Die Trying

Die Trying by Lee Child.

ONE

NATHAN RUBIN DIED BECAUSE HE GOT BRAVE. NOT THE SUSTAINED kind of thing which wins you a medal in a war, but the split-second kind of blurting outrage which gets you killed on the street.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short, round man aiming to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted corridors of a lakeside house, appropriate to a man who earned a thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A thumb on the b.u.t.ton of the garage door-opener and a twist of the wrist to start the silent engine of his expensive, imported sedan. A CD into the player, a backward sweep into his gravel driveway, a dab on the brake, a snick of the selector, a nudge on the gas, and the last short drive of his life was under way. Six forty-nine in the morning, Monday.

The only light on his route to work was green, which was the proximate cause of his death. It meant that as he pulled into his secluded slot behind his professional building the prelude ahead of Bach"s B minor fugue still had thirty-eight seconds left to run. He sat and heard it out until the last organ blast echoed to silence, which meant that as he got out of his car the three men were near enough for him to interpret some kind of intention in their approach. So he glanced at them. They looked away and altered course, three men in step, like dancers or soldiers. He turned toward his building. Started walking.

But then he stopped. And looked back. The three men were at his car.

Trying the doors.

"Hey!" he called.

It was the short universal sound of surprise, anger, challenge. The sort of instinctive sound an earnest, naive citizen makes when something should not be happening. The sort of instinctive sound which gets an earnest, naive citizen killed. He found himself heading straight back to his car. He was outnumbered three to one but he was in the right, which swelled him up and gave him confidence. He strode back and felt outraged and fit and commanding.

But those were illusory feelings. A soft, suburban guy like him was never going to be in command of a situation like that. His fitness was just health-club tone. It counted for nothing. His tight abdominals ruptured under the first savage blow. His face jerked forward and down and hard knuckles pulped his lips and smashed his teeth. He was caught by rough hands and knotted arms and held upright like he weighed nothing at all. His keys were s.n.a.t.c.hed from his grasp and he was. .h.i.t a crashing blow on the ear. His mouth filled with blood. He was dropped onto the blacktop and heavy boots smashed into his back. Then his gut.

Then his head. He blacked out like a television set in a thunderstorm.

The world just disappeared in front of him. It collapsed into a thin hot line and sputtered away to nothing.

So he died, because for a split-second he got brave. But not then. He died much later, after the split-second of bravery had faded into long hours of wretched gasping fear, and after the long hours of fear had exploded into long minutes of insane screaming panic.

Jack Reacher stayed alive, because he got cautious. He got cautious because he heard an echo from his past. He had a lot of past, and the echo was from the worst part of it.

He had served thirteen years in the army, and the only time he was wounded it wasn"t with a bullet. It was with a fragment of a Marine sergeant"s jawbone. Reacher had been stationed in Beirut, in the US compound out by the airport. The compound was truck-bombed. Reacher was standing at the gate. The Marine in sergeant was standing a hundred yards nearer the explosion. The jawbone fragment was the only piece left of the guy. It hit Reacher a hundred yards away and went tumbling through his gut like a bullet. The army surgeon who patched Reacher up told him afterward he was lucky. He told him a real bullet in the gut would have felt much worse. That was the echo Reacher was hearing. And he was paying a whole lot of attention to it, because thirteen years later he was standing there with a handgun pointing straight at his stomach. From a range of about an inch and a half.

The handgun was a nine-millimeter automatic. It was brand new. It was oiled. It was held low, lined up right on his old scar. The guy holding it looked more or less like he knew what he was doing. The safety mechanism was released. There was no visible tremor in the muzzle. No tension. The trigger finger was ready to go to work.

Reacher could see that. He was concentrating hard on that trigger finger.

He was standing next to a woman. He was holding her arm. He had never seen her before. She was staring at an identical nine-millimeter pointed at her own gut. Her guy was more tensed up than his. Her guy looked uneasy. He looked worried. His gun was trembling with tension.

His fingernails were chewed. A nervous, jumpy guy. The four of them were standing there on the street, three of them still like statues and the fourth hopping slightly from foot to foot.

