacher is convincingly tough, clear-headed, and street smart . . . everything falls into place like a well-assembled time bomb.” —The Boston Globe

 

“[The] fast-paced plot winds up to its exciting climax . . . Child’s novels are relentlessly paced, intricately plotted, and absolutely mesmerizing. This is no exception.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

 

“Jack Reacher is the best LTGG (loner-tough-good-guy) out there . . . self-sufficient, strong and stimulating to the fairer sex.” —*Contra Costa Times

 

“Lee Child has inexorably pulled himself into the upper echelons of thriller writing with a series of tough, lean and perfectly crafted novels featuring ex-US military cop Jack Reacher. Without Fail is the sixth outing for the resourceful Reacher, and far from showing any signs of incipient fatigue, the series just goes from strength to strength as Child hones his abilities.” —Yorkshire Post

 

“The sixth time’s a charm for thriller-meister Child, whose latest escapade starring ex-military cop Jack Reacher is handily his most accomplished and most compelling to date . . . [A] suspense-laden plot . . . this Child’s play will be a tough act to follow.” —Publishers Weekly

“A satisfying adventure . . . [a] burner pace . . . compelling.” —St. Petersburg Times

 

“Nail-biting . . . [with] a hero who’s as tough and rough and cool as they come.” —Belfast Telegraph

 

“A stunner, packed with extraordinary detail . . . the suspense becomes nearly unbearable . . . A thriller of un-equaled emotional depth.” —Booklist

 

“Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers get better every time, and this is a knockout.” —Library Journal

 

“In this sixth Reacher paperback, author Lee Child is as good as he’s ever been—and he’s usually very good.”

—Waikato Times (New Zealand)

 

 

“Superior . . . brilliant . . . Without Fail is worth a perusal and should satisfy those people who enjoyed Child’s first novels, Killing Floor and Die Trying. But make sure you’ve got time when you sit down to start reading it—you’ll be hooked.” —Evening Post (Bristol)

 

“A good, solid thriller that should bring Child more fans.”

—Newcastle Herald (Australia)

Praise for Lee Child and his bestselling Jack Reacher novels

“The best mystery I have read this year.” —The Boston Globe

 

“A story you can sink your teeth into. Lee Child is a master.”

—The Denver Post

 

 

“Swift and brutal.” —The New York Times

 

“Spectacular . . . Muscular, energetic prose and pell-mell pacing.” —The Seattle Times

 

“Bang-on suspense.” —Houston Chronicle

 

“Page for page, there’s probably more fisticuffs in a Lee Child thriller than anywhere else around.”

—Chicago Tribune

 

“Tough, elegant, and thoughtful.”—Robert B. Parker

 

“Combines high suspense with almost nonstop action. Reacher is a wonderfully epic hero: tough, taciturn, yet vulnerable. From its jolting opening scene to its fiery final confrontation, Killing Floor is irresistible.”—People

 

“This is such a brilliantly written first novel that [Child] must be channeling Dashiell Hammett . . . Reacher handles the maze of clues and the criminal unfortunates with a flair that would make Sam Spade proud.”—Playboy

Titles by Lee Child

WITHOUT FAIL
ECHO BURNING
RUNNING BLIND
TRIPWIRE
DIE TRYING
KILLING FLOOR

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

WITHOUT FAIL

 

A Jove Book / published by arrangement
with G. P. Putnam’s Sons

 

 

Copyright © 2002 by Lee Child

 

All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this
book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of
the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase
only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or
encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For information address: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

ISBN: 9781101052792

 

A JOVE BOOK®
Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
JOVE and the “J” design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

 

 

This one is for
my brother Richard in Gloucester, England;
my brother David in Brecon, Wales;
my brother Andrew in Sheffield, England;
and my friend Jack Hutcheson in Penicuik, Scotland.

1

They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren’t ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed.

They used their usual method to get past security and set up a hundred feet from where he was speaking. They used a silencer and missed him by an inch. The bullet must have passed right over his head. Maybe even through his hair, because he immediately raised his hand and patted it back into place as if a gust of wind had disturbed it. They saw it over and over again, afterward, on television. He raised his hand and patted his hair. He did nothing else. He just kept on with his speech, unaware, because by definition a silenced bullet is too fast to see and too quiet to hear. So it missed him and flew on. It missed everybody standing behind him. It struck no obstacles, hit no buildings. It flew on straight and true until its energy was spent and gravity hauled it to earth in the far distance where there was nothing except empty grassland. There was no response. No reaction. Nobody noticed. It was like the bullet had never been fired at all. They didn’t fire again. They were too shaken up.

So, a failure, but a miracle. And a lesson. They spent October acting like the professionals they were, starting over, calming down, thinking, learning, preparing for their second attempt. It would be a better attempt, carefully planned and properly executed, built around technique and nuance and sophistication, and enhanced by unholy fear. A worthy attempt. A creative attempt. Above all, an attempt that wouldn’t fail.

Then November came, and the rules changed completely.

 

 

Reacher’s cup was empty but still warm. He lifted it off the saucer and tilted it and watched the sludge in the bottom flow toward him, slow and brown, like river silt.

“When does it need to be done?” he asked.

“As soon as possible,” she said.

He nodded. Slid out of the booth and stood up.

“I’ll call you in ten days,” he said.

“With a decision?”

He shook his head. “To tell you how it went.”

“I’ll know how it went.”

