Die Trying

a minute or two late, but that was so far from normal that it was setting the bells ringing. In eight months, he had never known her to be late. It had never happened. Other people could be five minutes late into the meeting room and it would seem normal. Because of their pattern. But not Holly. At three minutes past five in the afternoon, McGrath stared at her empty chair and knew there was a problem. He stood up again in the quiet room and walked to the credenza on the opposite wall. There was a phone next to the coffee machine. He picked it up and dialed his office.
    “Holly Johnson call in?” he asked his secretary.
    “No, Mack,” she said.
    So he dabbed the cradle and dialed the reception counter, two floors below.
    “Any messages from Holly Johnson?” he asked the agent at the door.
    “No, chief,” the agent said. “Haven’t seen her.”
    He hit the button again and called the main switchboard.
    “Holly Johnson call in?” he asked.
    “No, sir,” the switchboard operator said.
    He held the phone and gestured for pen and paper. Then he spoke to the switchboard again.
    “Give me her pager number,” he said. “And her cell phone, will you?”
    The earpiece crackled and he scrawled down the numbers. Cut the switchboard off and dialed Holly’s pager. Just got a long low tone telling him the pager was switched off. Then he tried the cell phone number. He got an electronic bleep and a recorded message of a woman telling him the phone he was dialing was unreachable. He hung up and looked around the room. It was ten after five, Monday afternoon.

6
    SIX-THIRTY ON REACHER’S watch, the motion inside the truck changed. Six hours and four minutes they’d cruised steadily, maybe fifty-five or sixty miles an hour, while the heat peaked and fell away. He’d sat, hot and rocking and bouncing in the dark with the wheel well between him and Holly Johnson, ticking off the distance against a map inside his head. He figured they’d been taken maybe three hundred and ninety miles. But he didn’t know which direction they were headed. If they were going east, they would be right through Indiana and just about out of Ohio by now, maybe just entering Pennsylvania or West Virginia. South, they would be out of Illinois, into Missouri or Kentucky, maybe even into Tennessee if he’d underestimated their speed. West, they’d be hauling their way across Iowa. They might have looped around the bottom of the lake and headed north up through Michigan. Or straight out northwest, in which case they could be up near Minneapolis.
    But they’d gotten somewhere, because the truck was slowing. Then there was a lurch to the right, like a pull off a highway. There was gear noise and thumping over broken pavement. Cornering forces slammed them around. Holly’s crutch slid and rattled side to side across the ridged metal floor. The truck whined up grades and down slopes, paused at invisible road junctions, accelerated, braked hard, turned a tight left, and then drove slowly down a straight lumpy surface for a quarter hour.
    “Farming country somewhere,” Reacher said.
    “Obviously,” Holly said. “But where?”
    Reacher just shrugged at her in the gloom. The truck slowed almost to a stop and turned a tight right. The road surface got worse. The truck bounced forward maybe a hundred and fifty yards and stopped. There was the sound of the passenger door opening up in front. The engine was still running. The passenger door slammed shut. Reacher heard a big door opening and the truck moved slowly forward. The engine noise boomed against metal walls. Reacher heard the door noise again and the engine noise echoed louder. Then it shut down and died away into stillness.
    “We’re in some sort of a barn,” Reacher said. “With the door closed.”
    Holly nodded impatiently.
    “I know that,” she said. “A cow barn. I can smell it.” Reacher could hear muffled conversation outside the truck. Footsteps walking around to the rear doors. A key going into the lock. The handle turning. A blinding flood of light as the door opened. Reacher blinked against the sudden electric brightness and stared out across Holly at three men, two Glocks and a shotgun.
    “Out,” the leader said.
    They struggled out, handcuffed together. Not easy. They were stiff and sore and cramped from bracing themselves against the wheel well for six solid hours. Holly’s knee had gone altogether. Reacher started back for her crutch.
    “Leave it there,