Target: Alex Cross Read online

  When they radioed us that they were ready, we spilled out of the car, all of us dressed in jeans, work boots, and oversize rain jackets that hid our Kevlar vests. Remembering what we’d been told about the Hungarian assassin, I wondered if I was wearing enough armor.

  As we crossed the street, I said, “You don’t find it odd she used the same name she used coming into the country? Edith, that spook we spoke with at the CIA, said she switches identities constantly.”

  Mahoney shrugged. “She didn’t know she’d been spotted, so she stuck with it.”

  We went into the office where we were met by the owner, Vash Yasant, a young, nervous Indian immigrant who’d bought the motel three months before.

  “What’s this about?” Yasant said. “What’s she done?”

  “Let’s make sure of something first,” Mahoney said, and on the counter he put a still from the surveillance footage at Dulles airport.

  “Is that her?” I asked.

  Yasant studied it, stroking his chin, then nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s her. I’d swear on it. Especially that bag. She had it with her when she checked in.”

  “She have a car?”

  “She said she came by Metro and bus.”

  “Room?” Mahoney said.

  “Number fifteen, right above us,” Yasant said, pointing upward. “She wanted a room facing the street.”

  I sighed. “She saw us coming in.”

  “If she was looking,” Mahoney said.

  “She went out two hours ago,” the motel manager said. “What has this Martina Rodoni done?”

  “Nothing so far,” I said. “We just want to talk to her.”

  “I will take you to her room,” Yasant said. “I’ll bring the master key.”

  I thought that was a mistake, but Mahoney said, “You’ll stay well behind us, and you will move only when told to.”

  “Yes, sir!” the innkeeper cried, and he stood up straight.

  “Yes, what?” his wife said, coming out from behind a curtain. She was dressed in a colorful sari and was very pregnant.

  Her husband said, “Rani, these men are with the FBI, and that woman up in fifteen, she is very, very dangerous. They have asked me to assist them with the key!”

  Mrs. Yasant looked at her husband, at us, and then at her husband again. “You will do no such thing, Vash! The baby comes any day, and you cannot go playing policeman!”

  The innkeeper looked ready to argue, but Mahoney said, “On second thought, Mr. Yasant, your wife’s probably right. Why don’t you just give us the key? We’ll drop it on the way out.”

  The father-to-be looked chagrined and deflated, but he handed us the key from a hook on the wall behind him.

  “You will report what you find up there?” he asked. “This is my place, yes?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  We went out of the door and drew weapons and put them in our raincoat pockets before climbing the near staircase and walking back toward the main drag and room 15. It was mid-morning, no new hourly customers, and the long-termers had gone off to scavenge their lives.

  Every room we passed was quiet. Even room 15, which had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the door handle.

  Mahoney stood to the side of the door, looked at the window and tight curtains beyond it, then knocked sharply.

  No answer. After thirty seconds, Mahoney knocked again.

  Again, no answer.

  Mahoney took his pistol out. I did the same. He fitted the key in the lock and turned it.

  I pushed the door inward, revealing twin beds, unused, still crisply made. Dead center of the bed deeper into the room was the same roller bag we’d seen Varjan wheeling in the Dulles airport security footage.

  Beside it was a cheap cell phone.

  Mahoney went over to the bag, but I stopped him.

  “Why leave it like this?” I said. “Why not put it in the closed closet?”

  Ned did not have time to answer before the cell phone on the tacky bedspread began to ring and buzz.

  I was closer, so I picked it up and answered on speaker.

  “Hello?” I said. “Kristina? Kristina Varjan?”

  There was a moment before Varjan said, “Good-bye. Whoever you are.”

  The phone went dead.

  My eyes darted to the bag.

  “Run!”

  We spun and bolted toward the open door. I was behind Mahoney and one step onto the balcony when the phone in my hand began to ring with a different ringtone.

  I threw myself completely out of the room a split second before the bomb went off behind us, blowing out the windows and blasting the metal door off its hinges.

  CHAPTER

  40

  TWO HOURS LATER , the blast was still ringing in my ears as I looked down on the carnival that had descended on the Happy Pines Motel. Two fire trucks. Five police cruisers. Four vans bearing a small army of crime scene techs and special agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

  Mahoney was standing next to me, elbows on the balcony railing, still shocked by how close we’d come to death.

  “Wish I’d never quit smoking,” he said, and I heard a quiver in his voice.

  “Close,” I said, equally shaken. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”

  I’d called Bree to let her know what had happened, and Mahoney and I had already spoken about Varjan with a parade of agents assigned to the case. Our theory was that she suspected she’d been spotted after arriving at Dulles and had tested that suspicion by renting the motel room under the name Martina Rodoni.

  “She sat on us, waiting,” I said. “For two days.”

  “She’s disciplined, I give you that,” Mahoney said.

  “Is she? Why try to kill us? It only increases the heat on her.”

  “I’ll set aside the why for now. She did it is all I need to know. We have to get her face everywhere. She’s got other business planned.”

  “I agree. Enhance and enlarge the security photo of her. She’ll be recognized.”

  He nodded and took out his cell phone.

