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  But his father was a freak. He liked to see dead bodies, any kind—on a slab of pavement, inside a crashed car, being hauled out of a smoldering building. His crazy old man was the original Butcher of Sligo—and much, much worse. Of course, he was the Butcher now, one of the most feared and sought-after assassins in the world. He was the Man, wasn’t he? He could do whatever he wanted to, and that’s what he was up to now.

  Michael Sullivan was pulled out of his reverie by the sound of somebody talking into a mike at the hostage scene. He looked up, and it was the detective again—Alex Cross. It almost seemed like fate to him, like ghosts calling to the Butcher from the past.

  Chapter 26

  I FIGURED MY IDEA was a long shot, and definitely out of left field, but it was worth it if it could save some lives. Plus, nobody had come up with anything better.

  So at midnight we set up microphones behind a solid row of police cars and transport buses parked on the far side of Fifteenth. It looked impressive, if nothing else, and the TV cameras were all over it, of course.

  For the next hour, I led family members up to tell their stories into the mikes, to reason and plead with the men inside to put down their weapons and leave the building, or at the very least to let the lab workers out. The speakers stressed that it was hopeless not to surrender and that many of those inside would die if they didn’t. Some of the stories told at the mikes were heartbreaking, and I watched spectators tear up as they listened.

  The best of the moments were anecdotes—a Sunday soccer game a father was supposed to referee; a wedding less than a week away; a pregnant girl who was supposed to be on bed rest but who came to plead with her drug-runner boyfriend. Both of them were eighteen.

  Then we got an answer from inside.

  It came while a twelve-year-old girl was talking about her father, one of the dealers. Gunshots erupted in the building!

  The gunfire lasted for about five minutes, then stopped. We had no way of telling what had happened. We knew only one thing—the words of their loved ones had failed to move the men inside.

  No one had come out; no one had surrendered.

  “It’s all right, Alex.” Ned took me aside. “Maybe it bought us a little more time.” But that wasn’t the result either of us was looking for. Not even close.

  At one thirty, Captain Moran turned off the mikes outside. It looked like nobody was coming out. They had made their decision.

  A little after two o’clock, it was decided by the higher-ups that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team would go into the building first. They would be followed by a wave of DC police—but no one from SWAT. It was a tough-minded decision, but that’s the way it was these days in Washington—maybe because of the terrorist activity over the past few years. People didn’t seem to want to try to negotiate their way out of crisis situations anymore. I wasn’t sure what side of the argument I was on, but I understood both.

  Ned Mahoney and I would be part of the first assault team to go inside. We were assembled out on Fourteenth Street, directly behind the building under siege.

  Most of our guys were pacing, restless, talking among themselves, trying to stay focused.

  “This is a bad one,” Ned said. “SWAT guys know how we think. Probably even that we’re coming in tonight.”

  “You know any of them? The SWAT team inside?” I asked.

  Ned shook his head. “We don’t usually get invited to the same parties.”

  Chapter 27

  WE DRESSED UP in dark flight suits with full armor, and both Ned and I had MP5s. You could never predict too much about a night assault, but especially this one, with SWAT types on the inside and HRT as the force coming to get them.

  Ned got a message on his headset, and he turned to me. “Here we go, Alex. Keep your head down, buddy. These guys are as good as we are.”

  “You do the same.”

  But then the unexpected happened. And this time, it wasn’t such a bad thing.

  The front door to the building opened. For a few seconds, there was no activity at the door. What was going on in there?

  Then an elderly woman dressed in a lab smock wandered out into the bright lights aimed at the building. She held her hands up high and kept saying, “Don’t shoot me.”

  She was followed by more women in lab coats, young and old, as well as two boys who looked to be twelve or thirteen at the most.

  People behind the barricades were screaming out names. They were weeping for joy, clapping wildly.

  Then the front door slammed shut again.

  The exodus was over.

