Cross Fire ак-17

by James Patterson

  FIRST THINGS FIRST, he unlocked the basement door and let himself down the narrow stairs to the cinder-block-walled workshop underneath the house. It wasn’t exactly his father’s old walnut-paneled den, with the twelve-foot fireplace and rolling ladders, but it did the trick and would work just as well. A big bulkhead door at the back had allowed him to bring down a new chest freezer the other day, and he went to it now.

  Agent Patel was sleeping peacefully inside. She still looked basically like herself, but she’d grown quite stiff, which seemed fitting. The girl had been pretty much the same way when she was alive.

  “Ready for a change of scenery, my dear?”

  He lifted her out and laid her on a sheet of four-millimeter painter’s plastic to loosen up while he went about his other business. It reminded him of his not so dear but very much departed mother, Miriam – the way she used to leave a frozen tray of pork chops or a flank steak on the counter in the morning so it would be ready to cook up for dinner that night. He couldn’t say the old girl never taught him anything useful.

  Next, he tackled the walls. Dozens of new photos were taped up alongside the old, the result of several mind-numbing days of additional surveillance on Cross’s movements. Not the most stimulating part of the process so far, but it had certainly paid off.

  Here were Alex Cross and John Sampson, working the scene of that wonderfully twisted new case in Franklin Square.

  And there was Alex with his son Ali, and the mother, Christine, who seemed to have brought quite a bit of Sturm und Drang of her own to the table.

  It all came down now – every picture, every map, every clipping he’d collected since coming to Washington. None of it was necessary anymore. He’d committed it all to memory. And besides – now was the time to get the details out of his head and really start to fly!

  Once upon a time, Kyle knew, he would have wanted – no, needed – to have this thing mapped out down to the finest details. But that wasn’t true anymore. Now his options just hung there in the air, like so many pieces of fruit waiting to be picked.

  Maybe the final narrative went something like this: Alex wakes up on the bathroom floor, the knife still in his hand. He gets up, disoriented, and stumbles into the bedroom to find Bree gutted in their bed. When he runs to check on the children, it’s more of the same. The grandmother, too. Alex can’t remember a thing, not even how he got home that night. Flash forward a year or two, and he’s learning all about the unique hell that is maximum-security lockup, festering in his own innocence while the walls close in around him a little more every day.

  Or – maybe not.

  Maybe he’d take Alex out definitively, once and for all. Good old-fashioned torture and murder, not to mention getting to actually watch Cross die, had considerable appeal, too.

  In the meantime, there was no specific hurry to decide the final option. His only job for now was to breathe Max Siegel’s air, stay open to the possibilities, and focus on whatever was right in front of him.

  And, at the present moment, that was Agent Patel.

  When he went back to check on her, she was just starting to soften up around the edges. All well and good. By the time she started putting up any kind of smell, he’d be rid of her.

  “Fun while it lasted, roomie,” he said, and leaned down to give her a chaste good-bye kiss on the lips. Then he rolled his departing guest into a standard white body bag and zipped her up for transport.

  Chapter 67

  ANOTHER EARLY MORNING, and another phone call from Sampson. This time, I wasn’t even out of bed. “Listen, sugar, I know you had a hell of a night out on the parkway, but I thought you’d want to know. We just got another body in this numbers case.”

  “Great timing,” I said, still flat on my back with Bree’s arm slung over my chest.

  “I guess nobody’s getting my memos about that. Listen, I can cover this if you need to take a pass.”

  “Where are you?” I asked him.

  “The bus terminal behind Union Station. Seriously, though, you sound like the bad half of a hangover, Alex. Why don’t you stay put, and forget I called?”

  “No,” I said. Every part of me wanted to stay attached to that mattress, but you get only one first shot at a crime scene. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Bree grabbed at my arm as I sat up and swung my feet to the floor.

  “God, Alex, this is, like, the definition of ‘early.’ What’s going on now?”

  “Sorry to wake you,” I said, and leaned back far enough to kiss her good morning. “You know, I can’t wait to marry you, by the way.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s that going to change any of this?”

  “It won’t,” I said. “I just can’t wait.”

  She smiled, and even in the semidark it was a beautiful thing to see. No woman I’ve ever known can look as good as she does in the morning. Or as sexy. I had to get up again fast before I started something I couldn’t finish.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” she asked, a little groggy but up on one elbow now.

  “Thanks, no. I’ve got this. But if you could get the kids to school–”

  “Done. Anything else?”

  “A couple of quick, unspeakable acts before I leave?”

  “Rain check,” she said. “Sampson’s waiting. Now go – before we both do something we won’t regret.”

  I was gone a few minutes later, and had to wave off the security detail in the backyard when they saw me launch out the door. It had been only a few hours since I’d come dragging past them, moving in the opposite direction.

  “Hey, guys. Regina’s just getting up,” I said. “Coffee’ll be out for you soon.”

  “And biscuits?” asked one of them.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said, and laughed.

  This was getting out of hand, though. I knew about crazy hours as well as the next guy, but leaving the house before Nana Mama even gets her kitchen up and running for the day? That is the definition of “early.”

