Target: Alex Cross Read online

  “There you go. We’ll just play our game, and things will go fine.”

  She sighed and squeezed his hand. “How much farther?”

  “Twenty minutes?”

  “Peter should have put us closer,” she said.

  “Better to be far away,” he said, glancing at a Garmin Montana GPS unit mounted on the dash. “Keeps things simpler.”

  The GPS was loaded with a topographical map and an overlay that identified property ownerships. Texas was largely privately held, but there were slivers of federal land in the wilder sections of the state.

  When it was almost full daylight, Potter spotted a two-track leading to a heavy steel gate with a sign from the Bureau of Land Management saying the road was closed. He stopped, said, “I cut the lock. Close it behind us.”

  Mary did, and they quickly pushed on up the track and down the other side of a rise where they could not be seen from the country road. He parked, turned the truck off.

  It was cold, just above freezing, when they climbed out, both wearing dull tan camouflage that matched the vegetation. They got the horses from the trailer. After shouldering heavy day packs, they climbed into the saddles and set off up a game trail that climbed the flank of a low mesa covered in scrub oak and creosote that grabbed and tore at them.

  The temperature rose with the sun. The horses began to sweat. Two miles in they dropped off the mesa into a dry wash, an empty streambed that crawled off through a maze of brush and low trees. Two more miles on, they climbed a rocky out-cropping and stayed high and trending southwest for another mile.

  One hour and nine minutes after they had started out, they dropped into an arroyo. They left the horses in shade. Potter got out a handsaw and cut boughs of thin green leaves from a paloverde tree and set them in a pile on the bank when they left the sandy riverbed.

  The hill beyond was steep, with little vegetation and loose rocks everywhere.

  “Take our time,” he said. “No noise to set the dogs off. And wind’s in our favor.”

  Mary nodded and followed him slowly up the hill, putting her boots where he’d put his. They reached the crown of the hill and heard a cock crow in the distance, then a cowbell or two followed by the neighing of horses.

  They dropped their packs and dragged them as they crawled across the hill and caught the first glimpse of the long, narrow valley beyond. Strips of cultivated ground separated by thickets cut the valley floor from side to side all the way past barns and corrals to a low, Spanish-style hacienda with whitewashed walls, a terra-cotta-tile roof, and a terrace bathed in warm sun even at that early hour.

  Lying on his side, Potter opened his pack and removed a pair of Leica Geovid binoculars. He trained them on the terrace and saw twelve people at the three tables, all middle-aged men, having breakfast and drinking coffee. Most of them wore canvas jackets, some with hunter-orange fabric across the shoulders.

  “Right where he said they’d be,” he said.

  “I see them,” Mary said, looking through her own set of binoculars.

  Potter pressed a button on the binoculars that activated a range-finding system. He aimed the red glowing square on the nearest man and clicked the button a second time.

  “Five hundred and twelve meters to the first table,” he said.

  “Five twenty-six to the doors,” Mary said.

  He put his binoculars down after taking several more distance readings and memorizing them.

  “I’m good.”

  “I am too,” she said. “This spot will do nicely.”

  “Perfect line of sight.”

  They sneaked out backward and didn’t stand until they were ten feet down the other side of the hill. Back at the arroyo, they took the paloverde boughs and used them to brush out their tracks going into the sandy bottom and all the way to the horses.

  “Ready?” Potter asked when they were saddled.

  Mary nodded. He set his watch to stopwatch mode, started it, and said, “Go!”

  The Potters kicked up their horses and took off back the way they’d come, pushing their rides hard and taking chances where they could have slowed.

  It had taken them sixty-nine minutes on the way in, but only twenty-eight minutes had passed when they reached the truck and trailer. Five minutes after that, they pulled out on the country road and headed north.

  Ten miles farther on, Potter drove through another BLM gate, this one open, and again stopped out of sight of the road at the back of an escarpment overlooking a big dusty flat. He and Mary gave the horses water before walking down onto the flat carrying two milk jugs filled with a special punch.

  Using range finders, they placed one jug at 512 meters and the second at 526.

  Back at the truck, they took out the components of their ultralight rifles from their packs, put them together, and finished the process by attaching bipods and screwing in matte-black sound suppressors.

  They walked to the edge of the escarpment, extended the bipod legs, and lay prone behind the rifles before finding their targets. Potter settled the crosshairs of his telescopic sight on the jug at 526 meters.

  “Green?” he asked.

  “Green. On five,” she said. “Four, three, two—”

  Both rifles went off in unison, making thumping noises, and the bullets smashed into the jugs. They erupted into thin, billowing pillars of flame.

  CHAPTER

  34

  INSIDE A LARGE storage unit in Fairfax, Virginia, the man calling himself Pablo Cruz smiled when a bell dinged. He reached into an Ultimaker 2+ desktop 3-D printer and retrieved an appliance made of translucent high-detail resin that looked like a spider’s web that was about nine inches long and six wide.

  The long edges of the appliance were turned toward each other, forming a shape that failed to connect by two inches. The resin was warm to the touch, and as he flexed the web he found it strong but malleable in all directions.

