Alex Cross 03 - Jack & Jill Read online

  At the end of the film, Lena and Johnny had driven off into a sunset on an English coast, presumably to live happily ever after. The Hitchcock movie was an elegant, witty, mysterious game, just as this was.

  Their game. The most exquisite game two people had ever played together.

  Will we drive off into the sunset after all this? Sara Rosen wondered. Oh, I think not. I don’t suppose that we will. What will happen to us, then? Oh, what will happen to us? What will become of Jack and Jill?

  “I’ve only been to the Cipriani in my dreams,” she confessed to Sam. “Only in dreams. But, yes, I’ve been there many, many times.”

  “Is this all a dream, Monkey Face?” Sam asked. His look was serious for a moment. She couldn’t help thinking how precious every moment like this was, and how fleeting. She had secretly yearned for this all of her life, for one truly romantic experience.

  “I think it’s a dream, yes. It’s like a dream anyway. Please don’t wake me, though, Sam.”

  “It’s not a dream,” Sam whispered. “I love you. You are the most lovable woman I’ve ever met. You are, Sara. You’re like staying at the Cipriani every day for me. Please believe that Monkey Face. Believe in us. I do.”

  He clasped Sara from behind and pulled her closer. She savored the sweetness of his breath, the smell of his cologne, the smell of him.

  He began to move inside her and she felt herself melting into a liquid force. She did love him—she did, she did, she did. Her hands ran all over him, touching, possessing. There had never been anything like this before in her life, nothing even close.

  She slithered up and down on his long, powerful pole, his strength, his exquisite maleness. Sara couldn’t stop herself now, and she didn’t want to. She was choking with her own passion.

  She heard her voice crying out and almost didn’t recognize herself. She was joined with him in a simple rhythm that got faster and faster as the two of them came closer to being one—Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill!

  CHAPTER

  32

  THEIR FAIRY TALE ended with a quiet, almost disheartening thud, and Sara felt herself crashing back to earth, tumbling, being rushed along in a powerful tide. Monday morning meant a return to the dreary work world again, to real life.

  Sara Rosen had held “normal,” boring jobs around Washington for fourteen years, ever since she’d graduated from Hollins College in Virginia. She had a day job now. A perfect job for their purposes. The dreariest and weariest of jobs.

  That morning, she rose early to get ready. She and Sam had separated on Sunday night at the Four Seasons. She missed him, missed his humor, missed his touch, missed everything about him. Every inch.

  She had gotten lost in that thought. Inches, Millimeters. The essence of Sam. His tremendous inner strength She glanced at the luminescent face of the clock on her bed stand.

  She groaned out loud. Quarter to five. Dammit, she was already late.

  Her bathroom had a yoga corner with a custom-made leather mat. No time for that, though her body and mind ached for the discipline and the release.

  She took a quick shower and washed her hair with Salon Selectives shampoo. She put on a navy Brooks Brothers suit, low pumps, a leather-strapped Raymond Weil watch. She needed to look sharp, look alert, look freshly scrubbed this morning.

  Somehow, she always came out like that anyway. Sara the freshly starched.

  She hurried outside, where a grimy yellow cab was already waiting at the curb, wagging a tail of smoke. The wind whooped and howled up and down K Street.

  At five-twenty, the yellow cab pulled up in front of her workplace. The Liberty Cab driver smiled and said, “A famous address, my lady. So, are you somebody famous?”

  She paid the driver and collected change from a five-dollar bill. “Actually, I might be someday,” she said. “You never know.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’m somebody, too,” the driver said with a crooked smile. “You never know.”

  Sara Rosen climbed out of the cab and felt the early December wind in her face. The pristine building before her looked strangely beautiful and imposing in the early-morning light. It appeared to be shining, actually, glowing from the inside out.

  She showed her ID card, and security let her pass inside. She and the guard even shared a quick laugh about her being a workaholic. And why not? Sara Rosen had worked inside the White House for nine years.

  Part III

  The Photojournalist

  CHAPTER

  33

  THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.

  Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way.

  Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he’d been a bright, lonely, underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world. He was in San Francisco to kill someone.

  As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph—all in his mind.

  The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Leica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.

  The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals. They are like pigs at a trough, he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.

  His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit. The Boys at the Bowl.

  The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.

  The photojournalist couldn’t forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men’s room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak’s vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.

