Kill Alex Cross ac-18 Read online

  “Very good. I’m impressed. Now, enough antics. You can relax,” he told them in a quiet voice that was also firm and reassuring.

  As they loaded their plates, Hala’s mind came back to the night before. “What about the others?” she asked. “Is everyone —”

  “Perfectly safe, thanks to you,” Uncle said.

  It seemed imprudent to complain about the mother bitch right now. “The assignment didn’t come off,” she said instead.

  “Yes, but not without some impact all the same,” he answered. “Two of their police officers are dead. That’s a powerful symbol to the Americans. They both hate and love their police. The authorities are terrified, mostly because they don’t know what to make of us. The kidnapping of the children has them baffled as well.” He paused for a moment, then went on. “Of course, we are responsible for that.”

  Tariq passed her a piece of bread, smiling with his eyes. He was obviously proud that The Family had already accomplished so much.

  Hala sipped her coffee. It was Arabic, and not entirely hot, but delicious. She wanted to ask more about the president’s children but thought it would be wise to let Uncle take the lead on that subject.

  “There will be other important assignments,” Uncle went on casually. “In fact, we’d like to reposition you. We’re prepared to do this now, the sooner the better. As you know so well, we are at war!”

  The words hung there in the air.

  “I’m sorry? Reposition?” Tariq asked.

  “Take charge of the next phase we have planned for the Americans. Part of it, anyway.” He took a large manila envelope from the pocket on the back of his chair and slid it across the table.

  “Go ahead,” he said, smiling as though it were a personal gift. “Take a look.”

  Tariq tilted the envelope to empty its contents — a disk in a thin jewel case, two American passports, a car key, and an engraved hotel folio with a room entry card inside.

  “There’s a list of our targets there,” Uncle said, indicating the disk. “We will assemble a team for you. Whatever you like, whatever you need.”

  Hala took it all in, searching her mind for an appropriate response. “Thank you, Uncle,” she said finally. “We’re honored.”

  “Don’t be.” For the first time, there was a scowl on the man’s face. “This is about The Family, not some American version of self-glorification.”

  Hala felt embarrassed. “Of course. I understand,” she said.

  Then the man’s face turned again. He grinned that grin of his, and winked as he took another bite of breakfast.

  “But I do think you’ll like the Four Seasons,” he said. “It is a very good hotel.”

  Book Three

  WAR!

  THE KIDNAPPER UNDERSTOOD everything there was to understand about the case, and definitely more than the Washington police, the plodding Secret Service, and the painstakingly ineffective FBI. He watched them as they continued to search for any hint of a clue or evidence misplaced on the campus of the Branaff School. They weren’t going to find anything, though. He was certain of that.

  Record.

  “I have been thinking, obsessing over these desperate measures for over two years, and actually planning it for fourteen months. I believe that I’ve covered my tracks, and the more I go over the details, the more confident I am that this will go down as one of the great unsolved cases in history.”

  A school bell rang just then — lunch!

  He slid the tape recorder into a trouser pocket and decided to stroll out onto the school campus, to parade among the still-nervous students and teachers, but also the cops who were there performing their tireless yet pointless interviews. Talk to me, just me, he couldn’t help thinking.

  As he strolled along, he noticed a tall MPD detective, a striking figure, an obviously confident man. He knew this one, had read about his becoming part of the investigation. This detective had a success record that was some cause for concern.

  The kidnapper didn’t turn the tape recorder back on now, though his finger played over its shape. Still, he was recording inside his head.

  Record.

  “One of the MPD detectives on the case solved a major kidnapping years ago. If I am as thorough as I believe I am, I have to admit that he’s a danger to everything I’ve done, to all that I have accomplished, to the entire plan and its rewards. I feel this everywhere in my body. He’s different from the others, just as I am different from my fellow man and woman. I think I know what I should do now, but can I do it? Can I kill Alex Cross? It’s the right thing to do.”

  JUST OFF THE Northwest corner of Sixth and P streets, a plain white van sat stationed at the curb. The aluminum ladder and PVC pipe on the roof rack masked an air vent, which in turn masked a six-millimeter lens taking live footage of the mosque across the street.

  FBI Agent Cheryl Kravetz was on periscope. She shifted the joystick control in her right hand, bringing the double front doors of Masjid Al-Qasim into focus, just as the early morning service began to let out.

  The sidewalk filled up quickly. There were more men than women by far, in everything from thobes and skullcaps to Abercrombie T-shirts and patent leather high-tops. But there were families, too, and a good number of couples. Kravetz was particularly interested in the couples.

  “Is it just me,” she asked, “or does this whole thing seem kind of —”

  “Open-ended?”

  Her partner, Howard Green, kept his eyes on the console in front of him, where a bank of five small screens and two large ones showed various surveillance images. One of the big screens had a shot of the intersection, patched in from a Department of Transportation camera on the stoplight just outside the van. The other showed what Kravetz was seeing.

  “I was going to say ‘racist,’” she went on.

  “Here we go again.”

