Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  This time, they were quiet. They were muffled, not clattering. Somebody approaching quietly and cautiously. Somebody with no official business. She stood up slowly. Stepped out of the bathroom and pulled the door to hide the dismantled tub. Limped back toward the bed as the lock clicked and the door opened.

  A man came into the room. He was a youngish man, dressed in camouflage fatigues, black smears on his face. A vivid red scar running laterally across his forehead. A machine gun slung at his shoulder. He turned and closed the door, quietly. Turned back with his fingers to his lips.

  She stared at him. Felt her anger rising. This time, she wasn’t chained up. This time, the guy was going to die. She smiled a crazy smile at the logic of it. The bathroom was going to save her. She was a high-status prisoner. Supposed to be held with dignity and respect. Somebody came in to abuse her, and she killed him, they couldn’t argue with that, could they?

  But the guy with the scar just held his fingers to his lips and nodded toward the bathroom. He crept quietly over and pushed the door. Gestured for her to follow. She limped after him. He glanced down at the side panel on the floor and shook his head. Reached in and started the shower. Set it running hard against the empty tub.

  “They’ve got microphones,” the guy said. “They’re listening for me.”

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked.

  He squatted down and put the panel back on the bath.

  “No good,” he said. “There’s no way out.”

  “Got to be,” she said.

  The guy shook his head.

  “They had a trial run,” he said. “The commander put one of the guys who built this place in here. Told him if he didn’t get out, he’d cut his arms off. So I assume he tried real hard.”

  “And what happened?” she asked.

  The guy shrugged.

  “The commander cut his arms off,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked again.

  “FBI,” the guy said. “Counterterrorism. Undercover. I guess I’m going to have to get you out.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I can get a jeep. We’ll have to make a run for it. I can’t call in for assistance because they’re scanning for my transmitter. We’ll just get the jeep and head south and hope for the best.”

  “What about Reacher?” she asked. “Where have they taken him?”

  “Forget him,” the guy said. “He’ll be dead by morning.”

  Holly shook her head.

  “I’m not going without him,” she said.

  “LODER DISPLEASED ME,” Beau Borken said.

  Reacher glanced downward. Loder had squirmed up into a sideways sitting position, crammed into the angle between the floor and the wall.

  “Did he displease you?” Borken asked.

  Reacher made no reply.

  “Would you like to kick him?” Borken asked.

  Reacher kept quiet. He could see where this game was going. If he said yes, he’d be expected to hurt the guy badly. Which he had no objection to in principle, but he’d prefer to do it on his own terms. If he said no, Borken would call him a coward with no sense of natural justice and no self-respect. An obvious game, with no way to win. So he kept quiet, which was a tactic he’d used a thousand times before: when in doubt, just keep your mouth shut.

  “In the face?” Borken asked. “In the balls, maybe?”

  Loder was staring up at Reacher. Something in his face. Reacher saw what it was. His eyes widened in surprise. Loder was pleading with him to give him a kicking, so that Borken wouldn’t.

  “Loder, lie down again,” Borken said.

  Loder squirmed his hips away from the wall and dropped his shoulders to the floor. Wriggled and pushed until he was lying flat on his back. Borken nodded to the nearest guard.

  “In the face,” he said.

  The guard stepped over and used the sole of his boot to force Loder’s head sideways, so his face was presented to the room. Then he stepped back and kicked out. A heavy blow from a heavy boot. Loder’s head snapped backward and thumped into the wall. Blood welled from his nose. Borken watched him bleed for a long moment, mildly interested. Then he turned back to Reacher.

  “Loder’s one of my oldest friends,” he said.

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Begs two questions, doesn’t it?” Borken said. “Question one: why am I enforcing such strict discipline, even against my old friends? And question two: if that’s how I treat my friends, how the hell do I treat my enemies?”

  Reacher said nothing. When in doubt, just keep your mouth shut.

  “I treat my enemies a hell of a lot worse than that,” Borken said. “So much worse, you really don’t want to think about it. You really don’t, believe me. And why am I being so strict? Because we’re two days away from a unique moment in history. Things are going to happen which will change the world. Plans are made and operations are under way. Therefore I have to bring my natural caution to a new pitch. My old friend Loder has fallen victim to a historical force. So, I’m afraid, have you.”

  Reacher said nothing. He dropped his gaze and watched Loder. He was unconscious. Breathing raggedly through clotting blood in his nose.

  “You got any value to me as a hostage?” Borken asked.

  Reacher thought about it. Made no reply. Borken watched his face and smiled. His red lips parted over small white teeth.

  “I thought not,” he said. “So what should I do with a person who’s got no value to me as a hostage? During a moment of great historical tension?”

  Reacher stayed silent. Just watching. Easing his weight forward, ready.

  “You think you’re going to get a kicking?” Borken asked.

  Reacher tensed his legs, ready to spring.

