Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  “No. No charge.”

  I started to walk away.

  “Dr. Cross?”

  When I looked back, I saw he had my card out and was playing with it in his fingers. “Yes?”

  “I …” He paused to look at his bourbon. “Do you think people like me, addictive personalities—do you think we can ever stop our obsessions?”

  “If you’re sufficiently motivated to change, yes,” I said.

  “So someone else can’t stop you?”

  “When it comes right down to it, change has to come from within.”

  Winters nodded and pushed the bourbon away from him. He gazed at me and said, “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  As I turned to go again, he said, “I tried to change Kaycee, or whatever her name really is.”

  I paused, unsure of what to say. “Didn’t work?”

  He shook his head. “She’s crazy. Crazier than I ever was.”

  CHAPTER

  82

  PABLO CRUZ WAS nothing if not patient.

  On the second full day of martial law, President Hobbs’s assassin waited until darkness had fallen before slipping out from beneath the protective cover on a Bertram offshore fishing boat moored in a slip at the Hope Springs Marina in Stafford, Virginia. He still wore the dry suit, and he attributed the fact that he was still alive to the suit and to the belt he’d used as a tourniquet.

  The wound wasn’t as bad as it could have been, given the number of shots that had been fired at him at the confluence of the flooding Rock Creek and the surging Potomac River. The slug had hit him in top of his left forearm, just below the elbow, and broken bone before exiting.

  The pain had been excruciating enough to send even the most seasoned veteran to the surface and sure capture. But Cruz had embraced the pain and used it to drive him to swim harder and deeper into the main channel, where the current was swift and growing stronger with the rain and the tide. He was swept fast and far downstream as he felt water seeping through the holes the bullet had made entering and exiting the suit. He reached up and clamped his gloved hand over them.

  After staying under for more than two minutes, he surfaced, saw lights on the shore, and ducked under again. Cruz kept on in this manner, swimming farther and farther toward the center of the river, always underwater.

  After coming up for air the sixth time, he’d floated on his back, letting the river take him as it flowed toward the sea. He’d probed the wound, cleaned it as best he could, and applied the tourniquet.

  Then he dug in the thigh pocket of the dry suit for the patch kit that came with it. The suit had been designed by cave divers, people who knew a torn suit could kill them.

  It was a struggle, but he got two glued patches over the holes and then cinched the belt harder around his bleeding arm.

  The assassin had swum on and floated for almost seven hours with the current, releasing the tourniquet every fifteen minutes to avoid cutting off the blood flow for too long and heading consistently southeast, downstream. When he’d climbed into the boat before dawn that Saturday, Cruz was forty-six miles from where he’d entered the river.

  He’d found a cabinet with canned food and water in the fishing boat’s cabin. Knowing he risked serious infection, Cruz had forced the antibiotics into him before the painkillers. He’d eaten and slept fitfully with the Ruger in his good hand all day, setting his wristwatch to wake him every twenty minutes to briefly loosen the tourniquet.

  Even so, when Cruz stepped down on the dock, he felt feverish and light-headed. He needed to put as much distance as he could between himself and Washington, DC, he decided. But seeing a doctor came first.

  Cruz was halfway down the dock to shore when he saw a light go on in one of the marina offices. It went off a few moments later, then another one went on and off, and then a third.

  That works, the assassin thought.

  Without hesitation, he hurried forward and was hiding in the bushes outside the main door to the marina office when the security guard, a scrawny kid in his early twenties, exited. He had a thin caterpillar-like mustache and carried a flashlight in his hand and a small can of pepper spray in a holster on his hip. Cruz waited until the guard walked past before stepping out behind him.

  He stuck the Ruger against the back of the kid’s head.

  “Stop,” he said. “Do as I say, and you’ll live to see another day.”

  The guard froze and then, trembling, raised his arms.

  “Please, man,” he choked out. “I got no money. And there’s no money in any of the offices. Nothing worth nothing at all.”

