Target: Alex Cross

Chapter 16

Bree drank from a cup of hot black coffee as she surveyed the scene inside the apartment in Georgetown. The victim, a white male in his fifties, sat slumped in a club chair. Blood had spilled from his neck wound to his lap and clotted on his chest and belly like an apron.

“Time of death?” she asked Evelynn Kincaid, a top medical field examiner.

“Four or five hours ago?” said Kincaid, a tall lanky woman who used to play volleyball at Purdue. “The heat was turned up, so I’ll need more tests to be precise.”

“Nasty neck wound. The knife?” Bree said, gesturing to a switchblade on the carpet near the corpse.

Kincaid shook her head. “That’s his knife. There’s a scabbard for it around his right ankle, and there’s no blood on the blade.”

“So what was the weapon?”

The ME put on reading glasses, peered at the victim’s neck. “He’s got bruising and skin abrasions above and below the wound. And the edges are ragged. Could be a thin rope, but I’m thinking small-gauge wire.”

“From behind?”

“I’d say so,” Kincaid said. “The killer had to be plenty strong for the wire to cut deep like that. And smart. Victim got a shot off with that little Ruger in the corner, but it missed. Bullet hole is in the south wall, over there.”

“No one heard the shot?”

Natalie Parks, the detective on the scene, said, “No one yet.”

“We have an ID? Who found him?”

Detective Parks said they’d found a driver’s license and credit cards that identified the deceased as Carl Thomas of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and business cards that pegged him as a medical-equipment salesman. A maid for the apartment’s owners had arrived to bring clean towels around seven p.m. and found Thomas in his present state.

“I’ve already spoken with the owners,” Parks said. “Thomas booked online nine days ago. He indicated in his application he was going to combine business with tourism and stay for three nights.”

Bree thought about that. “Anything linking him to Senator Walker’s killing?”

Parks and Kincaid both seemed surprised by the question.

“Two killings seventeen hours and five blocks apart,” Bree said. “And this guy is armed not only with a pistol, but a knife he carries in an ankle sheath. So until we prove otherwise, we’re considering these murders connected. Meantime, I want his prints run. Anything else? Itinerary? Phone? Computer?”

Parks shook her head. “Nothing beyond the wallet and the IDs, Chief.”

“Killer took them. Clothes?”

“An overnight suitcase. A down parka, hat, gloves.”

“How’d he get here? Where’s his car?”

“No idea yet.”

“Nothing that said ‘shooter’ in that overnight bag?”

“No bullets or rifle components, if that’s what you mean,” Parks said.

Bree’s phone rang. Dispatch.

Bree sighed and answered. “This better be good. I’m running on fumes.”

“Chief, we’ve had officers under fire, a high-speed chase on Blair Road, and now an armed standoff in Takoma, multiple weapons involved,” the dispatcher said.

Bree started toward the door fast, barking questions at the dispatcher. She was told that it started when a Metro patrol unit had pulled over a Cadillac Escalade with California plates for failure to make a full stop at a blinking light. There were three males in the car. The officer ran the plates and found them registered to Fernando Romero of Oakland.

The name had rung bells.

“What kind of bells?” Bree demanded, leaving the apartment crime scene.

“Romero’s a big gangbanger with ties to the Mexican drug cartels. He’s got a long history of violence and three felony warrants out for his arrest, including one for threatening bodily harm to a U.S. senator two weeks ago.”

“Betsy Walker?” Bree said, running now.

“That’s affirmative.”

Chapter 17

We waited outside the Verizon Center until Damon emerged as happy as I’d ever seen him. And not just because he’d played an integral part in the upset of the NCAA season. He had his arm around a very pretty young Asian woman.

“This is my girlfriend, Song Li,” he said. “She’s from Hong Kong and goes to Davidson, a transfer like me.”

Girlfriend, I thought. That’s a first for Damon.

“Song Li,” Nana said, walking up and taking her hand. “What a beautiful name.”

Song smiled shyly and said in a soft British accent, “Thank you, Mrs. Hope. Damon has told me so much about you, I feel like I know you.”

“You can call me Nana or Nana Mama like everyone else, dear,” my grandmother said.

Jannie appeared suspicious until Song turned to her and said, “Are you the fabled Jannie?”

My daughter laughed. “Fabled?”

“Damon brags on you almost every day.”

“That’s not true,” Damon protested. “Well, maybe almost every other day.”

“Dr. Cross?” Song said. She shook my hand and bowed her head. “It is indeed an honor to meet you. My father will be most pleased.”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Song,” I said. “Your father?”

Damon said, “He’s a detective in Hong Kong. It’s how Song and I got to talking.”

Song smiled. “When I told my father who Damon’s father was, he got very excited. He has watched the tapes of your FBI seminars on profiling and homicide investigations. He says you are one of the best in the world.”

“I don’t know about that. But it’s very flattering and kind of him to say so.”

“I will tell him,” Song said. Beaming, she turned to Ali. “Damon says you are studying Chinese in school?”

Ali rattled off something in Chinese that made Song laugh and clap her hands. She replied to Ali, and he started laughing as well.

“Okay,” Nana said. “Fill the rest of us in?”

Song said, “Ali said it was nice to meet a daughter of Hong Kong.”

Ali grinned. “And she said it was nice to meet the brother of Mr. Basketball.”

“Mr. Basketball?” Damon said.

Song clapped again, laughed, and said, “He has a very good ear. How long have you been studying, Ali?”

“A year?” he said.

“That’s amazing!”

“Here’s the Uber car, Dad,” Jannie said.

Damon looked at me. “Can Song come with us? Stay at the house tonight?”

“Of course,” I said. “She fits right in.”

Damon grinned and put his arm around her again. “She does, doesn’t she?”

“C’mon, then,” Nana Mama said. “Get in, you two must be hungry.”

“Damon is always hungry,” Song said, shaking her head and looking awed enough that we all chuckled.

We climbed into the car and set off toward home.

Damon said, “Can Song sleep in your old attic office, Dad?”

I was slightly relieved to hear the plan. “That’s fine. You can blow up the mattress for her up there.”

On the ten-minute ride, Nana Mama gently interrogated Song, and we learned that she was born in Hong Kong, her mother worked in financial services, and her father had spent two years with Scotland Yard in London before returning home to head the detective and special investigations bureau for the Hong Kong police force.

“So he’s like Bree?” Ali said.

I nodded. “Sounds like it.”

Damon said, “Where is Bree, anyway?”

