Target: Alex Cross Read online

“There’s a wine-colored car back there at that exit north of Storck,” I said, and I swiped Ned’s iPad with my finger until I could see the parking lot and the buildings and the name of the property owner.

  “If he’s wounded, he’s in there!” I said. “It’s an animal hospital!”

  “That is where the second call came from,” Rawlins said over our headsets. “Kerry Large Animal Hospital.”

  Less than two minutes later, we circled high and well wide of the Kerry Animal Hospital. The tan van was gone, but the burgundy Toyota Camry was still there. We got an angle and binoculars on the license plate. It was the missing security guard’s car.

  “Land right in the parking lot,” Mahoney said.

  “We lose the surprise factor,” one of the SWAT agents said.

  I said, “There was a tan panel van here when we flew by. I saw it. We need to know who or what’s in it.”

  Mahoney said into his mike, “Cap, can you call Virginia State Police or the local sheriff? Get them to cordon off this area and look for a tan panel van? Don’t have a license plate.”

  “Done,” Carstensen said.

  The SWAT team went first, storming the veterinary hospital from all four sides.

  They threw flash-bang grenades the second they were all in position and then went in.

  Thirty seconds after they entered, our radios crackled with urgency.

  “We’ve got two alive,” the SWAT team leader barked. “Goldberg and the vet. Rest of the place is clear.”

  The pilot began to speak, but I cut him off.

  “Get us back in the air!” I shouted. “We’ve got to find that van!”

  CHAPTER

  89

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING , Kristina Varjan was traveling north on County Road 610 in a black Audi Q5. She lowered the driver-side window and picked up a black Glock pistol with an after-market sound suppressor.

  There was forest on both sides of the lightly traveled road. She waited until she could see a long empty stretch in the other lane before sliding the pistol out the window, resting the barrel on the side mirror, and stomping on the gas. The Audi roared and closed the gap between it and the tan van ahead of her in seconds.

  Varjan knew she had one good chance of this working. If she missed the opportunity, the equation changed, tilted against her.

  She drove up behind the van and weaved slightly right, toward the shoulder of the road, giving her a good look at the van’s rear tires. Varjan shot them both out with hollow-point bullets.

  She slammed on her brakes. The van swerved hard into the other lane, tires smoking as they disintegrated. The van’s back end swung around almost a hundred and eighty degrees.

  Varjan saw the horrified look on the driver’s face before the van careered sideways off the far shoulder. It had smashed and rolled over twice before she brought the Audi to a screeching stop. The assassin jumped from her car and sprinted across the narrow road and down the short embankment.

  There was tire smoke in the air, but no smell of spilling gas, so she went straight to the van, which had landed more or less upright. The roof and side door were partially caved in. Blood dripped down the driver’s face as he lifted his head to look at her.

  “Help,” he said.

  She shot him between the eyes.

  Varjan moved down the side of the van and around the back, seeing one door shut and the other almost torn off. Gun up, she looked inside and saw the ruins of a full ambulance setup. A woman was sprawled on the floor by an overturned gurney. She was bleeding and struggling to move. Varjan shot her through the top of her head before checking behind the closed door.

  No one.

  She heard a soft thump and a twig snapping. She jerked back, then took two cautious steps toward the opposite side of the van, where the sounds had come from. When she took a quick peek, she saw nothing but burned brush and the edge of the woods.

  She pivoted back the other way, but it was too late.

  Quiet as a leopard, Cruz had slipped up behind her, and now he stuck the muzzle of his pistol against her forehead.

  “You didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you, Varjan?”

  CHAPTER

  90

  ROUTE 17, SOUTHEAST toward the town of Brera and I-95, was my best guess of where the president’s assassin was headed. Mahoney thought so too.

  But when we lifted off, we immediately saw a plume of black smoke rising above the forest canopy not far to the northeast. Give credit to Ned’s instincts. He told the pilot to check it out before we went all the way to the interstate.

  We flew over a lumberyard and a farm toward a big chunk of forest. Within it, the black smoke had quickly become flames that fully engulfed the van, and now the fire was dying down.

  “Get us on the pavement,” Mahoney said.

  As we swung around to land, I punched in 911 and was surprised to be almost instantly connected to a dispatcher for Stafford County emergency services. After identifying myself, I reported the fire and asked that the Storck road be closed in both directions.

  We touched down north of the van. The flames coming from it were all but done, leaving the smoking, scorched shell. Tendrils of fire were consuming leaves and pine needles but not spreading widely or rapidly; they were hampered by the recent wet conditions.

  I went toward the burning vehicle, stopped at a safe distance, and used the pocket binoculars I always carry to study it.

  “Body in the front seat,” I said.

  Mahoney had already gone down the bank, and was looking at the van from behind through his own binoculars. “And a second in the back here.”

  We heard the first sirens in the distance. I knew the fire trucks would want to get close, and there’d be hoses, and water, and boots.