  Chapter 68

  ALL OF THE EARLY-MORNING buses were lined up on the street outside Union Station when I got there.

  Sampson had already shut down the rear terminal, and there were traffic cops in orange vests everywhere, pointing people to where they needed to go. One more colossal headache, but at least it wasn’t mine.

  I pulled around back and walked up from street level to the cavernous main deck of the parking garage. Sampson was waiting for me with a large coffee in each hand.

  “I’m hating this one, sugar. Hating it real bad,” he said, handing over my morning fuel.

  We walked toward the back, where I could see a row of big brown Dumpsters against the wall on the H Street side. Only one of them was sitting open.

  “Nude this time,” Sampson said. “And the numbers are all down her back. You’ll see. Also, it looks like she was stabbed instead of beaten to death. All in all, a real nasty scene.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. See what we’ve got.” I slipped on my gloves and stepped up to survey the damage.

  She was facedown on top of the refuse inside – mostly bags of garbage from the terminal. The numbers were etched into her skin in two parallel rows on either side of the spine. It wasn’t an equation, though. This was something else.

  N38°55′46.1598"

  W94°40′3.5256"

  “Are those GPS coordinates?” I said.

  “Be curious to see where they point, if they are,” Sampson said. “This guy’s evolving, Alex.”

  “Anyone move the body?”

  “ME still hasn’t gotten here. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I don’t think we should wait anymore.”

  “I agree. What a way to start the day. Give me a hand here.”

  We both took a deep breath and climbed up into the Dumpster. It was hard to maneuver with the shifting bags underfoot, much less try to maintain the scene. As quickly as we could, we got a grasp of the victim and gently turned her over.

&n
bsp; What I saw there knocked me right back on my ass. I leaned over the edge of the Dumpster and, for the first time in a long while, nearly lost the contents of my stomach.

  Sampson was right there with me. “Alex, you okay? What’s going on?”

  The taste of metal filled my mouth; I felt dizzy from the rush of adrenaline, from being blindsided so badly.

  “She’s an agent, John. At the Bureau. Remember her? The DCAK case? It’s Anjali Patel.”

  Chapter 69

  POOR ANJALI. And goddamnit! How did this happen? How the hell could it?

  There’s something inescapable about knowing the victim of a homicide, especially a killing as brutal as this. Unwelcome questions kept pushing to the surface: Did she see it coming? Did she suffer much? Was it over quickly for her?

  I tried to remind myself that any precision knife work would have been postmortem, but that thought was cold comfort right now. Besides, the best I could do for Patel was to focus on my job and on this crime scene as objectively as possible under the messed-up circumstances.

  Right away, I got on the phone to the ME’s office. I wanted to make sure Porter Henning was assigned to this one, and also to find out what the hell was taking them so long. They should have been here by now. Hell, I was.

  Sampson took down the numbers we’d found on Anjali’s back and got on his BlackBerry to see what he could find out about them in the short term.

  By the time I’d spoken with Porter, who was caught in traffic on the Eisenhower Freeway, John was waving me back over to see something.

  “I don’t know, Alex. This is pretty random.” He turned the screen around to show me the map he’d pulled up.

  “It’s an address in Overland Park, Kansas. This thing’s just getting weirder and weirder. Maybe it’s some kind of math formula after all.”

  “What about a reverse search on the address?” I asked.

  “Working on it.” It was slow going, though, with his man paws and that tiny keyboard. This is why Sampson almost never texts anyone.

  “Here we go, I got it. It’s a restaurant,” he said. “KC Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill?”

  Sampson was shaking his head as if it couldn’t be right, but the name hit me like cold water. It must have shown on my face, too, because Sampson waved his hand in front of my eyes.

  “Alex? Where’d you go?”

  My own hands had tightened into fists. I wanted to hit something. Bad. “Of course,” I said. “This is exactly how the son of a bitch works.”

  “How who works?” John said. “What are you–?”

  But then he got it.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  It all made sense now, in the worst possible way. There was the Alex Rifle reference from the night before, and now this – KC Masterpiece.

  Kyle Craig’s masterpiece.

  He’d done this before, leaving tokens behind at crime scenes, always aimed at getting him credit where credit was due. Both of these murders were references to my own open cases – the sniper-style hit on Tambour, and the numbers so brutally etched into Anjali Patel’s skin.

  Obviously Kyle had killed them both. Or had someone do it for him.

  Then, with a horrible kind of aftershock, I remembered something else: Bronson “Pop-Pop” James, my young client. He’d been shot trying to rob a store – a place called Cross Country Liquors. Of course. Why hadn’t I come back to that fact until now?

  It all added up – another ton of bricks dropped onto my shoulders. Kyle was circling me and closing in as he did it, wreaking as much havoc as possible in the process. This wasn’t just blind savagery either. It was much more specific than that and, unless I was mistaken, much more personal.

  It was all part of my punishment for catching him the first time.

  Chapter 70

  IN ONE PHONE CALL, I re-upped with Rakeem Powell for additional twenty-four-hour security coverage at the house. I’d take out a loan if I had to; cost was not my concern right now. I couldn’t be sure what Kyle’s endgame was, but I wasn’t going to wait for him to come at me again.

