The Affair: A Reacher Novel

anyway. I got there a half hour before the banks closed, and I picked one at random and moved my account. They offered me my choice of a toaster oven or a CD player. I took neither one, but I asked for their phone number and I registered a password.
    Then I headed over to the Pentagon. I chose the main concourse entrance, and I got halfway to the door, and then I stopped. The crowd carried on around me, oblivious. I didn’t want to go in. I borrowed a pen from an impatient passerby and I signed my form and I dropped it in a mailbox. Then I walked through the graveyard and out the main gate to the tangle of roads between it and the river.
    I was thirty-six years old, a citizen of a country I had barely seen, and there were places to go, and there were things to do. There were cities, and there was countryside. There were mountains, and there were valleys. There were rivers. There were museums, and music, and motels, and clubs, and diners, and bars, and buses. There were battlefields and birthplaces, and legends, and roads. There was company if I wanted it, and there was solitude if I didn’t.
    I picked a road at random, and I put one foot on the curb and one in the traffic lane, and I stuck out my thumb.

Dedicated to the memory of
    David Thompson

1971–2010
    A fine bookseller and a good friend

Also 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

About the Author
    LEE CHILD is the author of sixteen Jack Reacher thrillers, including the #1
New York Times
bestsellers
Worth Dying For
,
61 Hours
,
Gone Tomorrow
,
Nothing to Lose
, and
Bad Luck and Trouble
. His debut,
Killing Floor
, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and
The Enemy
won both the Barry and the Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in more than fifty territories. All titles have been optioned for major motion pictures. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City.