  Chapter 28

  THE RELEASE OF ELEVEN lab workers stopped the full Hostage Rescue Team assault and opened up communications again. The police commissioner and the chief of detectives appeared on the scene and talked with Captain Moran. So did a couple of ministers from the community. Late as it was, the TV crews were still here shooting film.

  At around three, we got word that we were going inside after all. Then there was another delay. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait.

  At half past, we got the go. We were told it was final.

  A few minutes past three thirty, Ned Mahoney and I were up and racing toward a side entrance into the building; so were a dozen other guys from HRT. The good thing about protective gear is that it might stop a fatal or damaging bullet; the bad thing is that it slows you down, makes it harder to run as fast as you need or want to, and forces your breath to come in gulps and gasps.

  Snipers were taking out windows, trying to keep resistance from inside as low as possible.

  Mahoney liked to call this drill “five minutes of panic and thrills,” but I always dreaded it. To me, it was more like “five minutes closer to heaven or hell.” I didn’t need to be here, but Ned and I had done a couple of assaults together and I couldn’t stay away.

  A booming, earsplitting explosion took out the back door.

  Suddenly, there were swirling clouds of black smoke and debris everywhere; then we were both running through it. I was hoping not to catch a bullet to the head or some other exposed body part in the next couple of minutes. I was hoping nobody had to die tonight.

  Ned and I took fire right away, and we couldn’t even tell who the hell was shooting at us. Drug dealers or the SWAT guys. Maybe both.

  The sound of submachine guns and then grenades was deafening in the hallways and as we inched up a set of winding stairs. There was a whole lot of firepower inside the building now, maybe too much for it to hold together. The noise level made it hard to think straight or keep any focus.

  “Hey! Assholes!” I heard somebody shout from above us. A volley of gunshots followed. Flashes of blinding light in the darkness.

  Then Ned grunted and went down hard on the stairway.

  I couldn’t tell where he was hit at first; then I saw a wound near his collarbone. I didn’t know if he’d been shot or struck with flying debris. There was a lot of blood spilling from the wound though.

  I stayed right there with him, called for help on the radio. I heard more blasts, shouts, male and female screams coming from above us. Chaos.

  Ned’s hands were shaking, and I hadn’t seen him show fear of anything before. The firefight raging in the building only added to the terror and confusion. Ned’s face had lost its color; he didn’t look good.

  “They’re coming for you,” I told him. “Stay with me, Ned. You hear me?”

  “Stupid,” he finally said, groaning. “Walked right into it.”

  “You feeling it yet?”

  “Could be worse. Could be better too. By the way,” he said, “you’re hit too.”

  Chapter 29

  “I’LL LIVE,” I told Ned as I huddled over him on the stairwell.

  “Yeah, me too. Probably, anyway.”

  A couple of minutes later, the paramedics were with us in the cramped space. By the time they got Ned out of there, the gunfight seemed to be over. Just like he always said—five minutes of panic and thrills.

  Reports sta
rted to come in. Captain Tim Moran gave the latest to me himself. The assault on the heroin factory seemed to have had mixed results. Most of us felt we shouldn’t have gone in so soon—but it wasn’t our decision. Two metro officers and two from HRT were wounded on our side. Ned was headed into surgery.

  There were six casualties among those inside the building, including two men from SWAT. A seventeen-year-old mother of two was one of the dead. For some reason she’d stayed inside when the lab workers came out. The girl’s husband had died too. He was sixteen.

  I finally got home at a little past six in the morning. I was dragging, wasted, bone tired, and something about coming in so late, or early, seemed surreal.

  It only got worse. Nana was up waiting in the kitchen.

  Chapter 30

  SHE WAS SITTING OVER toast and a cup of tea, looking infirm, but I knew better.

  The hot beverage was steaming, and so was she. She hadn’t gotten the kids up yet. Her small TV was tuned to the local news reports on last night’s police action at Kentucky and Fifteenth. It felt unreal to see the footage right here in our kitchen.