  “You have a car?” Cruz asked.

  The guard said nothing. Cruz poked the back of his head. “Answer me.”

  “I just bought it.” He moaned. “I worked overtime on this shit job just so I could—”

  “I don’t care,” Cruz said. “Where is it?”

  The kid cursed before nodding toward the side of the marina offices. “Over there. The maroon Camry.”

  “Keys?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Front right pocket.”

  “Keep them,” Cruz said. “We’re going for a drive.”

  “I can’t leave.”

  The assassin jabbed his head with the pistol’s muzzle. “You must.”

  The guard had stumbled forward, and now he looked over his shoulder at Cruz. He saw his battered, swollen, and stitched face. He saw the dry suit, had a moment of realization, and then lost it.

  “Oh, man,” he said, holding out his palms. “Please, just take the car. I promise you I won’t say a thing. I’ll just say someone knocked me out and stole my car.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” Cruz said. “Toss the pepper spray and move, or I’ll shoot you for spite.”

  The kid resigned himself to his fate, pulled out the pepper-spray canister, lobbed it toward the water, and then trudged around the building to a small gravel parking lot.

  When they reached the Camry, Cruz said, “Give me your coat.”

  The guard removed the jacket and handed it to him. Cruz put it on. “Get in. You’re driving.”

  After the guard was behind the wheel, the assassin took the seat directly behind him and tapped the back of his head with the gun barrel. “What’s your name?”

  “Jared,” he said, flinching. “Jared Goldberg.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jared,” he said. “Now drive.”

  CHAPTER

  83

  BACK AT JOINT Base Andrews, as well as across the nation, anxiety was building. Despite the imposition of martial law, protests had broken out at peace vigils held in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle.

  No country had lobbed a nuclear warhead at us, but the threat remained. You could see it was on everyone’s mind. Agents were calling home as often as they called for investigative leads, and I didn’t blame any of them for it.

  But I simply refused to let the possibility of a world war dominate my thoughts. If I did, I knew I’d be useless in my new role.

  When I returned from talking to Dr. Winters, Carstensen, the FBI deputy director, had asked me to move to the team that was synthesizing information. I’d started to protest that I was more useful in the field, but she’d cut me off and walked away.

  So I’d kept my head down through the evening, focusing on the flow of evidence crossing my screen and desktop. Twice I’d tried to return Nina Davis’s call, but I’d gotten no answer. But I couldn’t pay attention to that. Every minute seemed to bring an update, a field report, or a result from Quantico’s churning forensics laboratories.

  We knew by then, for example, that, courtesy of a bright ER nurse at George Washington University Hospital, we had DNA material and blood from the president’s assassin and possibly his fingerprints off the rail of a hospital bed he’d used after the ambulance ride. We knew his blood type was O negative, but DNA testing still took several days. And so far, there were no matches to the fingerprints.

  As I closed that fil
e, I once again forced myself to consider who benefited the most from the assassinations.

  Kasimov? I supposed if the Kremlin was behind the killings, then Kasimov would benefit as long as he could disappear and as long as his Moscow handlers could keep him hidden from the long arm of U.S. law enforcement. But Kasimov had vanished. Maybe it didn’t benefit him. Maybe his role in the plot was done, and some higher-up in Russia had ordered his plane shot down over the ocean.

  Did Samuel Larkin still benefit? The acting president had been at an undisclosed location all day, huddled with a small circle of advisers, dealing with the existential threat to the nation and the constitutional crisis. Would Larkin, the former attorney general, agree that Senator Talbot, the Senate president pro tempore, was the right and legal person to be sitting in the Oval Office and calling the shots? If Larkin refused to cede power, wouldn’t that be an indicator of his involvement and of his intent?

  For his part, Senator Talbot had been interviewed several times since the Lester Holt story appeared. Talbot seemed genuinely daunted by the idea of assuming the presidency, especially given his age. There’d even been talk of his retiring before this sudden change of circumstances.