“OK, to tell you where to send my money.”

She closed her eyes and smiled. He glanced down at her.

“You thought I’d refuse?” he said.

She opened her eyes. “I thought you might be a little harder to persuade.”

He shrugged. “Like Joe told you, I’m a sucker for a challenge. Joe was usually right about things like that. He was usually right about a lot of things.”

“Now I don’t know what to say, except thank you.”

He didn’t reply. Just started to move away, but she stood up right next to him and kept him where he was. There was an awkward pause. They stood for a second face-to-face, trapped by the table. She put out her hand and he shook it. She held on a fraction too long, and then she stretched up tall and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were soft. Their touch burned him like a tiny voltage.

“A handshake isn’t enough,” she said. “You’re going to do it for us.” Then she paused. “And you were nearly my brother-in-law.”

He said nothing. Just nodded and shuffled out from behind the table and glanced back once. Then he headed up the stairs and out to the street. Her perfume was on his hand. He walked around to the cabaret lounge and left a note for his friends in their dressing room. Then he headed out to the highway, with ten whole days to find a way to kill the fourth-best-protected person on the planet.

 

 

It had started eight hours earlier, like this: team leader M. E. Froelich came to work on that Monday morning, thirteen days after the election, an hour before the second strategy meeting, seven days after the word assassination had first been used, and made her final decision. She set off in search of her immediate superior and found him in the secretarial pen outside his office, clearly on his way to somewhere else, clearly in a hurry. He had a file under his arm and a definite stay back expression on his face. But she took a deep breath and made it clear that she needed to talk right then. Urgently. And off the record and in private, obviously. So he paused a moment and turned abruptly and went back inside his office. He let her step in after him and closed the door behind her, softly enough to make the unscheduled meeting feel a little conspiratorial, but firmly enough that she was in no doubt he was annoyed about the interruption to his routine. It was just the click of a door latch, but it was also an unmistakable message, parsed exactly in the language of office hierarchies everywhere: you better not be wasting my time with this.

He was a twenty-five-year veteran well into his final lap before retirement, well into his middle fifties, the last echo of the old days. He was still tall, still fairly lean and athletic, but graying fast and softening in some of the wrong places. His name was Stuyvesant. Like the last Director-General of New Amsterdam, he would say when the spelling was questioned. Then, acknowledging the modern world, he would say: like the cigarette. He wore Brooks Brothers every day of his life without exception, but he was considered capable of flexibility in his tactics. Best of all, he had never failed. Not ever, and he had been around a long time, with more than his fair share of difficulties. But there had been no failures, and no bad luck, either. Therefore, in the merciless calculus of organizations everywhere, he was considered a good guy to work for.

“You look a little nervous,” he said.

“I am, a little,” Froelich said back.

His office was small, and quiet, and sparsely furnished, and very clean. The walls were painted bright white and lit with halogen. There was a window, with white vertical blinds half closed against gray weather outside.

“Why are you nervous?” he asked.

“I need to ask your permission.”

“For what?”

“For something I want to try,” she said. She was twenty years younger than Stuyvesant, exactly thirty-five. Tall rather than short, but not excessively. Maybe only an inch or two over the average for American women of her generation, but the kind of intelligence and energy and vitality she radiated took the word medium right out of the equation. She was halfway between lithe and muscular, with a bright glow in her skin and her eyes that made her look like an athlete. Her hair was short and fair and casually unkempt. She gave the impression of having hurriedly stepped into her street clothes after showering quickly after winning a gold medal at the Olympics by playing a crucial role in some kind of team sport. Like it was no big deal, like she wanted to get out of the stadium before the television interviewers got through with her teammates and started in on her. She looked like a very competent person, but a very modest one.

“What kind of something?” Stuyvesant asked. He turned and placed the file he was carrying on his desk. His desk was large, topped with a slab of gray composite. High-end modern office furniture, obsessively cleaned and polished like an antique. He was famous for always keeping his desktop clear of paperwork and completely empty. The habit created an air of extreme efficiency.

“I want an outsider to do it,” Froelich said.

Stuyvesant squared the file on the desk corner and ran his fingers along the spine and the adjacent edge, like he was checking the angle was exact.

“You think that’s a good idea?” he asked.

Froelich said nothing.

“I suppose you’ve got somebody in mind?” he asked.

“An excellent prospect.”

“Who?”

Froelich shook her head.

“You should stay outside the loop,” she said. “Better that way.”

“Was he recommended?”

“Or she.”

Stuyvesant nodded again. The modern world.

“Was the person you have in mind recommended?”

“Yes, by an excellent source.”

“In-house?”

“Yes,” Froelich said again.

“So we’re already in the loop.”

“No, the source isn’t in-house anymore.”

Stuyvesant turned again and moved his file parallel to the long edge of the desk. Then back again parallel with the short edge.

“Let me play devil’s advocate,” he said. “I promoted you four months ago. Four months is a long time. Choosing to bring in an outsider now might be seen to betray a certain lack of self-confidence, mightn’t it? Wouldn’t you say?”

“I can’t worry about that.”

“Maybe you should,” Stuyvesant said. “This could hurt you. There were six guys who wanted your job. So if yo...

Biographie de l'auteur :

Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world, are published in over one hundred territories, and two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a writer of an outstanding body of crime fiction, the International Thriller Writers’ ThrillerMaster, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Putnam Pub Group
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0399148612
• ISBN 13: 9780399148613
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 374