Chapter 18

When bree reached the Takoma area of Washington, DC, patrol cars had blocked off both ends of Aspen Street between Seventh and Tenth.

“FBI here?” she asked a patrol officer.

“Not yet, Chief.”

“Secret Service, Capitol Police?”

“Negative. Metro SWAT’s en route.”

That helped. Bree ducked under the crime scene tape and kept low as she hustled toward another patrol car up the block where two officers were crouched, their weapons drawn. The side windows of the cruiser were blown out. So was the windshield. Half a block beyond them, in the middle of the street, there was a midnight-blue Cadillac Escalade with California plates and an abandoned city snowplow.

“You the ones who pulled them over?” Bree said when she reached the officers.

“Wiggins and Flaherty, Chief,” said Officer Wiggins, a blonde in her thirties.

Flaherty said that getting the alert regarding Romero’s felonies had taken long enough to make the gangbanger and his friends anxious.

“When they saw me climb out of the car, one of the two in the back opened fire, and Romero hit the gas.”

They gave chase for more than a mile before Romero saw the snowplow coming at them down Aspen Street between Eighth and Ninth. They couldn’t get around the plow, and they abandoned the Escalade in the middle of the street.

Armed with pistols and AR-style rifles, Romero shot at the snowplow, shattering the windshield and sending the operator scrambling out the other door and down the street. One of the other two opened up on the patrol car before the three of them forced their way into a yellow craftsman bungalow on the north side of the street.

“Time of last shots?” Bree asked.

“Nine minutes ago,” Wiggins said. “And we’ve got officers watching the back of the house. They’re still in there.”

“Hostages?”

“We’re assuming so,” Flaherty said. “According to city records, residents are Matthew Sheridan, his wife, Sienna, and their eight-year-old twins, Emma and Kate.”

Before Bree could reply, a gun went off in the house.

A woman started screaming, and then girls’ shrill voices joined her.

Bree radioed dispatch, reported the shot and the hostages, and requested that the entire neighborhood be cordoned off.

Bree clicked off and her phone immediately rang. Chief of Police Michaels.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

Bree told him about Romero. “He threatened Senator Walker two weeks ago in Oakland. Now he’s here in DC armed to the teeth with two of his fellow bangers.”

“You think he killed Walker?”

“When pulled over nearly three thousand miles from home, he and his men responded with violence, and they’ve taken hostages. There’s also a homicide victim in Georgetown who may or may not be involved.”

“Jesus,” Michaels said. “What do you need from me?”

She looked down the street behind her, saw a big black SWAT van pulling up.

“The cavalry just arrived, Chief,” Bree said. “I’ll let you know if anything—”

More screams came from the house.

“Sorry, Chief, gotta go,” Bree said. She hung up and peeked over the hood of the patrol car.

Emma and Kate, the terrified eight-year-old Sheridan twins, came out the front door, followed closely by two of the gangsters. The men were wearing kerchiefs over their lower faces, holding on to the collars of the sisters’ nightgowns, and pressing pistol muzzles to the backs of the girls’ heads, using the children as human shields.

“We ain’t waiting for no SWAT or negotiators,” one shouted. “Get that plow the hell out of here. You let us move on, or we kill them and go out in a blaze!”

“No!” a woman screamed.

Bree peeked again and saw a brunette in a Washington Red-skins jersey, jeans, and socks come out the door with the third man behind her. Bree recognized Romero from the picture that dispatch had sent. He held an AK-47 pressed to the back of a sobbing Sienna Sheridan.

He said something to her.

“Believe him!” she cried. “He shot my husband. He’ll kill us all.”

“So what’s it gonna be?” Romero yelled as his men started down the front steps. “A peaceful ending? Or a goddamned bloodbath?”

Chapter 19

Bree took the bullhorn that Officer Wiggins offered her.

“This is Chief Stone of Metro PD,” she said, trying to sound calm. “No one wants bloodshed here, Mr. Romero.”

“Then let us leave!” Romero yelled. “Now.”

“You’re going to have to give me time to clear the streets,” she called out. “It’s not like I have the keys to that snowplow at my fingertips.”

“Five minutes, then!” Romero said.

“Fifteen.”

“No. Ten! And after that we don’t give a damn about no East Coast bullshit, and little girls and Mommy gonna start dying, just like that bitch Betsy Walker did!”

Betsy Walker. My God, Bree thought as they dragged the girls and their mother back inside the bungalow. He did kill her. Romero is the shooter!

She dropped behind the cruiser and keyed her radio mike.

“DC SWAT, this is Chief Stone.”

“Captain Forchek here, Chief. SWAT is armored and ready to deploy.”

A plan formulated quickly in her head. “Captain, I need a team ready to push forward in support of my current location. I want quality shooters up high, with a clear view to that Land Rover. And put teams on porches on the southwest and northwest corners of Aspen and Tenth. Your best officers. Block off Ninth, north and south.”

“Roger that, Chief.”

From the house, Romero yelled, “Seven minutes, Stone!”

“I hear you, Mr. Romero,” she said through the bullhorn. “We’re trying to find the snowplow operator.”

A rattle of gunfire went off inside before he shouted, “There’s no trying! We’re about doing here, right?”

“Right, Mr. Romero,” she said, and then she ducked back behind the cruiser, still working out her strategy.

She looked at Officer Wiggins. “Where is the snowplow driver?”

“With Barstow and Hayes,” she said. “Other end of the street.”

Bree jumped up and started running east. She keyed her mike. “Forchek, send your best driver to Aspen and Eighth.”

“That would be me,” the SWAT captain said. “And I’m already on my way.”

Bree checked her watch as she ran. Six minutes.

Near the corner of Eighth, she cut right into an alley that wound back around south and then to the west, paralleling the hostage scene.

Bree triggered her mike. “Where are we, Captain?”

“We are go at twenty-two hundred five, Chief. I’m driving the plow?”

“Roger that,” she said.

She checked her watch: 10:00. Five minutes. Was it enough?

It had to be enough. She focused on an image of Jannie and went from a run to a sprint, dodging trashcans and the odd stack of boxes for three blocks, trying not to slip in the snow. She turned back north on Tenth and raced toward the other cruiser blocking access to Aspen.

Captain Forchek, a rangy guy even in his body armor, stood there waiting with two uniformed officers and their cruiser blocking Aspen.

Gasping, she laid out her plan to the SWAT commander.

Forchek listened, thought, and then smiled. “As long as the department backs me up afterward, I can do that, Chief.”

“Good,” she said, and she nodded to the other officers. “Pull your car and retreat to Eleventh and Aspen. Park north on Eleventh. Stand ready to block Aspen on my command.”

