Child Lee. Die Trying

   He turned into the rough track. There were lights in the windows of the farmhouse. He sprinted for the barn. Pushed the heavy wooden doors closed from the outside. Lifted the crossbeam into its supports and locked it in place with the padlock key. Ran back to the track and hurled the key far into the field. Wednesday was flaming up over the horizon. He sprinted for the far side of the barn and found the gap he'd sprung in the siding. Pushed his chain in ahead of him. Squeezed his shoulders through and forced his way back inside. Pulled the boards back flush with the old timbers, best as he could. Then he came back into the aisle and stood bent over, breathing hard.
   "All done," he said. They'll never find him."
   He scooped up the metal mess tin with the cold remains of the soup in it. Scratched around in his stall for the fallen bolts. He gathered as many wood splinters as he could find. Slopped them around in the cold soup and forced them back into the ragged bolt holes. He walked over to Holly's stall and put the tin back on the ground. Kept the spoon. He assembled the bolts through the holes in the base of the iron ring, hanging there off his length of chain. Forced them home among the sticky splinters. Used the back of the spoon to press them firmly in. He ran the chain through the loop until it was hanging straight down and resting on the stone floor. Minimum stress on the fragile assembly.
   He tossed the spoon back to Holly. She caught it one-handed and put it back in the tin. Then he ducked down and listened through the boards. The dog was outside. He could hear it snuffling. Then he heard people. Footsteps on the track. They ran to the doors of the barn. They shook and rattled the crossbeam. Retreated. There was shouting. They were calling a name, over and over again. The crack around the barn door was lighting up with morning. The timbers of the barn were creaking as the sun flooded over the horizon and warmed them through.
   The footsteps ran back to the barn. The padlock rattled and the chain came off. The crossbeam thumped to the ground. The door groaned open. Loder stepped inside. He had the Glock in his hand and strain showing in his face. He stood just inside the door. His eyes were flicking back and forward between Reacher and Holly. The strain in his face was edged by anger. Some kind of a cold light in his eyes. Then the jumpy guy stepped in behind him. Stevie. He was carrying the driver's shotgun. And smiling. He crowded past Loder and ran down the central cobbled aisle. Raised the shotgun and pointed it straight at Reacher. Loder started after him. Stevie crunched a round into the chamber. Reacher shifted a foot to his left, so the iron ring was hidden from view behind him.
   "What's the problem?" he asked.
   "You are, asshole," Loder said. "Situation has changed. We're a man short. So you just became one person too many."
   Reacher was on his way to the floor as Stevie pulled the trigger. He landed flat on the hard cobbles and hurled himself forward as the shotgun boomed and the stall blew apart. The air was instantly thick with splinters of damp wood and the stink of gunpowder. The plank holding the iron ring fell out of the shattered wall and the chain clattered to the floor. Reacher rolled over and glanced up. Stevie lifted the shotgun vertical and crunched another round into the chamber. Swung the barrel down and aimed again.
   "Wait!" Holly screamed.
   Stevie glanced at her. Impossible not to.
   "Don't be a damn fool," she yelled. "Hell are you doing? You don't have the time for this."
   Loder turned to face her.
   "He's run, right?" she said. "Your driver? Is that what happened? He bailed out and ran for it, right? So you need to get going. You don't have time for this."
   Loder stared at her.
   "Right now you're ahead of the game," Holly said urgently. "But you shoot this guy, you got the local cops a half-hour behind you. You need to get going."
   Reacher gasped up at her from the floor. She was magnificent. She was sucking all their attention her way. She was saving his life.
   "Two of you, two of us," she said urgently. "You can handle it, right?"
   There was silence. Dust and powder drifted in the air. Then Loder stepped back, covering them both with his automatic. Reacher watched the disappointment on Stevie's face. He stood slowly and pulled the chain clear of the wreckage. The iron ring fell out of the smashed wood and clanked on the stones.
   "Bitch is right," Loder said. "We can handle it."
   He nodded to Stevie. Stevie ran for the door and Loder turned and pulled his key and unlocked Holly's wrist. Dropped her cuff on her mattress. The weight of the chain pulled it back toward the wall. It pulled off the edge of the mattress and slid onto the cobblestones with a loud metallic sound.
   "OK, asshole, real quick," Loder said. "Before I change my mind."
