Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  “Yes, I’m Alex Cross,” I said, smiling. I stuffed the note in my jacket pocket and gestured her inside. “I’m sorry about not shoveling the path in. Ms. Davis?”

  Nina Davis smiled weakly through her tears as she passed me.

  “I rather like all the snow, Dr. Cross,” she said. “It reminds me of home.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  NINA DAVIS HAD been born and raised in Wisconsin, outside Madison, and she had always thought of snow as a bandage.

  “You can’t see the wounds and scars when there’s snow falling,” she told me. “I loved it as a child.”

  We chatted while she filled out paperwork. Davis was thirty-seven, bright, attractive, and committed to her career at the U.S. Justice Department, where she was a supervising attorney working on organized-crime prosecutions.

  “Once upon a time I was with the FBI,” I said.

  “I know,” Davis said. “It’s why I sought you out, Dr. Cross. I figured you might understand or at least be sympathetic to my position.”

  I smiled. “I’ll try to do both.”

  Davis returned the smile without conviction. “I don’t know quite where to begin.”

  “Tell me why you wanted to see me.”

  She looked at her hands in her lap, shoulders slumped, and sighed. “I don’t think I know how to love, Dr. Cross.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I settled in to listen, really listen.

  Davis told me that in her entire life, she’d felt love for only one person: her father, Anderson Davis, a small-town attorney who had spent lots of time with his sole child. Katherine, his wife, had emotional problems and wasn’t much interested in things physical. But Nina’s father loved to hike and roam around the Wisconsin countryside.

  “He called those walks tramps,” she said wistfully. “He’d say, ‘Come on, Nina, time for a tramp up to Beech Ridge.’”

  Davis blinked and wiped at a tear. “Even now, I miss tramping with him. I was thirteen when he died.”

  Tough age, I thought, and I made a note before saying, “How did he die?”

  “They were in the car, and my mother was driving. She was yelling at him about something, took her eyes off the road, and ran a red light. He was killed instantly.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It must have been hard.”

  Davis breathed in deep, pursed her lips, and shrugged. “My dad was gone, and my mom killed him. What can you say?”

  I absorbed that, then said gently, “So you blame your mother?”

  “Who else?” she said. “She’d kept her eyes on the road, my dad would’ve lived to a ripe old age. She’d kept her eyes on the road, and I wouldn’t have had a series of creepy men living in the house when I was a teenager.”

  Davis had gone cold, and I decided to leave the statement for another time.

  “She alive, your mother?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “When was that?”

  “Three weeks ago, when I signed the monthly check that pays for her assisted-living facility back home.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of conflicted feelings,” I said. “You blame her for all these things, and yet you stay involved in her care.”

  “Yes, well, there’s no one else to do it,” Davis said as another tear formed and slipped down her cheek.

  The timer dinged. She looked disappointed.

  “I promise you our next talk will be longer,” I said. “When you’re a one-man shop like I am, first sessions get taken up as much by paperwork as by real substance. And I charge your insurance for only a thirty-minute session rather than the hour. I can see you for a full hour tomorrow morning.”

  Her knitted brow eased. “That works.”

  “Before you go, and just until we speak at our next appointment, I want you to remember those times when your mother made you happy, those times, maybe before your father’s death, when you were grateful for her rather than resentful.”

  Davis’s laugh was short and sharp. “I’ll have to dig deep for memories like that.”

  “I’d expect no less,” I said gently. We fixed a time for the next appointment, then I stood and opened my office door.

  She walked through somewhat uncertainly, and I wondered whether she would ever return. I’d found over the years that a fair number of clients believed that they were going to get to the root of their problems in a session or two. When they realized that the process was less about cutting and more about peeling, some of them gave up. I never heard from them again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” I asked as she opened the basement door.

  “I’ll be here, Dr. Cross,” she said, but she did not look back.

  “I very much look forward to it, Nina,” I said, and I shut the door and the cold wind behind her.

  Going back into my office, I wondered at the human brain’s ability to seize on some terrible personal event and let that event define and control every action for years, decades, even lifetimes. I—

  Three short, sharp knocks came at the basement door.

  I was puzzled. I wasn’t supposed to have another client until early afternoon.

  When I opened the door, Ned Mahoney was standing there. Mahoney and I used to work together at the FBI, and he was normally as stoic a man as you’d find. But he was clearly upset as he came inside and shook snow off his pants legs.

  I shut the door, and he looked at me. “There’s some kind of shitstorm brewing, Alex. We’re going to need your help on this one, and more than part-time.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  MAHONEY STARED AT me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  “I have just a few clients at the moment, Ned,” I said. “The rest of my time is yours. Senator Walker’s case?”

  He hesitated before digging in an inner pocket of his coat. “You’ve signed a recent nondisclosure form with us, the Bureau?”

  “It’s in the formal contract, but I’m happy to sign again if you think it’s necessary.”

  “No, no, of course not,” he said, pulling out his phone. “It’s just that this is sensitive in the extreme. You can’t tell anyone, Bree and Sampson included.”

