Die Trying by Lee Child

had no complaints.

Mentally it was a different story. He was suspended in a vacuum just

as impenetrable as the darkness inside the cow barn. The problem was

the total lack of information. He was not a guy who necessarily felt

uncomfortable with some lack of information. He was the son of a

Marine officer and he had lived the military life literally all the way

since birth. Therefore confusion and unpredictability were what he was

accustomed to. But tonight there was just too much missing.

He didn’t know where he was. Whether by accident or by design, the

three kidnapers had given him absolutely no clue at all where they were

headed. It made him feel adrift. His particular problem was, living

the military life from birth, out of those thirteen thousand seven

hundred and sixty days of his life he’d spent probably much less than a

fifth of them actually inside the United States. He was as American as

the president, but he’d lived and served all over the world most of his

life. Outside the

United States. It had left him knowing his own country about as well

as the average seven-year-old knows it. So he couldn’t decode the

subtle rhythms and feel and smells of America as well as he wanted to.

It was possible that somebody else could interpret the unseen contours

of the invisible landscape or the feel of the air or the temperature of

the night and say yes, I’m in this state now or that state now. It was

possible people could do that. But Reacher couldn’t. It gave him a

problem.

Added to that he had no idea who the kidnapers were. Or what their

business was. Or what their intentions were. He’d studied them

closely, every opportunity he’d had. Conclusions were difficult. The

evidence was all contradictory. Three of them, youngish, maybe

somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, fit, trained to act together

with a measure of efficiency. They were almost military, but not

quite. They were organized, but not official. Their appearance

shrieked: amateurs.

Because they were so neat. They all had new clothes, plain chain store

cottons and poplins, fresh haircuts. Their weapons were fresh out of

the box. The Clocks were brand-new. The shotgun was brand-new,

packing grease still visible. Those factors meant they weren’t any

kind of professionals. Because professionals do this stuff every day.

Whoever they are, Special Forces, CIA, FBI, detectives, it’s their job.

They wear working clothes. They use weapons they signed out last year,

the year before, tried and trusted weapons, chipped weapons, scratched

weapons, working tools. Put three professionals together on any one

day, and you’ll see last night’s pizza on one guy’s shirt, another guy

won’t have shaved, the third guy will be wearing the awful old pants

his buddies make jokes about behind his back. It’s possible you’ll see

a new jacket once in a while, or a fresh gun, or new shoes, but the

chances of seeing everything new all at once on three working

professionals on the same day are so slim as to be absurd.

And their attitude betrayed them. Competent, but jumpy, uptight,

hostile, rude, tense. Trained to some degree, but not practiced. Not

experienced. They’d rehearsed the theory, and they were smart enough

to avoid any gross errors, but they didn’t have the habituation of

professionals. Therefore these three were some kind of amateurs. And

they had kidnaped a brand-new FBI agent. Why? What the hell could a

brand-new FBI agent have done to anybody? Readier had no idea. And

the brand-new FBI agent in question wasn’t saying. Just another

component he couldn’t begin to figure. But not the biggest component.

The biggest component he couldn’t begin to figure was why the hell he

was still there.

He had no problem with how he had gotten grabbed up in the first place.

Just a freak of chance had put him alongside Holly Johnson at the exact

time the snatch was going down. He was comfortable with that. He

understood freak chances. Life was built out of freak chances, however

much people would like to pretend otherwise. And he never wasted time

speculating about how things might have been different, if this and if