  He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors. Unimpressive in every way, he couldn’t help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him—so much so that he sighed involuntarily.

  He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.

  He started to cough and couldn’t stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.

  Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred. He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.

  He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth. Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch. He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.

  He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called “Rock the Casbah.” He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The “walking” suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.

  The red-on-black digital clock over the airport pa
ssageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule. Some people just know how to fly. Wasn’t that Northwest’s tag line?

  The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too. Life and death. It was their game, actually.

  He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.

  That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and well-wishers. He clicked off a shot in his mind. He got a peek at Mr. Tanaka of the Nipray Corporation. He clicked another shot.

  His adrenaline was flowing like lava from Kilauea in Hawaii, where he’d once shot for Newsweek. Adrenaline. Nothing like it. He was addicted to the stuff.

  Any second now.

  Any second.

  Any nanosecond—which, he knew, is to a second as a second is to about thirty years.

  There was no X-marks-the-spot on the terminal floor, but Kevin Hawkins knew this was the place. He had it all visualized, every critical angle was vivid as hell in his mind’s eye. All the intersect points were clear to him.

  Any second. Life and death.

  There might as well have been a big black X painted on the airport floor.

  Kevin Hawkins felt like a god.

  Here we go. Cameras loaded and at the ready. Lock and load! Someone’s going to die here.

  CHAPTER

  34

  WHEN THE SEMIOFFICIAL ENTOURAGE was approximately twelve feet from the busy corridor-crossing, a small bomb detonated. The explosion sent a cloud of gray-black smoke into Corridor A. Screams pierced the air like whining sirens.

  The bomb had been inside a dark blue suitcase left next to the news and magazine kiosk. Kevin Hawkins had placed the innocent-looking suitcase directly in front of a sign that advised travelers to WATCH YOUR LUGGAGE AT ALL TIMES.

  The deafening, booming noise and sudden chaos startled the bodyguards surrounding Mr. Tanaka. It made them erratic, and therefore predictable. Security teams, even the best of them, could be fooled if you forced them to improvise. Travelers and airport personnel were screaming, seeking cover where there was none to be had. Men, women, and children pressed themselves to the floor, faces hard against cold marble.

  People haven’t seen real panic until they’ve witnessed it in a large airport, where everyone is already close to the edge of primal fears.

  Two of the bodyguards covered the corporate chairman, doing a half-decent job, Hawkins saw.

  He clicked another mind photo. Stored it in his photo file for future reference.

  This was good stuff, valuable as hell. How an excellent security team reacted under stress during an actual attack.

  Then the efficient, if uninspired, bodyguards began to hurriedly move their “protected person” out of danger, out of harm’s way. They obviously couldn’t go forward into the smoky, bombed-out corridor. The security team chose to go back—their only choice, the one Kevin Hawkins knew they would make under duress.

  They pulled along Mr. Tanaka as if he were a large, ungainly puppet or doll, which he pretty much was. They almost physically carried the important businessman, holding him under his arms so that both his feet left the floor at times.

  Mind photo of that: expensive black tasseled loafers skipping across the marble floor.

  The trained bodyguards had one goal: get the “protected person” out of there. The photojournalist let them proceed about thirty feet before he pushed the detonator in the shoulder bag housing his camera gear. It was that easy. The best plans were one-button simple. Like a camera. Like a camera suitable for a child.

  A second suitcase he had left alongside the corridor near the men’s room exploded with double the thunder and lightning of the first, causing more than twice the damage. It was as if an invisible missile had been guided directly into the center of the airport.

  The destruction was instantaneous, and it was brutal. Bodies, and even body parts, flew in every imaginable direction.

  Tanaka didn’t survive. Neither did any of the four diligent and highly underpaid bodyguards.

  The photojournalist was tightly wedged in amidst the rushing wall of men and women trying to escape toward the airport exits. His was just another terrified face in the stormy human sea.

  And, yes, he could look very terrified. He knew more than any of them what fear looked like. He had photographed uncontrolled fear on so many faces. He often saw those awful looks of terror, those silent screams, in his dreams.

  He held back a tight, grim smile as he turned onto Corridor D and headed toward his own plane. He was going to Washington, D.C., that evening and hoped the delays caused by the murder wouldn’t be massively long.

  The risk had been a necessary one, actually. This had been a rehearsal, the last rehearsal.

