Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  He passed a bungalow in a clearing. A young woman was hanging sheets in a raw wind. Her bundled-up little child, a toddler, really, was booting a little soccer ball.

  Franks passed. He had a rule about killing women for sport. He wouldn’t do it. Especially young moms with kids.

  He drove on and passed a steel building that housed a machine shop and several smaller homes before hitting a long stretch of forest. He kept hoping he’d see a car or a truck pulled over, and tracks going off into the trees.

  That would make things easier. He had a pang of guilt knowing that he shouldn’t have been there at all, that he should have stayed hunkered down at the Mandarin Oriental, focused on his task for the next, what, fifty-six hours?

  Franks had found over the years, however, that the closer he got to a commercial job, the more he felt compelled to hunt on his own, almost as if he were—

  A Virginia State Police cruiser was pulled off the road just ahead. The lights were on but not blinking. Franks slowed as he passed by and saw a big Asian, late thirties, early forties, with a thick neck holding a coffee cup and a sandwich.

  Franks smiled, waved. The trooper lifted his cup.

  Franks glanced in the rearview, thinking, What’s he doing way out here? So far from the highway?

  And then an idea hatched in his head, and the questions didn’t matter. Whistling, he drove around a bend in the road and turned around. He took off his sunglasses, rolled down the window, put his hand out, waved again, and pulled to a stop opposite the cruiser.

  The trooper acted slightly annoyed, but he set his coffee cup and sandwich down and lowered his window.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt dinner, sir,” Franks said. “But my nav system committed suicide this morning, and my cell’s not picking up data for Google maps, and I can’t figure out where the heck I am on the real map.”

  Franks held up a Rand McNally atlas of the Eastern Seaboard, climbed out of the truck cab, and said, “Could you help orient me, Officer?”

  “Sergeant,” the trooper said, opening his door. “Sergeant Nick Moon.”

  “I appreciate it, Sergeant Moon,” Franks said, opening the atlas to Virginia and putting it on the hood of the cruiser.

  Moon climbed out. Muscular, athletic, he wore a bulletproof vest, had a large black Beretta pistol in his holster, and outweighed Franks by twenty pounds.

  “Where y’all from?” Sergeant Moon said.

  “Born in Arizona, but the past couple of years I’ve been jumping between Wyoming and South Dakota.”

  “Oil fields?”

  Franks smiled. “I do emergency welding work. You know, fix what needs fixing.”

  “Good money in that?”

  “Enough that I don’t work winters. I travel all over, taking a look around at things while I have the freedom.”

  “Sounds like a nice life,” the trooper said. “Nothing tying you down.”

  “Not for the next six weeks,” Franks said. He gestured at the map. “Can you help?”

  “Sure,” Moon said, leaning toward the map and squinting.

  Franks glanced around and saw no cars, then he smashed his right elbow up into the trooper’s voice box.

  Moon reeled backward and sideways, gagging as he hit the open cruiser door and fell to the ground. Franks was almost disappointed the trooper was down already, but he jumped forward to finish the drama.

  He kicked Moon’s right hand as he struggled for his service weapon. Franks’s steel-toed boot broke several fingers. Moon gasped and choked. Franks stooped, reached for the trooper’s pistol, and had almost slipped it free of the holster when a meaty fist smashed into the right side of his face.

  Franks staggered and went to his knees. He saw dots, felt woozy, but not enough to dull instincts honed for years in the Arizona desert and the bigger sandpit.

  Through sheer will, he threw himself forward, scrambling to get out of range of Moon’s left fist, and spun to his feet. Franks’s right eye was swelling shut, and he tasted blood on his lips, but the fog of the blow to his head was lifting.

  The trooper was still on his back, reaching across his body for the gun. Franks took one fast step and with his steel-toed boot kicked Sergeant Moon on the top of his skull. He heard a crunch. The trooper’s body went rigid.

  Franks kicked him again, this time in the temple, and then a third time, this one to Moon’s exposed neck. He felt vertebrae snap. The trooper sagged, dead.