   Reacher looped his chain into his hand. Ducked down and picked Holly up, under her knees and shoulders. They heard the truck start up. It slewed backward into the entrance. Jammed to a stop. Reacher ran Holly to the truck. Laid her down inside. Climbed in after her. Loder slammed the doors and shut them into darkness.
   "Now I guess I owe you," Reacher said quietly.
   Holly just waved it away. An embarrassed little gesture. Reacher stared at her. He liked her. Liked her face. He gazed at it. Recalled it white and disgusted as the driver taunted her. Saw the smooth swell of her breasts under his filthy drooling gaze. Then the picture changed to Stevie smiling and shooting at him, chained to the wall. Then he heard Loder say: the situation has changed.
   Everything had changed. He had changed. He lay and felt the old anger inside him grinding like gears. Cold, implacable anger.
   Uncontrollable. They had made a mistake. They had changed him from a spectator into an enemy. A bad mistake to make. They had pushed open the forbidden door, not knowing what would come bursting back out at them. He lay there and felt like a ticking bomb they were carrying deep into the heart of their territory. He felt the flood of anger, and thrilled with it, and savored it, and stored it up.
   Now there was only one mattress inside the truck. It was only three feet wide. And Stevie was a very erratic driver. Reacher and Holly were lying down, pressed tight together. Reacher's left wrist still had the cuff and the chain locked onto it. His right arm was around Holly's shoulders. He was holding her tight. Tighter than he really needed to.
   "How much farther?" she asked.
   "We'll be there before nightfall," he said, quietly. "They didn't bring your chain. No more overnight stops."
   She was silent for a moment.
   "I don't know if I'm glad or not," she said. "I hate this truck, but I don't know if I want to actually arrive anywhere."
   Reacher nodded.
   "It reduces our chances," he said. "Rule of thumb is escape while you're on the move. It gets much harder after that."
   The motion of the truck indicated they were on a highway. But either the terrain was different, or Stevie couldn't handle the truck, or both, because they were swaying violently. The guy was swinging late into turns and jamming the vehicle from side to side, like he was having a struggle staying between the lane markers. Holly was getting thrown against Reacher's side. He pulled her closer and held her tighter. She snuggled in close, instinctively. He felt her hesitate, like she realized she'd acted without thinking, then he felt her decide not to pull away again.
   "You feel OK?" she asked him. "You killed a man."
   He was quiet for a long moment.
   "He wasn't the first," he said. "And I just decided he won't be the last."
   She turned her head to speak at the same time he did. The truck swayed violently to the left. Their lips were an inch apart. The truck swayed again. They kissed. At first it was light and tentative. Reacher felt the new soft lips on his, and the unfamiliar new taste and smell and feel. Then they kissed harder. Then the truck started hammering through a series of sharp curves, and they forgot all about kissing and just held on tight, trying not to be thrown right off the mattress onto the ridged metal floor.

20

   Brogan was the guy who made the breakthrough in Chicago. He was the third guy that morning to walk past the can of white paint out there on the abandoned industrial lot, but he was the first to realize its significance.
   "The truck they stole was white," Brogan said. "Some kind of ID on the side. They painted over it. Got to be that way. The can was right there, with a brush, about ten feet from the Lexus. Stands to reason they would park the Lexus right next to the truck, right? Therefore the paint can was next to where the truck had been."
   "What sort of paint?" McGrath asked.
   "Ordinary household paint," Brogan said. "A quart can. Two-inch brush. Price tag still on it, from a hardware store. And there are fingerprints in the splashes on the handle."
   McGrath nodded and smiled.
   "OK," he said. "Go to work."
   Brogan took the computer-aided mug shots with him to the hardware store named on the paintbrush handle. It was a cramped, family-owned place, two hundred yards from the abandoned lot. The counter was attended by a stout old woman with a mind like a steel trap. Straightaway she identified the picture of the in guy who the video had caught at the wheel of the Lexus. She said the paint and the brush had been purchased by him about ten o'clock Monday morning. To prove it, she rattled open an ancient drawer and pulled out Monday's register roll. Seven ninety-eight for the paint, five ninety-eight for the brush, plus tax, right there on the roll.
   "He paid cash," she said.
   "You got a video system in here?" Brogan asked her.
   "No," she said.
   "Doesn't your insurance company say you got to?" he asked.
   The stout old woman just smiled.
   "We're not insured," she said.
   Then she leaned under the counter and came up with a shotgun.