  Now, on to far more important things. The photojournalist had a very big job in D.C. The code name was easy enough for him to remember.

  Jack and Jill.

  CHAPTER

  35

  “THE EIGHTEEN-ACRE ESTATE around the White House includes many diversions: a private movie theater, gym, wine cellar, tennis courts, bowling lanes, rooftop greenhouse, and a golf range on the South Lawn. The house and property are currently assessed at three hundred forty million by the District of Columbia.” I could almost do the spiel myself.

  I showed my temporary pass, then carefully drove down into the parking garage under the White House. On the way in I had noticed some renovation to the main building and also extensive groundwork, but overall the White House looked just fine to me.

  My head was not so fine. It was uneasy. Filled with chaotic thoughts. I had slept only a couple of hours the night before, and that was becoming a pattern. The morning’s Washington Post and New York Times lay folded on the car seat beside me.

  The Post headline asked WHO’S NEXT FOR JACK AND JILL? It seemed like a question directed right at me. WHO’S NEXT?

  I thought about a possible attempt on the life of President Thomas Byrnes, as I walked from the small parking garage to the elevator. A lot of people were extremely high on the President and his programs. Americans had clamored for change for a long time, and President Byrnes was delivering it in large doses. Of course, what most people want “change” to mean is more money in their pockets, instantly, without any sacrifice on their part.

  So who might be angry and crazed enough at the President to want him murdered? I knew that was why I was at the White House. I was here to conduct a homicide investigation. In the White House. A search for a couple of killers who could be planning to murder the President.

  I met Don Hamerman in the West Wing Entrance Hall. He was still acting extremely high strung and anxious, but that seemed to be his persona. It also fit the times. The chief of staff and I talked for a few minutes in the hallway. He went out of his way to tell me that I had been handpicked for the investigation because of my expertise with high-profile killers, especially psychopaths.

  He seemed to know an awful lot about me. As he talked, I imagined that he’d probably gotten the coveted brownnoser award in his senior year at Yale or Harvard, where he had also learned to talk with a whiny, upper-class drawl.

  I had absolutely no idea what to expect that morning. Hamerman said he was going to line up some “interviews” for me. I sensed some of his frustration in trying to organize an investigation like this inside the White House. A murder investigation.

  He left me alone inside the Map Room on the ground floor. I paced around the famous room, absently checking out the elaborately carved Chippendale furniture, an oil portrait of Ben Franklin, a landscape painting titled Tending Cows and Sheep. I already had a busy day ahead. I had appointments set up at the city morgue and with Benjamin Levitsky, the number two at the FBI’s intelligence unit.

  I continued to be frustrated about the Truth
School child murders. For the moment, that was Sampson’s concern. Sampson’s and our part-time posse of detectives’. But I couldn’t keep it off my mind.

  Suddenly, someone entered the Map Room along with the national security advisor. I was taken by surprise. I was blown away, actually. No words could possibly describe the feeling.

  Don Hamerman stiffly announced, “President Byrnes will see you now.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  “GOOD MORNING. Is it Doctor or Detective Cross?” President Thomas Byrnes asked me.

  I had a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Cross would serve me much better at the White House. Like Dr. Bunche, Dr. Kissinger, or even Doc Savage. “I guess that I prefer Alex,” I said to him.

  The President’s face lit up in a broad smile, and it was the same charismatic one I had seen many times on television and on the front pages of newspapers.

  “And I prefer Tom,” the President said. He extended his hand and the two of us shook off our surnames. His grip was firm and steady. He held eye contact with me for several seconds.

  The President of the United States managed to sound both cordial and appropriately serious at the same time. He was about six feet tall, and he was trim and fit at fifty. His hair was light brown, trimmed with silver-gray. He looked a little like a fighter pilot. His eyes were very sensitive and warm. He was already known as our most personable president in many years, and also our most dynamic.

  I had read and heard a lot about the man I was meeting for the first time. He had been the successful and much-admired head of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit before he decided to go for an even higher executive office. He had run for the presidency as an Independent, and true to the polls of the past few years, the people had voted for fresh, independent thinking—or maybe they were just voting against the Republican and Democratic Parties, as some pundits believed. So far, he had shown himself to be a contemporary thinker, but a bit contrarian, a genuine maverick in high office. As an independent mover and shaker, the President had made few friends in Washington, but lots of enemies.