Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Read online

  Also leaked was the fact that, in addition to the human cargo, the trucks had contained a million dollars in cash and ninety kilos of cocaine, all hidden in the produce crates. DC Metro and the FBI had been hoping to keep all that inside this room.

  “The leaks must stop,” Mahoney said. “They’re hamstringing us.”

  I scanned the room, seeing no one displaying obvious guilt or avoidance postures. But that didn’t matter. The leaks had already made the cops distrust this group as a whole. We had decided to hold back some of the new evidence we’d found, at least for the time being.

  “Moving on,” Mahoney said. “There is no Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. And six of the dead traffickers have been identified through fingerprints and IAFIS.”

  Six mug shots went up on a screen behind the FBI agent.

  “The two on the left are Russians with ties to organized-crime syndicates out of St. Petersburg and Brighton Beach,” Mahoney said. “There are agents in New York and Russia working those angles. These other four are more familiar to law enforcement. Correct, George?”

  George Potter, the DEA’s special agent in charge, nodded. “All four have long rap sheets in south Florida or Texas. The two there on the right, Chavez and Burton, they have loose connections to the Sinaloa cartel.”

  “Do any of them have a history of involvement in human trafficking?” Bree asked.

  “Not that we know of,” Potter said. “But they could be branching out.”

  “Or this could be just one branch of something bigger,” I said. “These connections to both Russian mobsters and Mexican drug cartels suggests a possible alliance that is frightening when you think about it.”

  Potter nodded. “Like a supercartel.”

  Sampson said, “Or maybe they’re just a crew of freight agents that transport three different kinds of criminal commodities at once: drugs, cash, and people.”

  “Slaves, you mean,” Bree said.

  Bob Taylor, a smart, African American agent over at Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, asked, “Are you a slave if you sign up of your own free will?”

  “They were bought and paid for,” Bree said. “Even if the sellers were the girls themselves. Let’s call this what it is: sexual slavery.”

  Taylor threw up his hands in surrender, said, “Just trying to clarify, Chief. You ask me, whoever these shooters are, they’re doing the world a favor getting defects out of the gene pool.”

  There were a number of nods and murmurs of agreement in the room.

  I couldn’t argue with the sentiment in one sense. I’d had the chance to go over the dead men’s rap sheets, and there was viciousness, cruelty, and depravity laced through their lives.

  I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, God, Allah, karma, the spirit of the universe, or a Higher Power—the crew of thugs who’d died in Ladysmith, Virginia, had been begging for a violent death like that: shot down, no mercy. I believed that was true, even if I also believed that whoever killed those thugs deserved trial and punishment.

  In my book and in the blind eyes of justice, the fact that a man had it coming to him doesn’t make killing him right. Especially if he’s killed in an ambush. That’s premeditation any way you look at it.

  Mahoney went on with the briefing, giving some of the preliminary lab reports. The victims were all shot with .223 rounds, probably from AR-style rifles.

  “Military?” ATF Special Agent Taylor asked. “Full-jacket?”

  “No,” Mahoney said. “The bulk crap you can buy at Wal-mart.”

  Sampson leaned over to me. “I gotta go. Anniversary dinner with Billie.”

  “Congratulations to you and Billie. How many years?”

  “The big six, and thanks.” He slipped out.

  The big six. Somehow that was funny.

  A few moments later, Bree leaned over and said, “I’ve got a pile of work on my desk I need to dig through.”

  “I’ll stay here and tell you if there’s anything new,” I said.

  There wasn’t anything new, at least not from my perspective. Mahoney wrapped up the rest of the briefing in twenty minutes, and the place emptied out.

  “You look like you could use a three-day weekend,” I told Ned.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Mahoney said.

  “Go to your place on the shore; it’ll give you fresh eyes on Tuesday.”

  “I don’t think the gods of the Bureau would appreciate me kicking back with a cold one if there’s another attack on the underworld over the weekend.”

  “You can always keep your phone on,” I said. “No one says you have to be in your office waiting for a call. There has to be some benefit to these phones beyond Facebook and texting, right?”

  Mahoney half bobbed his head, getting a distracted look. “Traffic will be a bitch tonight. Maybe I can sneak away early tomorrow?”

  “Now you’re thinking.”

  “What about you? And Bree? Why don’t you and the kids come? Supposed to be a beautiful weekend.”

  “Nothing would make me happier, but Jannie’s got an invitational thing over at Johns Hopkins, and we were going to see Damon too.”

  “There are three days to the holiday. You could always come on Sunday morning, or even on Saturday night.”

  “Tempting. Let me run that by the new chief of detectives.”

  CHAPTER

  51

  ORDINARILY, THE TRACK season ends in mid-August, but the U.S.A. Track and Field organization had launched a program to nurture young talent, inviting high school athletes from across the country to a meet on the Johns Hopkins campus in an effort to help coaches identify those with potential.

