Die Trying Part 15

"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.

"b.i.t.c.h 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, a.s.shole, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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. Readier 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 andtentative. 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. ion

TWENTY

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. "a.s.sume 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 G.o.d'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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton State, right?" McGrath said.

"So let's a.s.sume they're not in Was.h.i.+ngton 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 d.a.m.n 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 brus.h.i.+ng just a little above his eye-level. Brus.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 cha.s.sis number and the code stamped into the iron of the engine block were both original. The numbers enabled the manufacturer to identify the original s.h.i.+pment. 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 dealers.h.i.+p in Mojave. The dealer had paid the invoice in May and, beyond that, the manufacturer had no further knowledge of the vehicle.

The dealers.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p was all in storage.

Not every day that a small automotive dealers.h.i.+p 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 winds.h.i.+eld 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 gla.s.s. 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 s.e.x 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 c.u.m 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 a.s.sembling 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 dealers.h.i.+p 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 flas.h.i.+ng, 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 winds.h.i.+eld, 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, b.u.mper to b.u.mper. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 d.a.m.n doors and drag them out, OK, we got two guys in the front, two guys, one driver, one pa.s.senger, 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?