A Jack Reacher short story, 2012

REACHER’S DESIGNATED HANDLER told him it wasn’t going to be easy. There were going to be difficulties. Numerous and various. A real challenge. The guy had no kind of a bedside manner. Normally handlers started with the good news.

Maybe there isn’t any, Reacher thought.

The handler was an Intelligence colonel named Cornelius Christopher, but that was the only thing wrong with him. He looked like a decent guy. Despite the fancy name he seemed to have turned out fairly plain and pragmatic. Reacher would have liked him, except he had never met him before. Going undercover with a handler you never met before led to inefficiency. Or worse.

Christopher asked, ‘How much did they tell you yesterday?’

Reacher said, ‘I was in Frankfurt yesterday. Which is in Germany. No one told me anything. Except to get on a plane to Dulles, and then report to this office.’

‘I see,’ Christopher said.

‘What should they have told me?’

‘You really know nothing about this?’

‘Some local trouble with staff officers.’

‘So they did tell you something.’

‘No one told me anything. But I’m an investigator. I do this stuff for a living. And some things are fairly obvious. I’m a relatively new guy who has so far been posted almost exclusively overseas. Therefore I’m almost certainly unknown to the kind of staff officer who doesn’t get out much.’

‘Out of where?’

‘The Beltway, for instance. Call it a two-mile radius from this very office. Maybe they also have a fishing cottage on a lake somewhere. But that’s not the kind of place I’m likely to have been.’

‘You’re not very happy, are you?’

‘I’ve had more promising days.’

‘What’s your problem?’

‘When does this thing start?’