Die Trying Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the agents he worked with.
    An Agent-in-Charge in a Field Office like Chicago is like the captain on a great warship. Theoretically, there are people above him, but they’re all a couple of thousand miles away in Washington. They’re theoretical. The Agent-in-Charge is real. He runs his command like the hand of God. That’s how the Chicago office looked at McGrath. He did nothing to undermine the feeling. He was remote, but he was approachable. He was private, but he made his people feel he’d do anything at all for them. He was a short, stocky man, burning with energy, the sort of tireless guy who radiates total confidence. The sort of guy who makes a crew better just by leading it. His first name was Paul, but he was always called Mack, like the truck.
    He let his thirteen agents sit down, ten of them backs to the window and three of them with the sun in their eyes. Then he hauled a chair around and stuck it at the head of the table ready for Holly. He walked down to the other end and hauled another chair around for himself. Sat sideways on to the sun. Started getting worried.
    “Where is she?” he said. “Brogan?”
    The section head shrugged, palms up.
    “She should be here, far as I know,” he said.
    “She leave a message with anybody?” McGrath asked. “Milosevic?”
    Milosevic and the other fifteen agents and the Bureau lawyer all shrugged and shook their heads. McGrath started worrying more. People have a pattern, a rhythm, like a behavioral fingerprint. Holly was only 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