They were in Chicago. Center of the city, a busy sidewalk, a Monday, last day of June. Broad daylight, bright summer sunshine. The whole situation had materialized in a split second. It had happened in a way which couldn"t have been ch.o.r.eographed in a million years. Reacher had been walking down the street, going nowhere, not fast, not slow. He had been about to pa.s.s the exit door of a storefront dry-cleaner"s. The door had opened up in his face and an old metal walking cane had clattered out on the sidewalk right in front of him. He"d glanced up to see a woman in the doorway. She was about to drop an armful of nine dry-cleaning bags. She was some way short of thirty, expensively dressed, dark, attractive, self-a.s.sured. She had some kind of a bad leg. Some kind of an injury. Reacher could see from her awkward posture it was causing her pain. She"d thrown him a would-you-mind look and he"d thrown her a no-problem look and scooped up the metal cane. He"d taken the nine bags from her with one hand and given her the cane with the other. He"d flicked the bags up over his shoulder and felt the nine wire hangers bite into his ringer. She had planted the cane on the sidewalk and eased her forearm into the curved-metal clip. He had offered his hand. She had paused. Then she had nodded in an embarra.s.sed fashion and he had taken her arm and waited a beat, feeling helpful but awkward. Then they had turned together to move away. Reacher had figured he would maybe stroll a few steps with her until she was steady on her feet. Then he would let her arm go and hand back her garments. But he"d turned straight into the two guys with the nine-millimeter automatics.

The four of them stood there, face to face in pairs. Like four people eating together in a tight booth in a diner. The two guys with the guns were white, well fed, vaguely military, vaguely alike. Medium height, short brown hair. Big hands, muscular. Big, obvious faces, bland pink features. Tense expressions, hard eyes. The nervous guy was smaller, like he burned up his energy worrying. They both wore checked shirts and poplin windbreakers. They stood there, pressed together. Reacher was a lot taller than the other three. He could see all around them, over their heads. He stood there, surprised, with the woman"s dry-cleaning slung over his shoulder. The woman was leaning on her crutch, just staring, silent. The two men were pointing the guns.

Close in. Reacher felt they"d all been standing like that for a long time. But he knew that feeling was deceptive. It probably hadn"t been more than a second and a half.

The guy opposite Reacher seemed to be the leader. The bigger one. The calmer one. He looked between Reacher and the woman and jerked his automatic"s barrel toward the kerb.

"In the car, b.i.t.c.h," the guy said. "And you, a.s.shole." He spoke urgently, but quietly. With authority. Not much of an accent. Maybe from California, Reacher thought. There was a sedan at the kerb. It had been waiting there for them. A big car, black, expensive. The driver was leaning across behind the front pa.s.senger seat. He was stretching over to pop the rear door. The guy opposite Reacher motioned with the gun again. Reacher didn"t move. He glanced left and right. He figured he had about another second and a half to make some kind of an a.s.sessment. The two guys with the nine-millimeter automatics didn"t worry him too much. He was one-handed, because of the dry-cleaning, but he figured the two guys would go down without too much of a problem. The problems lay beside him and behind him. He stared up into the dry-cleaner"s window and used it like a mirror.

Twenty yards behind him was a solid ma.s.s of hurrying people at a crosswalk. A couple of stray bullets would find a couple of targets.

No doubt about that. No doubt at all. That was the problem behind him. The problem beside him was the unknown woman. Her capabilities were an unknown quant.i.ty. She had some kind of a bad leg. She would be slow to react. Slow to move. He wasn"t prepared to go into combat.

Not in that environment, and not with that partner.

The guy with the Californian accent reached up and grabbed Reacher"s wrist where it was pinned against his collar by the weight of the nine clean garments hanging down his back. He used it to pull him toward the car. His trigger finger still looked ready to go to work. Reacher was watching it, corner of his eye. He let the woman"s arm go. Stepped over to the car. Threw the bags into the rear seat and climbed in after them. The woman was pushed in behind him. Then the jumpy guy crowded in on them and slammed the door. The leader got in front on the right. Slammed the door. The driver nudged the selector and the car moved smoothly and quietly away down the street.

The woman was gasping in pain and Reacher figured she had the jumpy guy"s gun jammed in her ribs. The leader was twisted around in the front seat with his gun hand resting against the thick leather headrest. The gun was pointing straight at Reacher"s chest. It was a Clock 17. Reacher knew all about that weapon. He had evaluated the prototype for his unit. That had been his a.s.signment during his light-duty convalescence after the Beirut wound. The Glock was a tough little weapon. Seven and a half inches long from firing pin to muzzle tip. Long enough to make it accurate. Reacher had hit thumbtack heads at seventy-five feet with it. And it fired a decent projectile. It delivered quarter-ounce bullets at nearly eight hundred miles an hour.

