Jack & Jill Read online

  For that short period, he would be out in the open. Completely exposed. There was no way around it and, God knows, he had tried to figure out an alternative attack plan.

  He was about to attack a house in McLean. How incredible that seemed. This was like a war. A war fought at home. A revolutionary war.

  There were two other large Colonial-style houses that he could see from the light woods. No lights on yet; no one seemed to be up anywhere on Livingston Road. So far, his luck was holding okay. His luck, or his skill, or maybe a combination of both.

  As far as he could tell, no one was awake at 31 Livingston. He couldn’t be sure until he was inside the house itself, and then it would be too late to turn back.

  The FBI could be waiting in there or lurking right in these woods. Nothing would surprise him now. Anything could happen, at any time, to either him or Jill.

  He decided to walk out from the woods, looking calm, looking casual. As if he belonged. He didn’t make much noise as he gently raised the garage door. He quickly ducked under the partially open door and he was inside.

  He went straight to the Nutone security box and punched in the code. So much for high security in the suburbs. There was no effective protection, really. Not from people like him.

  He entered the main part of the house. His heart pounded like a battering ram inside his chest. There was a sheen of sweat on his neck now. He could picture Aiden’s face. He could see Aiden as if he were standing there beside him.

  Everything was peaceful and quiet and orderly inside the house. Fridge gently humming. Kids’ artwork and a school lunch menu attached to the door with magnets. That made his heart sink. Aiden’s kids.

  Aiden Junior was nine years old. Charise was six. The wife, Merrill, was thirty-four, fifteen years younger than her husband. It was her second marriage, his third. They’d seemed very much in love the last time he had seen them together.

  Jack moved quickly into the living room. He stopped breathing.

  Someone was in the living room!

  Jack whirled to the left. He yanked up his pistol and pointed it at the man. Jesus God, it was only a goddamn mirror! He was looking at his own image.

  He managed to catch his breath, then continued on his mission, his heart still thundering. He hurried through the living room. It was so familiar, lots of memories seeping into his consciousness. Painful thoughts. He pushed them aside.

  He began to climb up plush carpeted stairs, then stopped for a second. For the first time, he had doubts.

  There can’t be any doubts! Doubt and uncertainty weren’t allowed! Not in this. Not in Jack and Jill.

  He remembered the upstairs hallway, knew the house very well. He’d been here before—as a “friendly.”

  The master bedroom was the last door on the right.

  There would be weapons in the bedroom. A .357 in the drawer of the night table. An automatic taped under the bed.

  He knew. He knew. He knew everything.

  If Aiden had already heard him, everything would be over. The game would end right there. This would be it for Jack and Jill.

  Nutcruncher time. Weird thoughts. Too many of them.

  He had finally gone to see Pulp Fiction the night before. It hadn’t relaxed him, though he’d laughed out loud several times. Sick story; he was even sicker; America was sickest of all.

  Don’t think anymore, he warned himself. Just do this. Do it efficiently. Do it now! Do it fast! Get out!

  Jack kills American celebrities! Various and sundry bigshots. That’s what he does. Be Jack!

  But he wasn’t really Jack!

  He wasn’t really Sam Harrison!

  Don’t think, he commanded himself again as he hurried down the upstairs hallway to the master bedroom.

  Be Jack.

  Kill.

  CHAPTER

  57

  JACK—whoever the hell he was—was three or four steps from the master bedroom when its varnished wood door suddenly opened.

  A tall, balding man stepped out into the hall. Very hairy arms and legs. Bare, bony feet; toes splayed. Only half awake. In the middle of a jaw-cracking yawn.

  He had on blue plaid boxer shorts, nothing else. A good build, still athletic-looking; just a hint of a spare tire above the boxers’ elastic band. Still formidable after all the years of D.C. power lunches.

  General Aiden Cornwall!