  When it had cooled more, he squeezed open the edges and slipped the entire web onto his right forearm. It extended from just below his elbow over and around his wrist and fit snug, as if it had been crafted specifically for him, which it had.

  Cruz slipped it off and set it beside its twin on a workbench he’d brought in to the storage unit the week before. There were two small, translucent brackets on the bench that were made of Kevlar-reinforced nylon, a material stronger than block aluminum and neutral when scanned with a metal detector.

  The underside of the brackets held swivel balls in sockets attached to tiny, T-shaped valves. The brackets fitted to the underside of the forearm appliances.

  Cruz put on reading glasses to attach small hoses made of translucent carbon fiber to the T-valve. An inch long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter, the hose was designed to handle sudden and extreme pressure.

  He picked up a piece of clear Kevlar-reinforced nylon the shape and size of a .25-caliber bullet. Cruz placed the projectile in the head chamber of a clear three-inch barrel, then screwed the barrel into the free end of the T-valve. To the other end of the hoses, he attached Kevlar-reinforced nylon canisters the size of small cigarette lighters that fit snugly in the webbed appliance as well.

  His burn phone rang. He answered.

  The man he knew as Piotr spoke Russian. “We are good, Gabriel?” he asked.

  Cruz replied in Russian. “Actually, there is a problem with compensation.”

  A cold silence followed. Cruz waited him out.

  “We had a deal,” Piotr said at last.

  “Until I knew the subject.”

  “I thought you were the best.”

  “I am the best. It’s why you came to me.”

  There was another long pause.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty-five million. Ten now, twenty-five when the job’s done.”

  “I can’t authorize that.”

  “Then get it authorized. Now.”

  Piotr, sounding furious, said, “Hold on.”

  Cruz switched the phone to speaker a
nd set it on the bench. While he waited for a reply, he squeezed the appliances onto his forearms and fitted the crowned ends of the barrels through loops on the webbing below his wrists.

  Piotr came back on the line. “Deal,” he said. “Final payment upon deed accomplished.”

  Cruz hung up the phone, put it on the bench, and took a deep breath before picking up a hammer and crushing the device.

  Only then did he turn his attention to the fashion mannequin he’d set up at the other end of the storage unit. He walked to within ten feet, raised his right hand, and flicked his hand sharply back, arching his fingers toward his upper forearm.

  He felt the webbed appliance stretch. The ball pivoted in its socket and tripped a trigger in the valve that, with a thud, released a powerful burst of highly pressurized helium from the carbon canister.

  The gas drove the nylon bullet out of the barrel at fourteen hundred feet per second. It hit the mannequin in the chest, blew through the foam, and disintegrated into shards that hit the steel back wall of the unit.

  Cruz smiled, raised his left arm, and flicked that hand back, triggering the second of his hybrid, undetectable derringers. This bullet struck the mannequin on the bridge of the nose and blew out the back of its head.

  CHAPTER

  35

  NINA DAVIS WAS right on time. She knocked on my basement door at half past one and swept in with a smile that was, well, beguiling, not at all the troubled woman who’d showed up yesterday.

  “Hello, Dr. Cross,” she said pleasantly as she moved by me toward my office.

  Nina wore a hint of jasmine perfume that lingered in the air as I followed her. Inside, she shrugged off her trench coat, revealing a clingy black cashmere turtleneck sweater and snug matching slacks and heels. Gold earrings dangled from her earlobes.

  When she sat, she looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes. “I must say, you lead an exciting life, Dr. Cross.”

  “How’s that?”

  She adjusted her position, crossed her legs, smiled, said, “Last night. Chad Winters and a Russian honcho?”

  “Winters told you about the Russian?”

  “It was all he talked about, how he and the Russian were tight.”

  “He told us the Russian had been very sick.”

  Nina studied me in amusement, as if she knew something I did not.

  “The honcho was sick. But not his men. They come and go all the time. Chad’s seen them do it.”

  “Okay?”

  “They have disguises. Makeup. Latex prosthetics.”

  “Why?”

  “To fool the CIA. Chad says they’re watching the honcho and his men.”

  I didn’t doubt it but said, “You’d swear to the FBI about that? What Dr. Winters told you?”

  She gave me a look that suggested I was daft and said, “I do work for the Justice Department. If it helps, of course I’d swear.”

  “I’ll have Mahoney—the agent you met last night—call you after we’re done.”

  “Sure. After we’re done.”

  “What am I going to find if I look into Winters?”

  She paused. “I believe there was an issue with overprescribing pain meds that he managed to beat.”

  I let that sink in. “Okay, can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable.”

  Nina cocked her head. “You said this is a safe place. No judgments, right?”

  “Correct,” I said. “Last night, before Special Agent Mahoney approached you, was I seeing Nina or Kaycee?”

  The barest of smiles crossed her lips. “Guess.”

  “Kaycee.”

  “She hadn’t decided,” Nina said. “Kaycee, I mean. She hadn’t decided she wanted him. Winters.”

  “Because?”

  She laughed. “He’s easy. Kaycee stalked him a long time ago.”

  “So no risk, no reward?”