   "Not by no insurance company, anyway," she said.
   Brogan looked at the weapon. He was pretty sure the barrel was way too short for the piece to be legal. But he wasn't about to start worrying over such a thing. Not right then.
   "OK," he said. "You take care now."
   More than seven million people in the Chicago area, something like ten million road vehicles, but only one white truck had been reported stolen in the twenty-four-hour period between Sunday and Monday. It was a white Ford Econoline. Owned and operated by a South Side electrician. His insurance company made him empty the truck at night, and store his stock and tools inside his shop. Anything left inside the truck was not covered. That was the rule. It was an irksome rule, but on Monday morning when the guy came out to load up and the truck was gone, it started to look like a rule which made a whole lot of sense. He had reported the theft to the insurance broker and the police, and he was not expecting to hear much more about it. So he was duly impressed when two FBI agents turned up, forty-eight hours later, asking all kinds of urgent questions.
   "OK," McGrath said. "We know what we're looking for. White Econoline, new paint on the sides. We've got the plates. Now we need to know where to look. Ideas?"
   "Coming up on forty-eight hours," Brogan said. "Assume an average speed of fifty-five? That would make the max range somewhere more than twenty-six hundred miles. That's effectively anywhere on the North American continent, for God's sake."
   "Too pessimistic," Milosevic said. "They probably stopped nights. Call it six hours driving time on Monday, maybe ten on Tuesday, maybe four so far today, total of twenty hours, that's a maximum range of eleven hundred miles."
   "Needle in a haystack," Brogan said.
   McGrath shrugged.
   "So let's find the haystack," he said. "Then we'll go look for the needle. Call it fifteen hundred maximum. What does that look like?"
   Brogan pulled a road atlas from the stack of reference material on the table. He opened it up to the early section where the whole country was shown all at once, all the states splattered over one page in a colorful mosaic. He checked the scale and traced his fingernail in a circle.
   "That's anywhere shy of California," he said. "Half of Washington State, half of Oregon, none of California and absolutely all of everywhere else. Somewhere around a zillion square miles."
   There was a depressed silence in the room.
   "Mountains between here and Washington State, right?" McGrath said. "So let's assume they're not in Washington State yet. Or Oregon. Or California. Or Alaska or Hawaii. So we've cut it down already. Only forty-five states to call, right? Let's go to work."
   "They might have gone to Canada," Brogan said. "Or Mexico, or a boat or a plane."
   Milosevic shrugged and took the atlas from him.
   "You're too pessimistic," he said again.
   "Needle in a damn haystack," Brogan said back.

* * *

   Three floors above them the Bureau fingerprint technicians were looking at the paintbrush Brogan had brought in. It had been used once only, by a fairly clumsy guy. The paint was matted up in the bristles, and had run onto the mild steel ferrule which bound the bristles into the wooden handle. The guy had used an action which had put his thumb on the back of the ferrule, and his first two fingers on the front. It was suggestive of a medium-height guy reaching up and brushing paint onto a flat surface, level with his head, maybe a little higher, the paintbrush handle pointing downward. A Ford Econoline was just a fraction less than eighty-one inches tall. Any sign writing would be about seventy inches off the ground. The computer could not calculate this guy's height, because it had only seen him sitting down inside the Lexus, but the way the brush had been used, he must have been five-eight, five-nine, reaching up and brushing just a little above his eye-level. Brushing hard, with some lateral 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 they gotten where they were going, or were they still on their way?
   Two hours after starting the patient search, the fingerprint database brought back a name: Peter Wayne Bell. There was a perfect match, right hand, thumb and first two fingers. The computer rated the match on the partial from the little finger as very probable.
   "Thirty-one years old," Brogan said. "From Mojave, California. Two convictions for sex of fences Charged with a double rape, three years ago, didn't go down. Victims were three months in the hospital. This guy Bell had an alibi from three of his friends. Victims couldn't make the H, too shaken up by the beatings."
   "Nice guy," McGrath said.
   Milosevic nodded.
   "And he's got Holly," he said. "Right there in the back of his truck."
   McGrath said nothing in reply to that. Then the phone rang. He picked it up. Listened to a short barked sentence. He sat there and Brogan and Milosevic saw his face light up like a guy who sees his teams all win the pennant on the same day, baseball, football, basketball and hockey, all on the same day that his son graduates summa cum laude from Harvard and his gold stocks go through the roof.