  For four long, heaving breaths, Franks felt that shaky adrenaline clarity he always got after a challenging kill, that hyper-confidence that empowered him when he realized he’d cheated death again. But there was no time to linger. No time to revel in it.

  After wiping his prints off the sergeant’s pistol, he reholstered it, picked up the road atlas, and crossed to his truck.

  Franks took one last look at the tableau of Sergeant Moon’s death scene, committed it to sweet memory, and drove off. He didn’t look back and did not whistle a single note.

  CHAPTER

  37

  I LEFT MY office shortly after darkness fell, my mind still returning to Nina Davis.

  She was one of the most devastatingly beautiful women I’d ever met. She seemed to ooze sensuality from her pores and suggested forbidden adventure with every gesture. And she had predatory instincts. She stalked her sexual prey.

  What was that about? She intimated she’d stalked Dr. Winters before, and successfully. But what else did she say? That there were rumors that he was into pain? Wouldn’t she have known that for certain?

  As I climbed the stairs, smelling the aromas of Nana Mama’s latest triumph wafting through the door, I could not avoid the growing trepidation I felt. Nina Davis was making me nervous. I was the therapist. I was supposed to keep the inner lives of my clients at arm’s length, where they could be dispassionately observed.

  But since Nina had left, close to four hours before, I’d been thinking about her, imagining her stalking me, imagining her bringing me right to the edge of a decision.

  The guy has to make the final move in her little game. Isn’t that what she said?

  I felt guilty for even considering that possibility. Not only was I a happily married guy, but my job demanded I keep my feelings out of her game.

  But I was also a man, an alpha male if ever there was one, and Nina was so … how did she describe it? Free in her—

  On the other side of the door, the sound of a cooking spoon banging against a pot startled me back to reality. I opened the kitchen door and sighed with relief at the familiar sight of Nana Mama at the stove, her back to me.

  “That smells excellent,” I said.

  “A lamb stew I whipped up,” she said.

  “How long until dinner?”

  She glanced at the clock. “Forty minutes?”

  “I’m going to take a walk,” I said. “Clear my head.”

  “Don’t get hit by a bus.”

  I laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll try not to.”

  I grabbed a jacket, cap, and gloves. I was putting them on when Bree came through the door looking like she’d taken a pummeling.

  “Are you going for a walk?” she said. “I need one.”

  After putting my arms around her and kissing her on the lips, I said, “I would love to go for a walk with you.”

  That pleased Bree. She snuggled into my chest for a long hug before we went outside into the chill air and headed north toward Pennsylvania Avenue. As we walked, she told me about her frustration at her inability to make headway in the Betsy Walker murder case and about how Chief Michaels was calling her twice a day for updates.

  “I don’t know what’s behind this pressure he’s putting on me.”

  “Sounds like he’s up for a big job or he’s going to run for elected office.”

  Bree thought about that. “So he needs a coup, and I’m the one who’s supposed to manufacture that?”

  “I’m not saying I’m right. Just conjecture.”

  She
rubbed her temple, then stopped and fell into my arms.

  “Hey,” I said, patting her back.

  “I just need a hug, that’s all.”

  “I love you,” I said. “And you can have as many hugs as you need.”

  “Thank you, baby,” Bree whispered. “I love you too.”

  Someone called out from behind us, “C’mon, get a room, why don’t you?”

  We broke our embrace to see John Sampson hustling toward us. It had been a while since I’d seen my oldest friend and former partner at DC Metro.

  “When’d you get back?” I asked, shaking his hand.

  “Four hours ago,” he said.

  “Good trip?” Bree asked.

  “The best,” Sampson said. “I was ready to go back to work tomorrow completely refreshed, but I guess I had to start early.”

  We both looked at him with puzzled expressions.

  “I just got a call from a friend with the Virginia State Police,” Sampson said. “A mutual acquaintance of ours, Sergeant Nick Moon—”

  “I know Moon,” Bree said.

