Die Trying by Lee Child

this morning, they’d just gone on duty. Whichever one of them it is

must have gotten the fax and concealed it. But which one, I just don’t

know.”

Reacher nodded back.

“We could figure it out,” he said. “Or we could just wait and see. One

of them will be walking around best of friends and the other will be in

handcuffs, or dead. We’ll be able to tell the difference.”

McGrath nodded, sourly.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

Then Reacher stiffened and pulled him ten yards farther into the woods.

He had heard the patrol coming back through the trees.

Inside the courtroom, Borken had heard the three shots. He was sitting

in the judge’s chair and he heard them clearly. They went:

crack crack … crack and repeated a dozen times as each of the distant

slopes cannoned the echo back toward him. He sent a runner back to the

Bastion. A mile there, a mile back on the winding path through the

woods. Twenty minutes wasted, then the runner got back panting with

the news. Three corpses, four cut ropes.

“Readier,” Borken said. “I should have wasted him at the beginning.”

Milosevic nodded in agreement.

“I want him kept away from me,” he said. “I heard the autopsy report

on your friend Peter Bell. I just want my money and safe passage out

of here, OK?”

Borken nodded. Then he laughed. A sharp, nervous laugh that was part

excitement, part tension. He stood up and walked out from behind the

bench. Laughed and grinned and slapped Milosevic on the shoulder.

Holly Johnson knew no more than most people do about dynamite. She

couldn’t remember its exact chemical composition. She knew ammonium

nitrate and nitro cellulose were in there somewhere. She wondered

about nitroglycerin. Was that mixed in too? Or was that some other

kind of explosive? Either way, she figured dynamite was some kind of a

sticky fluid, soaked into a porous material and molded into sticks.

Heavy sticks, quite dense. If her walls were packed with heavy dense

sticks they would absorb a lot of sound. Like a soundproofing layer in

a city apartment. Which meant the shots she’d heard had been

reasonably close.

She’d heard: crack crack … crack. But she didn’t know who was

shooting at who, or why. They weren’t handgun shots. She knew the

flat bark of a handgun from her time at Quantico. These were shots

from a long gun. Not the heavy thump of the big Barratts from the

rifle range. A lighter weapon than that. Somebody firing a

medium-caliber rifle three times. Or three people firing once, in a

ragged volley. But whichever it was, something was happening. And she

had to be ready.

Garber heard the shots, too. Crack crack… crack, maybe a thousand

yards northwest of him, maybe twelve hundred. Then a dozen spaced

echoes coming back from the mountainsides. He was in no doubt about

what they represented. An M-16, firing singles, the first pair in a

tight group of two which the military called a double tap. The sound

of a competent shooter. The idea was to get the second round off

before the first shell case hit the ground. Then a third target, or

maybe an insurance shot into the second. An unmistakable rhythm. Like

a signature. The audible signature of somebody with hundreds of hours

of weapons training behind him. Garber nodded to himself and moved

forward through the trees.

“It must be Brogan,” Reacher whispered.

McGrath looked surprised.

“Why Brogan?” he asked.

They were squatted down, backs to adjacent trunks, thirty yards into

the woods, invisible. The search patrol had tracked back and missed

them again. McGrath had given Reacher the whole story. He had rattled

through the important parts of the investigation, one professional to

another, in a sort of insider’s shorthand. Reacher had asked sharp

questions and McGrath had given short answers.

Time and distance,” Reacher said. That was crucial. Think about it

from their point of view. They put us in the truck and they raced off

straight to Montana. What’s that? Maybe seventeen hundred miles?

Eighteen hundred?”

“Probably,” McGrath allowed.

“And Brogan’s a smart guy,” Reacher said. “And he knows you’re a smart