  “You! You son of a bitch!” he whispered as he suddenly saw Jack in the upstairs hallway. “I knew it might be you.” Yes, Aiden Cornwall knew everything in an instant. He had solved the mystery; a lot of mysteries, actually. He understood Jack and Jill. Where it was going. And why it was going there: why it had to be this way. Why there could be no turning back.

  Jack fired the silenced Beretta twice and the target collapsed. Jack quickly stepped forward and caught the lifeless body before it could thud loudly against the floor.

  He held the body in his arms, lowering it slowly to the carpet. His friend, whatever that meant now. He stayed down on his knees for a long moment. His heart was exploding.

  He hadn’t realized how hard this one was going to be until now. Not until this instant.

  He looked down into the startled gray blue eyes of the former member of the Joint Chiefs, part of the White House’s Jack and Jill emergency task force.

  One of the hounds had been taken out. Just like that. Jack and Jill had struck back boldly at the manhunters! They had shown their strength again.

  He took a note from his pocket. He left a calling card on Aiden Cornwall’s chest.

  Jack and Jill came to The Hill

  To storm your picket fences.

  Once safe and sound

  They easily found

  The flaw in your Defenses.

  A noise in the hall! He looked up. Aiden’s boy! “Oh Jesus God, no,” he whispered out loud. “Oh, God, no.” He felt sick all over. He wanted to run from the house.

  The boy had recognized him. How could he not? Young Aiden even knew his children. He knew too much. Dear God, have mercy on me. Please have mercy.

  Jack fired the Beretta again.

  This was war.

  CHAPTER

  58

  I WAS CALLED to an emergency crisis team meeting at the White House at 8:00 A.M. on December 10. I had been causing some trouble over the past few days there. My internal investigation was making waves, ruffling feathers. The big cats on The Hill didn’t like being under suspicion—but all of them were, at least in my book.

  Jay Grayer grabbed me the moment I arrived inside the West Wing. Jay’s eyes were flat and cold and hard. His grip was strong on my shoulder. “Alex, I need to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “It’s important.”

  “What’s going on now?” I asked the Secret Service agent. He didn’t look well. There were dark puffs under both his eyes. Something else had happened. I could tell.

  “Aiden Cornwall was murdered early this morning. It happened at his house out in McLean. It was Jack and Jill. They called us again. Called it in to us like we’re mission control.” He shook his head in sadness and disbelief. “They killed Aiden’s nine-year-old son, Alex.”

  I found myself rocking back on my heels. The news from Jay Grayer didn’t make sense to me; it didn’t track with the Jack and Jill style to this point. Goddamn them! They kept changing the rules. They had to be doing it on purpose.

  “I want to go there right now,” I told him. “I need to see the house. I need to be out there, not here.”

  “I hear you, but wait a minute, Alex,” he said. “Hold on. Let me tell you the rest of what’s going on. It gets worse.”

  “How could it get any worse?” I asked him. “Jesus, Jay.”

  “Trust me, it does. Just listen for a minute.”

  Agent Grayer continued to talk in a subdued whisper in the White House hallway as we walked together toward the Emergency Command Center, where the others were gathering. He pulled me aside a few paces from the meeting room. His voice was still an urgent wh
isper.

  “The President is always awakened at quarter to five by the agent in charge. Happens every morning. This morning, the President dressed and went down to the library, where he reads the early papers as well as an executive summary that’s prepared for him before he rises.”

  “What happened this morning?” I asked Jay. I was beginning to perspire. “What happened, Jay?”

  He was very thorough and procedural. “At five o’clock the phone in the library rang. It was Jill on the private line. She was calling to talk with the President. She got through to him, and that just isn’t possible.”

  My head involuntarily shook back and forth. I agreed with Jay Grayer: this couldn’t be happening. The idea, the concept, of the President as a murder target was a hugely disturbing one. The fact that, so far, we were helpless to stop it was much, much worse.

  “I think I understand why the call couldn’t happen, but tell me anyway,” I said. I needed to hear it from him.

