Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  He opened it slowly. The lights were off.

  Sampson reached around, groped for a moment, then flipped a switch. The morgue lights lit, and they eased inside, backs to each other.

  Bree saw nothing but rows of cold-storage lockers.

  “Over there,” Sampson said.

  She turned and peered around him to see a male, Asian, in boxers slumped against the far wall. Sampson went to the man, checked for a pulse, looked for breathing, then shook his head at Bree. She called in the homicide and started opening the cold lockers.

  Every one she opened was full. Corpses were stacked like cordwood in—

  She opened the second-to-last locker and gaped at the corpse of an obese man.

  Three surgical scalpels lay on his chest. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, he’d been skinned.

  CHAPTER

  67

  PABLO CRUZ STEPPED off a maintenance elevator that put him in a narrow hallway behind the hospital cafeteria. Despite the opiates the ER docs had given him, he was in ferocious pain from the broken teeth and facial bones.

  And it was taking everything in his power to block out the clammy, sticky feel of the cowl of cold, dead skin that he’d pulled down over his head to cover the bruising and bandages on his face. That’s who they’d be looking for if they were looking. The guy with the bandages. Not some old man with saggy gray skin.

  Cruz had tied on a surgical cap to hide part of the incision lines he’d had to make to skin the corpse’s head. He’d put the female pathologist’s headphones on to hide another four inches of cut skin. The hooded rain jacket covered the incisions down the sides of the neck. So did an ID on a chain he’d taken from the dead pathologist in the morgue.

  But he was worried about how it looked around his eyes, nose, and lips. Did they sag too much? Would someone know?

  He put the hood of the rain jacket up and cast his eyes down while he walked along the hallway, nervous that a hospital worker might appear; he didn’t want to test his disguise up close in any way.

  Cruz passed the cafeteria, hearing pots and pans banging and a woman singing in Spanish. Then he smelled garbage.

  He followed the smell out a door onto a loading dock. To his right there were men unloading a linen-service truck.

  Cruz paid them no attention, just bounded down the stairs and trotted out the open overhead door into chill pouring rain. He zipped the jacket to the collar and tugged on the hood strings to tighten it before lowering his head and walking very fast south on Twenty-Third Street.

  A knot of four or five people in raincoats or carrying umbrellas hurried ahead of him on the sidewalk, medical personnel, judging from the way they were talking. They were worrying about how they’d get home with all the public transit shut down.

  A block away, a police cruiser was parked across the intersection, its blue lights flashing. The shooter moved closer to the group ahead of him.

  When they were near the intersection with H Street, Cruz held the hood tight and turned his head briefly toward the police car, as if he were curious.

  Then he looked away, having given them just enough to know his face wasn’t bandaged but not enough to see he wore a dead man’s skin.

  Cruz crossed the street behind the others and heard no one call out. He stayed with them as the rain fell harder, and still he heard no one yell after him.

  It wasn’t until he was a block and a half south of the medical center that he heard a symphony of sirens start up, all of them getting closer, trumpeting and wailing their way toward a hospital where the president’s shooter wasn’t anymore.

  CHAPTE

  68

  I HAD TAKEN off from Andrews sitting in the rear seat of an air force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet, as stunning and exhilarating an experience as I’ve ever had.

  Mahoney had gone in a second one. With U.S. airspace empty, the pilots were free to fly near the Strike Eagles’ blistering top-end speed of more than eighteen hundred miles an hour. We covered the 1,624 miles to an air force base west of San Antonio in less than fifty-five minutes.

  As the planes were coming in for a landing, Director Sanford told Mahoney that Kasimov had not arrived in London. Ned relayed the information to me over my headset.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked.

  “Toward North Africa,” Mahoney said. “Before he disappeared off the radar.”

  “No,” I said as we touched down.

  “Yup. His jet was picked up crossing Majorcan airspace, and then nothing.”

  Was this an act of war? With Kasimov on the inside, choreographing the attacks from his suite at the Mandarin Oriental?