Chapter 20

Ninety seconds later, Captain Forchek ran crouched along the snow-packed south sidewalk of Aspen Street, sticking to the shadows until he was half a block from the snowplow.

Bree watched him through binoculars from the front porch of a town house at the southeast corner of Tenth and Aspen. Four SWAT officers awaited her command behind her, across Tenth. Another four waited on a porch across Aspen. The last of the twelve was diagonally across from her on the northwest corner of the intersection.

She keyed the bullhorn.

“Mr. Romero, we are moving the snowplow. I am assuring you safe passage as long as you leave the hostages behind.”

“You think I’m stupid?” Romero bellowed. “They’re staying with us until we decide to let them go. Just move the damn snowplow and get the hell out of our way!”

Suit yourself, Bree thought as she watched Forchek creep between two cars and angle onto the street itself, keeping the snowplow between him and the Sheridans’ bungalow. He climbed in the open side door.

She keyed her mike. “Nice and easy now, Captain.”

“Roger that, Chief.”

The snowplow engine turned over. Bree swung her binoculars to the front porch of the Sheridans’ house and saw Mrs. Sheridan and her daughters coming out. Romero and his two masked men were behind them.

“Move that goddamned plow!” Romero shouted.

Forchek lifted the snowplow’s blade, turned on the headlights, and drove.

Bree watched Romero and his men hustling Sienna, Emma, and Kate Sheridan off the porch and down the short path toward the north sidewalk.

The moving snowplow blocked her view for several moments before Forchek drove past her, slowed, swung the plow in reverse, and backed it up onto Tenth Street heading north. He stopped the plow about fifty yards from the intersection, right where Bree wanted him. The plow headlights died.

Bree looked back at the Escalade and saw Romero already in the front passenger seat aiming his gun at a trembling Sienna Sheridan, who was behind the wheel. The other four were in the backseat, one girl at each window, Romero’s men in the middle.

Real heroes.

Calling their positions into her radio, Bree watched the headlights on the Escalade go on, and the big SUV started toward her.

“Here we go,” she said. “On my call, Forchek.”

“Roger that, Chief.”

The SWAT officers on both sides of Aspen ducked low. Bree pushed back into the shadows, watching through binoculars. For a moment, she held her breath as the Escalade approached Ninth. She feared Romero might turn onto the side street but sighed with relief when he kept on coming.

“He’s taking the easy way out,” she said into her mike. “Ten seconds, Captain.”

The Cadillac’s headlights swayed closer.

Bree dropped the binoculars, let them hang around her neck, and drew her service weapon. The snowplow’s lights were still off, but Forchek had it moving in a slow roll toward Aspen.

She glanced from the accelerating SUV to the plow and said, “Now.”

She heard the plow’s big diesel engine roar and saw it barreling toward Aspen and the approaching Cadillac. The Escalade almost got through the intersection. But then the forward edge of the plow blade clipped the SUV’s right rear quarter panel and tore off the bumper.

On the slick winter surface, the Cadillac was hurled into a sharp, clockwise spin. It smashed into two parked cars. Forchek skidded the plow to a stop, blocking their retreat but not her view.

Bree said, “Take Romero.”

A rifle was shot from the rooftop diagonally across the intersection from her, shattering the passenger side of the Cadillac’s windshield. The three SWAT teams exploded from their positions, and charged the Escalade.

Bree could see one of the girls screaming in the backseat of the SUV and feared the two other gunmen would execute them before the SWAT teams could set them free.

Romero opened fire with the AK-47 through the Escalade ’s passenger-side window, blowing it out and hitting two of the SWAT men. They sprawled on the sidewalk behind parked cars.

Romero kicked open the Cadillac’s door and sprayed bullets in a quick side-to-side arc, then he jumped out, crouched down, and fired another burst.

Three SWAT officers opened fire. All three hit the gangster, and he crumpled. Blood haloed around him on the snowy street.

Captain Forchek pushed open the plow door and leaped down, gun up and aiming through the Escalade’s side rear window. The silhouette of one of Romero’s men was sagged over on one of the Sheridan twins, who was shrieking in fear. The other gunman had her sister around the neck, a pistol pressed to her head.

“Don’t do it!” Forchek shouted. “I’ve got a dead shot at you from six feet! Drop the gun and put your hands up!”

The third gunman hesitated and then dropped the pistol.

Forchek yanked open the passenger rear door and pulled a sobbing Sheridan girl out.

Bree ran forward, calling into her radio for SWAT to raid the Sheridans’ home. Other officers were helping Sienna Sheridan and her other daughter from the car. Inside the Cadillac, the third of Romero’s crew stared straight ahead.

Even with the wool hat she wore down over her eyebrows, there was no mistaking her gender. Latina, mid-twenties, she had tattoos of lavender-colored teardrops on her lower cheeks.

There was blood all over her from the dead man beside her. There was a gaping wound in his throat from the SWAT sniper’s shot, the one that missed Romero.

“Hands behind your head,” Bree said. “Fingers laced, and slide to me.”

She did. Bree spun her around and zip-cuffed her wrists.

She keyed her radio and said, “This is Chief Stone. Hostages are safe. Repeat, hostages safe. But I need ambulances. Over.”

She didn’t bother listening to dispatch’s reply but ran past Romero’s corpse to check on the SWAT officers hit in that flurry of gunfire. Both men had taken the rounds to their bulletproof vests. They were shaken, but alive.

Her cell phone rang. Chief Michaels.

“Chief,” she said. “I have Senator Walker’s confessed assassin here. He’s dead. Do you still want his head delivered to Ned Mahoney on a platter?”

Chapter 21

The next morning, February 2, around seven, Damon and Jannie were ferrying plates of steaming scrambled eggs, maple-smoked bacon, and hash-brown potatoes with hot sauce, a Cross family favorite breakfast, to the table.

“You’re sure you won’t have coffee?” Nana Mama asked Bree, who had walked in the door only twenty minutes before.

“I’m going to sleep once Damon and Song leave,” she said, and she yawned.

“Orange juice, then?”

Bree smiled. “That sounds wonderful, Nana.”

As we dished breakfast onto our plates, I said, “We’re proud of you, by the way. All of us, Bree.”

Ali and Song started clapping and whistling, and we all joined in.

“Stop!” Bree said, holding up her hands in mild protest but smiling softly. “I was just doing my job.”