  I spent most of the day at the Hoover Building. With Anjali’s sudden death, it was like a wake over there, except in the SIOC, which was buzzing like an air traffic control tower.

  The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, made his designated operations room available to us, and the manhunt for Kyle Craig was back on full steam. This wasn’t personal for just me. Craig was already the biggest inside scandal in the Bureau’s hundred-year history. And now he’d killed another agent, maybe to get back at the FBI, too.

  Every seat in the operation center’s double horseshoe of desks was filled. The five main screens at the head of the room showed alternating pictures and old video of Kyle, plus national and world maps with electronic markers for his known victims and associations, and past movements.

  We were on the line all day with Denver, New York, Chicago, Paris – everywhere Kyle had been known to live since his escape from ADX Florence. And every field office in the country was put on high alert.

  Even so, with all this flurry of activity, we had to accept the fact that nobody had any idea where Kyle was.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Alex,” Burns said, pacing. We’d just hung up after a marathon conference call. “We’ve got nothing useful here, no physical proof that Kyle killed Tambour or Patel, or even that he’s been in Washington. And nothing on that Beretta you pulled out of evidence either, by the way.”

  The Beretta he was referring to was the one Bronson James had used in the armed-robbery attempt. My original idea had been that Pop-Pop had gotten it from a gang member off the street, but Kyle Craig could have just as easily put that gun in his hand. I knew that Kyle favored Berettas, and he knew that I knew.

  “I’m the proof,” I said. “He’s called me on the phone. He’s made threats. The man is obsessed with me, Ron. In his mind, I’m the only one who’s ever beaten him, and Kyle Craig is nothing if not highly competitive.”

  “What about these disciples of his? Just for the sake of argument.” Burns was talking to me but also to a dozen other agents who took notes and banged away on laptops as he spoke. “The man’s got followers, some of them apparently ready to die on his command. It’s happened before. How do we know he didn’t commission one of them for these hits?”

  “Because the hits were directed at me,” I said slowly. “This is the part Kyle would want to do himself.”

  “Even so” – Burns stopped pacing and sat down – “we’re getting off point here. Whether Craig made these kills or he didn’t, our hand is pretty much the same. We keep scouring the crime scenes. We make sure that our radar’s up and that our people are as ready as they can be the next time he strikes.”

  “That’s not good enough. Goddamnit!” I said, and swiped my notes off the desk, taking with them a few other people’s papers, too. Right away, I regretted it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Burns bent to where I was picking up the papers and put out a hand. He pulled me to my feet. “Take a breather. Go get some dinner. There’s nothing else to do right now.”

  Like it or not, he was right. I was exhausted and a little embarrassed, and I definitely needed to go home for a while. Once I’d gathered up my stuff, I headed out.

  Waiting at the elevator, I felt my phone vibrate for the umpteenth time that day. It had been a steady stream of calls from MPD, Sampson, Bree, Nana –

  But this time, when I looked at the ID, it just said, “A. Friend.”

  “Alex Cross,” I answered, and I was already heading back to the operations center.

  “Hello, Alex,” Kyle Craig said. “Really in the thick of things now, aren’t we?”

  Chapter 71

  “THIS PHONE I’M CALLING ON is encrypted, so don’t bother trying anything,” Kyle went on. “Now, if I’ve timed this correctly, you’re right in the belly of the beast. Is that right? And don’t put me on speaker – or I’m hanging up.”

  I came into the confere
nce room, gesticulating like crazy to let them know something was going on. Agents started scrambling, although there wasn’t much they could do. I had no doubt Kyle was telling the truth about the encrypted phone.

  Someone handed me a pad and pen, and Burns sat down with his ear close to the cell, until an assistant ran over with a laptop. He took the director’s place and started transcribing as much as he could hear.

  “You killed Anjali Patel and Nelson Tambour, didn’t you, Kyle?”

  “I’m afraid I did.”

  “And what about Bronson James?” I said. “Did you do that, too?”

  “Remarkable little boy, wasn’t he? Just vegetable soup, last I checked.”

  My big mistake the previous time with Kyle had been to lose my shit during the manhunt. I was determined not to let that happen again, but my heart was pounding with as much hate as I’ve ever felt for anyone in my life.

  “Do you see the swath of destruction you’re creating here?” he went on. “How much better off these people would be if you simply didn’t exist?”

  “What I see is a man with an obsession against me,” I told him.

  “Not true,” he said. “I think you’re fascinating, especially for a Negro. If you weren’t, you’d be dead by now, and Tambour, Patel, and little Bronson James would all be wondering what to have for breakfast tomorrow. It’s quite a compliment, really. Not many people are worthy of my time.”

  His voice sounded almost… playful? He appeared to be in an especially good mood. Killing seemed to do that for him. Kyle also loved to talk about himself.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Interesting. You don’t usually ask permission. Go right ahead, Alex.”

  “I’m curious about the way you killed Tambour and Patel. It’s not like you to imitate anyone–”

  “No,” he said right away. “It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”