62 pages • 2 hours read
Killing Floor
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Chapters 25-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Reacher flies to New York to meet Professor Kelstein. The professor says he collaborated with Joe as a “sounding board,” because he is the most successful counterfeiter in history. Kelstein and Bartholomew, the Princeton professor, were drafted in World War II and succeeded in flooding the German markets with counterfeit money, effectively shattering the economy. After the war, the Senate commissioned a report from them about counterfeiting. The report became the Treasury’s “anti-counterfeiting bible.” Joe met with them because his “impossible” job was to eradicate counterfeiting of American currency. Joe shut down a massive counterfeiting ring in Lebanon and reduced in-country counterfeiting by 90%. He tracked ink and paper so closely that many counterfeiters were arrested before they had a chance to distribute the bills. Joe found a second large operation in Venezuela, a private effort that Reacher confirms is Kliner’s. Kelstein explains that American currency is produced by pressing the paper between two plates to create an embossed texture and then printed with four different inks. The press, plates, and inks can be obtained anywhere, so Joe focused mostly on preventing people from buying the correct paper. That was what made Kliner’s counterfeits significant: the paper was perfect, and Joe could not figure out how he got the right kind.
On his way to the airport, the two assassins confront Reacher on the street. Having left his weapons with Finlay before boarding the plane, Reacher fights them unarmed and runs away before they recover. At the Atlanta airport, Reacher picks up the Bentley key Finlay left for him at the arrivals desk. He drives back to Margrave, thinking hard the whole way. Hubble told him there were ten people running the Kliner’s operation, not including Hubble himself. Reacher knows Kliner, Kliner’s son, Teale, Morrison, and Baker are involved, so that leaves five more people to identify and eliminate. In the morning, Reacher has coffee with Baker at Eno’s. Baker asks a lot of questions about the trio’s plans. Reacher lies: Finlay is in Jacksonville and asked him to send Hubble’s files to an address in Washington. Reacher tells Baker he plans to spend the night at Hubble’s house so he can search the whole place.
Chapter 26 Summary
Reacher stages Hubble’s house to look inhabited. He puts on gloves and a ski hat he found in the closets and uses Charlene’s makeup to camouflage his face. Reacher hides in the shrubs outside and waits for the killing team to walk right into his trap. The team arrives in a Kliner Foundation van shortly after midnight. A rainstorm muffles most of their sound. Reacher left the Bentley blocking the driveway, so the men get out and walk the rest of the way to the house. Reacher recognizes the way the driver walks: it’s Kliner’s son. Three other men follow him, and a fourth waits in the van. Reacher sneaks up behind the fourth man and breaks his neck. Reacher goes into the house and sees one of the men searching the front closet. Reacher gouges the man’s eyes from behind, hauls him outside, and cuts his throat. He hides the body in the bushes. A few minutes later, two men leave the house. Reacher breaks the first’s neck easily. He stabs the second man in the face before breaking his neck, too. Reacher hides all four bodies in the bushes and goes inside the house to find Kliner’s son. Reacher sees him outside by the swimming pool. He follows Kliner’s son as he searches the backyard. The heavy rain makes his first strike slip, and Reacher loses his balance. Kliner’s son pumps his shotgun and aims. Reacher knocks the barrel upward so he misses, then hits Kliner’s son in the face with his shotgun. They both fall into the pool. Reacher gets him in a tight chokehold and forces him underwater, drowning him.
He pulls the dead body out of the pool and searches the Hubbles’ garage for a wheelbarrow. Reacher puts Kliner’s son’s body in the wheelbarrow and moves it through the house, back to the truck. He unmasks the other men: two guards from the warehouse and two officers who provided back-up at his initial arrest. Reacher loads all the bodies into the truck and drives it to Morrison’s house, where he abandons it in the driveway. As he walks back to Hubble’s house, Reacher wonders why they put serial numbers on the air conditioner boxes if they were just a cover. He recalls that Joe’s note said “Stollers’ garage,” plural possessive, rather than Stoller’s garage, singular. Reacher decides to visit Sherman Stoller’s parents again.
Chapter 27 Summary
At Hubble’s house, Reacher looks at Joe’s note again, but the chlorine from the pool has cleaned the ink off the page. While his clothes are in the dryer, Reacher showers and makes coffee. He looks through Hubble’s office and finds economics journals, books on finance, and a copy of Kelstein and Bartholomew’s report on counterfeiting. In the report, Reacher learns about a counterfeit operation in Colombia. There are also passages on the correct paper stock for American currency and some chemistry jargon he only halfway understands. Reacher picks up Finlay just before dawn and they drive to Atlanta to check the Stollers’ garage.
As they drive, Reacher shares what he figured out from the report. Kliner does not need to steal the paper, rather, he uses Hubble’s skills as a currency manager to acquire massive amounts of smaller bills to stockpile in the warehouse. They ship the bills to the chemical plant in Venezuela, where they are cleaned and reprinted as $100 bills, because America’s paper currency is all the same size. The serial numbers on the air conditioner boxes are actually indicators of how much currency is in each box. Kliner took his inspiration for this process from the counterfeit operation in Lebanon that Joe shut down and a similar one in Colombia.