  So, did Talbot benefit? All in all, it didn’t strike me that way, but then again, I’d heard it said more than once that every U.S. senator fantasizes about becoming president. U.S. senators were powerful and influential in their own right, but for men and women of overwhelming ambition, being a senator wasn’t powerful and influential enough.

  But having fellow politicians murdered to become president?

  Before I could give that further thought, more forensics and field reports blinked into my in-box.

  From Quantico’s ballistics lab: a report confirming Keith Rawlins’s suspicion that the bullets used to kill President Hobbs and wound the secretary of defense were made of carbon and built on a 3-D printer.

  The next report came from Rawlins himself, who had been writing programs and devising algorithms to filter the huge amounts of data flowing in the wake of the assassinations. He’d found an incredible amount of speculation about the assassinations by various conspiracy theorists on the internet and dark web. But so far he’d discovered little to suggest the intricate dance of people and events that had to have occurred before the coordinated killings.

  Mahoney came up to my workstation.

  “A man and a woman with horses rented a remote cabin about forty miles north of the ranch where the Speaker and the secretary of state were shot,” he said. “They drove a heavy-duty green Chevy pickup with Wyoming plates, paid the landlord cash, and had cases that looked like they could have held rifles. Best part? They carried bogus Wyoming licenses in the names of Frank and Elizabeth Marker.”

  “Do we have agents at the cabin?”

  Mahoney’s face fell. “The landlord hadn’t been out there since he’d gotten his money. He led two agents from Dallas into the middle of nowhere, and, surprise, they found the cabin burned to the ground.”

  Carstensen, who’d just walked up, said, “Nothing else?”

  “The owner’s working with a sketch artist.”

  I thought of something, got up, and went over to Keith Rawlins. I asked him if it was possible to craft an algorithm to sift through the vast NSA records of phone calls and data transmissions by specific location.

  The FBI computer wizard said he thought so, and I told him what locations I had in mind. Rawlins said it might take him several hours, but he’d try.

  When I returned to my work space, Mahoney, Carstensen, and half the other agents in the hangar were on their feet, their attention glued once again to the big screens dangling overhead.

  Lester Holt sat at his anchor desk. “Acting president Larkin and Senator Talbot have agreed to let the chief justice of the Supreme Court decide who should lead the nation. In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Harold Murphy clings to life. If Murphy lives, he’ll also have a claim to the Oval Office. Could the situation be cloudier?”

  Carstensen’s phone buzzed. She answered, listened, punched her fist in the air, and then looked at us and smiled. “The CIA just snatched Viktor Kasimov from a brothel in Tangier. They’re bringing him here.”

  CHAPTER

  84

  FOLLOWING CRUZ’S INSTRUCTIONS , the marina security guard, Jared Goldberg, had driven east by southeast, staying on residential and county secondary roads whenever possible. There were plenty of vehicles out after dark, which was a relief.

  In the assassin’s worst-case scenario, he’d imagined a roadblock at every main intersection in a sixty-mile circle around Washington, DC. But he guessed that would have required calling out the National Guard from five or six states. Maybe more.

  According to the all-news satellite station Goldberg had turned on, that had not yet happened and was unlikely to, given the projected short period of martial law. Three more days, Cruz thought. Three more days and I can make a real move.

  He shivered. He almost swooned. He needed a doctor. Fast.

  The radio was saying that the curfew would be in effect again at nine p.m. Any vehicles found traveling afterward could be stopped and searched.

  Cruz forced himself alert. He needed medical care and a place to hide until—

  “Where now?” Goldberg asked, gesturing at traffic signs.

  They were coming up on Virginia State Route 17, a four-lane highway that could take them west toward Storck or east toward Interstate 95 and the bridge to the eastern shore of Maryland.

  “Go west,” Cruz said.

  On the highway, they passed several dairy farms, one called Mill Creek, and then, a good ten miles on and set well back from the highway on a county road, they saw a ranch house and a steel outbuilding.