   "Arizona," he shouted. "It's in Arizona, heading north on US60."

* * *

   An old hand in an Arizona State Police cruiser had spotted a white panel truck making bad lane changes round the sharp curves on US60, as it winds away from the town of Globe seventy miles east of Phoenix. He had pulled closer and read the plate. He saw the blue oval and the Econoline script on the back. He had thumbed his mike and called it in. Then the world had gone crazy. He was told to stick with the truck, no matter what. He was told that helicopters would be coming in from Phoenix and Flagstaff, and from Albuquerque way over in New Mexico. Every available mobile unit would be coming in behind him from the south. Up ahead the National Guard would be assembling a roadblock. Within twenty minutes, he was told, you'll have more back-up than you've ever dreamed of. Until then, he was told, you're the most important lawman in America.
   The sales manager from the Dodge dealership in Mojave, California, called Quantico back within an hour. He'd been over to the storage room and dug out the records for the sales made ten years ago by the previous franchise owners. The pickup in question had been sold to a citrus farmer down in Kendall, fifty miles south of Mojave, in May of that year. The guy had been back for servicing and emissions testing for the first four years, and after that they'd never seen him again. He had bought on a four-year time payment plan and his name was Dutch Borken.
   A half-hour later the stolen white Econoline was twenty-eight miles further north on US60 in Arizona, and it was the tip of a long teardrop-shape of fifty vehicles cruising behind it. Above it, five helicopters were hammering through the air. In front of it, ten miles to the north, the highway was closed and another forty vehicles were stationary on the pavement, parked up in a neat arrowhead formation. The whole operation was being coordinated by the agent-in-charge from the FBI's Phoenix office. He was in the lead helicopter, staring down through the clear desert air at the roof of the truck. He was wearing a headset with a throat mike, and he was talking continuously.
   "OK, people," he said. "Let's go for it, right now. Go go go!"
   His lead chopper swooped upward out of the way and two others arrowed down. They hovered just in front of the truck, low down, one on each side, keeping pace. The police cars behind fanned out across the whole width of the highway and they all hit their lights and sirens together. A third chopper swung down and flew backward, right in front of the truck, eight feet off the ground, strobes flashing, rotors beating the air. The co-pilot started a sequence of clear gestures, hands wide, palms out, like he was personally slowing the truck. Then the sirens all stopped and the enormous bullhorn on the front of the helicopter fired up. The co-pilot's voice boomed out, amplified grotesquely beyond the point of distortion, clearly audible even over the thrashing and hammering of the rotor blades.
   "Federal Agents," his voice screamed. "You are commanded to stop at once. I repeat, you are commanded to stop your vehicle at once."
   The truck kept on going. The helicopter right in front of it swung and wobbled in the air. Then it settled again, even closer to the windshield, flying backward, not more than ten feet away.
   "You are surrounded," the co-pilot shouted through the huge bullhorn. "There are a hundred police officers behind you. The road is closed ahead. You have no option. You must slow your vehicle and come to a complete stop. You must do that right now."
   The cruisers all lit up their sirens again and two of them pulled alongside. The truck was locked into a solid raft of hostile traffic. It sped on for a long moment, then it slowed. Behind it, the frantic convoy braked and swerved. The helicopters rose up and kept pace. The truck slowed more. Police cruisers pulled alongside, two deep, door to door, bumper to bumper. The truck coasted to a halt. The helicopters held station overhead. The lead cars swerved around in front and jammed to a stop, inches from the truck's hood. All around, officers jumped out. The highway was thick with police. Even over the beating of the helicopter rotors, the crunching of shotgun mechanisms and the clicking of a hundred revolver hammers were clearly audible.
   In Chicago, McGrath did not hear the shotguns and the revolvers, but he could hear the Phoenix agent-in-charge shouting over the radio. The output from the throat mike in his helicopter was patched through Washington and was crackling out through a speaker on the long hardwood table. The guy was talking continuously, excited, half in a stream of instructions to his team, half as a running commentary on the sight he was seeing on the road below. McGrath was sitting there, hands cold and wet, staring at the noisy speaker like if he stared at it hard enough it would change into a crystal ball and let him see what was going down.