  “John’s on vacation in Belize, and I’ll keep this close until I hear otherwise.”

  “Good,” Mahoney said, and he looked at his phone. “This was caught on a Dulles security cam a little more than two hours ago.”

  He showed me a video still of a severe, dark-haired woman, more handsome than beautiful, who looked to be in her late thirties. She was dressed in denim, from her jeans to her blouse to her jacket. A shopping bag printed with a painting of the Eiffel Tower dangled off one arm. A leather knapsack hung from her other shoulder. She was pulling a carry-on roller and was in full stride.

  “Who is she?”

  “We believe her name is Kristina Varjan,” Mahoney said. “A Hungarian-born freelance assassin.”

  My mind raced. An assassin at Dulles International at 8:30 a.m., roughly three hours after Betsy Walker was shot?

  I held up my hands. “Wait. You believe this is Kristina Varjan?”

  Mahoney paused, thinking, and then told me that two hours and twenty minutes before, a highly regarded and experienced CIA field agent was moving through crowded security lines en route to London and spotted her walking by. The agent had evidently had an up-close-and-personal run-in with Kristina Varjan in Istanbul several years earlier and had almost died as a result.

  Having heard about the killing of Senator Walker, the agent got out of the TSA line and tried to pursue the woman to make sure. But the woman had vanished.

  The agent missed the flight, made calls, pulled strings, and spoke to the Dulles security people. Camera feeds were rewound fifteen minutes, and they quickly found Varjan passing by the security lines. They tracked her, using footage from other security cameras, until she went outside into the snowstorm and walked off.

  “So the agent had them track her backward,” Mahoney said. “Turns out Varjan came off a Delta
flight from Paris at eight a.m. That picture was taken in Customs. She’s traveling using a Eurozone passport under the name Martina Rodoni.”

  I studied the picture a long moment, then looked up at Ned. “Which means she couldn’t have killed Betsy Walker. The timing is off.”

  “Correct.”

  “Which means there are two professional assassins in the Greater DC area, one of whom killed a sitting U.S. senator.”

  Mahoney nodded.

  “Second assassin, second target?”

  “I can’t believe Varjan’s here to see the monuments.”

  “Put her picture in the hands of every cop within a hundred miles of DC.”

  Mahoney looked conflicted. “The director wants to keep this in-house with a full-court press to locate and pick her up for questioning.”

  I cocked my head. “He give you a reason?”

  “National security,” Mahoney said though he didn’t like it. “Something about CIA intelligence-gathering methods. All above our pay grade. He did get the president to order heightened security for all members of Congress. In the meantime, you and I are supposed to find Varjan and bring her in.”

  I thought about that a moment. Me and Ned in the field again. That felt good, so good that I put aside the questions about national security that kept popping into my head and turned to the task at hand.

  “Can we get a file on Varjan? Something to help us put together a profile?”

  “I can do you one better,” Mahoney said. “We’re going to talk to the CIA agent she almost killed.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  ON THE WAY to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, I called Bree to tell her that the FBI had optioned my contract.

  “Senator Walker’s case?”

  “Can’t talk details.”

  “The FBI’s gain and Metro’s loss,” she said. “Remember, the game’s tonight.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Bree paused, then said, “Got to go. The chief wants me in his office in ten minutes.”

  Our connection died just as we pulled into the parking lot outside the CIA’s security facility, a rectangular block built of bulletproof glass next to two solid steel gates that rose out of the ground to prevent unauthorized vehicular access.

  We presented our credentials. The guards seemed to have been alerted to our arrival beforehand because, with no further ado, one of them took our photographs, printed visitors’ badges with our faces on them, and clipped them to our jackets.

  “Main entrance,” he said. “Wait in the lobby. Someone will meet you there.”

  “Someone,” Mahoney said after we passed through screening devices and were walking toward the main building. “Do you think they always say that?”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I suppose.”

  The wind picked up and blew granular snow at us, so we hustled to the entry. We entered a vaulted lobby with a large CIA seal set into the black-and-gray polished granite floor. We stood near the seal and watched as academic-looking folks in suits and others who were buff and more casually attired passed us.

  “Analysts and operatives,” I murmured.

  Before Ned could reply, a woman said, “Special Agent Mahoney? Dr. Cross?”

  We turned to find a trim, unassuming brunette woman in her thirties wearing a frumpy blue pantsuit walking across the lobby to us. She squinted at us through nerd glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she did not extend her hand.

  “Would you follow me, please?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer but spun on her heel and marched off with us following close behind. We went down a long hallway, passing doors that had no identifiers. There were a lot of them, so I had no idea how she chose the right door to stop and use her key card on.

  There was a soft click, and she turned the door handle and led us into a nondescript conference room with an empty table and chairs. She went around the table, took a seat, and folded her hands.

  She squinted at us again. “What can I tell you about Kristina Varjan?”

  That surprised me. I thought she’d been taking us to see the spy.

  Mahoney’s eyebrows rose. “You’re the operative who spotted her this morning?”