Seventeen rounds to a magazine, hence the name. And it was light. For all its power, it weighed under two pounds. The important parts were steel. The rest of it was plastic. Black polycarbonate, like an expensive camera. A fine piece of craftsmanship. But he hadn"t liked it much. Not for the specialized requirements of his unit. He"d recommended rejection. He"d supported the Beretta 92F instead. The Beretta was also a nine-millimeter, a half-pound heavier, an inch longer, two fewer rounds in the magazine. But it had about 10 per cent more stopping power than the Clock. That was important to him. And it wasn"t plastic. The Beretta had been Reacher"s choice. His unit commander had agreed. He had circulated Reacher"s paper and the army as a whole had backed his recommendation. The same week they promoted him and pinned on his Silver Star and his Purple Heart, they ordered Berettas even though the Beretta was more expensive and NATO was crazy for the Clock and Reacher had been just about a lone voice and was not long out of West Point. Then he had been a.s.signed elsewhere and served all around the world and hadn"t really seen a Clock 17 since. Until now. Twelve years later he was getting a pretty d.a.m.n good second look at one.

He switched his attention away from the gun and took another look at the guy holding it. He had a decent tan which whitened near his hairline. A recent haircut. The driver had a big shiny brow, thinning hair swept back, pink and vivid features, the smirk that pig-ugly guys use when they think they"re handsome. Same cheap chain store shirt, same windbreaker. Same corn-fed bulk. Same in-charge confidence, edged around with a slight breathlessness. Three guys, all of them maybe thirty or thirty-five, one leader, one solid follower, one jumpy follower. All of them tense but rehea.r.s.ed, racing through some kind of a mission. A puzzle. Reacher glanced past the steady Clock into the leader"s eyes. But the guy shook his head.

"No talking, a.s.shole," he said. "Start talking, I"ll shoot you. That"s a d.a.m.n promise. Keep quiet, you could be OK."

Reacher believed him. The guy"s eyes were hard and his mouth was a tight line. So he said nothing. Then the car slowed and pulled onto a lumpy concrete forecourt. It headed around behind an abandoned industrial building. They had driven south. Reacher figured they were now maybe five miles south of the Loop. The driver eased the big sedan to a stop with the rear door lined up with the back of a small panel truck. The truck was standing alone on the empty lot. It was a Ford Econoline, dirty white, not old, but well used. There had been some kind of writing on the side. It had been painted over with fresh white paint which didn"t exactly match the body work Readier scanned around.

The lot was full of trash. He saw a paint can discarded near the truck. A brush. There was n.o.body in sight. The place was deserted.

If he was going to make some kind of a move, this was the right time to make it, and the right location. But the guy in front smiled a thin smile and leaned right over into the back of the car. Caught Reacher"s collar with his left hand and ground the tip of the Clock"s muzzle into Reacher"s ear with his right.

"Sit still, a.s.shole," the guy said.

The driver got out of the car and skipped around the hood. Pulled a new set of keys from his pocket and opened up the rear doors of the truck. Reacher sat still. Jamming a gun into a person"s ear is not necessarily a smart move. If the person suddenly jerks his head around toward it, the gun comes out. It rolls around the person"s forehead.

Then even a quick trigger-finger won"t do much damage. It might blow a hole in the person"s ear, just the outside flap, and it"s sure to shatter the person"s eardrum. But those are not fatal wounds. Reacher spent a second weighing those odds. Then the jumpy guy dragged the woman out of the car and hustled her straight into the back of the truck. She hopped and limped across the short distance. Straight out of one door and in through the other. Reacher watched her, corner of his eye. Her guy took her pocketbook from her and tossed it back into the car. It fell at Reacher"s feet. It thumped heavily on the thick carpet. A big pocketbook, expensive leather, something heavy in it.

Something metal. Only one metal thing women carry could make a heavy thump like that. He glanced across at her, suddenly interested.