   "He's stopping, he's stopping," the guy in the helicopter was saying. "He's stationary now, he's stopped on the road, he's surrounded. Hold your fire, wait for my word, they're not coming out, open the doors, open the damn doors and drag them out, OK, we got two guys in the front, two guys, one driver, one passenger, they're coming out, they're out, secure them, put them in a car, get the keys, open up the back, but watch out, there are two more in there with her. OK, we're going to the back, we're going around to the rear, the doors are locked back there, we're trying the key. You know what? There's still writing on the side of this truck. The writing is still there. It says Bright Spark Electrics. I thought it was supposed to be blanked out, right? Painted over or something?"

* * *

   In Chicago, a deathly hush fell over the third-floor conference room. McGrath went white. Milosevic looked at him. Brogan stared calmly out of the window.
   "And why is it heading north?" McGrath asked. "Back toward Chicago?"
   The crackling from the speaker was still there. They turned back toward it. Listened hard. They could hear the thump of the rotor blades behind the urgent voice.
   "The rear doors are open," the voice said. The doors are open, they're open, we're going in, people are coming out, here they come, what the hell is this? There are dozens of people in there. There are maybe twenty people in there. They're all coming out. They're still coming out. There are twenty or thirty people in there. What the hell is going on here?"
   The guy broke off. Evidently he was listening to a report radioed up from the ground. McGrath and Brogan and Milosevic stared at the hissing speaker. It stayed quiet for a long time. Nothing coming through at all except the guy's loud breathing and the hammering of the blades and the waterfall of static. Then the voice came back.
   "Shit," it said. "Shit, Washington, you there? You listening to this? You know what we just did? You know what you sent us to do? We just busted a load of wetbacks. About thirty illegals from Mexico. Just got picked up from the border. They're on their way up to Chicago. They say they all got jobs promised up there."

21

   The white Econoline droned on. It was moving faster than it had been before. But it was out of the curves. It had lurched around the last of the tight bends, and it had settled to a fast, straight cruise. Noisier than before, because of the extra speed and the whine of the slipstream through the hundred random holes in the roof.
   Reacher and Holly were tight together on the three-foot mattress. They were lying on their backs, staring up at the holes. Each hole was a bright point of light. Not blue, just a point of light so bright it had no color at all. Just a bright point in the dark. Like a mathematical proposition. Total light against the total dark of the surrounding sheet metal. Light, the opposite of dark. Dark, the absence of light. Positive and negative. Both propositions were contrasted vividly up there on the metal roof.
   "I want to see the sky," Holly said.
   It was warm in the truck. Not hot, like it had been the first day and a half. The whistling slipstream had solved that problem. The rush of air was keeping it comfortable. But it was warm enough that Reacher had taken his shirt off. He had balled it up and crammed it under his head.
   "I want to see the whole sky," Holly said. "Not just little bits of it."
   Reacher said nothing in reply. He was counting the holes.
   "What time is it?" Holly asked him.
   "Hundred and thirteen," Reacher said.
   Holly turned her head to him.
   "What?" she said.
   "Hundred and thirteen holes in the roof," he said.
   "Great," she said. "What time is it?"
   "Three-thirty, Central," he said.
   She snuggled closer. She moved her weight onto her side. Her head was resting on his right shoulder. Her leg was resting on his. His thigh was jammed between hers.
   "Wednesday, right?" she said.
   "Wednesday," he said.
   She was physically closer to him than many women had allowed themselves to get. She felt lithe and athletic. Firm, but soft. Young. Scented. He was drifting away and enjoying the sensation. He was slightly breathless. But he wasn't kidding himself about her motivation. She was relaxed about it, but she was doing it to rest her painful knee, and to keep herself from rolling off the mattress onto the floor.
   "Fifty-one hours," she said. "Fifty-one hours, and I haven't seen the sky."
   One hundred and thirteen was a prime number. You couldn't make it by multiplying any other numbers together. Hundred and twelve, you could make by multiplying fifty-six by two, or twenty-eight by four, or fourteen by eight. Hundred and fourteen, you could make by multiplying fifty-seven by two, or nineteen by six, or thirty-eight by three. But one hundred and thirteen was prime. No factors. The only way to make a hundred and thirteen was by multiplying a hundred and thirteen by one. Or by firing a shotgun into a truck in a rage.
   "Reacher, I'm getting worried," Holly said.
   Fifty-one hours. Fifty-one was not a prime number. You could make fifty-one by multiplying seventeen by three. Three tens are thirty, three sevens are twenty-one, thirty and twenty-one make fifty-one. Not a prime number. Fifty-one had factors. He dragged the weight of the chain up with his left wrist and held her tight, both arms around her.