  The fact that Jannie had been invited at the age of fifteen years and eight months was a shock to us. Initially, she hadn’t been among the athletes offered spots at the meet. But Ted McDonald, a well-regarded track coach who works with my daughter, showed videos of her to the right people, and she got in on discretion.

  We were on the shady side of the stands an hour before she was set to run. Down on the field, the kids were warming up. Except not many of them looked like kids.

  “What are they feeding them?” Bree asked.

  “Human growth hormone cereal with steroid milk,” Nana Mama said, and she cackled.

  “I hope not, for their sake,” Bree said. “Jannie said everyone had to submit urine and blood samples.”

  “Those can be doctored,” Nana Mama said.

  We knew that all too well. Earlier in the summer, a vindictive and jealous girl in North Carolina had tried to frame Jannie for drug use. Since then, we’d always demanded samples from any drug test she had to take.

  A group of athletes glided by at an easy ten miles an hour. I watched them, trying to keep memories of the prior evening at bay. This was a holiday, and I’d read that it was important to take them and enjoy them or you risked burnout.

  “Can I have a Coke?” Ali asked, pulling off his headphones, which were attached to the iPad we’d bought used on eBay.

  “Water would be better,” Nana Mama said.

  “I thought this was a holiday,” Ali grumbled. “Holidays are supposed to be fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”

  My grandmother twisted on the bleacher and fixed him with her evil-eye stare. “Are you sassing your great-grandmother?”

  “No, Nana Mama,” Ali said.

  “I won’t take sass,” she said. “You’ve heard about that, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Bree and I watched in amusement at the mastery with which Nana Mama handled Ali.

  “What are you listening to?” Nana Mama asked, her voice softening.

  Ali brightened. “A podcast about dolphins and how they have echolocation just like bats, only in the water.”

  “What’s the single most surprising thing you’ve heard so far?”

  Without hesitation, he said, “Dolphins have the best hearing in the world.”

  “Is that true?” Bree asked. />
  “Humans can hear up to, like, twenty kilo-hearses. Dogs to like forty-five kilo-hearses.”

  “Hertz,” Nana Mama said. “Forty-five kilohertz.”

  “Hertz,” Ali said. “Big cats, like lions, hear up to sixty-five, I think. But a dolphin can hear sounds up to a hundred and twenty kilohertz. And they have, like, an electrical field around them. They say you can feel it if you swim with them. I want to do that, Dad, swim with dolphins.”

  “I thought you had a few questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

  “That too,” Ali said. “Can I have a Coke, Dad?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What?” Nana Mama said.

  I smiled. “The holiday argument gets me every time.”

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found Damon.

  “Hey!” I cried, and I stood to hug him. “Look who snuck up!”

  “Hi, Dad,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and hugging me back.

  There was a round of hugs and kisses. We heard about orientation, and Ali got a Coke and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and life was good and grounded and solid. The pressure of Bree’s new job drained away too. I could see that in the way she laughed at one of Damon’s tales.

  She felt at ease. I did too. A rare thing in those days.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  CHAPTER

  52

  JANNIE WAS CALLING to me from the fence, so I got up and started down toward her.

  “Jannie, you got this,” Damon said, following me. “My friends on my hall are coming to see you smoke them all.”

  Jannie laughed, and punched the air before hugging Damon. She has never had stage fright, at least not when it comes to running. In the past year, she’d faced women running for NCAA Division 1 schools, and she’d run well enough to be here.

  “You good?” I asked.

  “Always,” she said, relaxed. “Coach McDonald’s got good meet and race strategies worked out.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You’ll see. Love you both.”

  “Love you too,” I said. “Nana Mama said to run like God gave you a gift and you are grateful for every stride of it.”

  She smiled but with some confusion. “Tell Nana Mama I’ll try, Dad. Coach Mac’s up behind you, by the way.”

  She trotted off. We climbed back up into the stands.

  Clad in his trademark gray warm-ups and a blue hoodie and wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, Ted McDonald was moving nervously from one running-shoed foot to the other as he spoke to Bree and Nana Mama. In his fifties, with a shock of reddish-gray hair that defied gravity, Coach McDonald had a straightforward style that I appreciated.

  “Dr. Cross,” McDonald said, shaking my hand.

  “Dr. McDonald,” I said. He had a doctorate in exercise physiology.

  “Ready to see a little history made today?” McDonald asked.

  Ali had been listening to his podcast, but he tugged out his earbuds and asked, “What history?”

  Jannie’s coach said, “Anything can happen under race conditions, but I’ve been tracking her workout times. They’re impressive. She could do something here that would really make people stand up and take notice.”

  “Like which people?” Nana Mama said.

  McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

  “Does she know this?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

  “What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

  “I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

  Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

  She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

  “Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”

  “But she’s a sophomore,” I said.

  “I know,” McDonald said. “But later on, if she runs the way she did the other day in training, you could have every coach over there camped out in your front yard.”

