Bad Luck and Trouble
Lee Child
 Reacher is roaming alone with no objectives, no phone, no address, just the clothes he's wearing and his ATM card, when an anonymous deposit is made to his bank account. Reacher automatically analyzes the amount, using his math obsession and investigative skills. Also obsessed with math, Frances Neagley (previously seen in Without Fail) is the sender of $1030.00, which Reacher recognises as their old army code, 10-30, for urgent help needed. He meets up with Neagley in California and they discover the death of Calvin Franz, one of nine members of their elite team of ex–army investigators, who are being hunted down one by one. After getting no reply from anyone else, their suspicions rise and Neagley convinces him to put the old unit back together. Reacher and Neagley find that three of the other five members are missing, while Stan Lowery had a fatal car accident years earlier. They conclude that Franz called the others for help with a major problem but left out the remaining four that resided too far away to get to him quickly, apart from Reacher, who is famously untraceable. Reacher and Neagley discover Franz's office gutted and trashed but decide the perpetrators didn't find what they were looking for. After further investigation they visit Franz's widow and child, Angela and Charlie. Angela notes that when Franz told her all about the team, she had felt like Franz had been married before, to them. Reacher says if people were lucky like the team, they became family, but Franz got even luckier with her and Charlie, with Angela replying, "...but his luck ran out, didn't it?", a reference to the book title. More information on the other team members makes Reacher and Neagley realise Franz was unlikely to be the person who called for help. They meet David O'Donnell at their hotel, making three of the team alive. Reacher goes to Tony Swan's workplace, defense contractor New Age, in search of information, but is sent away with basically nothing by the HR manager, Margaret Berenson. Following Reacher and his team is an unmarked car, which they trap to discourage the driver. After roughing him up they find out the driver is an LA County Deputy named Thomas Brant, but outside of his jurisdiction in Orange County, CA. The team decides to ditch their rental car for a new one and run into Karla Dixon. With four of the team now alive, they proceed to source money, cars and weapons. Except for Reacher, all the team members have "moved onward and upward" from the military, making Reacher reconsider his drifting. He is happy for the others' successes but feels as if he is "treading water while the rest are swimming". Putting aside onflicting reactions at seeing his team again, Reacher focuses on the three missing members, Manuel Orozco, Jorge Sanchez and Tony Swan, and which one was in a situation so bad they couldn't handle it on their own and called for help. The team realizes Franz kept his home life completely separate from his business, leading Franz to mail any dangerous computer data to himself, with triple backup of refreshed computer USB flash drives on rotating days. They find his flash memory sticks in his business post-office box, crack the password, then review a set of bizarre numbers which they conclude to be scores, and an unfamiliar name "Adrian Mount" with four aliases. Unsurprised, Reacher is visited by Brant and his boss, Curtis Mauney, an LA County Sheriff. But Reacher is surprised when Mauney tells him that Reacher and his team are bait, for whoever killed Franz and caused Swan, Sanchez and Orozco to be reported missing. Mauney's LA sheriffs and Las Vegas police frequently work together and recent information had linked the dead and the missing with Reacher's team. Neagley gets a response regarding Swan's company New Age from Diana Bond, a staffer for a guy on the House Defense Committee, that Reacher and his team distrust, but they pressure Diana for confidential information on New Age and its military contracts. Mauney later contacts the team with information on Jorge Sanchez's death and Vegas police evidence on Adrian Mount with five aliases, one more than Franz had. Sanchez and Orozco were partners in a Las Vegas casino security firm and the team drives to Las Vegas for clues and answers on Sanchez and the still missing Orozco. Reacher and his team seek out the major casino security directors about the possibility of Sanchez and Orozco being involved in a large scale internal multi-casino thief network and are told about Sanchez's girlfriend, who leads them to Orozco's wife and children. An assassination attempt is made on Reacher and his team but they kill the assassin and take his car, which Reacher recalls from their LA hotel. Reacher uses the cell phone in the car to return-dial the last number on the call list, telling the man who answers that his assassin failed, the team knows he is behind their unit's dead members and they are coming for him. From Las Vegas they are told to meet Mauney at the hospital, leading Reacher to conclude that Sanchez is not dead, just severely injured. O'Donnell and Dixon go to the hospital and Reacher and Neagley go to find Margaret Berenson, after they realise that she has been lying to them. They find that New Age has been producing state of the art air missiles and pretending to destroy the prototypes, whilst sending them to foreign terrorists. Neagley and Reacher leave Berenson's house after finding out Berenson is being blackmailed with harm to her son, and arranging a safe hiding place for them. O'Donnell and Dixon are captured by Mauney's men in the hospital and taken to New Age's Director, Allen Lamaison. Reacher and Neagley track Mauney down, take his suitcase containing the terrorists' payment of $65 million, and kill him. At the second New Age complex, Reacher stows away on the same helicopter as Lamaison, where he finds O'Donnell and Dixon tied up and about to be thrown off and killed the same way that Franz, Orozco, Sanchez and Swan were. Reacher confronts Lamaison just in time, kills his assistant and pushes Lamaison out of the helicopter once it is fully one mile above ground level. After the helicopter lands Reacher asks the pilot if he flew for each of the murders and after confirmation, Reacher kills the pilot also. The one part left is the terrorist weapons buyer, who Reacher concludes does not know how to use them. The team finds the one New Age staff engineer capable of teaching the terrorist how to use the weapons, and who is being threatened with his daughter's torture. Reacher poses as the engineer briefly as the terrorist arrives, then he and Neagley tie the terrorist up, leaving him for the special military police to find him. Later, the four team members agree to split the money obtained from the bad guys after setting up trust funds for the murdered team members' loved ones, with a donation to PETA for Tony Swan's only family, his dog Maisi. Reacher eventually receives a deposit for over $100,000 in his account, automatically analyzes it, and thinks the amount is just a boring plain number. He feels disappointed and let down by Dixon, the money manager of the group. But the detailed report shows multiple deposits, "101810.18. 10012 ... Military police radio code for mission accomplished, twice over. 10-18, 10-18 ... second deposit was her zip code: 10012. Greenwich Village. Where she lived."