At the Stollers’ house, Reacher and Finlay find two sealed air conditioner boxes in the garage. Reacher cuts one open and dumps out nearly $100 thousand in singles onto the floor. They load the second box into the car, leaving the opened box of money for the Stollers’.
Chapter 28 Summary
Finlay and Reacher drive to Picard’s office to strategize. Picard is impressed with their work and surprised that Reacher has identified all but one of the ten men in Kliner’s scheme. He tells them to go back to Margrave, and he will pick up Roscoe and meet them there. As they drive, Finlay asks Reacher how he feels about killing five men. Reacher asks, “How do you feel when you put roach powder down?” (437). Finlay wonders aloud how Margrave ended up in this situation; Reacher explains that when President Eisenhower built the interstates, the highway passed right by Margrave. As more traffic left the country road and hit the highways, Margrave’s economy collapsed. Teale sold the land for the warehouse to earn money for the town, and Kliner moved right in. His fake money rebuilt the town, which Teale could not refuse. At the stationhouse, Reacher and Finlay speculate the identity of the 10th man while they wait for Picard. They do not have to wonder very long—when Picard arrives, he does not have Roscoe with him. He does have his gun, and he points it right at Finlay.
Chapters 25-28 Analysis
Reacher’s conversation with Professor Kelstein is the penultimate piece he needs to solve the puzzle surrounding Joe’s murder. Although Reacher learns most of the general information about counterfeiting on the spot, his quick mind enables him to follow a path of deductive reasoning, from general to specific, and form conclusions in real-time. Their conversation also captures a brief moment of the grief Reacher feels for Joe. He hears Kelstein talk about how smart Joe was, how devoted he was to his job and the people he worked with, and his impressions of Joe make Reacher feel sad for never really knowing that side of his brother. He always looked at Joe as his sibling to whom he was duty-bound, but beyond that, they were not close enough to know these aspects of each other’s lives. For example, even if Joe were still alive, Reacher might not ever tell him about Roscoe no matter how much she meant to him, because their sibling relationship was not that close. Reacher is saddened by the possibility that a stranger knew Joe better, or more wholly, than he did. This highlights the lonely side of the wanderer character archetype. Even if he is a hero, even as he leaves a trail of good deeds and vanquished villains in his wake, the tradeoff is that he doesn’t have close connections to people or places for very long. Reacher has an impressive skillset and is able to make logical deductions about people very quickly, but the brother he’s had his whole life is still a mystery to him. The roaming cowboy, or the knight-errant, might have a good woman or a best friend that he protects and feels a connection with, but at the end of the day when the bad guys are caught, the road is his only close family, and his next quest is his only guarantee.
Kelstein’s description of Joe as highly detail-oriented makes Reacher reconsider his reading of the note about the Stollers’ garage. At first, he interpreted it as Sherman Stoller’s garage at his house with Judy, but the apostrophe after the -s makes the Stollers’ a plural possessive, meaning the garage of a house belonging to more than one Stoller. Judy never took Sherman Stoller’s last name while they were together, so the Stollers’ house is his parents’. The novel consistently incorporates fine details like this grammatical misunderstanding, planting them as clues along the way, though at the time of their introduction, many seem like descriptive filler. While the reader may not track every detail, Reacher does. It is worth nothing that he does not become upset with himself for not catching the grammatical detail. Rather, he simply amends his understanding of the note and moves forward with his new knowledge. Reacher does not waste time participating in “what-if” thought experiments. He acts only on the facts he has, and when he has new facts, he pursues those just as relentlessly.
The confrontation at Hubble’s house is a significant moment for understanding Reacher’s sense of morality. He admits to thinking Kliner’s son should know why he is about to die and who it is that is here to kill him, but his training overrides cultural expectations of courtesy in combat and classifies such niceties as an inhibition that could get himself killed. The ambush sequence also demonstrates how occasionally, despite all Reacher’s experience and confidence, sometimes a situation does not play out exactly as he thinks it will. The heavy rain makes his first strike against Kliner’s son a near miss, which in turn throws Reacher off balance. Reacher is a reactive, adaptive fighter; when the initial plan does not work, he immediately alters his tactics. Kliner’s son fights in a frenzy, without assessing his opponent; he believes relentless brute force will make him the winner, but Reacher’s training prepares him to fight enemies of all different styles, including learning how to outmaneuver someone who keeps charging. This is a classic hero/villain dynamic of brute force versus intelligence and strength. Both Reacher and Kliner’s son are physically strong and forceful, but Reacher has an added intelligence, agility, and adaptiveness that gives him the edge in the end. This gives his character more believability and likeability, as well as the moral upper hand to be the winner.
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