HOW FAST
There are ten radial hallways between the rings; traveling at Army marching pace of 4 mph, a person can make it between any two random points inside in a maximum of seven minutes.
“To escape into the Pentagon was no kind of a good idea.”
“I’m that guy … The only guy in the world who doesn’t have a cellphone.”
Remember that if the satellite can show you the way on your GPS, it can also pinpoint your exact location.
The guy who relies on his head clock has no use for a fancy watch.
“He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone.”
Put your brain first—electronic devices can affect your ability to process information, your concentration, and your sleep.
Why would you want to allow the world and his wife to track you down by phone?
If you’re constantly looking down at your phone, you’re not looking at the world around you.
“Text messaging.”
“What’s that?”
“You can send written messages by phone.”
“When did that start?”
THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY
Call me on my cell.
POTENTIAL ALIASES FOR USE WHEN BOOKING A MOTEL
“It helps if you can use a list of names embedded in your memory. Like the U.S. Presidents.”
George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William H. Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover
“If in doubt, use the names of obscure baseball players or dead musicians.”
“I like aliases. I like anonymity.”
“I don’t need to go hunting them. I already know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”
The basis of any scam is telling people what they want to hear. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
A classic confidence trick is where you drip, drip, drip the unimportant stuff but then hold back on the final installment.
Assess and evaluate.
Paranoia prefers triple bluffs to double bluffs.
Killers don’t stop at two murders. If they do more than one, they do more than two.
“People don’t look for complications. You hear hoofbeats, you look for horses, not zebras.”
“Something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.”
All good scam artists stick as close to the truth as possible.
There’s always something out of context, even before you know what the context ought to be.
Force yourself to think like they think.
“The whole of life is a gamble, from the very beginning to the very end.”
MIRANDA
The Miranda warning is used by U.S. police when questioning criminal suspects, to protect the individual from compelled self-incrimination, and to preserve the admissibility of the criminal’s statement in court. It originated in 1966 after Miranda vs. Arizona, when an Ernesto Arturo Miranda was deemed to have had his rights violated during his arrest.
• You have the right to remain silent.
• Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law.
• You have the right to speak to an attorney.
• If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.
• Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?
“Ernesto A. Miranda was a moron, you know that?” Deerfield said. “A couple of smokes short of a pack. He was a subnormal guy. He needed the protection. You subnormal? You a moron, Reacher?”
“Probably, to be putting up with this shit.”
THE SCIENCE OF … BURNING DOWN A BUILDING
Place books of matches under furniture in the center of the room.
Pile as much paper as you can find on top; lean a burning cigarette against the matches.
Retire, leaving the door open for a draft.
Brick buildings always burn well. The contents go up first, then the floors, ceiling, and roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. When the walls finally collapse, the blast of sparks and embers will spread the fire farther.
Sometimes a whole city block can be taken out with one cigarette and one book of matches.
“I’m sleeping well … but I think that’s mostly because of the tranquilizers.”
Sleep when you can, because you never know when you’re going to sleep again.
Accept that you’ll never find a bed that will accommodate your feet as well as your head.
Careful, sleep can be a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
Sleep as much as you can, because tiredness causes more foul-ups than carelessness and stupidity put together.
If you go to sleep fully dressed, you’ll be ready for action when you wake.
You’ll feel safer sleeping with a handgun under your pillow.
“A medical man would say I passed out. I prefer to think I just went to sleep.”
“He set the clock in his head for two hours, and he breathed in once, and he breathed out once, and then he fell asleep, almost instantly.”
Tune in to your circadian rhythms to set your personal internal alarm clock.
Four o’clock in the morning is the best time to attack. In the Army they call it KGB time.
“Clocks in prisons are bizarre. Why measure hours and minutes when people think in years and decades?”
THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY
Any idea what the time is?
“He knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service.
When you’re waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock on to the steady pace of the passing seconds. It’s like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in.
But it keeps you just awake enough to be ready for whatever you need to be ready for.
And it means you always know what time it is.”