Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  “Anybody with her?” he asked.

  “Nobody with her,” the woman said. “Nobody ever with her.”

  “Which direction was she headed?” Milosevic asked.

  The woman pointed back toward the Federal Building.

  “She came from that direction,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask you where she came from,” Milosevic said. “Where did she head when she left?”

  The woman paused.

  “I didn’t see,” she said. “I took her garments through to the back. I heard the door open, but I couldn’t see where she went. I was in back.”

  “You just grabbed her stuff?” Milosevic said. “Rushed through to the back before she was out of here?”

  The woman faltered, like she was being accused of an impoliteness.

  “Not rushed,” she said. “Miss Johnson was walking slow. Bad leg, right? I felt I shouldn’t stare at her. I felt she was embarrassed. I walked her clothes through to the back so she wouldn’t feel I was watching her.”

  Milosevic nodded and tilted his head back and sighed up at the ceiling. Saw a video camera mounted high above the counter.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  The Korean woman twisted and followed his gaze.

  “Security,” she said. “Insurance company says we got to have it.”

  “Does it work?” he asked.

  “Sure it works,” the woman said. “Insurance company says it’s got to.”

  “Does it run all the time?” Milosevic asked.

  The woman nodded and giggled.

  “Sure it does,” she said. “It’s running right now. You’ll be on the tape.”

  Milosevic checked his watch.

  “I need yesterday’s tape,” he said. “Immediately.”

  The woman faltered again. Milosevic pulled his shield for the second time.

  “This is an FBI investigation,” he said. “Official federal business. I need that tape, right now, OK?”

  The woman nodded and held up her hand to make him wait. Stepped through a door to the rear of the establishment. Came back out after a long moment with a blast of chemical smell and a videocassette in her hand.

  “You let me have it back, OK?” she said. “Insurance company says we got to keep them for a month.”

  MILOSEVIC TOOK IT straight in, and by eight-thirty the Bureau technicians were swarming all over the third-floor conference room again, hooking up a standard VHS player to the bank of monitors piled down the middle of the long table. There was a problem with a fuse, and then the right wire proved too short, so a computer had to be moved to allow the video player to get nearer to the center of the table. Then the head tech handed McGrath the remote and nodded.

  “All yours, chief,” he said.

  McGrath sent him out of the room and the three agents crowded around the screens, waiting for the picture to roll. The screens faced the wall of windows, so they all three had their backs to the glass. But at that time of day, there was no danger of anybody getting uncomfortable, because right then the bright morning sun was blasting the other side of the building.

  THAT SAME SUN rolled on seventeen hundred and two miles from Chicago and made it bright morning outside the white building. He knew it had come. He could hear the quiet ticking as the old wood frame warmed through. He could hear muffled voices outside, below him, down at street level. The sound of people starting a new day.

  His fingernails were gone. He had found a gap where two boards were not hard together. He had forced his fingertips down and levered with all his strength. His nails had torn off, one after the other. The board had not moved. He had scuttled backward into a corner and curled up on the floor. He had sucked his bloodied fingers and now his mouth was smeared all around with blood, like a child’s with cake.

  He heard footsteps on the staircase. A big man, moving lightly. The sound halted outside the door. The lock clicked back. The door opened. The employer looked in at him. Bloated face, two nickel-sized red spots burning high on his cheeks.

  “You’re still here,” he said.

  The carpenter was paralyzed. Couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  “You failed,” the employer said.

  There was silence in the room. The only sound was the slow ticking of the wood frame as the morning sun slid over the roof.

  “So what shall we do now?” the employer asked.

  The carpenter just stared blankly at him. Didn’t move. Then the employer smiled a relaxed, friendly smile. Like he was suddenly surprised about something.

  “You think I meant it?” he said, gently.

  The carpenter blinked. Shook his head, slightly, hopefully.

  “You hear anything?” the employer asked him.

  The carpenter listened hard. He could hear the quiet ticking of the wood, the song of the forest birds, the silent sound of sunny morning air.