“Just doing your job?” Song said in disbelief. “You caught Senator Walker’s killer less than twenty-four hours after she was shot. You did it before the FBI was even on the scene, and all four hostages survived!” SWAT team members had entered the Sheridans’ bungalow, found Mr. Sheridan wounded but alive, and rushed him, his wife, and their daughters to the hospital.

I wanted to say that Bree had also handled the pressure from Chief Michaels admirably, but I kept that to myself. She’d called me the night before shortly after talking to Michaels, who’d been forced to eat crow, and said that he was recommending her for citations.

“I got lucky,” Bree told Song. “And, for the record, I think Damon did too.”

Song grinned, glanced shyly my older son’s way, then gazed at each of us in turn. “Thank you. All of you. You’ve been so kind, and I want to say how very much I appreciate it.”

“You’re more than welcome here,” Nana said. “Anytime.”

We ate our fill. Bree’s eyes were fluttering shut before she agreed to my offer to help her to bed. She sleepily said her good-byes, and we disappeared upstairs. I tucked her in with a promise to wake her at three so she could participate in the FBI interrogation of Romero’s female accomplice.

Downstairs, I found Damon and Song already in their coats and carrying their small travel bags.

“Sure you don’t want me to drive you to the airport?”

“I have a per diem from school, Dad,” Damon said. “It will cover the Uber.”

“Okay, then,” I said, and I gave him a big hug. “You did great last night.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“The first of many more great games,” I said.

“Definitely,” Song said, and she hugged me. “Again, Dr. Cross, it was an honor to meet you and Chief Stone. My father will be most, most pleased.”

“Give your dad my best,” I said. “All our best.”

Song and Damon hugged Nana and Jannie. Song and Ali said their good-byes in Chinese, which delighted them both. And then my oldest and his girlfriend waved and went out to the Uber car to return to their lives too many miles away.

I felt sad for myself and excited for them all in the same moment.

“C’mon, Ali,” Jannie said. “Or we’ll be late for school.”

“And don’t forget you’ve got an early patient, Alex,” my grandmother said.

I glanced at my watch. It was twelve minutes to eight.

“Thanks for the reminder,” I said, and I gave Nana a kiss and my kids high-fives and then went back through the kitchen.

Taking the stairs down to my basement office, I realized once again how lucky I was and how grateful I was to have good kids and a wife who was damn near a superhero. I laughed at that and at the fact that she’d be embarrassed to hear me say anything remotely like—

At the bottom of the staircase, I saw an envelope had been pushed through the mail slot. I went over and picked it up off the carpet. My name was printed in block letters on the front. No address. No return address.

Tearing the envelope open, I walked to my office, then I pulled out a folded sheet of unlined paper. Spelled out in letters cut from magazines, the note read:

Chapter 22

I read the message twice more, feeling inexplicably angered.

Stop who from doing what? Why not just tell me?

I started to ball up the paper, intending to toss it, but then stopped.

Who’s sending them? And why?

Taking a deep breath after these questions popped in my head, I realized the message was a form of manipulation, a way of toying with me.

It was in my nature to help people whenever I could, either through my practice or through my investigative skills.

The message asked me to help but didn’t say how. I sensed that was deliberate and designed to irritate me, to get me asking myself unanswerable questions like Who’s sending these messages? And why?

The mind is an ancient contraption controlled by questions, which is both a positive and a negative. Ask yourself a good, definable question, and your mind will do everything in its power to answer it, and it probably will be able to if given enough time.

But if the question is unanswerable, the brain spins, hearing the question over and over and over and getting no response. Why does this always happen to me? Or Why can’t I get over this tragedy? Or Who’s sending these messages?

Like twisting the key in the ignition of an engine that won’t turn over, the brain whirls on these unsolvable or as-yet-unsolved queries. Eventually, without answers, the brain gets agitated, angered, and then ground down. Eventually, it burns its way into a crisis or stalls entirely.

Is that what these messages are meant to do? Get me wondering and then fixated on who is sending them and why? Get me—

I heard a knock at my outer basement door. After putting the message in the top drawer of my desk, I went to answer the door and found Nina Davis, the Justice Department attorney, waiting.

“I’m glad you decided to come back,” I said.

She smiled weakly. “I didn’t know if I would until just a few minutes ago.”

Nina made her way to my office and took the same seat she’d occupied during our first appointment.

I sat opposite her. “How are things?”

“Oh, you know, busy, busy, busy.”

“Did you have the chance to do that exercise we discussed yesterday? Where you looked for good memories of your mother?”

Her face fell. “You know, Dr. Cross, work’s been so crazy, I... no, actually, I didn’t go there.”

I noted that, said, “Because those memories don’t exist?”

Nina shrugged. “Because it’s a waste of time. If they did exist, they were blotted out by other memories, but really, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“Okay.”

She struggled, said, “I told you I can’t feel love, but that’s not totally true. I...”

She looked at her lap.

“As I’ve said, Nina, this is a safe place. You’ll get no judgment from me, and nothing you tell me ever leaves here. And honestly, I’ve heard so much and seen so much over the years, very little shocks me. I’ve found that most behaviors and problems, they aren’t all that unique once you talk them out, get to the root of things.”

She crossed her arms and seemed offended, which didn’t surprise me.

“You have no idea the things I’ve done, Dr. Cross,” she said. “The things I do when I’m not at work.”

I kept quiet and gazed at her expectantly. I’d intentionally broken her pattern of thinking by intimating that her story, whatever it was, was not unique.

Why? People in mental crisis are often convinced that they’re the only ones in the world suffering like this, which simply isn’t true. Once they abandon that notion, after realizing that most people have thoughts just like theirs, it’s often easier to get them to open up fully.

“I do feel something like love,” Davis said at last. “Not the real thing, but close enough to crave it.”

“When does that feeling happen?”

Davis hesitated, glanced at the floor, then stiffened her shoulders and looked back up at me. “When I put myself in extreme situations. Sexually, I mean.”

Over the course of the next forty-five minutes, Nina Davis told me of Kaycee Janeway, her dark side and alter ego when it came to sex.

Nina liked to stalk men, big strong men who could dominate her.

She would see a man like that, usually outside of work, and actually feel something, a tingle of attraction, perhaps, a twinge of risk, or a more primitive reaction to his particular musky smell. Whatever it was, there was always something else about him that took it further, triggered fantasies, and changed her fully from Nina to Kaycee.

“I follow them when I can,” Nina said, staring off. “The men. At night, mostly, in bars, restaurants, even movie theaters. With their wives and girlfriends, or without. And the entire time I’m thinking of having sex with them. Rough stuff, mostly, but other times tender and sweet, and everything it’s supposed to be.”