She was sprawled in the back of the truck. Impeded by her leg. Then the leader in the front pulled Reacher along the leather seat and pa.s.sed him on to the jumpy guy. As soon as one Clock was out of his ear, the other was jammed into his side. He was dragged over the rough ground. Across to the rear of the truck. He was pushed inside with the woman. The jumpy guy covered them both with the trembling Clock while the leader reached into the car and pulled out the woman"s metal crutch. He walked over and tossed it into the truck. It clanged and boomed on the metal siding. He left her dry-cleaning in the back of the sedan with her handbag. Then he pulled a set of handcuffs from the pocket of his jacket. He caught the woman"s right wrist and cuffed it with half the handcuff. Pulled her roughly sideways and caught Reacher"s left wrist. Snapped the other half of the cuff onto it.

Shook the cuff to check it was secure. Slammed the truck"s left rear door. Reacher saw the driver emptying plastic bottles into the sedan.

He caught the pale color and the strong smell of gasoline. One bottle into the back seat, one into the front. Then the leader swung the truck"s right rear door shut. Last thing Reacher saw before darkness enveloped him was the driver, pulling a matchbook from his pocket.

TWO

ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWO MILES FROM CHICAGO by road guest quarters were being prepared. They took the form of a single room. The room was following an unconventional design, specified by a thorough man after a great deal of careful thought. The design called for several unusual features.

The quarters were designed for a specific purpose, and for a specific guest. The nature of the purpose and the ident.i.ty of the guest had dictated the unusual features. The construction was concentrated on the second floor of an existing building. A corner room had been selected. It had a series of large windows on the two outside walls.

They faced south and east. The gla.s.s had been smashed out and replaced by heavy plywood sheeting nailed to the remaining window frames The plywood was painted white on the outside, to match the building"s siding. On the inside, the plywood was left unfinished.

The corner room"s ceiling was torn out. It was an old building, and the ceiling had been made of heavy plaster. It had been pulled down in a shower of choking dust. The room was now open to the rafters. The interior walling was torn off. The walls had been paneled in old pine, worn smooth with age and polish. That was all gone. The framing of the building and the heavy old tarpaper behind the exterior siding was exposed. The floorboards were pulled up. The dusty ceiling of the room below was visible under the heavy joists. The room was just a sh.e.l.l.

The old plaster from the ceiling and the boards from the walls and the floor, had been thrown out through the windows before they were covered over with the plywood. The two men who had done the demolition work had shoveled all that debris into a large pile, and they had backed their truck up to the pile ready to cart the trash away. They were very anxious to leave the place looking neat and tidy. This was the first time they had worked for this particular employer, and there had been hints of more work to come. And looking around, they could see that there was plenty more needed doing. All in all, an optimistic situation. New contracts were hard to find, and this particular employer, had shown no concern over price. The two men felt that to make a good first impression was very much in their long-term interest.

They were hard at work loading their truck with every last plaster fragment when the employer himself stopped by.

"All done?" he asked.

The employer was a huge guy, freakishly bloated, with a high voice and two nickel-sized red spots burning on his pale cheeks. He moved lightly and quietly, like a guy a quarter his size. The overall effect was a guy people looked away from and answered quickly.

"Just clearing up," the first guy said to him. "Where do we dump this stuff?"

"I"ll show you," the employer said. "You"ll need to make two trips.

Bring those boards separately, right?"

The second guy nodded. The floorboards were eighteen inches wide, from back when lumbermen had the pick of any tree they wanted. No way would they fit into the flatbed with the rest of the junk. They finished loading the plaster and their employer squeezed into their truck with them. He was such a big guy, it made for a tight fit. He pointed beyond the old building.

"Drive north," he said, "about a mile."

The road led them straight out of town and then wound upward through some steep bends. The employer pointed to a place.

"In there," he said, "all the way in back, OK?"

He strolled quietly away and the two guys unloaded their truck. Drove it back south and heaved the old pine boards in. Followed the winding bends again and unloaded. They carried the boards inside and stacked them neatly. All the way in back of the dark s.p.a.ce. Then the employer stepped out of the shadows. He had been waiting for them. He had something in his hand.

"We"re all done," the first guy said.

The employer nodded.

"You sure are," he said.

His hand came up. He was holding a gun. A dull black automatic. He shot the first guy in the head. The crash of the bullet was deafening.

Blood and bone and brain sprayed everywhere. The second guy froze in terror. Then he ran. He launched himself sideways in a desperate sprint for cover. The employer smiled. He liked it when they ran. He dropped his huge arm to a shallow angle. Fired and put a bullet through the back of the guy"s knee. Smiled again. Now it was better.