  “You were just kidding around?” he asked.

  His voice was a dry croak. Relief and hope and dread were jamming his tongue into the roof of his mouth.

  “Listen,” the employer said.

  The carpenter listened. The frame ticked, the birds sang, the warm air sighed. He heard nothing else. Silence. Then he heard a click. Then he heard a whine. It started slow and quiet and stabilized up at a familiar loud pitch. It was a sound he knew. It was the sound of a big power saw being run up to speed.

  “Now do you think I meant it?” the employer screamed.

  11

  HOLLY JOHNSON HAD been mildly disappointed by Reacher’s assessment of the cash value of her wardrobe. Reacher had said he figured she had maybe fifteen or twenty outfits, four hundred bucks an outfit, maybe eight grand in total. Truth was she had thirty-four business suits in her closet. She’d worked three years on Wall Street. She had eight grand tied up in the shoes alone. Four hundred bucks was what she had spent on a blouse, and that was when she felt driven by native common sense to be a little economical.

  She liked Armani. She had thirteen of his spring suits. Spring clothes from Milan were just about right for most of the Chicago summer. Maybe in the really fierce heat of August she’d break out her Moschino shifts, but June and July, September too if she was lucky, her Armanis were the thing. Her favorites were the dark peach shades she’d bought in her last year in the brokerage house. Some mysterious Italian blend of silks. Cut and tailored by people whose ancestors had been fingering fine materials for hundreds of years. They look at it and consider it and cut it and it just falls into marvelous soft shapes. Then they market it and a Wall Street broker buys it and loves it and is still wearing it two years into the future when she’s a new FBI agent and she gets snatched off a Chicago street. She’s still wearing it eighteen hours later after a sleepless night on the filthy straw in a cow barn. By that point, the thing is no longer something that Armani would recognize.

  The three kidnappers had returned with the truck and backed it into the cow barn’s central concrete aisle. Then they had locked the barn door and disappeared. Holly guessed they had spent the night in the farmhouse. Reacher had slept quietly in his stall, chained to the railing, while she tossed and turned in the straw, sleepless, thinking urgently about him.

  His safety was her responsibility. He was an innocent passerby, caught up in her business. Whatever else lay ahead for her, she had to take care of him. That was her duty. He was her burden. And he was lying. Holly was absolutely certain he was not a blues club doorman. And she was pretty certain what he was. The Johnson family was a military family. Because of her father, Holly had lived on Army bases her whole life, right up to Yale. She knew the Army. She knew the soldiers. She knew the types and she knew Reacher was one. To her practiced eye, he looked like one. Acted like one. Reacted like one. It was possible a doorman could pick locks and climb walls like an ape, but if a doorman did go ahead and do that, he would do it with an air of unfamiliarity and daring and breathlessness which would be quite distinctive. He wouldn’t do it like it came as naturally as blinking. Reac
her was a quiet, contained man, relaxed, fit, clearly trained to the point of some kind of superhuman calm. He was probably ten years older than she was, but somewhere less than forty, about six feet five, huge, maybe two-twenty, blue eyes, thinning fair hair. Big enough to be a doorman, and old enough to have been around, that was for sure, but he was a soldier. A soldier, claiming to be a doorman. But why?

  Holly had no idea. She just lay there, uncomfortable, listening to his quiet breathing, twenty feet away. Doorman or soldier, ten years older or not, it was her responsibility to get him to safety. She didn’t sleep. Too busy thinking, and her knee was too painful. At eight-thirty on her watch, she heard him wake up. Just a subtle change in the rhythm of his breathing.

  “Good morning, Reacher,” she called out.

  “Morning, Holly,” he said. “They’re coming back.”

  It was silent, but after a long moment she heard footsteps outside. Climbs like an ape, hears like a bat, she thought. Some doorman.

  “You OK?” Reacher called to her.