After several nights of stalking, Nina would try to ambush or accidentally encounter her prey and lure him in.

“Once I know the fantasy I want to fulfill, I’ve never had problems attracting the men, or anyway Kaycee hasn’t,” Nina said. “And once the men know what I want, it’s not hard to convince them to give it to me, or at least try to give it to me.”

No judgments, I reminded myself.

“And you feel something like love during these encounters?”

She brightened then, became almost radiant, and for the first time I realized just how beautiful Nina Davis was. Those eyes, those lashes, her dazzling smile. I understood in that moment that most men she stalked would indeed succumb to her.

“Yes,” she said. “I feel... desperate emotion, during the sex and after. Other than the brief happiness I get from a job well done, they’re the only times I feel deeply — when they’re rough and domineering and... especially when they’re strangling me.”

“So you engage in asphyxiation sex?”

“As often as Kaycee can get it,” she said matter-of-factly.

Nina said that when the blood flow to her brain was cut off by strangulation during intercourse, she almost always orgasmed and almost always felt flooded with warm feelings and positive emotions afterward.

“But they don’t last,” she said. “After a few hours, I’m back to Nina, and there’s nothing to really feel again.”

I said nothing, took a few notes.

“So I’m a basket case, right?” Nina asked as the hour ended.

“No,” I said. “Not in the least.”

“But you’ve never heard of something this weird, this disturbed, have you?”

I smiled, determined to break her of the idea that her issues were unique, and said, “Actually, I’ve heard stranger, and much more disturbed.”

She blinked. Her face tightened. “Well, then, I guess...”

“You guess?”

After a moment’s struggle, she stood and said, “Nothing, Dr. Cross.”

“Maybe something to talk about next time?”

She hesitated again. “Maybe. Do you think I could come back tomorrow to talk about this?”

I checked my schedule. “Yes, tomorrow at one thirty.”

“Thank you. And, again, thank you for listening without judgment. I’m still trying to understand myself.”

“We all are. Thank you for sharing. It had to have been difficult.”

She knitted her brow. “You know? Not really.”

When Nina Davis had gone, I let myself admit again how very attractive she was before thinking how defensive Nina had been when I’d challenged her. It was a clear sign to me that she was heavily invested in the role of a hypersexual woman.

This was beyond sex with strangers as a way to unlock emotions. This was some deep, dark story she told herself or tried to forget, a story I didn’t think I’d come close to hearing all of yet.

Chapter 23

El Paso County, Texas

After seeing to his two horses, Dana Potter picked up the last plastic storage box from the bed of the white Dodge Ram pickup with Kansas plates that he’d stolen in Abilene the evening before.

Potter lugged the boxes across the dusty yard to the back of an old ranch house surrounded by steep, rocky, arid hills in the middle of a nowhere that began thirty miles to the east and went on all the way to the New Mexico border.

A tall, wiry, and weathered man in his early forties, Potter toed open the kitchen door with his cowboy boots and went inside.

“That’s the lot of it,” he said.

Mary, his wife, looked up from the ultralight rifle she had mounted lengthwise in a portable gunsmith vise set up on an old wooden table covered in grocery bags.

“Put them there,” Mary said, gesturing with a screwdriver to the floor.

He put the boxes down and went over to his wife. “She come through zeroed?”

“Only one way to find out,” she said.

He hugged her. “I’ll do the basic check if you want to call on the sat phone. We can shoot her tomorrow.”

She hugged him back. “Thanks. I’ve been worried.”

“I know. Go on, now.”

Potter leveled the bolt-action rifle in 6.5mm Creedmoor using a bubble level he placed on the elevation turret of the gun’s Schmidt and Bender tactical telescopic sight. Then he dug in an open box of tools next to the gun vise and came up with a hard plastic case that contained a bore-sighting system precisely calibrated to the gun.

Mary was on her phone. “Jesse?”

She listened, smiled, said, “Long drive, but it’ll be worth it. How’re you feeling?”

In the silence that followed, Potter leveled and taped a custom cardboard chart to the kitchen wall. Then he got out the bore-sighting device itself.

It had a long tapered front end that fit snugly down the barrel of the rifle. The rear of it was the size of a Bic lighter and featured a laser.

Mary listened intently, and then her face clouded. “Put on Patty.”

Potter said, “What?”

His wife held up a finger.

Potter threw up his hands and turned around to peer through the scope. He adjusted the gun and the vise until the crosshairs were dead on a similar set of crosshairs printed on the chart taped to the wall.

Mary said, “Patty, I’m thankful for you being there. What’s his temperature?” Her expression darkened further. “Well, no matter what happens, he has to take his meds. Okay? Tell him his dad and I will call again later.”

She hung up, angry. “Jesse refused two doses of his medicine, and he’s running a steady low-grade fever because of it.”

Potter felt himself tighten, and then he sighed.

“Look at it from his perspective. He’s a fifteen-year-old who’s been told he’s going to die unless he can get access to an insanely expensive treatment his government doesn’t believe in and won’t pay for. He’s trying to get some control over his life, and refusing meds is his answer.”

Mary tried to stay angry, but then she let it go, appearing more sad than convinced. “I don’t like being away from him like this. Every moment, it’s...”

“Did we have a choice?”

“No,” she said, and her expression hardened. “We didn’t. We don’t. It’s no use wishing we had the money any other way. How’s my doll looking?”

He went to the gun and flipped on the laser sticking out of the barrel. A glowing red dot appeared on the chart three inches above the printed crosshairs.

“Perfect,” he said. “You’re three high at a hundred meters, dead on to three hundred. Two turret clicks and you’re zero at five hundred.”

“I do like precision.”

“It’s everything,” he said, taking her rifle from the vise and setting it aside.

Potter picked up his own rifle. Green custom stock with a nice grip, the gun was also chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor, but it carried a Leica sniper scope with an illuminated reticle.

When properly sighted in, Potter’s rifle was more than capable of handling a five-hundred-yard shot. He just wanted to make sure it would when the time—

The sat phone blinked and beeped before he could start testing the rifle.

It was a number he recognized, and he answered.

“Peter here,” said a male voice with a slight British accent. “How was the drive?”

“Just beat that storm coming.”

“Any trouble entering the country?”

“None.”

“I told you the passports and veterinarian papers were solid.”

“We didn’t even need them. You going to give us our assignment?”

“It’s all there, in the closet in the back bedroom. Everything you’ll need.”