  Nana’s eyes fixed on the scrape on the side of my forehead—the bandage there.

  “It’s a scratch,” I said. “Not a big deal. It’s all good. I’m fine.”

  “Don’t give me that ridiculous nonsense answer, Alex. Don’t you dare condescend to me like I’m somebody’s fool. I’m looking at the line of trajectory taken by a bullet that came an inch from splattering your brains and leaving your three poor children orphans. No mother, no father. Am I wrong about that? No, of course not!

  “I am so sick of this though, Alex. I have been living with this sort of terrible dread every single day for over ten years. This time I’ve had it. Up to here. I’ve truly had enough. I’m done with it. I’m through! I quit! Yes, you heard me correctly. I quit you and the children! I quit!”

  I put up both my hands in defense. “Nana, I was out with the kids when I got an emergency call. I had no idea the call was coming. How could I? There was nothing I could do to stop what happened.”

  “You accepted the call, Alex. Then you accepted the assignment. You always do. You call it dedication, duty. I call it total insanity, madness.”

  “I. Didn’t. Have. An. Option.”

  “You do have an option, Alex. That’s my whole point. You could have said no, that you were out with your kids. What do you think they would do, Alex—fire you for having a life? For being a father? And if by some accident of good fortune they did fire you, then so be it.”

  “I don’t know what they could do, Nana. Eventually I suppose they would fire me.”

  “And is that such a bad thing? Is it? Oh, forget it!” she said, and banged her mug down hard against the tabletop. “I’m leaving!” she said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, this is ridiculous, Nana. I’m totally exhausted. I was shot. Almost shot. We’ll talk about it later. I need to sleep right now.”

  Suddenly Nana stood up, and she moved in my direction. Her face was wild with outrage, her eyes tiny black beads. I hadn’t seen her like this in years, maybe not since I was growing up, and a little on the wild side myself.

  “Ridiculous? You call this ridiculous? How dare you say that to me.”

  Nana struck me in the chest with the heels of both her hands. The blows didn’t hurt, but their intent did, the truth of her words did. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  “Get yourself a housekeeper, a nanny, whatever you can get for yourself. You’re exhausted? I’m exhausted. I’m fed up and exhausted and sick to death of worrying about you!”

  “Nana, I’m sorry. What else do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing, Alex. Don’t say anything. I’m tired of listening to you anyway.”

  She stomped off to her room without another word. Well, at least that was over, I thought as I sat down at the kitchen table, tired and depressed as hell now.

  But it wasn’t over.

  Minutes later, Nana reappeared in the kitchen, and she was lugging an ancient leather suitcase and a smaller traveling bag on wheels. She walked past me, through the dining room, and then right out the front door without another peep.

  “Nana!” I called, struggling up from my seat, then starting to jog after her. “Stop. Please, stop and talk to me. Let’s talk.”

  “I’m through talking!”

  I got to the door and saw a dented and gashed pale-blue DC Cab throwing off exhaust fumes and plumes of smoke out front on the street. One of her many cousins, Abraham, drove for DC Cabs. I could see the back of his retro Afro from the porch.

  Nana climbed into the ugly blue taxi, and it immediately sputtered away from the house.

  Then I heard a small voice. “Where’s Nana going?”

  I turned and lifted Ali, who had snuck around behind me on the porch. “I don’t know, little man. I think she just quit on us.”

  He looked aghast. “Nana quit our family?”

  Chapter 31

  MICHAEL SULLIVAN WOKE with an awful shudder and a start and knew immediately he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. He’d been dreaming about his father again, the scary bastard, the boogeyman of all his nightmares.

  When he was a little kid, the old man had brought him to work at his butcher shop two or three times a week in the summer. This went on from the time he was six until he was eleven, when it ended. The shop took up the ground floor of a two-story redbrick building on Quentin Road and East Thirty-sixth Street. KEVIN SULLIVAN, BUTCHER was known for having the best meats in all of the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, but also for his skill in catering not just to the Irish but to Italian and German tastes.