  “Relax,” Borken said. “No kicking for you. When the time comes, it’ll be a bullet through the head. From behind. I’m not stupid, you know. I’ve got eyes, and a brain. What are you, six-five? About two-twenty? Clearly fit and strong. And look at you, tension in your thighs, getting ready to jump up. Clearly trained in some way. But you’re not a boxer. Because your nose has never been broken. A heavyweight like you with an unbroken nose would need to be a phenomenal talent, and we’d have seen your picture in the newspapers. So you’re just a brawler, probably been in the service, right? So I’ll be cautious with you. No kicking, just a bullet.”

  The guards took their cue. Six rifles came down out of the slope and six fingers hooked around six triggers.

  “You got felony convictions?” Borken asked.

  Reacher shrugged and spoke for the first time.

  “No,” he said.

  “Upstanding citizen?” Borken asked.

  Reacher shrugged again.

  “I guess,” he said.

  Borken nodded.

  “So I’ll think about it,” he said. “Live or die, I’ll let you know, first thing in the morning, OK?”

  He lifted his bulky arm and snapped his fingers. Five of the six guards moved. Two went to the door and opened it. A third went out between them. The other two waited. Borken stood up with surprising grace for a man of his size and walked out from behind the desk. The wooden floor creaked under his bulk. The four waiting guards fell in behind him and he walked straight out into the night without a backward glance.

  HE WALKED ACROSS the clearing and into another hut. Fowler was waiting for him, the headphones in his hand.

  “I think somebody went in there,” he said.

  “You think?” Borken said.

  “The shower was running,” Fowler said. “Somebody went in there who knows about the microphones. She wouldn’t need another shower. She just had one, right? Somebody went in there and ran the shower to mask the talking.”

  “Who?” Borken asked.

  Fowler shook his head.

  “I don’t know who,” he said. “But I can try to find out.”

  Borken nodded.

  “Yes, you can do that,” he said. “You can
try to find out.”

  IN THE ACCOMMODATION huts, men and women were working in the gloom, cleaning their rifles. The word about Loder had traveled quickly. They all knew about the tribunal. They all knew the likely outcome. Any six of them could be selected for the firing squad. If there was going to be a firing squad. Most people figured there probably was. An officer like Loder, the commander might limit it to a firing squad. Probably nothing worse. So they cleaned their rifles, and left them locked and loaded next to their beds.

  Those of them with enough demerits to be on tomorrow’s punishment detail were trying to get some sleep. If he didn’t limit it to a firing squad, they could be in for a lot of work. Messy, unpleasant work. And even if Loder got away with it, there was always the other guy. The big guy who had come in with the federal bitch. There wasn’t much chance of him surviving past breakfast time. They couldn’t remember the last time any stray stranger had lasted longer than that.

  HOLLY JOHNSON HAD a rule. It was a rule bred into her, like a family motto. It had been reinforced by her long training at Quantico. It was a rule distilled from thousands of years of military history and hundreds of years of law enforcement experience. The rule said: hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

  She had no reason to believe she would not be speeding south in a jeep just as soon as her new ally could arrange it. He was Bureau-trained, the same as she was. She knew that if the tables were turned, she would get him out, no problem at all. So she knew she could just sit tight and wait. But she wasn’t doing that. She was hoping for the best, but she was planning for the worst.

  She had given up on the bathroom. No way out there. Now she was going over the room itself, inch by inch. The new pine boarding was nailed tight to the frame, all six surfaces. It was driving her crazy. Inch-thick pine board, the oldest possible technology, used for ten thousand years, and there was no way through it. For a lone woman without any tools, it might as well have been the side of a battleship.

  So she concentrated on finding tools. It was like she was personally speeding through Darwin’s evolutionary process. Apes came down from the trees and they made tools. She was concentrating on the bed. The mattress was useless. It was a thin, crushed thing, no wire springs inside. But the bed frame was more promising. It was bolted together from iron tubes and flanges. If she could take it apart, she could put one of the little right-angle flanges in the end of the longest tube and make a pry bar seven feet long. But the bolts were all painted over. She had strong hands, but she couldn’t begin to move them. Her fingers just bruised and slipped on her sweat.

  LODER HAD BEEN dragged away and Reacher was locked up alone with the last remaining guard from the evening detail. The guard sat behind the plain desk and propped his weapon on the wooden surface with the muzzle pointing directly at him sitting on his chair. His hands were still cuffed behind him. He had decisions to make. First was no way could he sit all night like that. He glanced calmly at the guard and eased himself up and slid his hands underneath. Pressed his chest down onto his thighs and looped his hands out under his feet. Then he sat up and leaned back and forced a smile, hands together in his lap.

  “Long arms,” he said. “Useful.”

  The guard nodded slowly. He had small piercing eyes, set back in a narrow face. They gleamed out above the big beard, through the camouflage smudges, but the gleam looked innocent enough.

  “What’s your name?” Reacher asked him.

  The guy hesitated. Shuffled in his seat. Reacher could see some kind of natural courtesy was prompting a reply. But there were obvious tactical considerations for the guy. Reacher kept on forcing the smile.