He liked it when they ran, but he liked it better when they were squirming on the floor. He stood and listened to the guy"s yelping for a long moment. Then he strolled quietly over and took careful aim. Put a bullet through the other knee. He watched for a while, then he tired of the game. Shrugged and put a final bullet through the guy"s head.

Then he laid the gun on the ground and rolled the two bodies over and over until they were stacked neatly in line with the old floorboards.

THREE

THEY HAD BEEN ON THE ROAD AN HOUR AND THIRTY-THREE minutes. Some urban crawling, then an acceleration to a steady cruise. Maybe sixty miles covered. But in the noisy darkness inside the panel truck Reacher had no idea which direction those sixty miles were taking him.

He was handcuffed to the young woman with the bad leg and within the first few minutes of their forced acquaintance they had worked out how to get as comfortable as they were ever going to get. They had crabbed around inside the truck until they were sitting sideways on the floor, legs straight out, propped against the big wheel well on the right, braced against the motion. The woman sat against the rear side and Reacher sat on the forward side. Their cuffed wrists lay together on the flat top of the metal bulge like they were lovers idling their time away in a cafe.

At first they hadn"t spoken. They"d just sat for a long time in stunned silence. The immediate problem was the heat. It was the middle of the last day of June in the Midwest. They were shut into an enclosed metal s.p.a.ce. There was no ventilation. Reacher figured the rush of air over the outside of the truck"s body must be cooling it to an extent, but nowhere near enough. He just sat there in the gloom and used the hot dead time thinking and planning like he was trained to do.

Staying calm, staying relaxed, staying ready, not burning his energy away with useless speculation. a.s.sessing and evaluating. The three guys had shown a measure of efficiency. No great talent, no real finesse, but no significant mistakes. The jumpy guy with the second Clock was the weakest component of the team, but the leader had covered for him pretty well. An efficient threesome. Not at all the worst he"d ever seen. But, at that point, he wasn"t worrying. He"d been in worse situations and survived them. Much worse situations, and more than once. So he wasn"t worrying yet.

Then he noticed something. He noticed that the woman wasn"t worrying yet either. She was calm too. She was just sitting there, swaying, cuffed to his wrist, thinking and planning like maybe she was trained to do, as well. He glanced across at her in the gloom and saw her looking steadily at him. A quizzical stare, calm, in control, faintly superior, faintly disapproving. The confidence of youth. She met his gaze. Held it for a long moment. Then she stuck out her cuffed right hand, which jarred his left wrist, but it was an encouraging gesture.

He reached around and shook her hand and they smiled brief ironic smiles together at their mutual formality.

"Holly Johnson," she said.

She was a.s.sessing him carefully. He could see her eyes traveling around his face. Then they flicked down to his clothing and back up to his face. She smiled again, briefly, like she had decided he merited some kind of courtesy.

"Nice to meet you," she said.

He looked back at her. Looked at her face. She was a very good-looking woman. Maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. He looked at her clothes. A line from an old song ran through his head: hundred dollar dresses, that I ain"t paid for yet. He waited for the next line, but it didn"t come. So he smiled back at her and nodded.

"Jack Readier," he said. "Pleasure"s all mine, Holly, believe me."

It was difficult to speak, because the truck was cruising noisily. The sound of the engine was fighting with the roar from the road. Reacher would have been happy to sit quiet for a while, but Holly wasn"t.

"I need to get rid of you," she said.

A confident woman, well in control of herself. He made no reply.

Just glanced at her and glanced away. The next line was: cold, cold-blooded woman. A dying fall, a sad poignant line. An old Memphis Slim song. But the line was not right for her. Not right at all. This was not a cold-blooded woman. He glanced over again and shrugged at her. She was staring at him. Impatient with his silence.

"You understand exactly what"s happening?" she asked him.

He watched her face. Watched her eyes. She was staring straight at him. Astonishment on her face. She thought she was stuck in there with an idiot. She thought he didn"t understand exactly what was happening.

"It"s pretty clear, right?" he said. "From the evidence?"

"What evidence?" she said. "It was all over in a split second."

"Exactly," he said. That"s all the evidence I need, right? Tells me more or less what I need to know."

He stopped talking and started resting again. Next opportunity to get away would be the next time the truck stopped. Could be some hours away. He felt he could be in for a long day. Felt he should be prepared to conserve his resources.