Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  He crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and entered the Hoover Building through the main doors. Laid his hands palms down on the reception counter.

  “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said. “To see the Director.”

  His hands left two palm-shaped patches of dampness on the laminate. The agent who came down to show him upstairs noticed them. Johnson was silent in the elevator. Harland Webster was waiting for him at the door to his private suite. Johnson nodded to him. Didn’t speak. Webster stood aside and gestured him into the inner office. It was dark. There was a lot of mahogany paneling, and the blinds were closed. Johnson sat down in a leather chair and Webster walked around him to his desk.

  “I don’t want to get in your way,” Johnson said.

  He looked at Webster. Webster worked for a moment, decoding that sentence. Then he nodded, cautiously.

  “You spoke with the President?” he asked.

  Johnson nodded.

  “You understand it’s appropriate for me to do so?” he asked.

  “Naturally,” Webster said. “Situation like this, nobody should worry about protocol. You call him or go see him?”

  “I went to see him,” Johnson said. “Several times. I had several long conversations with him.”

  Webster thought: face-to-face. Several long conversations. Worse than I thought, but understandable.

  “And?” he asked.

  Johnson shrugged.

  “He told me he’d placed you in personal command,” he said.

  Webster nodded.

  “Kidnapping,” he said. “It’s Bureau territory, whoever the victim is.”

  Johnson nodded, slowly.

  “I accept that,” he said. “For now.”

  “But you’re anxious,” Webster said. “Believe me, General, we’re all anxious.”

  Johnson nodded again. And then he asked the question he’d walked three and a half miles to ask.

  “Any progress?” he said.

  Webster shrugged.

  “We’re into the second full day,” he said. “I don’t like that at all.”

  He lapsed into silence. The second full day of a kidnap is a kind of threshold. Any early chance of a resolution is gone. The situation starts to harden up. It starts to become a long, intractable set-piece. The danger to the victim increases. The best time to clear up a kidnap is the first day. The second day, the process gets tougher. The chances get smaller.

  “Any progress?” Johnson asked again.

  Webster looked away. The second day is when the kidnappers start to communicate. That had always been the Bureau’s experience. The second day, sick and frustrated about missing your first and best chance, you sit around, hoping desperately the guys will call. If they don’t call on the second day, chances are they aren’t going to call at all.

  “Anything I can do?” Johnson asked.

  Webster nodded.

  “You can give me a reason,” he said. “Who would threaten you like this?”

  Johnson shook his head. He had been asking himself the same question since Monday night.

  “Nobody,” he said.

  “You should tell me,” Webster said. “Anything secret, anything hidden, better you tell me right now. It’s important, for Holly’s sake.”

  “I know that,” Johnson said. “But there’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Webster nodded. He believed him, because he knew it was true. He had reviewed the whole of Johnson’s Bureau file. It was a weighty document. It started on page one with brief biographies of his maternal great-grandparents. They had come from a small European principality which no longer existed.

  “Will Holly be OK?” Johnson asked quietly.

  The recent file pages recounted the death of Johnson’s wife. A surprise, a vicious cancer, no more than six weeks, beginning to end. Covert psychiatric opinion commissioned by the Bureau had predicted the old guy would hold up because of his daughter. It had proven to be a correct diagnosis. But if he lost her too, you didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to know he wouldn’t handle it well. Webster nodded again and put some conviction into his voice.

  “She’ll be fine,” he said.

  “So what have we got so far?” Johnson asked.

  “Four guys,” Webster said. “We’ve got their pickup truck. They abandoned it prior to the snatch. Burned it and left it. We found it north of Chicago. It’s being airlifted down here to Quantico, right now. Our people will go over it.”

  “For clues?” Johnson said. “Even though it burned?”

  Webster shrugged.

  “Burning is pretty dumb,” he said. “It doesn’t really obscure much. Not from our people, anyway. We’ll use that pickup to find them.”

  “And then what?” Johnson asked.