  “I’m Reacher,” he said. “You know my name. You got a name? We’re here all night, we may as well be a little civilized about it, right?”

  The guy nodded again, slowly. Then he shrugged.

  “Ray,” he said.

  “Ray?” Reacher said. “That your first name or your last?”

  “Last,” the guy said. “Joseph Ray.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “OK, Mr. Ray,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Call me Joe,” Joseph Ray said.

  Reacher forced the smile again. The ice was broken. Like conducting an interrogation. Reacher had done it a thousand times. But never from this side of the desk. Never when he was the one wearing the cuffs.

  “Joe, you’re going to have to help me out a little,” he said. “I need some background here. I don’t know where I am, or why, or who all you guys are. Can you fill me in on some basic information?”

  Ray was looking at him like he was maybe having difficulty knowing where to start. Then he was glancing around the room like maybe he was wondering whether he was allowed to start at all.

  “Where exactly are we?” Reacher asked him. “You can tell me that, right?”

  “Montana,” Ray said.

  Reacher nodded.

  “OK,” he said. “Where in Montana?”

  “Near a town called Yorke,” Ray said. “An old mining town, just about abandoned.”

  Reacher nodded again.

  “OK,” he said. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “We’re building a bastion,” Ray said. “A place of our own.”

  “What for?” Reacher asked him.

  Ray shrugged. An inarticulate guy. At first, he said nothing. Then he sat forward and launched into what seemed to Reacher like a mantra, like something the guy had rehearsed many times. Or like something the guy had been told many times.

  “We came up here to escape the tyranny of America,” he said. “We have to draw up our borders and say, it’s going to be different inside here.”

  “Different how?” Reacher asked him.

  “We have to take America back, piece by piece,” Ray said. “We have to build a place where the white man can live free, unmolested, in peace, with proper freedoms and proper laws.”

  “You think you can do that?” Reacher said.

  “It happened before,” Ray said. “It happened in 1776.

  People said enough is enough. They said we want a better country than this. Now we’re saying it again. We’re saying we want our country back. And we’re going to get it back. Because now we’re acting together. There were a dozen militias up here. They all wanted the same things. But they were all acting alone. Beau’s mission was to put people together. Now we’re unified and we’re going to take our country back. We’re starting here. We’re starting now.”

  Reacher nodded. Glanced to his right and down at the dark stain where Loder’s nose had bled onto the floor.

  “Like this?” he said. “What about voting and democracy? All that kind of stuff? You should vote people out and vote new people in, right?”

  Ray smiled sadly and shook his head.

  “We’ve been voting for two hundred and twenty years,” he said. “Gets worse all the time. Government’s not interested in how we vote. They’ve taken all the power away from us. Given our country away. You know where the government of this country really is?”

  Reacher shrugged.

  “D.C., right?” he said.

  “Wrong,” Ray said. “It’s in New York. The United Nations building. Ever asked yourself why the UN is so near Wall Street? Because that’s the government. The United Nations and the banks. They run the world. America’s just a small part of it. The President is just one voice on a damn committee. That’s why voting is no damn good. You think the United Nations and the world banks care what we vote?”

  “You sure about all this?” Reacher asked.

  Ray nodded, vigorously.

  “Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I’ve seen it at work. Why do you think we send billions of dollars to the Russians when we got poverty here in America? You think that’s the free choice of an American government? We send it because the world government tells us to send it. You know we got camps here? Hundreds of camps all over the country? Most of them are for United Nations troops. Foreign troops, waiting to mov
e in when we start any trouble. But forty-three of them are concentration camps. That’s where they’re going to put us when we start speaking out.”

  “You sure?” Reacher said again.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Ray said again. “Beau’s got the documents. We’ve got the proof. There are things going on you wouldn’t believe. You know it’s a secret federal law that all babies born in the hospital get a microchip implanted just under their skin? When they take them away, they’re not weighing them and cleaning them up. They’re implanting a microchip. Pretty soon the whole population is going to be visible to secret satellites. You think the space shuttle gets used for science experiments? You think the world government would authorize expenditure for stuff like that? You got to be kidding. The space shuttle is there to launch surveillance satellites.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Reacher said.

  Ray shook his head.

  “No way,” he said. “Beau’s got the documents. There’s another secret law, guy in Detroit sent Beau the stuff. Every car built in America since 1985 has a secret radio transmitter box in it, so the satellites can see where it’s going. You buy a car, the radar screens in the UN building know where you are, every minute of the day and night. They’ve got foreign forces training in America, right now, ready for the official takeover. You know why we send so much money to Israel? Not because we care what happens to the Israelis. Why should we care? We send the money because that’s where the UN is training the secret world army. It’s like an experimental place. Why do you think the UN never stops the Israelis from invading people? Because the UN has told them what to do in the first place. Training them for the world takeover. There are three thousand helicopters right now, at airbases round the U.S., all ready for them to use. Helicopters, painted flat black, no markings.”