Die Trying (Page 36)

They climbed inside the small plane. The steps folded in and the door sucked shut behind them. Webster led them forward to a group of seats. Two facing two across a small table. They sat, McGrath and Brogan facing Webster, Milosevic next to him. They buckled their belts and the Lear began to taxi again. The plane lurched through its turn onto the runway and waited. It quivered and vibrated and then rolled forward, accelerating down the long concrete strip before suddenly jumping into the air. It tilted northwest and throttled back to a loud cruise.

"OK, try this," Webster said. "The Joint Chairman’s daughter’s been snatched by some terrorist group, some foreign involvement. They’re going to make demands on him. Demands with some kind of a military dimension."

McGrath shook his head.

"That’s crap," he said. "How could that possibly work? They’d just replace him. Old soldiers willing to sit on their fat asses in the Pentagon aren’t exactly thin on the ground."

Brogan nodded cautiously.

"I agree, chief," he said. "That’s a nonviable proposition."

Webster nodded back.

"Exactly," he said. "So what does that leave us with?"

Nobody answered that. Nobody wanted to say the words.

THE LEAR CHASED the glow of the setting sun west and landed at Fargo in North Dakota. An agent from the Minneapolis Field Office was up there to meet them with a car. He wasn’t impressed by Brogan or Milosevic, and he was too proud to show he was impressed by the Chicago Agent-in-Charge. But he was fairly tense about meeting with Harland Webster. Tense, and determined to show him he meant business.

"We found their hideout, sir," the guy said. "They used it last night and moved on. It’s pretty clear. About a mile from where the body was found."

He drove them northwest, two hours of tense darkening silence as the car crawled like an insect through endless gigantic spreads of barley and wheat and beans and oats. Then he swung a right and his headlights opened up a vista of endless grasslands and dark gray sky. The sun was gone in the west. The local guy threaded through the turns and pulled up next to a ranch fence. The fence disappeared onward into the dark, but the headlights caught police tape strung between a couple of trees, and a police cruiser, and a coroner’s wagon waiting twenty yards away.

"This is where the body was found," the local guy said.

He had a flashlight. There wasn’t much to see. Just a ditch between the blacktop and the fence, overgrown with grass, trampled down over a ten-yard stretch. The body was gone, but the medical examiner had waited with the details.

"Pretty weird," the doctor said. "The guy was suffocated. That’s for sure. He was smothered, pushed facedown into something soft. There are petechiae all over the face, and in the eyes. Small pinpoint hemorrhages, which you get with asphyxia."

McGrath shrugged.

"What’s weird about that?" he said. "I’d have suffocated the scumbag myself, given half a chance."

"Before and after," the doctor said. "Extreme violence before. Looks to me like the guy was smashed against a wall, maybe the side of a truck. The back of his skull was cracked, and he broke three bones in his back. Then he was kicked in the gut. His insides are a mess. Just slopping around in there. Extreme violence, awesome force. Whoever did 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.

Chapter Twenty-Three

NOBODY COULD SEE Holly because she was alone, 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 Reacher 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 of the forest again and over to the large white building. They had not spoken to her. Just marched her in and pushed her up the stairs to the second floor. They had pulled open the stout new door and pushed her up the step into the room. The step was more than a foot high, because the floor inside the room was built up higher than the floor in the hallway outside. She crawled up and in and heard the door slamming and the key turning loudly behind her.