Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Read online

  “Okay, what are your years of experience telling you?”

  I thought about that, said, “This isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”

  Detective Lincoln knocked, said, “McGrath had serious encryption on his computer. We’re going to have to send it out.”

  “Send it to Quantico,” I said. “I’ll try to get it moved to the front of the line.”

  “Right away,” Lincoln said, and he left.

  Sampson said, “I feel like we’re banging our heads against a wall on every aspect of every case we’ve got.”

  “You’ve got a hard head; you’ll break us through.”

  “No match between Howard’s gun and the Rock Creek shooter.”

  “I saw that. You talk with Aaron Peters’s fellow lobbyists? Family?”

  Sampson nodded, said the Maserati’s driver had been divorced for five years. No kids. Played the field. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, but not in a way that provoked animosity or revenge.

  “His partners said Peters could make you smile while he was cutting your throat,” Sampson said.

  “Lovely image,” I said. “What about other shootings like these?”

  Sampson frowned, said, “I’ll look. You?”

  “I think I’ll go hunting for mercenaries.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  THREE DAYS LATER, Sampson and I drove south on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Looking west across Chesapeake Bay, I saw something pale and white in the sky far away. I squinted. The sun caught it.

  “There’s a blimp out there,” I said. “A couple of them.”

  “Don’t see those too often. There a big sports event?”

  “No idea,” I said before losing sight of them.

  Forty minutes later, we were on the Nanticoke Road in Salisbury, Maryland. Farmers were cutting hay and harvesting corn in a shimmering heat.

  “Feels like we’re going to kick a hornet’s nest,” Sampson said.

  “Or a basket with spitting cobras inside,” I said, and I wondered whether we might be biting off more than we could chew, coming here without an entire SWAT team to back us up.

  “This guy’s background is spooky.”

  I nodded, said, “In some ways, he’s got the perfect résumé for a mass murderer.”

  “That’s it up ahead on the right, I think,” Sampson said, gesturing through the windshield at a gated pull-off in a large woodlot between two farms.

  Hand-painted signs hung from the locked gate: DOGS ARE THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES; DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT; BLAST ZONE; and, my favorite, THE LUNATIC IS IN THE GRASS.

  “We might want to rethink this,” Sampson said.

  “Dolores said he’s good until sundown usually,” I said and pulled the squad car over on the shoulder beyond the gate.

  I got out, felt the breeze, smelled the salt air, and heard the sawing of cicadas in the hardwoods. I looked at the signs on the gate again, thought about the path that had taken us here, and wondered if Sampson was right, if we should rethink this unannounced visit.

  Three days before, I’d started looking into mercenaries living in the Washington, DC, area, and I was shocked at the high numbers. But once it was explained to me, it made sense.

  In 2008, at the height of the Iraq War, there were 155,826 private contractors operating in Iraq in support of 152,000 U.S. soldiers. Private contractors outnumbered the U.S. military in Afghanistan as well. Between the two wars, best estimates are that as many as forty thousand men and women were involved in security and other private military activities. In other words, guns for hire. In other words, mercenaries.

  Most of them were highly trained former elite soldiers working through security companies like Blackwater, which had been based in Northern Virginia. These companies and ex-soldiers had made a lot of money for nearly a decade.

  And then the spigot closed. President Obama ordered the troops withdrawn from Iraq, and with them went the need and the money to hire scads of private security personnel. Men who’d been making a hundred and fifty thousand to a half a million a year in the war zones were suddenly looking for work.

  A friend of mine at the Pentagon told me there were probably five thousand of these guns for hire living in and around the nation’s capital. But it wasn’t like there was a directory of them.

  I’d asked my friend if there was someone who knew a lot about that world, someone who might point us in the right direction. He’d called back yesterday and given me a phone number.

  When I’d called it, a woman answered and said, “Don’t bother doing a trace, Detective Cross. It’s a burn phone. And call me Dolores.”

  “I’m just asking for advice, Dolores.”

  “Ask away.”

  I asked Dolores if she’d read about the massacre at the drug factory in Anacostia. She had. I told her how clean an operation it was and how we believed ex-military were involved.

  “Makes sense,” she’d said.

  “Any candidates you can think of? Someone with military training, and maybe a beef with drug dealers? Someone willing to go outside the law and lead others into mass murder?”

  There was a long, long pause, and finally Dolores had said, “I can think of only one offhand.”

  Startling me from my thoughts, Sampson cleared his throat and gestured at the gate. “After you, Alex.”

  With a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach, I walked to the gate of Nicholas Condon’s place and climbed over it.

  CHAPTER

  33

  SAMPSON AND I had looked at Condon’s hundred-and-twelve-acre empire on Google Earth the night before. The dirt road beyond the gate wound through woods to a modest farm with several fields.

  Now we could see that the road was not frequently used and even less frequently maintained, with wild raspberry and thorny vines trying to choke it off on both sides.

  “Get your badge out,” I said. “You see him, you raise both hands and identify yourself.”

  “Think he’ll care that we’re cops?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But someone with his background probably realizes that killing a cop would be a stupid move.”