  “I do too,” I said. “He’s a guest instructor in mixed martial arts and submission techniques at Quantico.”

  “That’s him,” Sampson said. “Good guy. And he’s dead.”

  “What?” Bree said. “How? Line of duty?”

  “He was in uniform,” Sampson said. “A couple of teenagers found him lying dead beside his cruiser, which was still running.”

  “Shot?”

  Sampson shook his head. “Looks like he’d been in a fight. Three of his right fingers were broken. His larynx was crushed. The knuckles of his left hand were split and bloody. The top of his skull was fractured from kicks, and his neck was broken.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “His service weapon?”

  “Snapped in his holster.”

  “So he was surprised,” Bree said. “Hit without warning.”

  “Still,” I said. “The Sergeant Moon I remember was a fighting machine. You’d have to be one hell of a warrior to kill him.”

  “That’s exactly what my friend said: a professional killed Moon.”

  Thinking about the sniper who’d killed Senator Walker and then about Kristina Varjan, the Hungarian killer for hire spotted at Dulles Airport, I said, “As in an assassin?”

  “He said Special Forces kind of badass, but sure, assassin would fit.”

  Bree said, “No one saw the fight?”

  “Happened way out in the middle of nowhere,” Sampson said. “But the state police may have gotten lucky.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Moon’s left hand, the one with the split knuckles. It had to have connected with one hell of a punch. There was blood evidence at the scene that wasn’t Moon’s.”

  Bree said, “And there’s probably DNA on his knuckles. That helps.”

  That did help, but in my gut, something churned, a sensation that grew the more I thought about the shooting expertise of Senator Walker’s killer, the CIA’s concerns about Kristina Varjan, and how one of law enforcement’s best self-defense men had turned up beaten and dead by his cruiser in a way that suggested a pro.

  “Alex?” Bree said. “What is it? What are you thinking?”

  I licked my lips before gazing at Sampson and Bree in turn.

  “I’m thinking it’s odd that we’ve had two, maybe three professional killers around suddenly, and I’m feeling like they’re all here for some reason beyond Senator Walker and Sergeant Moon.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  SHORTLY AFTER NINE in the morning, Pablo Cruz pressed down the last strip of blue painter’s tape on the floor of an abandoned factory in the far northwest corner of Maryland. It was a vast space that had once held huge textile looms and massive cutting machines.

  The machines had been removed and sold for scrap a long time ago, leaving the silhouettes of their footprints on the filthy concrete floor. Cruz barely glanced at them. He studied the maze of tape he’d been laying down since the afternoon before.

  The maze stretched almost the entire length of the space, more than one hundred and twenty-five yards by the range finder Cruz had brought in to help him transfer dimensions from old blueprints onto this factory’s floor.

  Looking from the blueprints to the tape diagram, he thought he’d come close, probably within inches of the actual spaces he’d be dealing with the day after tomorrow.

  Day after tomorrow, Cruz thought, feeling a thrill go through him and checking his watch.

  Cruz tried to ignore the second thrill that shivered up his spine. This would no doubt be the pinnacle of his career. The crowning achievement.

  If he survived.

  That last thought sobered him, yanked him out of fantasy and back to the task at hand. He zipped his down coat up under his chin and saw his breath in the cold air as he studied the maze once again. Then he closed his eyes and tried to see it in his mind, tried to imagine himself moving through all the various hallways, rooms, and passages.

  When he’d gotten halfway through, he stopped imagining and opened his eyes.

  He’d been studying the diagrams so much, Cruz felt ready to go at least that far. Halfway. Just to see what he’d already memorized. He got out a phone, found the stopwatch, and started it.

  He walked confidently to marks indicating steps and climbed them to a guarded door. He would have the proper identifications. They would put him through a metal detector and find nothing.

  They would pat him down, probably find the resin webs around his forearms and wrists, but he had a perfect excuse. They would search his bag, but they would recognize nothing. They would let him through.