  “What’s the point to anything if there is no real challenge?” she said, and she shifted again so her sweater moved across her breasts.

  “No danger?”

  “From Chad? I suppose. There are rumors he’s into pain. Sexually.”

  “But you enjoy the dangerous aspects of stalking men like Chad and seducing them.”

  Nina tapped a fingernail against her lips and thought about that.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But then again there’s always danger when you’re a woman venturing into the unknown.”

  “You like the unknown.”

  “I’m comfortable there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Not wary?”

  Nina shook her head, causing her ash-blond hair to come loose and fall gracefully across one shoulder. “No, Kaycee is oblivious, but I have a sense for creeps. And besides, as I said, I study them for quite a while before I make my move.”

  “You do understand that some people might find a woman stalking men as disturbing as a man stalking women?”

  “Would they? I suppose. But it’s not like I’m obsessive or violent. Ultimately, they have free will. The guy always has to make the final move in my little game.”

  “You enjoy that moment, when they make the final move?”

  “Very much so.”

  “What do you feel right then?”

  “Desire, of course.”

  “Beyond desire?”

  Nina twisted her chin slightly, gazed downward and diagonally a few moments, then met my eyes and said, “I guess I feel liberated, a primal woman in her essence.”

  “No guilt. No remorse.”

  “None,” she said firmly. “No boundaries. I am in the feminine and free.”

  “Kaycee is, you mean,” I said.

  “I know Kaycee’s spirit.”

  “Is that the moment when you feel closest to love? When the man becomes the aggressor?”

  “No. That’s later. During.”

  “When he’s choking you?”

  Nina’s eyes shimmered ever so slightly, as if she were replaying a memory.

  “Not always,” she said at last. “But often enough.”

  “Where did that come from? The choking?”

  Nina frowned slightly. “Where? I don’t know. I think I read about it in a book, The Joy of Sex ?”

  “How old were you?”

  “When?”

  “When you read the book.”

  Her frown deepened. “I … I can’t remember. In my teens?”

  “And when did you first experiment with asphyxiation?”

  She turned defensive. “What does this have to do with an inability to love?”

  I held up both hands. “You’ve told me that the closest you come to feeling love is during rough sex when you’re choking to orgasm. I’m trying to understand why that turns you on so much.”

  Nina looked past me. “I … I don’t know. I just tried it once, and it felt so good, I wanted to do it again. And again.”

  “How old were you when you first tried it?”

  She squinted, blinked, and then looked at me with slight puzzlement. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Sometime in law school, I think. There was a guy, Bill. We used to hook up, more for stress release than anything romantic. And I just asked him to do it, choke me, and he did, and the rest is history.”

  I sat there, giving no response, aware of the clock ticking away and chewing on what she’d told me.

  “Let’s change direction,” I said at last. “Tell me about life with your mother after your father died.”

  Some of her billowing female essence seeped away. Her skin paled, and her face sagged, weary.

  The alarm on my phone rang, ending the session.

  Nina looked relieved, brightened, and then beamed at me. “Saved by the bell.”

  “Saved by the bell.”

  By the time the Justice Department attorney stood up from the chair, she was radiating the feminine again, from her smell to her beauty to her confidence as she put on her coat. Nina extended her hand. I took it, surprised at how delicate it was. She
gazed at me with a sweet, intoxicating expression.

  “Thank you, Dr. Cross,” she said softly. “Kaycee and I look forward to the next time we meet.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  AROUND THREE IN the afternoon, Martin Franks flipped the blinker on his pickup truck and turned right off a state route south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Franks headed west. On the pickup’s navigation screen, he saw that the road ahead climbed into rural, forested country, and he started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son.”

  The ex–Special Forces operator liked this scenario. The rural ground. The woods. It brought back waking-dream images of the logger.

  Places like abandoned farms, big tracts of timber, they tended to isolate people. That was always good, in Franks’s opinion. Fewer eyes meant more latitude in the games he liked to play.

  Franks crossed a bridge above a stream lined with leafless hardwood trees. On the other side of the stream, he crossed a railroad track, and the road surface changed to hard-packed dirt and gravel.

  Now it was up to chance, synchronicity, serendipity, three powers Franks was used to cultivating. Franks had once dated a beautiful young woman named Ella. She was his opposite in almost every sense, a pacifist given to hippie clothing who taught him the power of imagining what he wanted and then asking the universe for some sign that his vision was being seen and shared.

  This unorthodox approach to life had saved Franks more than once when he was operating in Afghanistan. Every morning and every night on tour, he asked the universe for a warning if danger loomed.

  Twice, he had been on the verge of walking into a Taliban ambush. The first time, a kid goat scampered out of hiding, blatting as if a dog were after it.

  The second time, Franks had seen vultures flying above a village they were about to enter.

  Both times he’d halted his team and waited and watched. In the first case, he saw human movement among the rocks where the goat had run from, and in the second, he’d realized that the carrion birds were there because Taliban fighters had already killed enough civilians in the village to attract them.

  “C’mon,” Franks said to the sky and the universe beyond. “Give me a sign here. Tell me I was right to come up this road. Show me a worthy opponent.”