  Webster shrugged again.

  “Then we’ll go get your daughter back,” he said. “Our Hostage Rescue Team is standing by. Fifty guys, the best in the world at this kind of thing. Waiting right by their choppers. We’ll go get her, and we’ll tidy up the guys who grabbed her.”

  There was a short silence in the dark quiet room.

  “Tidy them up?” Johnson said. “What does that mean?”

  Webster glanced around his own office and lowered his voice. Thirty-six years of habit.

  “Policy,” he said. “A major D.C. case like this? No publicity. No media access. We can’t allow it. This sort of thing gets on TV, every nut in the country is going to be trying it. So we go in quietly. Some weapons will get discharged. Inevitable in a situation like this. A little collateral damage here and there.”

  Johnson nodded slowly.

  “You’re going to execute them?” he asked, vaguely.

  Webster just looked at him, neutrally. Bureau psychiatrists had suggested to him the anticipation of deadly revenge could help sustain self-control, especially with people accustomed to direct action, like other agents, or soldiers.

  “Policy,” he said again. “My policy. And like the man says, I’ve got personal command.”

  THE CHARRED PICKUP was lifted onto an aluminum platform and secured with nylon ropes. An Air Force Chinook hammered over from the military compound at O’Hare and hovered above it, its downdraft whipping the lake into a frenzy. It winched its chain down and eased the pickup into the air. Swung around over the lake and dipped its nose and roared back west to O’Hare. Set its load down right in front of the open nose of a Galaxy transport. Air Force ground crew winched the platform inside. The cargo door closed on it and four minutes later the Galaxy was taxiing. Four minutes later again it was in the air, groaning east toward Washington. Four hours after that, it was roaring over the capital, heading for Andrews Air Force Base. As it landed, another borrowed Chinook took off and waited in midair. The Galaxy taxied to its apron and the pickup was winched out. The Chinook swooped down and swung it into the air. Flew it south, following I-95 into Virginia, forty miles, all the way to Quantico.

  The Chinook set it down gently on the tarmac right outside the vehicle lab. Bureau techs ran out, white coats flapping in the fierce downdraft, and dragged the platform in through the roller door. They winched the wreck off the platform and pulled it into the center of the large shed. They rolled arc lights into a rough circle around it and lit them up. Then they stood there for a second, looking exactly like a team of pathologists getting ready to go to work on a corpse.

  GENERAL JOHNSON RETRACED his steps exactly. He made it down 9th Street, past Natural History, past American History, his mouth forced into a tense rigid oval, breathing hard. He walked the length of the reflecting pool with his throat clamping and gagging. He swung left onto Constitution Avenue and made it as far as the Vietnam Wall. Then he stopped. There was a fair crowd, stunned and quiet, as always. He looked at them. He looked at himself in the black granite. He didn’t stand out. He was in a lightweight gray suit. It was OK. So he let his vision blur with his tears and he moved forward and turned and sat against the base of the wall, sobbing and crying with his back pressed against
the golden names of boys who had died thirty years ago.

  19

  REACHER BALLED HIS loose chain into his hand and slipped out of the barn into the predawn twilight. He walked twenty paces and stopped. Freedom. The night air was soft and infinite around him. He was unconfined. But he had no idea where he was. The barn stood alone, isolated fifty yards from a clutch of farm buildings of similar old vintage. There was a house, and a couple of small sheds, and an open structure with a new pickup parked in it. Next to the pickup was a tractor. Next to the tractor, ghostly white in the moonlight, was the truck. Reacher walked over the rocky track toward it. The front doors were locked. The rear doors were locked. He ran back to the horse barn and searched through the dead driver’s pockets. Nothing except the padlock key from the barn door. No keys to the truck.

  He ran back, squeezing the mass of chain to keep it from making a sound, past the motor barn, and looked at the house. Walked right around it. The front door was locked tight. The back door was locked tight. And there was a dog behind it. Reacher heard it move in its sleep. He heard a low, sleepy growl. He walked away.