  “I am. You can call me Edith.”

  “You look more like a soccer mom than a spy, Edith,” I said.

  “That’s the point,” she said dismissively.

  Mahoney said, “Tell us what we need to know to catch Varjan.”

  “Catch her?” Edith said, and she laughed caustically. “Good luck with that, gentlemen. God knows I tried. Here’s what she gave me for my troubles.”

  She took off her jacket and tugged a red sleeveless T-shirt off her left shoulder to reveal a nasty scar like interwoven spiderwebs below her collarbone.

  Edith said she’d gotten the scar three years ago when the CIA began to suspect that Varjan had been responsible for the murder of two U.S. operatives in Istanbul. Edith’s assignment had been to lure Varjan in, subdue her, and see her brought to an interrogation facility in Eastern Europe.

  “I found her, and I thought I had her cornered entering an apartment building near the Bosporus,” she said. “I was armed. She was not, or at least, not with a gun.”

  Varjan surprised Edith and stabbed her repeatedly with a sharp pottery shard.

  “I should have known better,” Edith said, shaking her head and crossing her arms. “Varjan’s an improviser. Invents weapons of the moment. Kills without hesitation.”

  She told us that INS records showed that Varjan had entered the U.S. that morning on a Eurozone passport under the name Martina Rodoni, a woman born in the former Yugoslavia who was now a resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her occupation was listed as “fashion consultant,” and she said she had come on business.

  “Count on not finding her under that identity,” Edith said. “She’ll have shifted to another by now.”

  “Then how do we figure out where she is?” I said. “And what she’s here to do?”

  The CIA operative twisted her head to one side and pursed her lips a moment.

  “I wish I could say I knew a habit of hers, a hotel chain she frequents or the kind of meals she likes to eat, but Varjan is a chameleon. She speaks eight languages and changes identity constantly. She knows it’s her best defense.”

  “So we’ve got nothing to go on?” Mahoney said.

  “Well, you could do what I did to find her.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  “Figure out who she’s here to kill and then lie in wait for her.”

  I thought about that. “Does she ever target politicians?”

  “Dr. Cross, Kristina Varjan will target anyone if the price is right.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  BREE WALKED UP to the closed double doors on the fifth floor of police headquarters downtown and knocked.

  “Come in,” a familiar male voice called.

  Bree opened the door and stepped inside the office of chief of police Bryan Michaels. The chief, a fit man with a thick shock of steel-gray hair, was on a cell phone, listening intently and nodding.

  “I’m hearing you,” Michaels said in a firm tone. “Loud and clear.”

  He hung up, reached over to shake her hand, and gestured her to a chair. “Where are we on Senator Walker’s death?”

  “Fourth in line, sir,” Bree said, taking the chair. “FBI’s got jurisdiction, with Secret Service and Capitol Police in support.”

  He didn’t seem to like that. “So we’re not even in the game?”

  “I offered Ned Mahoney anything he needed from Metro PD,” Bree said. “I’ll be briefed on a daily basis.”

  The chief said, “I’m getting heat on this one, Bree. From the commissioner, the mayor, and the congressmen. They’re all wondering how we’re not out front on a murder in our own backyard. I’m won
dering too.”

  That surprised Bree. Chief Michaels was by nature a pragmatist, and he knew the command structure in a situation like this as well as she did.

  Before she could reply, he said, “Where’s Alex in all this?”

  “FBI snapped him up. I don’t know exactly what he’s working on.”

  “Course not,” the chief said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if this consultant thing’s going to work. It’s …”

  “Sir?”

  “When Alex was on board full-time, I could count on Metro PD being out front no matter the case,” Michaels said.

  “He’s that kind of detective, sir,” Bree allowed.

  “He is,” the chief said, and then he leaned across the desk. “But he’s unavailable. So I need you to step up, Bree. I want my chief of detectives to be hungry. Not a paper pusher. Not a caretaker. I want you to be bold, to take action, stand for something in the community. I mean, for God’s sake, a U.S. senator was assassinated in our jurisdiction and we’re not breaking ground?”

  “Chief, again, and with all due respect, the FBI—”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the FBI or the Secret Service or the Capitol Police. This is my city, and you are its chief of detectives, Stone. Prove you still should be.”

  Bree was taken aback for several moments before lifting her chin. “And how exactly do I prove that, sir?”

  “You find Senator Walker’s assassin and deliver his head to Mahoney on a plate.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  HANDS CLASPED BEHIND his back, Sean Lawlor paced through a comfortable Airbnb apartment some five blocks from where he’d seen to the end of U.S. senator Betsy Walker.

  Within hours of a successful strike on such a sensitive target, most other professional killers would have tried to leave the area, if not the city, if not the country. But Lawlor wasn’t like most professionals. He was an elite practitioner, and he prided himself on thinking and acting outside the norm.

  Given Senator Walker’s stature, he had no doubt that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would be looking for people entering and leaving the country on a very short turnaround. That would have brought scrutiny he didn’t need.