   "You'll be OK," he said to her. "They're not going to hurt you. They want to trade you for something. They'll keep you fit and well."
   He felt her shake her head against his shoulder. Just one small shake, but it was very definite.
   "I'm not worried about me," she said. "I'm worried about you. Who the hell's going to trade something for you?"
   He said nothing. Nothing he could say to that. She snuggled closer. He could feel the scratch of her eyelashes against the skin on the side of his chest as she blinked. The truck roared on, faster than it wanted to go. He could feel the driver pushing it against its natural cruising speed.
   "So I'm getting a little worried," she said.
   "You look out for me," he said. "And I'll look out for you."
   "I'm not asking you to do that," she said.
   "I know you're not," he said.
   "Well, I can't let you do that," she said.
   "You can't stop me," he said. "This is about me now, too. They made it that way. They were going to shoot me down. I've got a rule, Holly: people mess with me at their own risk. I try to be patient about it. I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past. So you may as well face it, win or lose, now we do it together."
   They went quiet. The truck roared on.
   "Reacher?" Holly said.
   "What?" he said.
   "Hold me," she said.
   "I am holding you," he said.
   He squeezed her gently, both arms, to make his point. She pressed closer.
   "Reacher?" she said again.
   "Yes?" he said.
   "You want to kiss me again?" she said. "Makes me feel better."
   He turned his head and smiled at her in the dark.
   "Doesn't do me a whole lot of harm, either," he said.
   Eight hours at maybe sixty-five or seventy miles an hour. Somewhere between five hundred and five hundred and fifty miles. That's what they'd done. That was Reacher's estimation. And it was beginning to give him a clue about where they were.
   "We're somewhere where they abolished the speed limit," he said.
   Holly stirred and yawned.
   "What?" she said.
   "We've been going fast," he said. "Up to seventy miles an hour, probably, for hours. Loder is pretty thorough. He wouldn't let Stevie drive this fast if there was any danger of getting pulled over for it. So we're somewhere where they raised the limit, or abolished it altogether. Which states did that?"
   She shrugged.
   "I'm not sure," she said. "Mainly the western states, I think."
   Reacher nodded. Traced an arc on the map in his head.
   "We didn't go east," he said. "We figured that already. So I figure we're in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana. Maybe as far as Idaho, Utah, Nevada or Arizona. Not in California yet."
   The truck slowed slightly, and they heard the engine note harden up. Then they heard the crunch as the driver came down out of fifth gear into fourth.
   "Mountains," Holly said.
   It was more than a hill. More than an up-grade. It was a smooth, relentless climb. A highway through the mountains. Clearly engineered to help out the laboring traffic, but they were adding hundreds of feet, every mile they drove. Reacher felt the lurch as the truck pulled out to pass slower vehicles. Not many, but a few. It stayed in fourth gear, the guy's foot hard down, hammering uphill, then relaxing, changing up to fifth, then down again, charging upwards.
   "We could run out of gas," Holly said.
   "It's diesel, not gas," Reacher said. "We used these things in the army. Thirty-five gallon tank. Diesel will do maybe twenty-five to the gallon, highway mileage. Best part of nine hundred miles, before they run out."
   "That could get us all the way out of the States," she said.
   They cruised on. The truck roared through the mountains for hours, then it left the highway. Night had fallen. The bright holes in the roof had dimmed. Then they had disappeared. They had turned darker than the roof itself. Positive and negative. They felt the lurch as the truck pulled to the right, off the highway, and they felt the tires grabbing at the pavement as the truck hauled around a tight right. Then there was a confusing blur of turns and stops and starts. Bumpy downhill bends and tight uphill turns with the truck grinding in a low gear. Periods of cruising down gently winding roads, bad surfaces, good surfaces, gradients, gravel under the wheels, potholes in the road. Reacher could imagine the headlight beams flicking left and right and bouncing up and down.
   The truck slowed almost to a stop. Turned a tight right. Pattered over some kind of a wooden bridge. Then it yawed and bumped its way along a rutted track. It was moving slowly, shuddering from side to side. It felt like they were driving up a dry riverbed. Some kind of a stony, narrow track. It felt like this was the very last leg of the journey. It felt like they were very close to their destination. The urgency had gone out of the guy's driving. It felt like the truck was nearly home.
