Die Trying by Lee Child

force. There wasn’t going to be a lot of finesse in the finished job.

Wet paint is a pretty good medium for trapping fingerprints, and the

techs knew they weren’t going to have a lot of trouble. But for the

sake of completeness, they ran every process they had, from fluoroscopy

down to the traditional gray powder. They ended up with three and a

half good prints, clearly the thumb and the first two fingers of the

right hand, with the extra bonus of a lateral half of the little

finger. They enhanced the focus in the computer and sent the prints

down the digital line to the Hoover Building in Washington. They added

a code instructing the big database down there to search with maximum

speed.

In the labs at Quantico the hunters were divided into two packs. The

burned pickup had been torn apart and half the staff were examining the

minute physical traces unique to that particular vehicle. The other

half were chasing through the fragmented records held by the

manufacturers, listening out for the faint echoes of its construction

and subsequent sales history.

It was a Dodge, ten years old, built in Detroit. The chassis number

and the code stamped into the iron of the engine block were both

original. The numbers enabled the manufacturer to identify the

original shipment. The pickup had rolled out of the factory gate one

April and had been loaded onto a railroad wagon and hauled to

California. Then it had been driven to a dealership in Mojave. The

dealer had paid the invoice in May and, beyond that, the manufacturer

had no further knowledge of the vehicle.

The dealership in Mojave had gone belly-up two years later. New owners

had bought the franchise. Current records were in their computer.

Ancient history from before the change in ownership was all in storage.

Not every day that a small automotive dealership on the edge of the

desert gets a call from the FBI Academy at Quantico, so there was a

promise of rapid action.

The sales manager himself undertook to get the information and call

right back.

The vehicle itself was pretty much burned out. All the soft clues were

gone. There were no plates. There was nothing significant in the

interior. There were no bridge tokens, no tunnel tokens. The

windshield stickers were gone. All that was left was the mud. The

vehicle technicians had cut away both of the rear wheel wells, the full

hoop of sheet metal right above the driven tires, and carried them

carefully across to the Materials Analysis Unit. Any vehicle writes

its own itinerary in the layers of mud it throws up underneath. Bureau

geologists were peeling back the layers and looking at where the pickup

had been, and where it had come from.

The mud was baked solid by the burning tires. Some of the softer

crystals had vitrified into glass. But the layers were clear. The

outer layers were thin. The geologists concluded they had been

deposited during a long journey across the country. Then there was a

couple of years’ worth of mixed rock particles. The particular mixture

was interesting. There was such a combination of sands there that

identifying their exact origin should be easy enough. Under that

mixture was a thick base layer of desert dust. Straightaway the

geologists agreed that the truck had started its life out near the

Mojave desert.

Every single law-enforcement agency in forty-five states had the

description and the plate number of the stolen white Econoline. Every

single officer on duty in the whole nation had been briefed to look for

it, parked or mobile, burned or hidden or abandoned. For a short time

that Wednesday, that white Econoline was the most hunted vehicle on the

planet.

McGrath was sitting at the head of the table in the quiet conference

room, smoking, waiting. He was not optimistic. If the truck was

parked and hidden, it would most likely never be found. The task was

too huge. Any closed garage or building or barn could hide it for

ever. If it was still somewhere on the road, the chances were better.

So the biggest gamble of his life was: after forty-eight hours, had