Mary left the kitchen, heading toward the back bedroom.

Potter stayed where he was. “You’ll deposit the down payment?”

“As soon as you tell me you’re taking the job.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Just the same.”

Mary came back into the kitchen carrying a thick manila envelope. She’d lost several shades of color.

“I’ll call you back,” Potter said, and he clicked off. “What’s the matter?”

“Jesus Christ, Dana,” she said, handing him the envelope. “What the hell are we into now?”

Chapter 24

Handcuffed and wearing an orange prisoner jumpsuit, the only surviving member of Romero’s crew glared at the tabletop as Bree followed Ned Mahoney into an interrogation room at the federal detention facility in Alexandria, Virginia.

I was in an observation booth with U.S. Secret Service agent Lance Reamer and Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee.

“She still hasn’t said anything?” Special Agent Reamer asked.

“She’s asked for an attorney,” I said.

“Course she did,” Lieutenant Lee said bitterly.

Mahoney and Bree took seats opposite her. She raised her head, saw Bree, and acted as if she’d sniffed something foul. She had spiderweb tattoos on both hands and another climbing the left side of her neck.

“Your prints came up,” Mahoney said, sliding a piece of paper in front of her. “Lupe Morales. Multiple arrests as a juvenile. Four as an adult, for solicitation, drug dealing twice, and abetting an armed robbery. Looks like you did three years in the California Institution for Women at Lompoc for that one.”

“Eighteen months,” Lupe said, and she yawned. “I’ve asked for a lawyer. Twice now.”

“The federal defender’s office has been notified,” Bree said. “In the meantime, you can do yourself a whole lot of good by talking to us.”

She sniffed. “I’ve heard that one before.”

Bree showed no reaction. “The U.S. attorney is preparing to charge you with four counts of kidnapping, three counts of attempted murder, and two counts of firing on police officers in the course of duty. Oh, and co-conspirator in the plot to murder a sitting U.S. senator. I’m thinking life without parole times two, maybe more.”

“If not the federal death penalty,” Mahoney said. “The new administration’s big on taking that road whenever possible. Or hadn’t you heard?”

Lupe sat forward, her upper lip curled. “I’m guilty of nothing but being stupid and going along for a ride I shouldn’t never have been on. Know what I’m saying?”

“No, actually,” Bree said.

“Spell it out,” Mahoney said.

“Check my gun,” she said. “That little Glock? No bullets, and not because I ran out. It’s clean because I’ve never shot it. I didn’t shoot at no one. Never have. Never will. And especially no senator.”

In the booth, I put a call in to the FBI lab at Quantico and asked a tech to check her assertion about her gun. He put me on hold. As I waited for an answer, I heard Lupe denying knowing exactly why Fernando Romero had decided to drive across country from Oakland to Washington, DC.

“Only thing I knew is he said he was gonna set some things straight and make a pile of Benjamins doing it,” Lupe said. “I was just along for the ride.”

“Armed to the teeth?” Mahoney said.

“Not me. Like I said, that piece was all show.”

“Tell us about Senator Walker,” Bree said.

She shrugged. “Fernando hated her.”

“Enough to kill her?”

Lupe thought about that and then nodded. “But he’d have to have been seriously messed up on meth and Jim Beam and have her, like, show up at the door when he was all hating the world and shit.”

Mahoney said, “C’mon, Ms. Morales. Romero or his other man or you shot Senator Walker early yesterday morning from an empty town house in Georgetown.”

“The hell I did,” Lupe said, sitting up, indignant. “Fernando didn’t either, or Chewy. We might’ve hated Walker, but we sure didn’t kill her.”

“Romero confessed,” Bree said. “I heard him. So did two other police officers.”

“No way!”

“Way,” Bree said. “When you were out on the porch with the girls, when Romero and I were negotiating for time, he told me we had ten minutes and after that he didn’t give a damn, that little girls and Mommy were going to start dying, quote, ‘just like that bitch Betsy Walker did.’”

“So?” Lupe said. “That’s no confession. He was just, like, comparing it.”

“That’s not the way I heard it.”

“You hear it any way you want, that don’t make it so. Was Fernando happy Walker was dead? Totally. He went out into the damned snow and did a dance when he heard. But he did not kill Betsy Walker. None of us did. Early yesterday morning? When she was shot? We were stuck in a shithole motel ’cause of that ice storm. The Deer Jump Lodge or something in, like, Roanoke. You go on and check. We gotta be on security cams there. People can’t be two places at once.”

Bree started to say something but Mahoney beat her to it.

“We will check, Ms. Morales. But again, if you weren’t here to kill Senator Walker, why did you and Mr. Romero and this Chewy come to Washington in the first place? And armed to the teeth?”

“Like I said, I don’t know for sure,” Lupe said evasively. “I came along for the ride, mostly. I always wanted to see like the Lincoln Monument. Know what I’m saying?”

Bree said, “But Mr. Romero was coming for other reasons, to set things right and make a lot of money? Is that correct?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Were you going to make money?”

Lupe didn’t reply for several beats. “I dunno, maybe. It hadn’t been decided if I was in or out yet, like, if I was needed. Necessary, I guess.”

“To do what?” Bree asked.

Lupe’s face scrunched up. “No clue, I said.”

There was a sharp knock at the door. A tall, willowy blonde in a fine blue pantsuit and a pearl necklace came in carrying an attaché case.

“Perrie Knight, counselor-at-law,” she said crisply. “I’ll be representing Ms. Morales. And this interview, I’m afraid, is over.”

Bree exited the interrogation room looking agitated. She was openly angry when she reached the observation booth. I was still on hold, waiting for the lab tech.

“Romero confessed,” she said. “I heard it. Wiggins and Flaherty heard it too.”

“Lupe says it was just a manner of speaking,” Agent Reamer said.

“Sure, she says that,” Bree replied. “She wants off death row.”

“What’s Perrie Knight doing involved in this case?” Lieutenant Lee said. “She’s not with federal defenders. She’s high-dollar, white-collar crime cases.”

The tech at Quantico came back on the line. I listened, thanked him, and hung up. “Morales was right about her gun being empty. In fact, the FBI lab says it’s never been fired.”

“That doesn’t absolve Romero of the murder,” Bree said.

“I agree,” Lieutenant Lee said.

“You’re both right,” I said. “Until we check with that motel, an empty gun doesn’t absolve anyone. But you should also know that the ballistics folks at Quantico say that none of the weapons recovered last night remotely match the bullets that killed Senator Walker. I think we have to consider the senator’s case open again.”