  A Texas National Guard Apache helicopter flew us thirty-five minutes southwest of the air base over dry, broken country pocked with scrub brush to the remote Garand Ranch, reputed to be one of the Lone Star State’s finest quail-hunting lodges.

  We flew in over harvested agricultural fields. Deer scattered and bounded from the stubble as we dropped in altitude and landed near a barn and a hacienda-style lodge.

  A small contingent of local law enforcement waited for us along with an FBI forensics crew that had just arrived on the scene from the Dallas office. To my surprise, I recognized someone in the crowd right away: U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee looked shell-shocked when I walked up and shook his hand.

  “What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”

  Lee shook his head in disbelief. “Bill Johnston, Speaker Guilford’s usual body man, got sick, and I got assigned to come down and watch Guilford and the secretary of state take a much-needed break and hunt quail. First Betsy Walker and now Guilford, both on my watch? I … it makes me look—”

  “Dr. Cross?”

  I looked to Terrance Crown, the U.S. Diplomatic Service agent who’d been assigned to protect secretary of state Aaron Deeds and his wife, Eliza.

  “I’m glad you’re here, sir,” Crown said, shaken. “I’ve heard you’re the best, and we need the best right now.”

  Eldon Pritchard, a lean man in his forties with a waxed mustache who was wearing a white cowboy hat, boots, jeans, and the badge of a Texas Ranger, was also there, but he seemed thoroughly unimpressed by our presence.

  They took us out on the terrace, where the bodies of the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state were still lying where they’d fallen, covered with clear plastic sheeting. It was warm in the sunshine, but they were in shade. Eliza Deeds, the secretary of state’s wife, had been medevaced to a hospital in Dallas hours ago.

  “We haven’t touched a thing,” Lieutenant Lee said. “I insisted. And the staff is waiting to talk.”

  “Take us through it,” Mahoney said.

  We heard about breakfasts on the terrace in the morning sun, a Garand Ranch tradition even in winter. We heard about soft, distant thuds, and how the Speaker had been hit first and the secretary of state wounded and then killed with another shot.

  Mahoney said, “And that was at roughly what time?”

  Both Lieutenant Lee and Agent Crown agreed it was 7:28 a.m. local time when the shooting ended, plus or minus thirty seconds.

  “Why did it take so long for word to reach Washington?” I asked.

  Lee said, “This whole area is a dead zone as far as cell service. They usually have satellite coverage, but it was out too. We had to drive twenty miles on dirt roads to call it in.”

  Mahoney said, “Which gave the other assassins back east time to act.”

  “The coordination in this is breathtaking,” I said.

  “Who knew the Speaker was coming?” Mahoney said. “And the secretary of state?”

  Lee said Guilford’s wife knew about the trip, of course, and his two sons, his chief of staff, and his personal secretary. Other than that small circle, the Speaker tended to keep his hunting life quiet.

  Likewise, Secretary of State Deeds had told few people that he and his wife were going off for a few days with the Speaker of the House. But Deeds’s bodyguard did say the secretary’s
top tier of foreign policy advisers all knew he would be at the ranch.

  “They were in a tizzy, afraid there would be no cell service,” Crown said. “I guess they were right.”

  I said, “We’ll come back to that. Do we know where the shots came from?”

  One of the FBI forensics techs said, “Haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  Pritchard, the Texas Ranger, spat tobacco into a Styrofoam cup and said, “I already eyeballed it. They came from out on that bluff beyond the ag fields. I’m figuring five hundred to five twenty-five meters out.”

  “You don’t know that,” the tech said.

  Pritchard shot him a sour look as he smoothed his mustache. “Son, I promise you, I can walk you to within ten feet of where those snipers were lying.”

  Mahoney said, “So you’ve been out there to look already?”

  Pritchard smiled. “I may be a hick, Special Agent Mahoney, but I am not stupid.”