  “Every single call to the White House goes through a private switchboard. Then the call is monitored by a second operator in White House Communications, which is actually part of our Intelligence Division. Every call except this one. The call completely bypassed the control system. Nobody knows how the hell it happened. But it happened.”

  “This phone call that couldn’t have happened—was it recorded?” I asked Grayer.

  “Yes, of course it was. It’s already being processed at FBI headquarters and also at Bell Atlantic out in White Oak. Jill used another filtering device to modify her voice, but there might be ways to get around that. We’ve got half the Baby Bell’s high-tech lab on it.”

  I shook my head again. I’d heard it, but I couldn’t believe any of this. “What did Jill have to say?”

  “She began by identifying herself. She said, ‘Hi, this is Jill speaking.’ I’m sure that got the President’s attention better than his usual cup of joe in the morning. Then she said, ‘Mr. President, are you ready to die?’”

  CHAPTER

  59

  I NEEDED TO SEE the house. I needed to be inside the place where General Cornwall and his son had been murdered. I needed to feel everything about the killers, their modus operandi.

  I got my wish. I reached McLean before nine that morning. The December day was very gray and overcast. The Cornwall house looked surreal, stark and cold, as I approached and then entered through the front door. It was cold on the inside, too. Either the Cornwall family was denying that winter was coming or they were saving money on heat.

  The double murders had been committed on the second floor. General Aiden Cornwall and his nine-year-old son still lay on their backs in the upstairs hallway.

  It was a cold, calculated, very professional killing. The grisly murder scene looked like something from a casebook, maybe even one of my notebooks. It was forensic textbook stuff, almost too much so.

  FBI technicians and medical examiners were all over the house. There were probably twenty people inside.

  It began raining hard just after I arrived at the house. The cars and TV news trucks that came after me all had their headlights on. It was eerie as hell.

  Jeanne Sterling found me in the upstairs hallway. For the first time, the CIA inspector general seemed rattled. The severe, constant pressure was getting to all of us. Some people were after the President of the United States, and they were very good at this. They were extremely brutal as well.

  “What’s your gut reaction, Alex?” asked Jeanne.

  “My reaction won’t make any of our jobs easier,” I said. “The only truly sustaining pattern I’ve seen is that Jack and Jill really don’t have a pattern. Other than the notes, the poems. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any sexual angle to these two murders. Also, from what I understand, Aiden Cornwall was a conservative, not a liberal like the other victims. That’s a shift that might knock down a whole lot of theories about Jack and Jill.”

  As I was talking to Jeanne Sterling, I had another insight into the notes Jack and Jill had left. The poetry might be telling us something important. The FBI linguistic agents hadn’t found anything yet, but I didn’t care. Whoever was writing the rhymes, probably Jill, wanted us to know something…. Was there a definite order to what they were doing? The desire to create instead of destroy? The poetry had to mean something. I was almost sure of it.

  “How about on your end, Jeanne? Anything?”

  Jeanne shook her head and bit her lower lip with her big teeth. “Not a thing.”

  CHAPTER

  60

  IT HAD BEEN a very long day and it was still going strong and hard. At ten o’clock that night, I arrived at the FBI offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. My mind was running way too fast as I rode the elevator up to twelve. The lights in the building were blazing like tiny campfires above D.C. I figured that Jack and Jill had a lot of people staying up late that night. I was only one of them.

  I’d come to the FBI offices to listen to the phone message Jill had sent to the President early that morning. All the important evidence was being made available to me. I was being let inside. I was even being allowed to make waves inside the White House. I knew all about horrible multiple killers; most of the rest of the team hadn’t had that pleasure.

  No rules.

  I was brought by Security to an audio/electronics office on twelve. An NEC tape machine was waiting for me. A copy of Jill’s voice tape was already in. The tape machine was on. Running hot.