Chapter 25

Marty Franks whistled an old Kansas tune, “Carry On Wayward Son,” as he drove east toward an oncoming winter storm. It was already getting late. The sun barely showed in a gunmetal sky. Less than an hour of daylight left.

Few people were on the highway in this mountainous part of West Virginia. Dead of winter. No reason to be out and about if you didn’t have to be, especially with a blizzard forecast.

Franks liked to whistle. He was good at it, and he kept whistling that Kansas song until the burn phone rang on the seat beside him.

He pressed Answer on the Bluetooth connection. “Talk.”

“Peter here. How you coming along, Conker?” said a man with a British accent.

“Five, maybe six hours out of DC, if I’m lucky,” Franks said.

“There’s a room for you at the Mandarin Oriental under Richard Conker. Everything else you’ll need is in the safe. Code 1958. Repeat, 1958.”

“Got it.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning, then.”

The line went dead. Franks ate a carrot, took a gulp of water, and thought about a bed at the Mandarin. But that was hours away.

He took his mind off the long drive by focusing on the pleasant soreness in his shoulders and legs. A welterweight in his thirties with a smooth shaved head and a disarming smile, he kept his body in prime condition by pushing it hard, and often.

Earlier in the day, just west of Cleveland, he’d stopped at a park and in twenty-degree temperatures put himself through a brutal hour-long routine of gymnastics, calisthenics, and body-weight plyometric exercises, followed by his own meld of yoga and the various martial arts he’d studied over the years. He’d burned twenty-five hundred calories, easy.

Since then, Franks had been engaged in a near nonstop, slow-motion binge of various shakes, protein bars, and raw vegetables and fruits.

And yet, after his phone call with the Brit, after knowing he had a high-dollar job waiting, he felt a different kind of hunger. One that couldn’t be sated with food.

Franks saw a sign ahead: ROUTE 16, IVYDALE — MUDFORK.

Despite the storm coming, despite the long drive ahead, he ran his tongue along his lips, went with his gut, and got off at the exit.

West Virginia State Route 16 ran north and south. He took a left and headed toward Mudfork. The road was narrow, snow-covered, and potholed in places, but Franks drove fast in his white Chevy Tahoe. Wyoming plates. Radial studded snow tires. Heavy-duty shocks. Registered to Richard Conker.

Franks pressed on the gas, his head swiveling as he scanned the area. He didn’t have a lot of time to find what he was looking for. Once darkness fell, he’d be done.

North of the hamlet of Nebo, the land on both sides of the route turned hilly; it was forested in bare oaks and clad in four inches of fresh snow. Franks passed a short driveway and saw an opportunity that made him smile.

Beyond some pines, two hundred yards farther on, he came upon the relic of a farmhouse, windowless, siding peeled to bare board and rotten. The barn’s roof was caved in. No sign of life anywhere.

Even better.

Franks pulled into the overgrown lane and parked the white Tahoe behind a gnarled old spruce and crab-apple trees laden with snow. His wiser, more experienced self said to sit there a few moments, breathe, and consider other options.

But then, even with the window closed, he heard the buzz of a chain saw. It almost took his breath away. Throwing caution to the wind, he reached around beneath the seat behind him, grabbed a few things, and climbed out.

The snow came up over Franks’s ankles, running shoes, socks, and the bottom of his leggings. His feet felt cold and wet almost immediately, but he didn’t care.

He pulled up the hood of his black fleece jacket against the wind and broke into a jog, passing an old chicken coop in the overgrown farmyard as he headed toward a stand of mature pine trees and the revving, biting sounds of that saw.

Chapter 26

Franks ducked into a pine break planted ages ago.

No doubt meant to block the view of nosy neighbors, he thought, ignoring the fluffy snow that sloughed off the boughs and clung to his hood, shoulders, and sleeves. He welcomed the snow and knew he had to have been almost invisible in those firs, frosted as he was, and moved toward the chain saw.

Creeping up to the edge of the muddy work yard he’d glimpsed from the road, he spotted a stack of long logs to his left and a steel shed to his right.

The chain saw and its operator worked by an idle log splitter set up near the base of a low hill of firewood. The logger had his back to Franks and was lopping fifteen-inch sections off a stripped tree trunk braced and strapped between two sawhorses.

He had on an orange helmet with a visor and ear protectors, and he wore thick leather chaps and gauntlet gloves over a quilted canvas coverall. By the ease with which the man wielded the twenty-four-inch Stihl saw, Franks understood that beneath all that heavy gear, there was someone of formidable strength and power.

That thrilled Franks. He forced himself to breathe deeply for a count of three before stepping from the pines, plucking up a short length of discarded tree limb about the thickness of his fist, and running right at the logger.

He slowed at ten yards, glanced toward the road, saw nothing, and then threw the piece of wood at the man’s back.

It smacked him. The logger started. The Stihl chain saw bucked and jumped, almost coming free of his grasp.

He released the throttle. The saw idled. The blade stopped cutting a quarter of the way through the log. Only then did the logger look over his shoulder.

Franks was in a fighting crouch not six yards away. He showed the sawyer the eight-inch blade of the Buck hunting knife in his right hand before lunging toward him.

Franks slashed at the logger’s left upper arm, felt the razor-sharp blade slice through the canvas jacket and several layers beneath. The sawyer screamed out in pain. Franks leaped back into that fighting crouch, the Buck knife weaving in the cold air, the blade showing a film of bright blood.

The logger let loose a bellow of rage then. He hit the gas on the chain saw and wrenched it free of the log. He swung it sideways and moved toward Franks, who jumped away nimbly, just out of reach of the chain saw’s ripping blade.

Franks grinned at the logger, who’d swung too hard with the heavy saw and staggered left in the mud before regaining his balance. Now he squared off as he faced him, the cutting machine growling in his hands.

Franks looked the sawyer in the eye then and saw no fear. That made Franks even happier. Somehow, somewhere in the past, in the military, perhaps, the logger had faced death, and with that two-foot chain saw in hand now, he had the confidence of a warrior who knows his enemy holds an inferior weapon.

“I’ll cut you in half, shit-brains,” the logger shouted from behind his helmet’s visor. “I’ll put you in two pieces.”

“Do it, then,” Franks said calmly. “You can claim self-defense.”

The logger thought about that, smiled, and pulled the butt end of the saw tight to his pelvis so the blade stuck out in front of him like some motorized sword. The logger charged at Franks, feinting this way and that with the spinning head of the saw.