  Cruz caught more than a glimpse, enough to know that the ranch house was lit and that the parking area near the out-building was empty save for a single pickup truck. He also saw the sign at the entrance to the drive before they went by it.

  KERRY LARGE ANIMAL HOSPITAL

  TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR EMERGENCY SERVICE

  It took a moment for that to alter his thinking. He glanced at his watch: 8:10.

  “Get off at the next exit and go back one,” Cruz said.

  Goldberg did. At the assassin’s instructions, the security guard drove beyond the pickup in the animal hospital parking lot and stopped where their car would be shielded from view of the highway and County Road 610. As they passed the glass front door to the vet clinic, Cruz saw through it to an empty lobby that was dimly lit.

  Someone, probably a veterinary tech, was on the overnight shift, Cruz thought. Well, it was better than nothing.

  “You got a cow,” Cruz said to Goldberg after he’d turned the car off.

  “What?”

  The assassin jabbed the kid in the ribs with the gun barrel. “You ring the bell, and you tell them you’ve got a cow calf that’s birthing breech at Mill Creek Farm, and you need help.”

  “I don’t even understand that,” Goldberg said.

  “You don’t have to,” Cruz said. “Just say it. A cow calf that’s birthing breech at Mill Creek Farm.”

  The security guard muttered something but climbed from the car. Cruz got out after him and followed him down the walkway toward the entrance. It was cold. Their breath clouded in the air.

  The assassin stopped ten feet short of the entrance and aimed the gun low and from the hip at Goldberg, who’d halted at the door and glanced at him.

  “Do it,” Cruz said. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

  Looking miserable, Goldberg rang the buzzer and stood there expectantly.

  A few moments later, a woman’s voice came over an intercom.

  “Kerry Hospital,” she said.

  The security guard looked up at the camera and, to the assassin’s surprise, said exactly what he’d told him to say.

  After a pause, she said, “I’ll be right out. Why didn’t Angelo call?”

  “Cell tower’s out,” Goldberg said, without hesitati
on. “So they sent me.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m the new hired hand, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be right out to follow you back.”

  Although Cruz was impressed by how well Goldberg had ad-libbed in the situation, he felt suddenly nauseated; his skin got hot, and he felt dizzy.

  He lowered the gun and rested against the wall so he wouldn’t fall.

  “She’s coming,” Goldberg said.

  “Step back and smile, Jared.”

  Cruz heard a dead bolt thrown, and the door was pushed open. A stout blonde in her forties stepped out. She wore winter gear and carried a large bag.

  “Dr. Kerry,” she said, holding out her mitten. “You keep her on her feet? Or is she down?”

  Goldberg looked confused.

  “The cow?”

  Cruz stepped up and aimed the gun at the vet from point-blank range. “She’s still on her feet,” he said. “Get back inside, Doc. Now.”

  CHAPTER

  85

  DR. KERRY’S EYES widened in shock and fear. She stepped back, and then she saw his face and registered the fact that he was wearing a wet suit and booties. She turned, terrified.

  “Now!” Cruz said.

  The veterinarian was shaking, but she did as she was told.

  “You too, Jared.”

  “Haven’t I done enough? Can’t I just go, man?”

  “No.”

  Goldberg didn’t like it, but he went inside. The assassin followed.

  He turned the dead bolt, then looked at Dr. Kerry, who was summoning her courage. She stood straighter, said, “What do you want?”

  “You’re going to take care of my left arm,” Cruz said. “Gunshot wound.”

  Her chin dipped. “I’m not an MD.”

  “Large-animal vet is close enough,” he said. “Get it cleaned out and give me IV antibiotics and some painkillers, and Jared and I will be on our way.”

  Forty minutes later, a grim-faced Dr. Kerry taped the last bandage in place.

  “That’s the best I can do,” she said. “You’ll need a real surgeon if you want to use that arm properly again.”