  “Comforting when you’re going to talk to a guy who considers himself a lunatic in the grass.”

  I couldn’t argue with Sampson’s concern. Condon had graduated from the Naval Academy and been a sniper, a damned good one, with a SEAL Team 6 unit. A week after he had mustered out of the military for medical reasons, a company called Dyson Security gave Condon a contract and sent him to Afghanistan.

  Condon’s reputation for having a cool head even in the most extreme conditions continued after he left the military, and he soon led a Dyson team that specialized in protecting political and corporate dignitaries and rescuing private contractors taken hostage by the Taliban.

  One of those private contractors was an American woman named Paula Healey who worked trying to improve the lives of Afghani girls, which had made her a target for the fundamentalists. Healey was also the love of Condon’s life.

  She and three other women were taken outside of Kandahar. After several months, Condon learned where Healey was being held—in a remote village in a region known for poppy cultivation and opium production.

  Condon and a team of his men went in under cover of night. After a firefight with the local Taliban, he found Healey strung out on opium and stabbed in the chest. She was the only one of the four women left alive. She’d been raped repeatedly and died in Condon’s arms.

  What happened then depends on whose testimony you believe. Either the Taliban counterattacked and Condon risked his life repeatedly to kill and drive them back, or Condon went berserk with grief and rage and gunned down every male over the age of fourteen left in the village.

  There’d been an investigation, and every one of the Dyson Security operators backed up Condon’s version of events. The widows and mothers claimed their dead were not Taliban and that they had been slaughtered.

  Ultimately, Condon was exonerate
d. But losing his love changed him, made him violent and unpredictable. Dyson decided he could not be put in the field and paid off his five-year contract in a lump sum.

  Condon had used the money to buy the land we were walking through.

  Dolores said Condon was a hermit who liked to farm and go fishing on his boat out on the ocean alone. He distrusted anybody involved in the government. His only visitors, and they were rare, were the men and women who’d served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  I’d asked Dolores how she knew so much about him.

  She’d hesitated and then said, “Once, a long time before he met Paula, I was the love of Nicholas’s life.”

  There was a picket stake in the trail with a piece of orange tape fluttering off it. We went around it and entered the field forty yards from its eastern end, where there was a ten-foot-high dirt embankment with a large red tub of Tide detergent sitting on top.

  The field to our right lay fallow. It was long and narrow, three hundred yards to the other end and maybe fifty yards to the far tree line.

  “The house is in the next field?” Sampson said as we started across.

  “That’s the way I—”

  We never heard the shot, just the bullet ripping the air before the Tide detergent tub on the embankment erupted like a land mine, throwing dirt, rock, and melted plastic everywhere and sending a plume of gray smoke toward the sky.

  CHAPTER

  34

  AS SOON AS we heard the bullet ripping past us, instinct kicked in. We were both diving when the bomb went off.

  Sampson and I hit the ground and put our arms over our heads as debris rained down on us. My left ear rang and for a moment I was disoriented.

  Then, like a boxer recovering from a glancing blow, I became more alert. I dug at my back for my service pistol and then followed Sampson as he squirmed forward into high grass and weeds.

  “Where’d the shot come from?” Sampson asked in a harsh whisper.

  “From Condon’s sniper rifle?”

  “I meant from what direction?”

  “No idea, but it had to have been far away if we didn’t hear the report before whatever was in that Tide thing exploded.”

  “We need to reach the trees and call for backup,” Sampson said.

  “Backup first,” I said, and pulled out my cell. “Great—no service.”

  “I had it over by the road.”

  “Not here,” I said, and then I heard something over the ringing in my left ear.

  Sampson heard it too, rose up to look, and then ducked down.

  “That’s an ATV,” Sampson said. “He’s coming for us. Two hundred yards out. Near the tree line.”

  We stared at each other, thinking the same thing: Do we run for the trees and risk getting shot by a world-class sniper? Or—

  I pushed myself to my feet, held out my badge, and aimed my pistol at Condon, who was less than a hundred yards away in a green Polaris Ranger. Sampson stood up beside me and did the same.

  Condon pulled up at ninety yards, snaked a scoped rifle over the wheel, and shouted, “You trying to get yourselves killed? Didn’t you see the goddamned orange flag in the road?”

  “We didn’t know what it meant,” I shouted back. “We’re detectives with Washington Metro Police. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

  Condon was hunkered over the rifle, aiming at us through his scope. At ninety yards, any shot we might take with the pistol would be a Hail Mary. But ninety yards with a precision sniper rifle was a chip shot.

  I had a funny feeling in my chest, as if he’d put the crosshairs there. Then he lifted his head. “You the Alex Cross? FBI profiler and all that?”

  “I was,” I called back. “That’s right.”

  That seemed to satisfy Condon because he slipped the rifle into a plastic scabbard mounted to the side of the ATV and started driving toward us.

  “How’d he know your name?” Sampson asked.

  “I’m thinking he read our credentials through his scope,” I said, lowering my gun but not holstering it.

  Condon pulled up about ten yards away. Late thirties and rawboned, he had silver-and-red hair and a matching beard. Both needed cutting.

