Die Trying by Lee Child

Die Trying

by

Lee Child

Die Trying

by

Lee Child

ONE

NATHAN RUBIN DIED BECAUSE HE GOT BRAVE. NOT THE SUSTAINED kind of

thing which wins you a medal in a war, but the split-second kind of

blurting outrage which gets you killed on the street.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a

year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short, round man aiming

to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted

corridors of a lakeside house, appropriate to a man who earned a

thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A

thumb on the button of the garage door-opener and a twist of the wrist

to start the silent engine of his expensive, imported sedan. A CD into

the player, a backward sweep into his gravel driveway, a dab on the

brake, a snick of the selector, a nudge on the gas, and the last short

drive of his life was under way. Six forty-nine in the morning,

Monday.

The only light on his route to work was green, which was the proximate

cause of his death. It meant that as he pulled into his secluded slot

behind his professional building the prelude ahead of Bach’s B minor

fugue still had thirty-eight seconds left to run. He sat and heard it

out until the last organ blast echoed to silence, which meant that as

he got out of his car the three men were near enough for him to

interpret some kind of intention in their approach. So he glanced at

them. They looked away and altered course, three men in step, like

dancers or soldiers. He turned toward his building. Started walking.

But then he stopped. And looked back. The three men were at his car.

Trying the doors.

“Hey!” he called.

It was the short universal sound of surprise, anger, challenge. The

sort of instinctive sound an earnest, naive citizen makes when

something should not be happening. The sort of instinctive sound which

gets an earnest, naive citizen killed. He found himself heading

straight back to his car. He was outnumbered three to one but he was

in the right, which swelled him up and gave him confidence. He strode

back and felt outraged and fit and commanding.

But those were illusory feelings. A soft, suburban guy like him was

never going to be in command of a situation like that. His fitness was

just health-club tone. It counted for nothing. His tight abdominals

ruptured under the first savage blow. His face jerked forward and down

and hard knuckles pulped his lips and smashed his teeth. He was caught

by rough hands and knotted arms and held upright like he weighed

nothing at all. His keys were snatched from his grasp and he was hit a

crashing blow on the ear. His mouth filled with blood. He was dropped

onto the blacktop and heavy boots smashed into his back. Then his gut.

Then his head. He blacked out like a television set in a thunderstorm.

The world just disappeared in front of him. It collapsed into a thin

hot line and sputtered away to nothing.

So he died, because for a split-second he got brave. But not then. He

died much later, after the split-second of bravery had faded into long

hours of wretched gasping fear, and after the long hours of fear had

exploded into long minutes of insane screaming panic.

Jack Reacher stayed alive, because he got cautious. He got cautious

because he heard an echo from his past. He had a lot of past, and the

echo was from the worst part of it.

He had served thirteen years in the army, and the only time he was

wounded it wasn’t with a bullet. It was with a fragment of a Marine

sergeant’s jawbone. Reacher had been stationed in Beirut, in the US

compound out by the airport. The compound was truck-bombed. Reacher

was standing at the gate. The Marine in sergeant was standing a

hundred yards nearer the explosion. The jawbone fragment was the only

piece left of the guy. It hit Reacher a hundred yards away and went