Die Trying Part 20

"How?" she asked.

Tomorrow," he said. "I can get a jeep. We'll have to make a run for it. I can't call in for a.s.sistance because they're scanning for my transmitter. We'll just get the jeep and head south and hope for the best."

"What about Readier?" she asked. "Where have they taken him?"

"Forget him," the guy said. "He'll be dead by morning."

Holly shook her head.

"I'm not going without him," she said.

"Loder displeased me," Beau Borken said.

Reacher shrugged and glanced downward. Loder had squirmed up into a sideways sitting position, crammed into the angle between the floor and the wall.

"Did he displease you?" Borken asked.

Reacher made no reply.

"Would you like to kick him?" Borken asked.

Reacher kept quiet. He could see where this game was going. If he said yes, he'd be expected to hurt the guy badly. Which he had no objection to in principle, but he'd prefer to do it on his own terms.

If he said no, Borken would call him a coward with no sense of natural justice and no self-respect. An obvious game, with no way to win. So he kept quiet, which was a tactic he'd used a thousand times before: when in doubt, just keep your mouth shut.

"In the face?" Borken asked. "In the b.a.l.l.s, maybe?"

Loder was staring up at Reacher. Something in his face. Reacher saw what it was. His eyes widened in surprise. Loder was pleading with him to give him a kicking, so that Borken wouldn't.

"Loder, lie down again," Borken said.

Loder squirmed his hips away from the wall and dropped his shoulders to the floor. Wriggled and pushed until he was lying flat on his back.

Borken nodded to the nearest guard.

"In the face," he said.

The guard stepped over and used the sole of his boot to force Loder's head sideways, so his face was presented to the room. Then he stepped back and kicked out. A heavy blow from a heavy boot. Loder's head snapped backward and thumped into the wall. Blood welled from his nose. Borken watched him bleed for a long moment, mildly interested.

Then he turned back to Reacher.

"Loder's one of my oldest friends," he said.

Reacher said nothing.

"Begs two questions, doesn't it?" Borken said. "Question one: why am I enforcing such strict discipline, even against my old friends? And question two: if that's how I treat my friends, how the h.e.l.l do I treat my enemies?"

Reacher said nothing. When in doubt, just keep your mouth shut.

"I treat my enemies a h.e.l.l of a lot worse than that," Borken said. "So much worse, you really don't want to think about it. You really don't, believe me. And why am I being so strict? Because we're two days away from a unique moment in history. Things are going to happen which will change the world. Plans are made and operations are underway.

Therefore I have to bring my natural caution to a new pitch. My old friend Loder has fallen victim to a historical force. So, I'm afraid, have you."

Reacher said nothing. He dropped his gaze and watched Loder. He was unconscious. Breathing raggedly through clotting blood in his nose.

"You got any value to me as a hostage?" Borken asked.

Reacher thought about it. Made no reply. Borken watched his face and smiled. His red lips parted over small white teeth.

"I thought not," he said. "So what should I do with a person who's got no value to me as a hostage? During a moment of great historical tension?"

Reacher stayed silent. Just watching. Easing his weight forward, ready.

"You think you're going to get a kicking?" Borken asked.

Reacher tensed his legs, ready to spring.

"Relax," Borken said. "No kicking for you. When the time comes, it'll be a bullet through the head. From behind. I'm not stupid, you know.

I've got eyes, and a brain. What are you, six five? About two twenty?

Clearly fit and strong. And look at you, tension in your thighs, getting ready to jump up. Clearly trained in some way. But you're not a boxer. Because your nose has never been broken. A heavyweight like you with an unbroken nose would need to be a phenomenal talent, and we'd have seen your picture in the newspapers. So you're just a brawler, probably been in the service, right? So I'll be cautious with you. No kicking, just a bullet."

The guards took their cue. Six rifles came down out of the slope and six fingers hooked around six triggers.

"You got felony convictions?" Borken asked.

Reacher shrugged and spoke for the first time.

"No," he said.

"Upstanding citizen?" Borken asked.

Reacher shrugged again.

"I guess," he said.

Borken nodded.

"So I'll think about it," he said. "Live or die, I'll let you know, first thing in the morning, OK?"

He lifted his bulky arm and snapped his fingers. Five of the six guards moved. Two went to the door and opened it. A third went out between them. The other two waited. Borken stood up with surprising grace for a man of his size and walked out from behind the desk. The wooden floor creaked under his bulk. The four waiting guards fell in behind him and he walked straight out into the night without a backward glance.

He walked across the clearing and into another hut. Fowler was waiting for him, the headphones in his hand.

"I think somebody went in there," he said.

"You think?" Borken said.

The shower was running," Fowler said. "Somebody went in there who knows about the microphones. She wouldn't need another shower. She just had one, right? Somebody went in there and ran the shower to mask the talking."

"Who?" Borken asked.

Fowler shook his head.

"I don't know who," he said. "But I can try to find out."

Borken nodded.

"Yes, you can do that," he said. "You can try to find out."

In the accommodation huts, men and women were working in the gloom, cleaning their rifles. The word about Loder had traveled quickly. They all knew about the tribunal. They all knew the likely outcome. Any six of them could be selected for the firing squad. If there was going to be a firing squad. Most people figured there probably was. An officer like Loder, the commander might limit it to a firing squad. Probably nothing worse. So they cleaned their rifles, and left them locked and loaded next to their beds.

