Die Trying by Lee Child

that, I wouldn’t want him to get mad at me, that’s for damn sure.”

“What about after?” McGrath said.

The body was moved,” the doctor said. “Hypostasis pattern is all

screwed up. Like somebody beat on the guy, suffocated him, left him

for an hour, then thought better of it and moved the body out here and

dumped it’

Webster and McGrath and Brogan all nodded. Milosevic stared down into

the ditch. They regrouped on the shoulder and stood looking at the

vast dark landscape for a long moment and then turned together back to

the car.

Thank you, doc,” Webster said vaguely. “Good work.”

The doctor nodded. The car doors slammed. The local agent started up

and continued on down the road, west, toward where the sun had set.

The big guy is calling the shots,” Webster said. “It’s clear, right?

He hired the three guys to do a job of work for him. Peter Wayne Bell

stepped out of line. He started to mess with Holly. A helpless,

disabled woman, young and pretty, too much of a temptation for an

animal like that, right?”

“Right,” Brogan said. “But the big guy is a professional. A mercenary

or a terrorist or something. Messing with the prisoner was not in his

game plan. So he got mad and offed Bell. Enforcing some kind of

discipline on the troops.”

Webster nodded.

“Had to be that way,” he said. “Only the big guy could do that. Partly

because he’s the boss, therefore he’s got the authority, and partly

because he’s physically powerful enough to do that kind of serious

damage.”

“He was protecting her?” McGrath said.

“Protecting his investment,” Webster said back, sourly.

“So maybe she’s still OK,” McGrath said.

Nobody replied to that. The car turned a tight left after a mile and

bounced down a track. The headlight beams jumped over a small cluster

of wooden buildings.

This was their stopping place,” the local guy said. “It’s an old horse

farm.”

“Inhabited?” McGrath asked.

“It was until yesterday,” the guy said. “No sign of anybody today.”

He pulled up in front of the barn. The five men got out into the dark.

The barn door stood open. The local guy waited with the car and

Webster and McGrath and Brogan and Milosevic stepped inside. Searched

with their flashlights. It was dark and damp. Cobbled floor, green

with moss. Horse stalls down both sides. They walked in. Down the

aisle to the end. The stall on the right had been peppered with a

shotgun blast. The back wall had just about disintegrated. Planks had

fallen out. Wood splinters lay all around, crumbling with decay.

The end stall on the left had a mattress in it. Laid at an angle on

the mossy cobbles. There was a chain looped through an iron ring on

the back wall. The ring had been put there a hundred years ago to hold

a horse by a rope. But last night it had held a woman, by a chain

attached to her wrist. Webster ducked down and came up with the bright

chrome handcuff, locked into the ends of the loop of chain. Brogan

knelt and picked long dark hairs off the mattress. Then he rejoined

Milosevic and searched through the other stalls in turn. McGrath

stared at them. Then he walked out of the barn. He turned to face

west and stared at the point where the sun had fallen over the horizon.

He stood and stared into the infinite dark in that direction like if he

stared long enough and hard enough he could focus his eyes five hundred

miles away and see Holly.

TWENTY-THREE

NOBODY COULD SEE HOLLY BECAUSE SHE WAS ON HER OWN, LOCKED in the prison

room that had been built for her. She had been taken from the forest

clearing by four silent women dressed in dull green fatigues, night

camouflage smearing their faces, automatic weapons slung at their

shoulders, ammunition pouches chinking and rattling on their belts.

They had pulled her away from Readier and dragged her in the dark

across the clearing, into the trees, through a gauntlet of hissing,

spitting, jeering people. Then a painful mile down a stony path, out