Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel Read Online Free

dividers between the guests and the staff. The seats were tall swiveling apparatuses that belonged in a nightclub and not a coffee bar. But Cameron didn’t complain—all he cared about was that a coffee bar had coffee, and probably good coffee at that.
    Behind the attendant standing in front of him, a flat screen TV was mounted on the back wall above the coffee bar. It was a newly bought, newly installed LED TV with high-definition and no buttons visible on the front or the side panels.
    CNN International played a muted report about the Confederate flag being removed from a distant, southeastern state—one of the Carolinas, which Cameron hadn’t been to, not yet. He wasn’t paying attention to the news, but if he had been, he would’ve seen a news crawl scrolling on the bottom of the screen showing headlines from across the world.
    One headline, creeping by too fast for anyone who wasn’t focusing, read: African son kills father, President.
    A YEAR AGO, Cameron hadn’t been a fan of coffee. He never had been, not in his whole life, until one day he sat in a booth in a diner in Austin, Texas. It was a generic diner with generic white countertops and high generic stools attached to it at the bottom by a long black bar with a second long bar for resting feet. Wall-length windows were nestled in the walls flanking the booths, like the one at which Cameron now sat with his back to the wall. He faced the door and the other guests, which was the way he liked it. He didn’t like to turn his back to an entrance—any entrance. You couldn’t see who was coming at you if you had your back turned. Not that he was paranoid or thought that bad guys were coming for him. Not that he thought everyone was out to get him, Cameron was a cautionary optimist by nature. He was a lot of things by nature. But one thing he wasn’t was a paranoid person. He didn’t believe that people were out to get him—the same way he didn’t believe that people were not out to get him. As a result, he remained vigilant and always on the defensive, which was a good habit to have. It was defensive living—like defensive driving.
    Of course, in his experience so far, trouble seemed to find him no matter where he was. He had bad luck when it came to getting mixed up with trouble—a family curse. After learning as much as he could about Jack Reacher’s life so far, he had concluded that his father was full of bad luck and trouble. He had also concluded that his father’s bad luck had become his bad luck.
    In the old days, before Cameron knew anything about his drifter father, there was a zero percent chance that someone had been out to get him. But in all honesty, he had made some enemies this last year. And even though he thought there was probably no one out to get him, he figured it was best to make himself difficult to locate. He believed it was better to err on the side of caution. “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst” had been a family motto, preached by his father and handed down to him from his mother.
    Of course, his mother also used to tell him was that the best defense was a good offense—contrary to what he had learned in sports and gained from common wisdom. Her opinion was that it was better to get your offense in first than to wait for the other guy. A swift offense was the fastest way to ensure no defense was required.
    Having been on the road for the better part of a year, Cameron had adopted many new philosophies. Some of them were his own, and some of them weren’t. Most were from one of his two parents. He had always thought his mother had been the original source of all the things she’d taught him. But he was learning, in different ways, that while she was his mother, she had also tried to be his father. In doing so, she had passed on some of his father’s opinions to him.
    In the diner in Austin, Texas, a waitress had brought him coffee. Black. He had said nothing about it. No complaint. No request for something