  Almost directly below us in the parking lot, Rani Yasant was yelling at her husband, who was looking up at the smoldering hole that had once been room 15.

  “You see?” Mrs. Yasant cried, hands on her belly. “If you had been brave and gone up there, you would have died, Vash, and then where would I be? Answer me that, where would I be?”

  Yasant put both hands to his head as if squeezing it in a vise. “Why do you always think this way, Rani? I did not go up there. I am alive. And you wish me to be a coward in every aspect of my life!”

  He shouted this last bit, and it caused his wife to step back and start crying.

  “What are we going to do?” she said, sobbing. “I told you not to buy that extra fire insurance. I said it was too expensive!”

  Her husband softened and walked over to her. He put his arms around her.

  “It’s okay, Rani. I did not listen to you.”

  His wife looked up at him through tears. “Is that true?”

  “We’re covered,” he said, and he kissed her forehead.

  “Agent Mahoney?”

  Mahoney and I turned to find Tim Schmidt, the supervising special agent with BATF, coming toward us. Mahoney finished his call and hung up.

  Schmidt said, “Preliminary results say you had plastic explosives in that bag with a frequency trigger set to trip at the phone’s ringtone. Where is the phone, by the way? We’d like to take it if possible.”

  Mahoney said, “It’s already on its way to Quantico, but we will share everything with BATF as soon as we have it.”

  Schmidt puffed up his cheeks and blew out his mouth. “Fair enough. It’s cooled down enough in there to look around if you want.”

  We walked back to room 15. The walls were scorched and blackened. So was the ceiling. There was an inch of dark water on the floor.

  The near twin bed had been thrown over. The mattress lay in the slurry
, coated in soot. The mattress of the far bed, the one where the bag and phone had been, now had a gaping charred hole in it almost the entire width and three-quarters of the length.

  I stared at the blast hole. So did Ned, who said, “Darn happy to be here, Alex.”

  I nodded, still stunned and thanking my guardian angel for helping me put the phone, the bag, and Varjan’s words together fast enough to clear the room and survive. I felt humbled and then desperate to go home and be with my family.

  But I overrode that desire with the need to do my job. I turned from the mattress and looked at a table lamp, bent and twisted on the floor, and then at the night table flipped over on its left flank. The right side was caved in and scorched. The drawer was closed.

  Beside the table on the floor was an open and partially burned Gideon Bible.

  I looked at the closed drawer. I supposed it was possible the blast had driven the open drawer shut. Or that Gideon Bible had been out before the blast. Had I seen it?

  I didn’t remember. If it was out, why? Would a professional assassin like Varjan seek spiritual solace in a motel Bible?

  After putting on gloves, I picked the Bible up. A charred chunk of pages fell out from the back. I flipped through the Bible but found nothing tucked in it.

  I was about to set it aside when I noticed that soot from the burned pages had streaked and smudged across the mostly white inside of the Bible’s back cover. Then I noticed that the soot had raised the impression of letters there. An e and an r .

  Someone had obviously scribbled on the front of the back page, and the pressure had gone through to the cover. I was about to set it aside to be bagged again, but then I thought, What if Varjan scribbled there?

  What were the odds of that? Hundreds of people must have used the room in the past twelve months, let alone years.

  Still, I did not want to leave any stone unturned. I broke off the charred edges of the pages that had fallen on the floor, crumbled the charring into dust, and spilled it around the two visible letters and across the page.

  Words appeared, a stack of them:

  Celes Chere

  Prelim 2 sharp

  Marstons, same

  Gabriel, same

  Conker 3

  Conker? Below that, there were other letters but they were indistinct. A b and an i or a t and then a c . Or an o?

  I had no idea when the words were written or what significance they held. I took a picture of the list with my phone and left the Bible for the criminalists to bag and analyze further.

  “Not much here that wasn’t here before she planted the bomb,” said Schmidt, the ATF agent.

  “This was a kill zone for her, nothing more,” Mahoney said. “But we’ve got her phone, and we’ll be inside it in hours.”

  “Why the hell is she here?” Schmidt said. “Who the hell is she trying to kill?”

  “Besides us?” I said. “No clue. But when we find her, I sure plan to ask.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  KRISTINA VARJAN DROVE a beater Dodge sedan she’d bought off a lot in College Park. It had a shimmy in the front end and almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, so she kept on at one mile under the speed limit, heading up I-95 toward Atlantic City, New Jersey, and an Airbnb apartment she’d rented online.

  Varjan had cut her hair shorter, spiked it, and bleached the tips blond. She’d changed into skinny jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and a long-sleeved Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her makeup was heavy on the mascara. She’d pierced her own nose the night before, and her upper right lip and tongue too.

  When she glanced at herself in the rearview, she looked nothing like Martina Rodoni, the fashionable European in for a week of sightseeing. Now she was Elena Wolfe, rebellious nonconformist over from Great Britain to play a few games.

  Varjan shifted. She was sick of sitting, especially in this seat. She’d sat in it for almost two days, watching the Happy Pines Motel from well down the street.

