Die Trying by Lee Child

inflated bid, with a large horse-trading margin built in. But the guy

had not eaten into that margin. He had not negotiated at all. He had

just nodded and told them to start work as soon as the wrecking crew

had finished. Work was hard to find, and employers who accepted your

first price were even harder to find. So the three men were happy to

work hard, work fast, and work late. They were anxious to make a good

first impression. Looking around, they could see the potential for a

lot more employment.

So they were giving it their best shot. They ran up and down the

stairs with tools and fresh lumber. They worked by eye, marking

cut-lines in the wood with their thumbnails, using their nail guns and

their saws until they ran hot. But they paused frequently to measure

the gap between the old framing and the new. The employer had made it

clear that dimension was critical. The old framing was six inches

deep. The new framing was four. The gap was twelve inches.

“Six and four and twelve,” one guy said. Twenty-two inches total.”

“OK?” the second guy asked the crew chief.

“Ideal,” the crew chief said. “Exactly what he told us.”

FIVE

HOLLY JOHNSON’S FIVE O’CLOCK CASE CONFERENCE WAS ALLOCATED to the

Chicago FBI office’s third-floor meeting room. This was a large room,

better than forty feet by twenty, and it was more or less filled by a

long polished table flanked by thirty chairs, fifteen on each side. The

chairs were substantial and leather and the table was made of fine

hardwood, but any tendency for the place to look like a corporate

boardroom was defused by the scruffy government wall covering and the

cheap carpet. There were ninety square yards of carpet on the floor

and the whole ninety together had probably cost less than just one of

the chairs.

Five o’clock in the summer, the afternoon sun streamed in through the

wall of windows and gave the people arriving in the room a choice. If

they sat facing the windows, they got the sun in their eyes and

squinted through the meeting and ended up with a blinding headache. And

the sun overpowered the air conditioning, so if they sat backs to the

windows, they got heated up to a point where it got uncomfortable and

they started worrying about whether their deodorant was still OK at

five o’clock in the afternoon. A tough choice, but the top option was

to avoid the headache and take the risk of heating up. So the early

attenders took the seats on the window side.

9Q

First into the room was the FBI lawyer with special responsibility for

financial crime. He stood for a moment and made a judgment about the

likely duration of the meeting. Maybe forty-five minutes, he thought,

knowing Holly, so he turned and tried to assess which seat might get

the benefit of the shade from the slim pillar splitting the wall of

windows into two. The bar of shadow was lying to the left of the third

chair in the row, and he knew it would inch toward the head of the

table as time passed. So he spilled his pile of folders onto the table

in front of the second chair and shrugged his jacket off and claimed

the place by dropping it onto the chair. Then he turned again and

strolled to the credenza at the end of the room for a cup of coffee

from the filter machine.

Next in were two agents working on cases that might be tied in to the

mess that Holly Johnson was dealing with. They nodded to the lawyer

and saw the place he’d claimed. They knew there was no point in

choosing between the other fourteen chairs by the window. They were

all going to get equally hot. So they just dumped their portfolios at

the nearest two places and lined up for coffee.

“She not here yet?” one of them said to the lawyer.

“Haven’t seen her all day,” the lawyer said.

“Your loss, right?” the other guy said.

Holly Johnson was a new agent, but talented, and that was making her