Reacher and Neagley go to former team member Tony Swan's workplace, defense contractor New Age, looking for information, but are sent away with basically nothing by the HR manager, Margaret Berenson.

They meet David "Dave" O'Donnell at their hotel, who cracks the password to Franz's flash drives, finding a set of numbers which they conclude to be scores and the name "Azhari Mahmoud" with four aliases.

Reacher is visited by Brant and his boss, Curtis Mauney, a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department detective.

From Las Vegas they are told to meet Mauney at the hospital, leading Reacher to conclude that Sanchez is not dead, just severely injured.

Berenson, it turns out, is being blackmailed by New Age's corrupt director, Allen Lamaison, who has threatened to harm her son if she reveals what she knows.

At the New Age manufacturing facility, Reacher stows away on the company helicopter just before Lamaison loads O'Donnell and Dixon, tied up, planning to throw them out and kill them in the same way he did Franz, Orozco, Sanchez, and Swan.

Child began forming the plot on 21 June 2005, when he remembered that it was ten years to the day he had been fired from a previous job, leading to the why and how he became a writer.

He then thought about old colleagues, workmates, buddies, that he went through a lot with, and wondered where they all were, what were they doing, were they doing well or struggling, were they happy, what did they look like, and leading to full nostalgia: feelings that high school, college, old jobs, old towns moved away from, that everyone shares.

He decided to make the next Reacher book about a reunion, "among a bunch of old colleagues that he hadn't seen for ten years, people that he loved fiercely and respected deeply.

Regular Reacher readers will know that he's a pretty self-confident guy, but I wanted him to wobble just a little this time, to compare his choices with theirs, to measure himself against them."