  CHAPTER

  69

  PRITCHARD HAD US climb into his truck. A black Malinois shepherd paced behind a screen in the back of it.

  “My boy Samba back there’s an asset to you,” Pritchard said. “Best man-tracker in the state, and that’s no BS. Won down to Houston, fair and square.”

  Mahoney said, “You don’t think they’ve left the county by now?”

  “Probably so,” the Texas Ranger said. “But at least Samba can tell us the way they went and where your forensics team should focus.”

  It made sense to me. Pritchard drove a ranch road to the base of the bluff. We got out and climbed a rocky, sandy wall through sage and other desert plants blooming.

  It smells too good for a murder scene, I thought as we crested the rise. Mahoney puffed up beside me, with the Texas Ranger, his dog, and the FBI forensics crew trailing.

  Pritchard adjusted his belt and then released the Malinois. “Seek, Samba. Seek!”

  The dog’s ears went up. He bounded forward, arcing across the wind with his tail up. We watched him dodge sage plants and then slow, his muzzle raised and his nostrils flaring. I didn’t know dogs that well, but he seemed confused.

  “Seek!” Pritchard said again.

  The Malinois’s vigor renewed. He trotted forward again some forty yards, looking confident, then looped back toward us. His tail was all we could see for a few moments, wagging there above the brush.

  Samba halted. He started to wheeze, then whimper, then shriek in pain. He exploded away from the spot and spun in circles, digging frantically at his nose and muzzle with his paws.

  “Damn it!” Pritchard said, running after the dog. “He get into a porcupine?”

  When the Ranger caught up to Samba, the dog was still crying and scratching at his face.

  “Damn it,” the Ranger said again. “No quills,” he called back to us. “They must have sprayed the place with bleach or cayenne or both!”

  I held up a hand, telling the forensics team to stay put. Mahoney and I donned blue booties. Ten feet apart, we walked abreast, searching the undergrowth separating us from Pritchard and his dog, which was still whimpering.

  “I got something,” Mahoney said just as my eyes came to rest on a rectangular box lying in the sand.

  “I do too,” I said, easing around a bush and putting on latex gloves.

  I squatted down and picked up the box, which was about the size of a paperback novel. It had slits on the front, a fan on the bottom, a complicated control panel, and a logo.

  “Anyone know what an Ozonics is?” I asked.

  Pritchard had calmed his dog and reclipped his lead. “Portable ozone machine,” he said. “Hunters use them to kill odor. Makes sense.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Wind’s blowing from us to the hacienda,” the Texas Ranger said. “If the ranch dogs had smelled them out here, they’d have barked, probably come to investigate. Sumbitches really thought this through, you know. Contingencies.”

  Before I could agree, Mahoney held up a smaller, thinner metal box. “Any idea on this one, Mr. Pritchard?”

  He told his dog to stay and came over to look. After several moments, he looked over at one of his deputies.

  “Got your radio, Devin?”

  The deputy nodded.

  “Call me.”

  He did, but Pritchard didn’t get the transmission on his end.

  “Jammer,” the Ranger said. “No wonder the satellite phone wasn’t working.”

  Mahoney said, “Looks like the ground’s been swept for a ways,” he said.

  “Samba good enough to pick up scent back there?” I asked.

  Pritchard shook his head. “His nose is toast for today.”

  Mahoney said, “You know this country?”

  The Ranger nodded. “Lot of it.”

  “Where would their natural line of travel be? How would they likely go if they were heading, say, roughly north?”

  Pritchard thought a moment. “Straight north, there’s a whole lot of nothing but BLM land, broken country, and box canyons for twenty miles, maybe more.”

  “Northeast? Northwest?”

  The Texas Ranger thought about that, then said, “Northeast, maybe four, five miles, there used to be an old road into a mining claim on the federal land, but I want to say its gated or blocked.”

  “I’m betting it’s not anymore,” I said. “How long to drive there?”

  “We’ll have to loop all the way around. Forty minutes?”

  “We’ll fly,” Mahoney said.