  “I mean, seriously. We have no idea what we’re looking for here. ‘Suspicious Muslims?’” Kravetz took her hand off the controls to air-quote the last part. “I don’t even know which of these people are Saudi, or if that even matters.”

  “Nobody said ‘suspicious Muslims,’” Green countered.

  “They didn’t have to,” Kravetz said. “We all know what they want us to do. Scan the brown faces for a while, see what we see. Make sure everyone feels like we’re on the job.”

  “We are on the job,” Green said. “How do you think this works? You prefer to sit around and wait for more Americans to die? ’Cause you can bet your ass these bad guys aren’t going to sit on their heels.”

  “All right. Cool your jets. I’m just saying —”

  “Yeah, I got it the first couple times.”

  “— ACLU’s going to have their hands full before this thing is over. That’s all.”

  Agent Green reached down and took the last bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from the greasy McDonald’s bag at his feet. He knew he was better off not going there with Kravetz, especially this early in the day. The Bureau was spread thin, and their relief wouldn’t be coming for another ten hours. Maybe more.

  Then, as Green looked up again, something caught his attention. It was a well-dressed couple, coming out of the mosque at the back of the crowd. Nothing strange there — except they were both loaded down with luggage.

  “What’s with the suitcases?” he said. Kravetz took her eye off the periscope to see what Green meant. He put a finger up to the screen. “That couple, right there.”

  The woman had stopped to lower her hijab. The man, clean shaven with a Ravens cap on his head, took up the larger bag she’d just set down and handed her a briefcase to carry instead.

  “Maybe they came in on a red-eye,” Kravetz offered. “Went straight to services from the airport.”

  “Maybe,” Green said. “Stay with them.”

  He watched as Kravetz put the couple in the center of her frame. She pressed a thumb control on the joystick and zoomed in close enough to snap a still image of their faces just before they continued up
the sidewalk.

  “Nice work,” Green said.

  Kravetz was still watching the young Middle Eastern couple walk away.

  “Nice ass,” Green went on. “She’s kind of smoking hot, isn’t she?”

  “I’m sending this in,” Kravetz said dryly. But yes, the woman was definitely hot.

  With a few keystrokes, the image was on its way to IDENT. Both faces would be electronically logged and then scanned against an international database of known terrorists and persons of interest. Secret Service’s facial recognition system would pick it up, too.

  “See, this is exactly what I’m talking about,” Kravetz said. “Do you know how many random, innocent people are pouring into the system right now?”

  “There must be some kind of compelling intel on that mosque,” Green said. “They’ve got us on this corner for a reason.”

  “Yeah, us and a hundred other JTTF teams on a hundred other corners. This is a needle in a haystack. On a good day.”

  Agent Green took a bite of his sandwich and tried not to think about it. They had a long shift ahead, and they were already talking in circles. Even if Kravetz was right — and she probably was — there was no sense in admitting it now. He’d never hear the end of it.

  AFTER OUR EARLY morning meeting at CIA headquarters, Ned Mahoney and I were both detailed straight over to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, also in Langley. It’s housed in a secure building called Liberty Crossing, or LX1 for short.

  The command center was a cavernous space with the soft lighting of a movie theater. But the volume was more like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and the tension was sky high.

  Thousands of personnel had been dispatched to locations all over the city, and reps from every major agency had been assigned to this room, like me. Each area was marked with quickly made signs taped to the front of the desks — HOSTAGE AND RESCUE, MPD, CIA, MOBILE CTOC COMMUNICATIONS, and on it went.

  Beyond the rail yard incident itself, we had a whole new element to deal with this morning. As of five a.m., Homeland Security had raised the terror threat level for Washington’s mass transit system from orange to red. All subway service, bus routes, and commuter trains were suspended until further notice.

  This was only the second time any sector had gone red since they established the alert system after 9/11. There was no soft-selling it to the locals anymore.

  Reports were steadily coming in that people were starting to flee the city in noticeable numbers.

  The story had gone fully national, too. CNN was up on several screens around the room, covering the shootings and transit shutdown to the exclusion of everything else. They had a live helicopter shot of the rail yard, crawling with TV crews.

  You could see officers from the Explosive Ordnance Division in their bulky suits, climbing in and out of the subway cars, like something right out of The Hurt Locker. It was the kind of imagery news directors love, and law enforcement hates.

  I took my seat next to Javier Crist, an MPD sergeant who worked at LX1 full-time. He had the computer-assisted 911 dispatch up on one of the screens in front of him, monitoring the distress and emergency calls that were pouring in from everywhere. Our job was to gather information from the field, report it to the room, and send back a constant stream of leads for MPD to run down.

  “Welcome to Camp Hell” was all Crist got out before he had to take another call.

  That was the extent of my orientation. My own phone was already ringing.

  I slapped on a headset and got straight to work. This wasn’t what I had been hoping for, but at least it was something. I was on the inside now.

  BREE CROSS WAS reading in bed at two o’clock that afternoon when the doorbell started ringing. Not just once, but over and over and over.

  Something was wrong.

  And if it wasn’t, someone was going to get a piece of her mind once she got to the front door.