  With that certainty firmly in mind, Cruz proceeded, still at that steady, relaxed pace, until he reached a large square room in the maze. He slanted to the opposite corner of the room, and another passage. There he broke into a jog, as if he’d needed to be somewhere five minutes before.

  When he reached a T, he broke left, crossed the mouth of an even larger space, and started to slow as he moved toward the mannequin from the storage unit. He’d set it up at the intersection of two passages.

  If he had to shoot early, it would be here.

  Cruz walked confidently, hands out, palms up, toward the mannequin. Ten feet shy of it, he snapped the fingers of his left hand back toward his wrist.

  A Kevlar-reinforced nylon bullet slammed into the mannequin’s throat and blew out the back of its neck.

  Cruz did not stop to admire the destruction. Instead, he pushed on, reloading the graphite derringer and trying to see if he remembered the diagram past midpoint.

  He went to a closet in the maze, gave himself sixty seconds to change clothes and credentials, and then hurried up another long passage. He hesitated at a door on the right and looked ahead a moment before going inside.

  After waiting for ninety seconds exactly, Cruz exited the room, turned right again, then took two lefts and went through imaginary double doors into the largest space yet, so big he hadn’t bothered to tape it all in. He made his way toward the far-right corner, where a second and a third mannequin stood. In his mind, Cruz imagined the place packed and him shifting and slipping his way forward.

  Cruz stopped fifteen feet to the right of the mannequins and waited, a smile on his face, his left hand poised as if resting on the shoulder of someone in front of him.

  Cruz laughed, bobbed his head, extended his right hand in welcome, and then snapped his fingers back sharply. The web stretched and triggered the second single-shot gas derringer. It fired with a thud, and the nylon bullet penetrated the mannequin’s chest and knocked it to the ground.

  A moment later, he fired the left-hand derringer at the rear mannequin and hit it square in the chest.

  Cruz clicked the stopwatch on his phone and saw that nine minutes and eleven seconds had elapsed. He started the clock again, stayed cool as he backed up, slow, deliberate, then turned and headed back through the maze the way he’d come.

&
nbsp; In the long hallway, Cruz broke into a slow jog. When he reached the mannequin with the hole in its neck, he stopped for fifteen seconds, then moved on, running fast now, and was soon back at the entrance to the schematic.

  Cruz stopped the clock; his hard breathing left clouds pluming in the frigid air. Six minutes and fourteen seconds coming back. Fifteen minutes and twenty-five seconds total.

  That will do it, he thought, and he stared at the door that led outside the factory.

  Cruz shook off the idea that he was ready and told himself to run the route at least twenty more times. He had enough time to practice until he could do the whole thing blindfolded or in the dark. Before resetting the stopwatch and starting again, he decided he would do both.

  CHAPTER

  39

  NED MAHONEY PULLED over at the curb and pointed diagonally across a busy street past a dingy strip mall to the Happy Pines Motel in suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland.

  The Happy Pines was one of those no-tell joints you could rent by the hour, day, week, or month. A thirty-unit, two-story affair, the motel was badly in need of renovation, and the rain and gray skies made the place look even drearier than it was.

  But according to Mahoney, a woman named Martina Rodoni bearing a Eurozone passport had registered at the Happy Pines two days before. Even though our contact at the CIA said there was zero chance Varjan would use the identity again, we decided to drive out to see if they were one and the same.

  I said, “What are the odds she’s here?”

  Mahoney turned off the car, said, “The clerk I spoke with said she’s in and out and hasn’t let them service the room.”

  For a moment, I thought about Kasimov, the Russian, and how he’d been holed up at his hotel while his men put on disguises to go out on clandestine missions.

  But I tucked that away and focused on the motel parking lot, seeing aged Ford pickups and beater Chevy sedans with tailpipes held on by coat hangers. Nothing newer. Nothing that screamed rental. Then again, Kristina Varjan could have parked on the street or in the alley behind the motel, where Mahoney had a squad of junior FBI agents moving into position.