  She didn’t answer. His welfare was her responsibility, not the other way around. She heard a rattle as the barn door was unlocked. It rolled open and daylight flooded in. She caught a glimpse of empty green country. Pennsylvania, maybe, she thought. The three kidnappers walked in and the door was pulled shut.

  “Get up, bitch,” the leader said to her.

  She didn’t move. She was seized by an overpowering desire not to be put back inside the truck. Too dark, too uncomfortable, too tedious. She didn’t know if she could take another day in there, swaying, jolting, above all totally unaware of where the hell she was being taken, or why, or by who. Instinctively, she grabbed the metal railing and held on, arm tensed, like she was going to put up a struggle. The leader stood still and pulled out his Glock. Looked down at her.

  “Two ways of doing this,” he said. “The easy way, or the hard way.”

  She didn’t reply. Just sat there in the straw and held on tight to the railing. The ugly driver took three steps nearer and started smiling, staring at her breasts again. She felt naked and revolted under his gaze.

  “Your choice, bitch,” the leader said.

  She heard Reacher moving in his stall.

  “No, it’s your choice,” she heard him call to the guy. “We need to be a little mutual here. Cooperative, right? You want us to get back in your truck, you need to make it worth our while.”

  His voice was calm and low. Holly stared across at him. Saw him sitting there, chained up, unarmed, facing a loaded automatic weapon, totally powerless by any reasonable definition of the word, three hostile men staring down at him.

  “We need some breakfast,” Reacher said. “Toast, with grape jelly. And coffee, but make it a lot stronger than last night’s crap, OK? Good coffee is very important to me. You need to understand that. Then put a couple of mattresses in the truck. One queen-size, one twin. Make us a sofa in there. Then we’ll get in.”

  There was total silence. Holly glanced between the two men. Reacher was fixing the leader with a calm, level gaze from the floor. His blue eyes never blinked. The leader was staring down at him. Tension visible in the air. The driver had torn his gaze away from her body and was looking at Reacher. Anger in his eyes. Then the leader snapped around and nodded the other two out of the barn with him. Holly heard the door locking behind them.

  “You eat toast?” Reacher said to her.

  She was too breathless to answer.

  “When they bring it, send it back,” he said. “Make them do it over. Say it’s too pale or too burnt or something.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “Psychology,” Reacher said. “We need to start getting some dominance here. Situation like this, it’s very important.”

  She stared at him.

  “Just do it, OK?” he said, calmly.

  SHE DID IT. The jumpy guy brought the toast. It was just about perfect, but she rejected it. She looked at it with the disdain she’d use on a sloppy balance sheet and said it was too well-done. She was standing with all her weight on one foot, looking like a mess, dung all over her peach Armani, but she managed enough haughty contempt to intimidate the guy. He went back to the farmhouse kitchen and made more.

  It came with a pot of strong coffee and Holly and Reacher ate their separate breakfasts, chains clanking, twenty feet apart, while the other two guys hauled mattresses into the barn. One queen, one twin. They pulled them up into the back of the truck and laid the queen out on the floor and stood the twin at right angles to it, up against the back of the cab bulkhead. Holly watched them do it and felt a whole lot better about the day. Then she suddenly realized exactly where Reacher’s psychology had been aimed. Not just at the three kidnappers. At her, too. He didn’t want her to get into a fight. Because she’d lose. He’d risked doing what he’d done to defuse a hopeless confrontation. She was amazed. Totally amazed. She thought blankly: for Christ’s sake, this guy’s got it ass backward. He’s trying to take care of me.

  “You want to tell us your names?” Reacher asked, calmly. “We’re spending some time together, we can be a little civilized about it, right?”

  Holly saw the leader just looking at him. The guy made no reply.

  “We’ve seen your faces,” Reacher said. “Telling us your names isn’t going to do you any harm. And we might as well try to get along.”

  The guy thought about it and nodded.

  “Loder,” he said.

  The little jumpy guy shifted feet.

  “Stevie,” he said.