   But the final leg took a long time. The speed was low and the road was bad. Stones and small rocks were popping under the tires. The tires were squirming sideways across the loose surface. The truck ground on for forty minutes. Fifty minutes. Reacher got cold. He sat up and shook out his shirt. Put it on. An hour on the bumpy track. At this speed, maybe fifteen miles, maybe twenty.
   Then they were there. The truck lurched up over a final heave and leveled out. Rolled forward another few yards and stopped. The engine noise died. It was replaced by an awesome silence. Reacher could hear nothing at all except a vast emptiness and the ticking of the muffler as it cooled. He could hear the two guys in front, sitting quiet and exhausted. Then they got out. He heard their doors open and their seat springs bounce. He heard their feet on gravel. Their doors slammed, enormously loud metallic clangs in the stillness. He heard them crunch around to the rear. He could hear the sound of the keys swinging gently in the driver's hand.
   The key slid into the lock. The lock clicked back. The handle turned. The door swung open. Loder propped it back with the metal stay. Then he opened the other door. Propped it back. Gestured them out with the Glock. Reacher helped Holly along the ridged floor. He stepped down. The chain on his wrist clattered to the earth. He lifted Holly down beside him. They stood together, leaning back against the edge of the truck's ridged metal floor. Looking out and around.
   Holly had wanted to see the sky. She was standing there under the vastest sky Reacher had ever seen. It was a dark inky-blue, almost black, and it was huge. It stretched up to an infinite height. It was as big as a planet. It was peppered with a hundred billion bright stars. They were far away, but they were unnaturally vivid. They dusted back to the far cold reaches of the universe. It was a gigantic night sky and it stretched on forever.
   They were in a forest clearing. Reacher could smell a heavy scent of pines. It was a strong smell. Clean and fresh. There was a black mass of trees all around. They covered the jagged slopes of mountains. They were in a forest clearing, surrounded by mountainous wooded slopes. It was a big clearing, infinitely dark, silent. Reacher could see the faint black outlines of buildings off to his right. They were long, low huts. Some kind of wooden structures, crouching in the dark.
   There were people on the edge of the clearing. Standing among the nearest trees. Reacher could see their vague shapes. Maybe fifty or sixty people. Just standing there, silent. They were in dark clothing. They had darkened faces. Their faces were smudged with night camouflage. He could see their eyes, white against the black trees. They were holding weapons. He could see rifles and machine guns. Slung casually over the shoulders of the silent, staring people. They had dogs. Several big dogs, on thick leather leashes.
   There were children among the people. Reacher could make them out. Children, standing together in groups, silent, staring, big sleepy eyes. They were clustered behind the adults, still, their shoulders facing diagonally away in fear and perplexity. Sleepy children, woken up in the middle of the night to witness something.
   Loder turned himself around in a slow circle and waved the silent staring people nearer. He moved his arm in a wide inclusive gesture, like a ringmaster in a circus.
   "We got her," he yelled into the silence. "The federal bitch is here."
   His voice boomed back off the distant mountains.
   "Where the hell are we?" Holly asked him.
   Loder turned back and smiled at her.
   "Our place, bitch," he said quietly. "A place where your federal buddies can't come get you."
   "Why not?" Holly asked him. "Where the hell are we?"
   "That could be hard for you to understand," Loder said.
   "Why?" Holly said. "We're somewhere, right? Somewhere in the States?"
   Loder shook his head.
   "No," he said.
   Holly looked blank.
   "Canada?" she said.
   The guy shook his head again.
   "Not Canada, bitch," he said.
   Holly glanced around at the trees and the mountains. Glanced up at the vast night sky. Shuddered in the sudden chill.
   "Well, this isn't Mexico," she said.
   The guy raised both arms in a descriptive little gesture.
   "This is a brand-new country," he said.

22

   The atmosphere in the Chicago Field Office Wednesday evening was like a funeral, and in a way it was a funeral, because any realistic hope of getting Holly back had died. McGrath knew his best chance had been an early chance. The early chance was gone. If Holly was still alive, she was a prisoner somewhere on the North American continent, and he would not get even the chance to find out where until her kidnapers chose to call. And, so far, approaching sixty hours after the snatch, they had not called.