  She’d almost quit her surveillance the evening before, tried to tell herself that thirty-six hours watching her back trail was enough, that she’d been wrong, that she hadn’t seen the CIA op she’d fought with in Istanbul standing in the line for security at Dulles only minutes after her own arrival in the U.S.

  Take off, Varjan had thought. You’re good. Get your game on. Leave everything else behind you.

  Varjan had almost driven to the Happy Pines to retrieve the bomb, check out, and carry on with her more pressing plans. But some difficult voice in her head insisted she’d been spotted and that she needed to keep up her vigil.

  The difficult voice had proved to be the right one.

  What happened then had been reflexive, nothing she could have controlled. She hadn’t meant to blow the bomb unless that CIA agent, Edith, was with them. But then that guy who’d answered the phone, he’d known her real name.

  He called me Kristina, Kristina Varjan.

  The very words made Varjan feel exposed and angry, made her want to lash out. She preferred to go through life playing roles, only rarely showing her true self to anyone and never using her given name in any context.

  But that man had known her. He’d used her real name!

  And then it had been reflexive. Uncontrollable. She’d set off the bomb.

  Varjan understood she needed to inform Piotr, or whatever his real name was, and explain the situation.

  However, maybe the less he knew, the better. Given the contracts he’d assigned her the day before, she understood that any weakness would likely change their arrangement and make her a target for elimination at some point in the near future.

  That was too complicated. That was just too much to handle while trying to execute multiple plays as fast as possible.

  No, Varjan decided as she passed the exit for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. She’d keep her employer in the dark, get the jobs done, collect, and then vanish once and for all.

  CHAPTER

  42

  WHAT WAS VARJAN up to?

  That question and others like it ran laps in my head as I got out of an Uber at my house. The sun had set. The lights glowed in the front room. So did the big screen, which was tuned to the news.

  I climbed the front steps, thanking my Savior once again.

  When I opened the door, I heard Bree cry, “Alex?”

  “Dad!” Ali shouted.

  They all came running to the front hall, Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama too. Bree had tears in her eyes. “It’s so good … you’re here.”

  I hugged her, kissed her, whispered in her ear, “I’ll always be here.”

  She squeezed me tight, then stood back while I hugged my daughter, son, and grandmother.

  “The local news says an assassin set off the bomb, a lady assassin,” Ali said.

  Jannie said, “They showed her picture. Did you see her, Dad?”

  “No,” I said. “But she saw us. She called the phone for the first time after we were in the room, so we figure she had to have been in range, watching, when she made the second call to trigger the bomb.”

  Nana Mama patted her heart. “Thank God, you got out of there in time.”

  “I’ve been weak-kneed and grateful a thousand times since it happened,” I said.

  We went into the kitchen, where my grandmother had a steaming pot of soup made from chicken, celery, onions, basil, garlic, oregano, and halved cherry tomatoes. She’d also made two big loaves of garlic bread slathered with lots of butter.

  While Jannie helped Bree ladle the soup into bowls that Ali ferried to the kitchen table, I was feeling almost overjoyed. It was such a simple thing, being with family, preparing for dinner, but that evening, it made me want to cry.

  “What else, Dad?” Ali said. “Do you know where she went? Varjan?”

  Ordinarily I would have deflected further conversations about an ongoing case, but since Mahoney had let the cat out of the bag with the media, I shared with them what I knew. I explained Varjan’s reputation as a
ruthless killer for hire, her recent arrival in the U.S. under the name Martina Rodoni, and our belief that she was in the country to kill someone other than me and Mahoney.

  Nana came to the table and we all held hands to say grace.

  My grandmother finished with “Thank You for getting Alex out of that motel room this morning. And bless him in the days ahead.”

  “Amen,” we all said.

  After I’d eaten two slices of homemade bread, finished a bowl of the delicious soup, and gone back for seconds, Bree said, “I don’t suppose there was any evidence left in the motel room? Other than the bomb material, I mean.”

  I started to shake my head, but then I remembered something. I dug in my pocket for my phone.

  “About the only thing I could find that survived was a Bible, and I don’t know if this has a thing to do with anything, but there was this list of …”

  I found the picture on my phone and tapped it to open it. “Here.”

  I turned it and showed them the list raised by the soot:

  Celes Chere

  Prelim 2 sharp

  Marstons, same

  Gabriel, same

  Conker 3

  “What does that mean?” Jannie asked, passing the phone to Nana. “Did she write it?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “It was just there on the inside back cover, so I shot it.”

  Ali took the phone from Nana Mama, who shrugged, said, “What’s a Conker?”

  Staring at the screen, Ali said, “Well, a Conker is this …” He looked up at me. “Dad, Kristina Varjan. No doubt about it.”

  “How do you know that?” Jannie asked, her brow knitted.

  “So, first, Conker? He’s like this crazed squirrel. Drinks. Smokes. Likes to smack people in the face with a frying pan.”

  “What?” my grandmother said.

  “In a really good video game, Nana,” Ali said. “Conker’s the hero avatar in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Check it out, Dad, for real.”

  “I will, but how do you know that Varjan wrote the list?”

  He pointed to the list. “Marstons? Gabriel? Those are avatars in other video games made by the same company, Victorious Gaming.”