  I didn’t ask him for more. No particulars. The entire conversation had me nervous in a sour-gut sort of way, and proud, and nervous all over again.

  We used the two-hour break to have lunch with Damon and two of his new friends, his roommate, William, and fellow basketball player Justin Hahn, from Boston. Both were good guys, both were very funny, and both were capable of eating a staggering amount of food. Damon too. They ate so much, we almost missed the finals.

  Jannie and seven other girls were heading into the blocks when we hurried to our seats. She drew lane three of eight. The girls took their marks. The gun went off.

  Jannie came up in short choppy strides, tripped, stumbled, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.

  “No!” we all groaned before she sprang up and started running again.

  “Oh, that sucks,” Damon said.

  “There goes the scholarship,” his roommate said, which annoyed me but not enough to make me lower my binoculars.

  Ali said, “What happened?”

  “She got off balance,” said Coach McDonald, who was also watching through binoculars. “Kicked her heel and … she’s maybe twenty yards in back of Bethany Kellogg, the LA girl in lane one. Odds-on favorite.”

  The runners in the outer lanes were almost halfway down the back straight when Jannie finally came out of the curve in dead last. But she didn’t look upset. She was up to speed now, running fluidly, efficiently.

  “That’s not going to do it, missy,” McDonald said, and it was almost like Jannie could hear him because her stride began to lengthen and her footfalls turned from springy to explosive. She didn’t run so much as bound down the track, looking long-legged, loose-jointed, and strong as hell.

  Through the binoculars, I was able to get a good look at her face; she was straining but not breaking with the effort.

  “She just picked off the girl from Kentucky in lane four,” McDonald said as the runners entered the far turn. “She’s not going to be last. C’mon, young lady, show us what you’ve got now.”

  The stagger was still on, but the gaps between the athletes were narrowing fast as they drove on through the turn. Jannie was moving up with every stride. Coming onto the home-stretch, she passed a Florida girl in lane two.

  Damon’s roommate yelled, “She’s freaking flying!”

  We were all on our feet now, watching Jannie dig deep into her reservoir of grit and determination. Thirty yards down the stretch, she surged past the Texas girl in lane six. She went by an Oregon racer in lane eight at the halfway mark.

  “She’s in fourth!” Ali shouted.

  The top three girls were neck and neck, with Bethany Kellogg barely leading and ten feet between Jannie and the girl from Alabama in third.

  With thirty yards to go, she closed that to six feet. With fifteen yards left, she’d pinched it to three.

  Eight inches separated the two girls when they crossed the finish line.

  Coach McDonald lowered his binoculars, shaking his head in wonder. “She just ran out of track, that’s all that happened there.”

  My binoculars were still glued on Jannie, who was limping away from the finish line in pain. A television cameraman was moving toward her across the track when she bent over and started to sob.

  CHAPTER

  53

  FOUR HOURS LATER we had the surreal experience of seeing Jannie’s race on ESPN. We watched the clip on a flat-screen at Ned Mahoney
’s beach house on the Delaware shore.

  The edited video showed the start of the race, Jannie’s fall, and Jannie coming into the backstretch in dead last, then the tape jump-cut to the far turn and her go-for-broke sprint down the stretch.

  A second camera caught her limping away from the finish line and doubling over, and then the screen cut to the anchor desk at ESPN’s SportsCenter.

  Carter Hayes, the Saturday coanchor, looked at his partner, Sheila Martel, and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she broke her foot crossing the finish line!”

  Martel stabbed her finger at her coanchor and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she missed third by eight one-hundredths of a second, and first by four-tenths of a second.”

  Hayes jabbed his own finger Martel’s way and said, “That girl ran so hard that if you subtract the conservative two seconds she lost in the fall, she would have won by one point six seconds and she would have been in the record books with the seventh-fastest time for the four-hundred among high school women. An amazing performance. Highlight of the day, no question.”

  Sheila Martel pointed at the camera and said, “Heal up, young Jannie Cross. We have a feeling we’ll be hearing from you again.”

  The screen cut away to the next story. We all cheered and clapped.

  “Seeing her run in person, I swear my heart almost stopped,” Nana Mama said. “But when they called out Jannie just then, it almost stopped again.”

  “Dad?” Ali said. “Is Jannie famous?”

  “Tonight, she is,” I said.

  ESPN? Highlight of the day? Jannie?

  “How the hell did ESPN know about the race?” Mahoney asked.

  Bree said, “Some freelance cameramen who sell to ESPN were there. They caught the whole thing.”

  My phone rang. It was Jannie, calling from somewhere with a lot of background noise.

  “Did you see it?” she shouted.

  “Of course we saw it. Where are you?”

  “At a party with Damon and his friends and some people I met at the meet. Everyone cheered for me, Dad.”

  “Everyone cheered here too,” I said, tearing up. “You deserved it.”