   He was at the head of the long table in the third-floor conference room. Smoking. The room was quiet. Milosevic was sitting to one side, back to the windows. The afternoon sun had inched its way around to evening and fallen away into darkness. The temperature in the room had risen and fallen with it, down to a balmy summer dusk. But the two men in there were chilled with anticlimax. They barely looked up as Brogan came in to join them. He was holding a sheaf of computer printouts. He wasn't smiling, but he looked reasonably close to it.
   "You got something?" McGrath asked him.
   Brogan nodded purposefully and sat down. Sorted the printouts into four separate handfuls and held them up, each one in turn.
   "Quantico," he said. They've got something. "And the crime database in DC. They've got three something's. And I had an idea."
   He spread his papers out and looked up.
   "Listen to this," he said. "Graphic granite, interlocking crystals, cherts, gneisses, schists, shale, foliated metamorphics, quartzites, quartz crystals, red-bed sandstones, Triassic red sand, acidic volcanics, pink feldspar, green chlorite, ironstone, grit, sand and silt. You know what all that stuff is?"
   McGrath and Milosevic shrugged and shook their heads.
   "Geology," Brogan said. "The people down in Quantico looked at the pickup. Geologists, from the Materials Analysis Unit. They looked at the shit thrown up under the wheel arches. They figured out what the stuff is, and they figured out where that pickup has been. Little tiny pieces of rock and sediment stuck to the metal. Like a sort of a geological fingerprint."
   "OK, so where has it been?" McGrath asked.
   "Started out in California," Brogan said. "Citrus grower called Dutch Borken bought it, ten years ago, in Mojave. The manufacturer traced that for us. That part is nothing to do with geology. Then the scientists say it was in Montana for a couple of years. Then they drove it over here, northern route, through North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin."
   "They sure about this?" McGrath said.
   "Like a trucker's logbook," Brogan said. "Except written with shit on the underneath, not with a pen on paper."
   "So who is this Dutch Borken?" McGrath asked. "Is he involved?"
   Brogan shook his head.
   "No," he said. "Dutch Borken is dead."
   "When?" McGrath asked.
   "Couple of years ago," Brogan said. "He borrowed money, farming went all to hell, the bank foreclosed, he stuck a twelve-bore in his mouth and blew the top of his head all over California."
   "So?" McGrath said.
   "His son stole the pickup," Brogan said. "Technically, it was the bank's property, right? The son took off in it, never been seen again. The bank reported it, and the local cops looked for it, couldn't find it. It's not licensed. DMV knows nothing about it. Cops gave up on it, because who cares about a ratty old pickup? But my guess is this Borken boy stole it and moved to Montana. The pickup was definitely in Montana two years, scientists are dead sure about that."
   "We got anything on this Borken boy?" McGrath asked him.
   Brogan nodded. Held up another sheaf of paper.
   "We got a shitload on him," he said. "He's all over our database like ants at a picnic. His name is Beau Borken. Thirty-five years old, six feet in height and four hundred pounds in weight. Big guy, right? Extreme right-winger, paranoid tendencies. Now a militia leader. Balls-out fanatic. Links to other militias all over the damn place. Prime suspect in a robbery up in the north of California. Armored car carrying twenty million in bearer bonds was hit. The driver was killed. They figured militia involvement, because the bad guys were wearing bits and pieces of military uniforms. Borken's outfit looked good for it. But they couldn't make it stick. Files are unclear as to why not. And also, what's good for us is before all that, Beau Borken was one of the alibis Peter Wayne Bell used to get off the rape bust. So he's a documented associate of somebody we can place on the scene."
   Milosevic looked up.
   "And he's based in Montana?" he said.
   Brogan nodded.
   "We can pinpoint the exact region, more or less," he said. "The scientific guys at Quantico are pretty hot for a couple of particular valleys, northwest corner of Montana."
   "They can be that specific?" Milosevic said.
   Brogan nodded again.
   "I called them," he said. "They said this sediment in the wheel arches was local to a particular type of a place. Something to do with very old rock getting scraped up by glaciers about a million years ago, lying there nearer the surface than it should be, all mixed up with the regular rock which is still pretty old, but newer than the old rock, you know what I mean? A particular type of a mixture? I asked them, how can you be so sure? They said they just recognize it, like I would recognize my mother fifty feet away on the sidewalk. They said it was from one of a couple of north-south glacial valleys, northwest corner of Montana, where the big old glaciers were rolling down from Canada. And there was some sort of crushed sandstone in there, very different, but it's what the Forest Service use on the forest tracks up there."