  “Azore,” he said. “Denni.”

  Two German shepherds jumped down from the flatbed carrier behind the sniper. They stopped and stood there, panting, at Condon’s side.

  “You mind telling us what the hell that was all about?” Sampson asked. “Shooting at us?”

  Condon said, “Practicing my trade. You walked into a hot rifle range, my place of business, unannounced and forewarned. That’s what happened.”

  I said, “You didn’t see us before you shot?”

  He looked at me, blinked, said, “Hell no, I was in the zone. In the whole wide world, there was nothing but the I and the D and the trigger and me.”

  “What’s the I and the D?”

  He spelled it out. “T-i-d-e.”

  “What was in that container?” I asked.

  “Tannerite,” he said. “Exploding target material. Shot indicator.”

  Sampson said, “You almost killed us with that stuff, which is illegal in Maryland, by the way.”

  Ordinarily the mere presence of a pissed-off John Sampson was enough to shake the toughest of criminals. But Condon looked at ease.

  “Not for me,” he said. “I have a federal permit through Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And, like I said, I didn’t know you were there. If I’d wanted to kill you, Detectives, you’d already be dead, and I’d have a shovel-and-shut-up mission on my hands. Know what I mean?”

  I did know what the sniper meant and absolutely believed him.

  CHAPTER

  35

  CONDON CROSSED HIS arms and said, “So go ahead, ask your questions.”

  “Somewhere we can sit down?” Sampson said. “Get out of this heat?”

  Condon considered that, said, “Two weapons each? Primary and backup?”

  I nodded.

  “Azore,” Condon said. “Denni.”

  The dogs circled us in easy lopes. Both hesitated, turned noses toward our ankles, then wagged their tails.

  The sniper whistled and they went back to his side.

  “Always like to know for sure,” Condon said, and he started up the Ranger. “One of you can sit up front. One in the back.”

  “I’ll take the back,” I said, then I holstered my pistol and climbed up onto the little flatbed carrier beside several tool-boxes that presumably held the tools of Condon’s trade.

  Sampson had to duck his head to squeeze into the passenger seat.

  Condon put the Ranger in gear, glanced at Sampson, and said, “Guys big as you don’t last long when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Which is why I like to be holding the fan at all times,” Sampson growled.

  Condon almost smiled.

  The German shepherds ran along as we drove to the tree line, where another picket with orange flagging blocked the road. The sniper got out, drew it from the ground, and handed it to me.

  A minute or two later, we pulled up by a black Ford F-150, a Harley-Davidson, and a John Deere farm tractor parked in front of a white ranch house in need of scraping and painting. A Grady-White fishing boat sat on a trailer near a red barn in need of shoring and paint.

  The long field in front of Condon’s house was shoulder-high in corn. His grass needed mowing, and the air smelled of stale dog dung and urine.

  Condon turned off the ATV, tugged the rifle from the black scabbard, and got out. He walked with a slight hitch in his stride to retrieve one of the toolboxes.

  “Nice gun,” I said.

  “Designed it myself,” he said, grabbing one of the toolboxes and showing me a .338 Lapua with a Timney trigger, a Lone Wolf custom stock, and a Swarovski 4 to 18 power scope.

  No wonder he’d been able to read my credentials at ninety yards.

  “How far can you shoot something like that?” Sampson asked.

  “Wind’s c
alm and I’m right, a mile,” Condon said, and he went with a slight hitch in his gait up a cracked walkway to the front porch.

  He came up with a heavy ring of keys and used them to open three dead bolts. Opening the door, he called, “Denni. Azore.”

  The dogs streaked into the house. Two minutes later, they returned.

  “Kennel up,” he said.

  The dogs trotted over to cedar beds and lay down.

  Condon gestured for us to follow him inside and flipped on the light in a small living area off a kitchen. The place reeked of marijuana. Beer cans and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s crowded a coffee table between a couch with busted springs and a large TV on the wall. An image from Game of Thrones was frozen on the flat-screen.

  The drapes were drawn. Condon crossed to an air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall and turned it on.

  “Beer?” he asked.

  “We’re on duty,” Sampson said.

  “Suit yourself,” Condon said, and he went into the kitchen.

  I looked around, saw Sampson had gone to a small table in the corner and was looking at several framed photographs, all of the same beautiful young woman in a variety of rugged outdoor settings. In the largest picture, an eight-by-ten, she was in Condon’s arms and he glowed like he owned the world.

  “That what you’re here about?” Condon asked. “Paula and all?”

  Even with the limp, he’d come up behind us so quietly we both startled.

  When I turned, the sniper popped his Bud can, looked at us coldly.

  “We’d heard about her. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Condon softened slightly, said, “Thank you.”

  “What’s it been? Four years?”

  “Four years, six months, three days, nine hours, three minutes. Was this what you came all the way from DC to talk about?”

  In the car, Sampson and I had hashed out how best to approach him. Trying to bull or bluff a guy like Condon wasn’t going to work, so I opted to come at him from the side.

  “We need your help,” I said. “Do you keep up with the news?”