  While Mahoney called for an FBI forensics team, I lowered my binoculars and got out my cell phone. I walked past the van and started taking pictures of the scene, especially the skid marks that told a story in reverse from the tire tracks in the softer soil on the shoulder where it left the road to the beginning of the skids a good eighty yards beyond.

  Right away I saw that there could be two vehicles involved, the van and another one that had come to a stop almost parallel to the wreck. Was this second set of marks from before?

  If the marks had ended anywhere but in front of the van, I might have discounted them. But they did stop by the van, so I went on the assumption that they were new.

  Had someone seen the accident, stopped, saw the van was on fire, and left? Who? And why hadn’t that person called it in?

  I looked beyond the start of the van’s skid, no more than forty feet, and saw what seemed at first to be a piece of tire rubber. I walked to it and realized that it was actually a shard of pavement about three inches long and the shape and thickness of my pinkie.

  I saw the gouge in the road where the little finger had come from, and then behind that and to the left, I saw another gouge and two pieces of asphalt. As I photographed it all, I heard the sirens closing on our position from two directions. I looked north and saw the flashing red lights of a fire truck, followed by the lights of an ambulance.

  I ran toward the smoking wreckage of the van. Mahoney had come back up the bank onto the road and was talking to Susan Carstensen on the radio.

  The van was no longer burning, just belching caustic smoke.

  “Anything?” Mahoney called to me.

  “Don’t let them spray down the van. I want a closer look at it just as it is,” I said. “And let’s keep them away from those skid marks until forensics gets here.”

  Ned nodded and turned to meet the firemen. I scrambled down into the ditch and got much closer to the van.

  The metal was still throwing enough heat that I had to stop a good fifteen feet away. After shooting a video and stills of the scene from that perspective, I used the binoculars again to study the corpse in the front seat.

  The jaw was frozen open, not unusual for a burn victim. Though the face was charred beyond recog
nition, I could make out big fissures in the skin where it had split in the heat, several on what was left of his cheeks, and another that started between the eye sockets and ran up onto the forehead.

  Something about that one looked strange, but I couldn’t tell why. I shifted the binoculars lower and adjusted the focus so I could peer at the ground between myself and the van.

  The forest floor was a tangle of old leaves, dormant vines, and thorny stalks that were charred close to the vehicle. Behind me, up on the road, I could hear the firemen calling out to one another.

  Two of them looped around me and the van with axes and shovels, heading toward the trees. More firemen maneuvered a hose across the ditch and sprayed down the struggling blaze in the woods.

  I kept moving around the van, fifteen feet back, peering at the ground through the glasses. I’d taken six or seven steps counterclockwise before I spotted something that made me lower the binoculars.

  I couldn’t make it out with the naked eye, so I looked again with the glasses and figured out exactly what it was. Holding my arm up to protect my face from the heat, I hurried to within six feet, squatted, and pushed aside a singed leaf that half covered a nine-millimeter shell casing.

  Of course, it was a rural area. The brass could have been there from something unrelated, but I didn’t think so. Leaving it in place, I went around the smashed front end of the van to look in at the corpse from the passenger side.

  At a glance, I was positive. After walking to the rear of the van and peering inside with the binoculars, I was dead certain.

  “What are you seeing?” Mahoney called from the road.

  I went around and climbed up to him. “This wasn’t an accident, Ned. And neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin.”

  “Okay?”

  I gestured south. “There are gouges in the pavement over there that I think were made by bullets, two of them. Someone very good shot out the tires, which sent the van into this curving skid and off the road. The shooter skidded to a stop right there, climbed out, went into the ditch, and shot those two.”

  After that I described the position of the spent shell casing, the weird fissure between the driver’s eye sockets, and the hole the size of a fist in the back of his skull.

  “The corpse in the rear has a head wound too,” I said.

  Mahoney looked beyond frustrated. “But how do you know neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin?”

  “The one in the rear’s too small in stature to match Bree’s description of him,” I said. “I’m guessing a woman. And the driver had all his teeth. The president’s killer had knocked out or broken several. Remember?”

  “Now that you reminded me. But I’m still confused. Did Hobbs’s assassin go off with this shooter of his own free will? Or was he forced out of here?”

  “One or the other. Unless he took off into the woods. We should check, but I don’t think so.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Ned said, furious. “Now we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. We had him, Alex. We had him, and we let him slip away again!”

  Part Five

  STOP ME, PLEASE

  CHAPTER

  91

  ON SUNDAY, AS the sun was setting, Pablo Cruz plunged a thick knitting needle that he held with vise grips into the flames of a gas stove burner. He watched the metal tip turn a glowing red.

  Cruz had given Kristina Varjan no chance to try to overpower him once they were in her car. He’d disarmed her right away. Then, at every stoplight or stop sign, he’d pressed the muzzle of her Glock into her side and given her directions that took them across one arm of the Chesapeake Bay and onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

  According to the satellite radio, they’d gotten across the bridge just in time. News reports said the president’s assassin had been hiding in a veterinary hospital west of there and had managed to elude federal agents once again.