  He stood on the track, halfway back to the horse barn, and looked around. He trained his eyes on the indistinct horizon and turned a full circle in the dark. Some kind of a huge, empty landscape. Flat, endless, no discernible features. The damp night smell of a million acres of something growing. A pale streak of dawn in the east. He shrugged and ducked back inside. Holly raised herself on one elbow and looked a question at him.

  “Problems,” he said. “The handcuff keys are in the house. So are the truck keys. I can’t go in for them because there’s a dog in there. It’s going to bark and wake everybody up. There’s more than the two others in there. This is some kind of a working farm. There’s a pickup and a tractor. Could be four or five armed men in there. When that damn dog barks, I’ve had it. And it’s nearly daylight.”

  “Problems,” Holly said.

  “Right,” he said. “We can’t get at a vehicle, and we can’t just walk away, because you’re chained up and you can’t walk and we’re about a million miles from anywhere, anyway.”

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “I want to see,” she said. “I want to see outside. I’m sick of being closed in. Can’t you get this chain off?”

  Reacher ducked behind her and looked at the iron ring in her wall. The timber looked a little better than his had been. Closer-grained. He shook the ring and he knew it was hopeless. She nodded, reluctantly.

  “We wait,” she said. “We wait for a better chance.”

  He hurried back to the middle stalls and checked the walls, low down, where it was dampest and the siding was made from the longest boards. He tapped and kicked at them. Chose one particular place and pressed hard with his foot. The board gave slightly and opened a gap against its rusty nail. He worked the gap and sprung the next board, and the next, until he had a flap which would open tall enough to crawl through. Then he ducked back into the center aisle and piled the loose end of his chain onto the dead driver’s stomach. Fished in the trouser pocket and pulled out the padlock key. Held it in his teeth. Bent down and picked up the body and the chain together. Carried it out through the open door.

  He carried it about twenty-five yards. Away from the house. Then he rested the body on its feet, supporting it by the shoulders, like he was dancing with a drunken partner. Ducked forward and jacked it up onto his shoulder. Caught the chain with one hand and walked away down the track.

  He walked fast for twenty minutes. More than a mile. Along the track to a road. Turned left down the road and out into the empty countryside. It was horse country. Railed paddocks ran left and right beside the road. Endless flat grassland, cool and damp in the last of the night. Occasional trees looming through the dark. A narrow, straight, lumpy road surface.

  He walked down the center of the road. Then he ducked onto the grassy shoulder and found a ditch. It ran along the base of the paddock rail. He turned a complete circle, with the dead driver windmilling on his shoulder. He could see nothing. He was more than a mile from the farm and he could have been more than a hundred from the next one. He bent over and dropped the body into the ditch. It flopped down through the long grass and landed facedown in mud. Reacher turned and ran the mile back to the farm. The streak of dawn was lightening the sky.

  He turned into the rough track. There were lights in the windows of the farmhouse. He sprinted for the barn. Pushed the heavy wooden doors closed from the outside. Lifted the crossbeam into its supports and locked it in place with the padlock key. Ran back to the track and hurled the key far into the field. Wednesday was flaming up over the horizon. He sprinted for the far side of the barn and found the gap he’d sprung in the siding. Pushed his chain in ahead of him. Squeezed his shoulders through and forced his way back inside. Pulled the boards back flush with the old timbers, best as he could. Then he came back into the aisle and stood bent over, breathing hard.

  “All done,” he said. “They’ll never find him.”

  He scooped up the metal messtin with the cold remains of the soup in it. Scratched around in his stall for the fallen bolts. He gathered as many wood splinters as he could find. Slopped them around in the cold soup and forced them back into the ragged bolt holes. He walked over to Holly’s stall and put the tin back on the ground. Kept the spoon. He assembled the bolts through the holes in the base of the iron ring, hanging there off his length of chain. Forced them home among the sticky splinters. Used the back of the spoon to press them firmly in. He ran the chain through the loop until it was hanging straight down and resting on the stone floor. Minimum stress on the fragile assembly.

