Die Trying
by
Lee Child
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 button 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 snatched from his grasp and he was hit 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