  The sawdust on the floor was always thick and swept clean every day. The glass in the windows of the cases sparkled. And Kevin Sullivan had a trademark—after he presented a customer’s meat for inspection, he smiled, and then took a polite bow. His little bow got them every time.

  Michael, his mother, and his three brothers knew another side of his father though. Kevin Sullivan had massive arms and the most powerful hands imaginable, especially in the eyes of a young boy. One time he caught a rat in the kitchen and crushed the vermin in his bare hands. He told his sons he could do the same thing to them, crush their bones to sawdust, and their mother seldom went a week without a purplish bruise appearing somewhere on her frail, thin body.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, and it wasn’t what had woken Sullivan that night and so many other times during his life. The real horror story had begun when he was six and they were cleaning up after closing one evening. His father called him into the shop’s small office, which held a desk, a file cabinet, and a cot. Kevin Sullivan was sitting on the cot, and he told Michael to sit next to him. “Right here, boy. By my side.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Michael said immediately, knowing this had to be about some dumb mistake he’d made during his chores. “I’ll make up for it. I’ll do it right.”

  “Just sit!” said his father. “You have plenty to be sorry for, but that’s not it. Now you listen. You listen to me good.”

  His father put his hand on the boy’s knee. “You know how badly I can hurt you, Michael,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  “And I will,” his father continued, “if you tell a single living soul.”

  Tell them what? Michael wanted to ask, but he knew better than to say a word, to interrupt his father once he had begun to speak.

  “Not a solitary soul.” His father squeezed his son’s leg until tears formed in Michael’s eyes.

  And then his father leaned forward and kissed the boy on the mouth, and did other things that no father should ever do to his son.

  Chapter 32

  HIS FATHER HAD BEEN DEAD for a long time now, but the creepy bastard was never far enough away from Sullivan’s thoughts, and in fact, he had devised unusual ways to “escape” from his childhood demons.

  Around four the next afternoon he w
ent shopping at Tysons Galleria in McLean, Virginia. He was looking for something very special: just the right girl. He wanted to play a game called Red Light, Green Light.

  During the next half hour at the Galleria, he approached a few possible game players outside Saks Fifth Avenue, then Neiman Marcus, then Lillie Rubin.

  His pitch was straightforward and didn’t vary. Big smile, then: “Hi. My name is Jeff Carter. Could I ask you a couple of questions? You mind? I’ll be quick, I promise.”

  The fifth or sixth woman he approached had a very pretty, innocent face—a Madonna’s face?—and she listened to what he had to say. Four of the women he’d hit on before her were pleasant enough. One was even flirty, but they all had walked away. He had no problem with that. He liked bright people, and the women were just being cautious about the pickup game. What was the old saying? Don’t pick that up, you have no way of knowing where it’s been.

  “Well, not exactly questions,” he went on with his sales pitch to the Madonna of the Galleria. “Let me put it another way. If I say anything that bothers you, I’ll stop and walk away. That sound fair enough? Like Red Light, Green Light.”

  “That’s a little weird,” said the dark-haired girl. She had a truly gorgeous face and a nice body from what he could tell. Her voice was somewhat monotone—but hey, nobody’s perfect. Other than maybe himself.

  “But it’s harmless,” he went on. “I like your boots, by the way.”

  “Thanks. It doesn’t bother me to hear that you like them. I like ’em too.”

  “You have a nice smile too. You know that you do, right? Sure you do.”

  “Careful now. Don’t lay it on too thick.”

  They both laughed, hitting it off okay, Sullivan was thinking to himself. The game was on anyway. He just had to avoid getting a red light.

  “Okay if I go on?” he asked. Always ask their permission. That was a rule he had whenever he played. Always be polite.