  He tossed the spoon back to Holly. She caught it one-handed and put it back in the tin. Then he ducked down and listened through the boards. The dog was outside. He could hear it snuffling. Then he heard people. Footsteps on the track. They ran to the doors of the barn. They shook and rattled the crossbeam. Retreated. There was shouting. They were calling a name, over and over again. The crack around the barn door was lighting up with morning. The timbers of the barn were creaking as the sun flooded over the horizon and warmed them through.

  The footsteps ran back to the barn. The padlock rattled and the chain came off. The crossbeam thumped to the ground. The door groaned open. Loder stepped inside. He had the Glock in his hand and strain showing in his face. He stood just inside the door. His eyes were flicking back and forth between Reacher and Holly. The strain in his face was edged by anger. Some kind of a cold light in his eyes. Then the jumpy guy stepped in behind him. Stevie. He was carrying the driver’s shotgun. And smiling. He crowded past Loder and ran down the central cobbled aisle. Raised the shotgun and pointed it straight at Reacher. Loder started after him. Stevie crunched a round into the chamber. Reacher shifted a foot to his left, so the iron ring was hidden from view behind him.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “You are, asshole,” Loder said. “Situation has changed. We’re a man short. So you just became one person too many.”

  Reacher was on his way to the floor as Stevie pulled the trigger. He landed flat on the hard cobbles and hurled himself forward as the shotgun boomed and the stall blew apart. The air was instantly thick with splinters of damp wood and the stink of gunpowder. The plank holding the iron ring fell out of the shattered wall and the chain clattered to the floor. Reacher rolled over and glanced up. Stevie lifted the shotgun vertical and crunched another round into the chamber. Swung the barrel down and aimed again.

  “Wait!” Holly screamed.

  Stevie glanced at her. Impossible not to.

  “Don’t be a damn fool,” she yelled. “Hell are you doing? You don’t have the time for this.”

  Loder turned to face her.

  “He’s run, right?” she said. “Your driver? Is that what happened? He bailed out and ran for it, right? So you need to get going. You don’t have time for th
is.”

  Loder stared at her.

  “Right now you’re ahead of the game,” Holly said urgently. “But you shoot this guy, you got the local cops a half hour behind you. You need to get going.”

  Reacher gasped up at her from the floor. She was magnificent. She was sucking all their attention her way. She was saving his life.

  “Two of you, two of us,” she said urgently. “You can handle it, right?”

  There was silence. Dust and powder drifted in the air. Then Loder stepped back, covering them both with his automatic. Reacher watched the disappointment on Stevie’s face. He stood slowly and pulled the chain clear of the wreckage. The iron ring fell out of the smashed wood and clanked on the stones.

  “Bitch is right,” Loder said. “We can handle it.”

  He nodded to Stevie. Stevie ran for the door and Loder turned and pulled his key and unlocked Holly’s wrist. Dropped her cuff on her mattress. The weight of the chain pulled it back toward the wall. It pulled off the edge of the mattress and slid onto the cobblestones with a loud metallic sound.

  “OK, asshole, real quick,” Loder said. “Before I change my mind.”

  Reacher looped his chain into his hand. Ducked down and picked Holly up, under her knees and shoulders. They heard the truck start up. It slewed backward into the entrance. Jammed to a stop. Reacher ran Holly to the truck. Laid her down inside. Climbed in after her. Loder slammed the doors and shut them into darkness.

  “NOW I GUESS I owe you.” Reacher said quietly.

  Holly just waved it away. An embarrassed little gesture. Reacher stared at her. He liked her. Liked her face. He gazed at it. Recalled it white and disgusted as the driver taunted her. Saw the smooth swell of her breasts under his filthy drooling gaze. Then the picture changed to Stevie smiling and shooting at him, chained to the wall. Then he heard Loder say: the situation has changed.