Die Trying by Lee Child

lab. Bureau techs ran out, white coats flapping in the fierce

downdraft, and dragged the platform in through the roller door. They

winched the wreck off the platform and pulled it into the center of the

large shed. They rolled arc lights into a rough circle around it and

lit them up. Then they stood there for a second, looking exactly like

a team of pathologists getting ready to go to work on a corpse.

General Johnson retraced his steps exactly. He made it down 9th

Street, past Natural History, past American History, his mouth forced

into a tense rigid oval, breathing hard. He walked the length of the

reflecting pool with his throat clamping and gagging. He swung left

into Constitution Avenue and made it as far as the Vietnam Wall. Then

he stopped. There was a fair crowd, stunned and quiet, as always. He

looked at them. He looked at himself in the black granite. He didn’t

stand out. He was in a lightweight gray suit. It was OK. So he let

his vision blur with his tears and he moved forward and turned and sat

against the base of the wall, sobbing and crying with his back pressed

against the golden names of boys who had died thirty years ago.

NINETEEN

REACHER BALLED HIS LOOSE CHAIN INTO HIS HAND AND SLIPPED OUT of the

barn into the pre-dawn twilight. He walked twenty paces and stopped.

Freedom. The night air was soft and infinite around him. He was

unconfined. But he had no idea where he was. The barn stood alone,

isolated fifty yards from a clutch of farm buildings of similar old

vintage. There was a house, and a couple of small sheds, and an open

structure with a new pickup parked in it. Next to the pickup was a

tractor. Next to the tractor, ghostly white in the moonlight, was the

truck. Reacher walked over , the rocky track toward it. The front

doors were locked. The rear doors were locked. He ran back to the

horse barn and searched through the dead driver’s pockets. Nothing

except the padlock key from the barn door. No keys to the truck.

He ran back, squeezing the mass of chain to keep it from making a

sound, past the tractor barn, and looked at the house. Walked right

around it. The front door was locked tight. The back door was locked

tight. And there was a dog behind it. Reacher heard it move in its

sleep. He heard a low, sleepy growl. He walked away.

He stood on the track, halfway back to the horse barn, and looked

around. He trained his eyes on the indistinct horizon and turned a

full circle in the dark. Some kind of a huge, empty landscape.

Flat, endless, no discernible features. The damp night smell of a

million acres of something growing. A pale streak of dawn in the east.

He shrugged and ducked back inside. Holly raised herself on one elbow

and looked a question at him.

“Problems,” he said. “The handcuff keys are in the house. So are the

truck keys. I can’t go in for them because there’s a dog in there.

It’s going to bark and wake everybody up. There’s more than the two

others in there. This is some kind of a working farm. There’s a

pickup and a tractor. Could be four or five armed men in there. When

that damn dog barks, I’ve had it. And it’s nearly daylight.”

“Problems,” Holly said.

“Right,” he said. “We can’t get at a vehicle, and we can’t just walk

away because you’re chained up and you can’t walk and we’re about a

million miles from anywhere, anyway.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“No idea,” he said.

“I want to see,” she said. “I want to see outside. I’m sick of being

closed in. Can’t you get this chain off?”

Reacher ducked behind her and looked at the iron ring in her wall. The

timber looked a little better than his had been. Closer grained. He

shook the ring and he knew it was hopeless. She nodded, reluctantly.

“We wait,” she said. “We wait for a better chance.”

He hurried back to the middle stalls and checked the walls, low down,