Those of them with enough demerits to be on tomorrow's punishment detail were trying to get some sleep. If he didn't limit it to a firing squad, they could be in for a lot of work. Messy, unpleasant work. And even if Loder got away with it, there was always the other guy. The big guy who had come in with the federal b.i.t.c.h. There wasn't much chance of him surviving ivn past breakfast time. They couldn't remember the last time any stray stranger had lasted longer than that.

Holly Johnson had a rule. It was a rule bred into her, like a family motto. It had been reinforced by her long training at Quantico. It was a rule distilled from thousands of years of military history and hundreds of years of law-enforcement experience. The rule said: hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

She had no reason to believe she would not be speeding south in a jeep just as soon as her new ally could arrange it. He was Bureau-trained, the same as she was. She knew that if the tables were turned, she would get him out, no problem at all. So she knew she could just sit tight and wait. But she wasn't doing that. She was hoping for the best, but she was planning for the worst.

She had given up on the bathroom. No way out there. Now she was going over the room itself, inch by inch. The new pine boarding was nailed tight to the frame, all six surfaces. It was driving her crazy.

Inch-thick pine board, the oldest possible technology, used for ten thousand years, and there was no way through it. For a lone woman without any tools, it might as well have been the side of a battles.h.i.+p.

So she concentrated on finding tools. It was like she was personally speeding through Darwin's evolutionary process. Apes came down from the trees and they made tools. She was concentrating on the bed. The mattress was useless. It was a thin, crushed thing, no wire springs inside. But the bed frame was more promising. It was bolted together from iron tubes and f.l.a.n.g.es. If she could take it apart, she could put one of the little right-angle f.l.a.n.g.es in the end of the longest tube and make a pry-bar seven feet long. But the bolts were all painted over. She had strong hands, but she couldn't begin to move them. Her fingers just bruised and slipped on her sweat.

Loder had been dragged away and Reacher was locked up alone with the last remaining guard from the evening detail. The guard sat behind the plain desk and propped his weapon on the wooden surface with the muzzle pointing directly at him sitting on his chair. His hands were still cuffed behind him. He had decisions to make. First was no way could he sit all night like that. He glanced calmly at the guard and eased himself up and slid his hands underneath.

Pressed his chest down onto his thighs and looped his hands out under his feet. Then he sat up and leaned back and forced a smile, hands together in his lap.

"Long arms," he said. "Useful."

The guard nodded slowly. He had small piercing eyes, set back in a narrow face. They gleamed out above the big beard, through the camouflage smudges, but the gleam looked innocent enough.

"What's your name?" Reacher asked him.

The guy hesitated. Shuffled in his seat. Reacher could see some kind of natural courtesy was prompting a reply. But there were obvious tactical considerations for the guy. Reacher kept on forcing the smile.

"I'm Reacher," he said. "You know my name. You got a name? We're here all night, we may as well be a little civilized about it, right?"

The guy nodded again, slowly. Then he shrugged.

"Ray," he said.

"Ray?" Reacher said. "That your first name or your last?"

"Last," the guy said. "Joseph Ray."

Reacher nodded.

"OK, Mr. Ray," he said. "Pleased to meet you."

"Call me Joe," Joseph Ray said.

Reacher forced the smile again. The ice was broken. Like conducting an interrogation. Reacher had done it a thousand times. But never from this side of the desk. Never when he was the one wearing the cuffs.

"Joe, you're going to have to help me out a little," he said. "I need some background here. I don't know where I am, or why, or who all you guys are. Can you fill me in on some basic information?"

Ray was looking at him like he was maybe having difficulty knowing where to start. Then he was glancing around the room like maybe he was wondering whether he was allowed to start at all.

"Where exactly are we?" Reacher asked him. "You can tell me that, right?"

"Montana," Ray said.

Reacher nodded.

"OK," he said. "Where in Montana?"

"Near a town called Yorke," Ray said. "An old mining town, just about abandoned."

Readier nodded again.

"OK," he said. "What are you guys doing here?"

"We're building a bastion," Ray said. "A place of our own."

"What for?" Readier asked him.

Ray shrugged. An inarticulate guy. At first, he said nothing. Then he sat forward and launched into what seemed to Reacher like a mantra, like something the guy had rehea.r.s.ed many times. Or like something the guy had been told many times.

"We came up here to escape the tyranny of America," he said. "We have to draw up our borders and say, it's going to be different inside here."

"Different how?" Reacher asked him.

"We have to take America back, piece by piece," Ray said. "We have to build a place where the white man can live free, unmolested, in peace, with proper freedoms and proper laws."

"You think you can do that?" Reacher said.

"It happened before," Ray said. "It happened in 1776. People said enough is enough. They said we want a better country than this. Now we're saying it again. We're saying we want our country back. And we're going to get it back. Because now we're acting together. There were a dozen militias up here. They all wanted the same things. But they were all acting alone. Beau's mission was to put people together.

Now we're unified and we're going to take our country back. We're starting here. We're starting now."

Reacher nodded. Glanced to his right and down at the dark stain where Loder's nose had bled onto the floor.

"Like this?" he said. "What about voting and democracy? All that kind of stuff? You should vote people out and vote new people in, right?"

Ray smiled sadly and shook his head.

"We've been voting for two hundred and twenty years," he said. "Gets worse all the time. Government's not interested in how we vote.