Plot Summary
In the last hours of 1989, two-star Army General Ken Kramer is in a North Carolina motel when he dies of a fatal heart attack. Military Police Major Jack Reacher investigates, and comes to the conclusion that the woman Kramer was with in the motel stole his Army briefcase.
Reacher and a female assistant named Lieutenant Summer travel to inform Mrs. Kramer of her husband's death. However, when they arrive, it turns out the house has been broken into and Mrs. Kramer has been murdered with a crowbar.
Reacher goes to a bar across the street from the motel to find out who the hooker was, and creates some trouble when he gets into a fight with the owner, shattering his knee. Afterwards, the motel receptionist informs Reacher that he heard a military vehicle leaving after Kramer's death, and Reacher concludes that the woman Kramer was with is a female officer. The book introduces General Vassell and Colonel Coomer, and later their errand boy, Major Marshall. It becomes clear that they are hiding something, related to an agenda for a meeting that was in Kramer's briefcase.
Two soldiers named Carbone and Brubaker are murdered soon afterward. It turns out that Carbone filed a complaint against Reacher, his first in a sixteen-year career, for assaulting the bar owner. This puts Reacher under a cloud of suspicion.
Reacher, in a talk with the Chief of Staff, finds out that with the collapse of Soviet communism, the military at large is worried about its inevitable downsizing, and in particular the different branches are having a power struggle.
Reacher realises that Vassell, Coomer, and Marshall killed Carbone, by sneaking Marshall into the base in the car trunk. This is proven when investigation of the car finds Marshall's fingerprints as well as large quantities of blood in the trunk.
Reacher arrests Vassell and Coomer for conspiracy to commit homicide. He makes the mistake of traveling alone to a firing range in the Mojave Desert to arrest Marshall. Marshall is hiding out in a bunker, also armed. A firefight ensues, during which Marshall calls his tank squadron, practicing nearby, to fire rounds on their position. Under cover of the incoming tank shells, and realizing that time is short, Reacher sneaks into the bunker and shoots and wounds Marshall. Escaping in his Humvee, he drives the wounded Marshall to a military hospital.
Reacher finds the missing agenda. It turns out that it was a plan to ensure that Armored Branch, the military the conspirators worked for, avoided being reduced. The agenda was a plan to assassinate eighteen prominent individuals in the army, one already killed. Vassell, Coomer, and Marshall plead guilty as charged in exchange for life imprisonment, avoiding the death penalty which was threatened.
Reacher pleads guilty to the brutality charge that had been brought by Carbone, and is demoted to Captain, but has cleared his conscience.
Read more about this topic: The Enemy (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)