  We did. Following Pritchard’s directions, the helicopter took us to a heavy-duty gate off a spur of a country road. A sign said ROAD CLOSED. BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT . The lock had been cut. We opened the gate and started on foot up a terrible, washed-out rock-and-sand road.

  “No tire tracks,” Ned said.

  “But look at all the little lines in the sand,” I said, kneeling. “It’s like whoever drove in and out was pulling brooms behind them.”

  “Special Agent Mahoney?” the copter pilot called from the other side of the gate. “We just got the call, sir. President Hobbs is dead.”

  CHAPTER

  70

  DARKNESS HAD FALLEN when Mahoney and I touched down at Andrews. With the tailwind, we’d made even better time on the return flight.

  As we climbed out of the Strike Eagles, it seemed surreal that we’d been in West Texas less than an hour before. We hustled across the tarmac. My phone beeped, alerting me to several calls from Bree.

  I slowed, told Ned I’d be right along, and called her back.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Have you heard?”

  “That Hobbs died?”

  “No, that we had his assassin on a gurney right in front of us and let him slip. Then we had him almost cornered in GW Medical Center, and he got past us again wearing a dead guy’s facial skin.”

  That struck me as gruesome. “For real?”

  “I found the skinned body myself! Someone’s keeping him just ahead of us. I think there’s a traitor, Alex.”

  “Ned does too,” I said.

  “Maybe Lance Reamer with the Secret Service,” she said, her voice hardening as she recounted how Reamer had waved the bleeding assassin through the checkpoint over her protests and then balked at providing an agent to accompany the killer to the hospital.

  “I know you lost an officer, but you’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “I know,” Bree said, and she exhaled hard.

  I told her about the old mining road north of the hunting ranch that looked swept.

  “But we found some fresh tire imprints about three hundred yards up the road when whoever it was bounced over rocks and hit sand,” I said. “Looks like a big pickup pulling a horse trailer. Trouble is, those happen to be everywhere in Texas and all points north, south, east, and west of it. Mahoney’s got agents and police canvassing in a fifty-mile radius around that ranch, but nothing yet.”

  I told her I’d text if I thought I could make it home, and then I w
ent inside the hangar.

  In the hours we’d been gone, the vast space had been transformed into a teeming hive. There were several hundred people inside, uniformed and not. At least a hundred of them had already been assigned workstations complete with ultra-secure computers linked to the databases of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and Homeland Security. Four huge TV monitors hung above the work area.

  They were tuned to CNN and the network news. The nation was in shock at the four assassinations. People were fearing an attempt to topple the government altogether, and they spoke of potential anarchy and despair. President Larkin was due to speak to the country in less than an hour.

  I spotted Keith Karl Rawlins, and then I saw Mahoney talking to a trim, fit woman in a business suit. I vaguely recognized her as a high-ranking FBI official. She didn’t look happy and seemed to find my arrival a cause for more sourness.

  Mahoney introduced her as Susan Carstensen, the Bureau’s deputy director for investigations. Carstensen shook my hand and said, “We won’t be jetting about at supersonic speeds like that again unless I give the go, are we clear, Dr. Cross?”

  “Director Sanford ordered us to go,” I said.

  “Just the same. I won’t have this spin out of control with cowboys riding off on a whim.”

  Mahoney gritted his teeth. “With all due respect, ma’am, that was no whim, and we’re hardly cowboys. We were able to see the entire crime scene as well as find the odor destroyers I described, a signal jammer, and the tire prints.”

  Carstensen lost the attitude, became all business. “The jamming device. Russian-made?”

  “On its way to Quantico for testing,” Mahoney said. “Kasimov?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “But you should know that NSA is reporting we’re getting scores of attempts to hack us coming out of Russia, China, and North Korea.”

  “You mean they’re trying to hack us in here?” I said.

  “The word is out. They seem to know this is the center of the investigation.”

  “Feeling us out,” Mahoney said. “Seeing if we can be compromised.”