  She jumped up and dropped her book on the bed. The title was You and Your Stepkids. She was supposed to be getting some sleep before the night shift, but this was a chance to sneak in a few chapters while no one was looking, especially Alex, who would be sweet enough about the book but would be unable to stop at least one snorting laugh.

  “I’m coming!” Bree yelled from the stairs. The bell was still going. She could see two shadows on the other side of the front door’s frosted glass, one of them a good head taller than the other. Now what?

  When she flipped the dead bolt and threw open the door, Nana was standing there. Next to her was a man Bree had never seen before. The man had his arm around Nana’s middle, and she was holding a red-stained handkerchief up to her forehead. Her left knee was dripping with blood as well.

  “Oh my God! What happened?”

  “My key was in my purse,” Nana said — and her purse was nowhere in sight.

  “Some punk knocked her down,” the man said. He had bloodstains on the sleeve of his khaki jacket. “I didn’t get there in time to see anything. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you so much,” Nana said as he handed her off to Bree’s care. “A real gentleman. And you will absolutely be sending the cleaning bill to this address!”

  As soon as the man had gone, though, her face fell into a grimace. Bree eased her down onto the old caned chair in the hall for a better look. The cut on her forehead wasn’t deep, but the knee was badly abraded.

  “Goddamnit! Who would do something like this?” Bree said.

  “There’s no need for language. I’ll be fine,” Nana told her. “I’ll live.”

  “Sorry. Just … stay right there.”

  Bree raced to the bathroom for a first-aid kit and a couple of washcloths. She was silently fuming the whole time. Her head felt like it was burning up, and her chest, too.

  I’m going to kill someone. I swear to God, I’m going to commit murder today.

  Back out in the hall again, she put on a calm face. Then she knelt down and gently pushed Nana’s hair away to clean the wound.

  “What happened, Regina? Tell me.”

  “Well …” Nana took a deep breath. “I was walking back from the pharmacy up on Pennsylvania. It was across from United Methodist, right there in the middle of Seward Square. Maybe I should have gone around the long way, I don’t know —”

  Bree stopped with the washcloth in midair. “Don’t you dare blame yourself for this! Since when is Seward Square dangerous in the middle of the day?”

  “Since about fifteen minutes ago,” Nana said, half joking, but also on the verge of tears. She looked down at the bloodstained handkerchief in her hand. “Seventy years in this city, and I’ve never been mugged. Good Lord, I’m getting old.”

  It made Bree want to cry herself. This damn neighborhood, this city, what was it doing to people? She quietly finished up the first aid and walked Nana over to the living room couch to rest.

  Then just as quietly, she slipped back upstairs and took the Glock 19 out of the lockbox in her closet.

  When she came down, Nana was sitting and staring out the front window toward Fifth Street. An issue of O, the Oprah Magazine sat unopened on her lap.

  “I’m going to run out for a minute,” Bree told her. “You need anything right now?”

  Nana eyed her suspiciously. “Why? Where are you going?”

  “Just up the street. Now tell me what this asshole — excuse me, this mugger — looked like.”

  THE TEMPERATURE WAS high for September. In more ways than one. Sweat started dripping down Bree’s back before she’d gone a block. It was shades of running the 440 at UVA all over again — not quite a run, not quite a sprint. She wasn’t sure how much ground she’d have to cover.

  Or whose butt she was going to have to kick.

  At the south side of Seward Square, she stopped to catch a breath and look around. This was most likely a wild goose chase, but she was too pissed to just sit home and file a police report like somebody else might do. Somebody sane.

  And then —

 
; “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  There was the mugger, squatting in the shade of an old cherry tree in the middle of the square. Didn’t even have the sense to make herself scarce.

  This had to be her. Nana had been pretty specific — red Hollister hoodie, brown denim shorts to the knees, dirty white ball cap, and a pair of ridiculous-looking white plastic shades that were too big to be anything but stolen.

  Way to blend in, girlie.

  She looked all kinds of stupid, but the girl did know enough to leap up and bolt as soon as she saw Bree, who was clearly on a mission. She sprang away on a pair of long skinny legs, going straight up Pennsylvania in the direction of the Hill.

  She was quick, too. But she had probably never ran NCAA track, had she?

  Once Bree had her on a straightaway, it took less than half a block to close the gap to an arm’s reach. She nabbed the girl by the hood and practically yanked her off her feet as they came to a stop and near collision.

  The little thief didn’t weigh anything inside those baggy clothes. And her height was deceptive. Up close, she looked even younger than Jannie. She was maybe twelve years old, could be thirteen.

  “Get off me!” she screamed, scrambling to get away. “Help! Somebody call the damn po-lice!”

  Bree’s badge was already out and in the girl’s face. The Glock, she left in its holster.

  “I am the damn police, little girl. Now turn around! You knocked down the wrong grandmother.”

  She put the girl up against the wall of a corner Exxon and gave her the full treatment. There was nothing down her sides, nothing in the hoodie’s pouch when she squeezed it. But then she felt something in the front right pocket of the shorts.

  “Is that a credit card?”

  “Yeah,” the girl said over her shoulder. “My mama’s card, okay? We done here?”