  “This is a dupe, Dr. Cross, but it’s close enough for your listening purposes,” I was told. An FBI techie, long hair and all, went on to inform me they were certain that the voice on the tape had been altered or filtered electronically. The FBI experts didn’t believe the caller could possibly be identified from the tape. Once again, Jack and Jill had carefully covered their trail.

  “I talked to a contact at Bell Labs,” I said. “He told me the same thing. Couple more experts confirm that and I’ll believe it.”

  The nonconformist-looking FBI technician finally left me alone with the taped phone call. I wanted it that way. For a while I just sat in the office and stared out at the Justice Department across Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Jill was right there with me.

  She had something about herself to reveal, something she needed to tell us. Her deep, dark secret.

  The tape had been cued up. Her voice startled me in the silent, lonely office.

  Jill spoke.

  “Good morning, Mr. President. It’s December ten. Exactly five A.M. Please don’t hang up on me. This is Jill. Yes, the Jill. I wanted to speak to you, to make this situation very personal for you. Are we okay so far?”

  “It’s way past ‘personal.’” President Byrnes spoke calmly to her. “Why are you murdering innocent people? Why do you want to kill me, Jill?”

  “Oh, there’s a very good reason, a fully satisfactory explanation for all our actions. Maybe we just like the power trip of frightening the so-called most powerful people in the world. Maybe we like sending you a message from all the little people you’ve frightened with your command decisions and almighty mandates from on high. At any rate, no one who’s been killed was innocent, Mr. President. They all deserved to die, for one reason or another.”

  Then Jill laughed. The sound of the electronically altered voice was almost childlike.

  I thought of Aiden Cornwall’s young son. Why did a nine-year-old boy deserve to die? At that moment, I hated Jill—whoever she was, whatever her motives.

  President Byrnes didn’t back down. The President’s voice was measured, calm. “Let me make one thing clear to you: you don’t frighten me. Maybe you ought to be afraid, Jill. You and Jack. We’re getting close to you now. There’s nowhere on earth you can hide. There isn’t one safe spot on the globe. Not anymore.”

  “We’ll certainly keep that in mind. Thanks so much for the warning. Very sporting of you. And you please keep this in mind—you’re a dead man, Mr. President. Your assassination is already a done deal.”


  That was the end of the tape. Jill’s final words to President Byrnes, spoken so coolly, so brazenly.

  Jill the morning deejay. Jill the poet. Who are you, Jill?

  Your assassination is already a done deal.

  I wanted to interview President Byrnes again. I wanted to talk with him right now. I needed him in this office, listening to the sick, threatening tape with me. Maybe the President knew things that he wasn’t telling any of us. Someone must.

  I played the frightening taped message several more times. I don’t know how long I sat in the FBI office, staring out over the becalmed lights of Washington, D.C. They were somewhere out there. Jack and Jill were out there. Possibly planning an assassination. But maybe not. Maybe that wasn’t it at all.

  You’re a dead man, Mr. President.

  Your assassination is already a done deal.

  Why were they warning us?

  Why warn us about what they planned to do?

  CHAPTER

  61

  IT WAS PAST TEN-THIRTY, but I still had one more important stop I wanted to make. I called Jay Grayer and told him I was on my way to the White House. I wanted to see President Byrnes again. Could he make it happen?

  “This can wait until the morning, Alex. It should wait.”

  “It shouldn’t wait, Jay. I’ve got a couple of theories that are burning a hole in my brain. I need the President’s input. If President Byrnes says that it waits until the morning, then it waits. But talk to Don Hamerman and whoever else needs to be talked to about it. This is a murder investigation. We’re trying to prevent murders. At any rate, I’m on my way over there.”

  I arrived at the White House, and Don Hamerman was waiting for me. So was John Fahey, the chief counsel, and James Dowd, the attorney general and a personal friend of President Byrnes. They all looked put out and also very tense. This apparently wasn’t how things were done in the Big House.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Hamerman confronted me angrily. I had been waiting to see what his bite was like. I’d seen worse, actually.