  Reacher nodded. Then the ugly driver realized all four were looking at him. He ducked his head.

  “I’m not telling you my name,” he said. “Hell should I?”

  “And let’s be real clear,” the guy called Loder said. “Civilized is not the same thing as friendly, right?”

  Holly saw him aim his Glock at Reacher’s head and hold it there for a long moment. Nothing in his face. Not the same thing as friendly. Reacher nodded. A small cautious movement. They left their toast plates and their coffee mugs lying on the straw and the guy called Loder unlocked their chains. They met in the central aisle. Two Glocks and a shotgun aimed at them. The ugly driver leering. Reacher looked him in the eye and ducked down and picked Holly up like she weighed nothing at all. Carried her the ten paces to the truck. Put her down gently inside. They crawled forward together to the improvised sofa. Got themselves comfortable.

  The truck’s rear doors slammed and locked. Holly heard the big barn door open up. The truck’s engine turned over and caught. They drove out of the barn and bounced a hundred and fifty yards over the rough track. Turned an invisible right angle and cruised straight and slow down a road for fifteen minutes.

  “We aren’t in Pennsylvania,” Holly said. “Roads are too straight. Too flat.”

  Reacher just shrugged at her in the dark.

  “We aren’t in handcuffs anymore, either,” he said. “Psychology.”

  12

  “HELL IS THIS?”Agent-in-Charge McGrath said.

  He thumbed the remote and rewound the tape. Then he pressed play and watched it again. But what he saw meant nothing at all. The video screens were filled with jerky speeding images and shashy white snow.

  “Hell is going on here?” he asked again.

  Brogan crowded in and shook his head. Milosevic pushed closer to look. He’d brought the tape in, so he felt personally responsible for it. McGrath hit rewind again and tried once more. Same result. Just a blur of disjointed flashing pictures.

  “Get the damn tech guy back in here,” he shouted.

  Milosevic used the phone on the credenza next to the coffeepot. Called upstairs to tech services. The head tech was in the room within a minute. The tone of Milosevic’s voice had told him to hurry more effectively than any words could have.

  “Damn tape won’t run properly,” McGrath told him.

  The technician took the remote in his hand with that blend of familiarit
y and unfamiliarity that tech guys use the world over. They’re all at home with complex equipment, but each individual piece has its own peculiarities. He peered at the buttons and pressed rewind, firmly, with a chewed thumb. The tape whirred back and he pressed play and watched the disjointed stream of flashing images and video snow.

  “Can you fix that?” McGrath asked him.

  The tech stopped the tape and hit rewind again. Shook his head.

  “It’s not broken,” he said. “That’s how it’s supposed to be. Typical cheap surveillance video. What it does is record a freeze-frame, probably every ten seconds or so. Just one frame, every ten seconds. Like a sequence of snapshots.”

  “Why?” McGrath asked him.

  “Cheap and easy,” the guy said. “You can get a whole day on one tape that way. Low-cost, and you don’t have to remember to change the cassette every three hours. You just change it in the morning. And assuming a stickup takes longer than ten seconds to complete, you’ve got the perp’s face right there on tape, at least once.”

  “OK,” McGrath said impatiently. “So how do we use it?”

  The tech used two fingers together. Pressed play and freeze at the same time. Up on the screen came a perfect black-and-white still picture of an empty store. In the bottom left corner was Monday’s date and the time, seven thirty-five in the morning. The tech held the remote out to McGrath and pointed to a small button.

  “See this?” he said. “Frame-advance button. Press this and the tape rolls on to the next still. Usually for sports, right? Hockey? You can see the puck go right in the net. Or for porn. You can see whatever you need to see. But on this type of a system, it jumps you ahead ten seconds. Like on to the next snapshot, right?”

  McGrath calmed down and nodded.

  “Why’s it in black and white?” he said.

  “Cheap camera,” the tech guy said. “The whole thing is a cheap system. They only put them in because the insurance companies tell them they got to.”