  Cruz smiled. He liked elusion. He took pride in staying ahead of the dogs. It was an art form, as far as he was concerned, and he was the master of it.

  Like his choice of safe house. He’d spotted the shuttered beach cottage from the road and had Varjan park the car behind an outbuilding. After looking for signs of an alarm system and finding none, he had her crowbar the back door open.

  Cruz turned from the stove in the cottage’s kitchen with the glowing knitting needle before him and looked at Varjan, who was tied to a chair and eyeing him like she wanted to rip his throat out.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” Cruz said. “Who hired you to kill me?”

  She sneered. “I’m going to tell you again: I don’t know. He calls himself Piotr.”

  “A Russian?”

  “Who knows.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Cruz said, bringing the still-glowing knitting needle by her cheek. “There is more you are not telling me.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  Cruz dropped the nose of the needle to her collar and pushed it aside. Fabric burned before he touched her skin, right above the carotid artery. Her skin sizzled, and she shrank back, gritting her teeth.

  He said, “A second or two longer and you’d be bleeding out, Varjan.”

  Her pained expression returned to a snarl. “How do you know my name?”

  “I make it my business to know my competitors,” Cruz said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Me? I am nobody, nowhere, in no time.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Cruz did not answer. He returned to the rustic kitchen and put the knitting needle back in the flame, saying, “I have nowhere to go, Varjan. I have nothing to do, and so I will do this until you tell me what I want to know.”

  She said nothing, but watched him sidelong.

  A few moments later, he came at her again. Varjan raised her head in contempt.

  He stopped, laughed. “You don’t think you’re going to somehow reverse this situation and kill me, do you? Who hired you?”

  Varjan did not reply and would not look at the red-hot knitting needle that he brought toward her neck again.

  Cruz stopped the tip less than an inch away from her skin so she could sense the heat. Then he poked it through her shirt and bra into the side of her breast.

  She screamed and cursed at him in Hungarian. He went back to the stove, saying, “Even if you could have somehow managed to kill me, Piotr wouldn’t have paid you. My payment request upon completion of task? Delayed, which is as good as denied in my book. Think about that. If I’m expendable, you are too.”

  Varjan stayed mute, but something changed in her carriage. She’d relaxed slightly, a small reaction, but he’d gotten her attention.

  “Think about it,” he said, watching the needle tip begin to glow again. “They’re stiffing me and trying to kill me. What do you think they’ll do to you? Pay? No way. You will be expendable, and dealt with appropriately. In our profession, to believe otherwise would be … well, stupid. And I know you’re not that.”

  Varjan tried to remain contemptuous. He touched the needle to the collar of her shirt again, let the singed smell reach her nose.

  “Where will it go next?” he asked, and he glanced down the front of her body.

  After a pause, he gazed into her eyes. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another choice here.”

  She twitched, and he knew he had her properly leveraged.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Cruz took a step back, set the knitting needle down. “I propose we join forces, find out who is behind this plot, and go get our money. Does that work? Or do I continue to knit?”

  Varjan glanced at the needle, then at the floor, then up at him.

  “We don’t need to find out who’s behind the plot,” she said evenly. “I already know. I laid a trap and caught them in it right from the start. They haven’t got a clue.”

  CHAPTER

  92

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

  DANA POTTER PACED in
the hallway outside his son’s hospital room. Every two minutes, Potter thumbed Redial on his phone. SpoofCard, an app that disguised a caller’s number, took over and placed the call.

  He heard ringing somewhere in St. Petersburg, Russia, but he got no answer and no voice telling him to leave a message. Hanging up, Potter wanted to hurl his phone against the wall, see it shatter into a million pieces.

  But anger was useless, he told himself. Anger said you were out of control and feeling like you were cornered.

  I am cornered, Potter thought. They’ve got all of us cornered.

  Fighting against that idea, willing himself to be brave, Potter entered the hospital room and tried not to weep at the sight of his son wasting away in bed. Jesse’s eyes were closed, and Potter thought once again how much his boy resembled a baby bird fallen from its nest, all skin and sinew.

  He looked to his wife, who sat by Jesse’s bed. She gave him a questioning raise of her eyebrow. Shaking his head, he wondered if God had inflicted this punishment on the poor innocent boy as payback for his father’s sins.

  Jesse had been born just fine, ten fingers, ten toes, a healthy cry when the midwife delivered him. And he’d thrived through the age of five.

  Then he started falling a lot for no apparent reason. Soon after, he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Duchenne, the deadliest form of muscular dystrophy, caused muscles to waste away. Boys around five or six were the most likely group to develop the disorder, and those boys usually died in their early twenties.

  If we had until his early twenties, we could beat this thing, Potter thought bitterly. But here’s my Jesse dying at fifteen, and there’s hope, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

  Potter cursed himself for a tactical error. He should have insisted on more of a payment up-front, enough to hire a private jet to fly his son to Panama and pay a doctor millions to administer a radical, controversial, and illegal stem-cell treatment that some said could stop the muscle wasting in its tracks. Even give Jesse back his strength.