At each feint, Franks stepped back, one foot, then the other, and then again, staying just inches from the whirling teeth and seeing his enemy grow more and more frustrated at not being able to cut him to pieces.

The logger took his finger off the gas. His shoulders and chest were heaving from the exertion of flinging the heavy saw around.

Franks stood his ground, watching everything about the man, trying to see him as a whole enemy rather than just eyes or legs or arms, and definitely not as just that saw.

“What the hell are you doing this for?” the logger yelled.

“Practice,” Franks yelled back.

“Practice? You insane?”

“Just hungry.”

“Hungry? Hungry?”

The logger’s expression turned murderous. He exploded then and charged forward, wielding the saw like a bayonet that he intended to drive straight through Franks.

Franks stood his ground. At the last second, he flung his body sideways and sprang at the logger. The chain saw’s teeth passed inches from his belly before he drove the Buck knife up under the visor and deep into the logger’s neck.

The logger dropped the chain saw, which bit into the mud and flipped away from them, sputtering, coughing, and then dying.

Franks was barely aware of the sounds. He was watching and feeling the logger’s quivers and shakes as more of his blood spurted against the inside of the visor. He grabbed the knife handle with his other hand just before the logger died and sagged against the blade and hilt.

Franks used all of his strength to heft the dead man’s weight, then pushed hard against it and yanked back on the knife handle. The blade came free. The logger fell in the mud beside his saw.

Franks stood there for several long moments, gasping for air, feeling exhilarated beyond words, soaking up the whole scene, until a snowflake hit his face. He looked up into a sky heading toward dusk, seeing more and more flakes coming at him, thick ones, swirling down.

He felt giddy. A part of him wanted to stay and relive the last few amazing minutes. But his wiser self knew when to walk away.

Franks never wavered as he hustled through the pine break into the old farmyard. The snow showers had turned into a squall by the time he reached the Chevy.

When he drove past the logger’s work lot, Franks could make out the small hill of firewood through the falling snow but not the log splitter or the man he’d killed in mortal combat. He felt neither pity toward nor interest in the logger beyond the memory of their encounter. The logger had been a thrill, a challenge, training against a worthy opponent, and nothing more.

He started to whistle, and then to sing. “Carry on, my wayward son, there’ll be peace when you are done.”

As he sang on, the wind picked up. So did the snow. It was a full-on blizzard by the time he reached I-79 and turned east again toward Washington.

Chapter 27

Chief Michaels gave Bree a withering glare as he worried a pen in his hand.

“You told me we had him!” Michaels said. “Self-confessed, you said! I told the mayor. I told the congressmen. I... shit.”

He plopped in his chair and tossed the pen on the desk in disgust.

Bree took a deep breath before saying as calmly as she could: “Chief, at the time, I believed I had Senator Walker’s killer. Romero had threatened the senator recently. He referenced Senator Walker’s murder as evidence he would not hesitate to kill Mrs. Sheridan or her daughters. His accomplice says he came three thousand miles to, quote, ‘set some things straight and make a pile of Benjamins.’ He was a prime suspect even before he started shooting.”

“But Romero’s on this motel security tape in Roanoke?”

“I haven’t seen it,” she said, deflated. “But evidently Romero, Lupe Morales, and this Chewy character are all on motel video checking in and out. With the snowstorm, there definitely was not enough time for them to get from Roanoke and back.”

“So the senator’s killer remains at large,” Michaels said. “There’s still an asshole out there we don’t know about.”

“Or a dead one we do know about.”

Michaels cocked his head. “I’m not following.”

Bree opened the manila file in her lap. She handed over photographs taken at the strangulation scene in Georgetown.

“This man, carrying the ID of one Carl Thomas of Pittsburgh, was throttled five blocks from the senator’s crime scene about seventeen hours after Walker was shot.”

“Loose proximity,” the chief said dismissively. “Where’s the hard connection?”

“The victim was able to get two shots off at his killer with a gun recovered at the scene,” she said, and then she pushed a paper across the desk. “The rush report says there’s gunpowder residue on the victim’s right hand and wrist that matches the pistol.”

“Okay?”

Bree handed him a second document. “Results for gunpowder on his clothes.”

Michaels studied the lab results, which had come in moments before Bree was set to speak with the chief.

He glanced at the first report. “Different gunpowders?”

Bree nodded. “It’s all being sent to Quantico for confirmation, but it will be interesting to see if the blast powder on his clothes matches the residues found in that apartment Senator Walker’s assassin used.”

“That’s a pretty big leap, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so, Chief, even without the lab results,” she said. “I had Thomas’s prints run. We got no hits in the FBI databases, but we did in Scotland Yard’s files.”

Michaels sat forward. “Scotland Yard? I thought the victim was from Pittsburgh.”

“I said his driver’s license said he was from Pittsburgh.”

“And Scotland Yard says different?”

“Not in so many words.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that when we ran the prints, we definitely got a hit in Scotland Yard,” she said. “There’s a file there somewhere, but we were denied access to it.”

Michaels shook his head. “So let me get this straight. A man with a Pittsburgh ID dies violently five blocks from Senator Walker’s murder scene, and Scotland Yard won’t tell us who he really is?”

“That’s correct.”

The chief thought about that. “So he’s a spook or something? Someone protected, anyway. Or someone Scotland Yard doesn’t want us to know about?”

“Any or all three, sir,” Bree said.

“What if he was working with the Brits? What if he shot Betsy Walker on orders from the Brits?”

Bree had not considered that last idea, and the implications shocked her.

“It would be a political assassination ordered by a foreign power,” she said. “An act of war. By an ally.”

Chapter 28

My son Ali hustled ahead of me toward the front door of Fong and Company, the best Asian market in the District of Columbia.

“I think this will be fun,” Ali said, looking at me over his shoulder. “You know, kind of like that show I like. Weird Foods? I love that guy. He’s always eating the grossest things and makes it sound like he’s in heaven doing it.”

“Okay, what’s weird in this recipe?”

“Nothing. I don’t think. But there’s bound to be weird food in the store, right?”

He sounded so desperately hopeful that I laughed. “I’m sure we can find something weird if we look hard enough.”

Ali brightened and pushed into Fong’s, a sprawling, happy warren with narrow aisles and shelves stacked high with mysterious boxes that threw sweet and spicy smells into the air.

Ali went off through the maze, hunting. He pointed to several live tanks by the fish counter and said, “Okay, that’s weird.”

“Live crabs?”

“No, the eels,” he said, and he shivered. “I couldn’t eat those.”

I saw them slithering about in the tank next to the crabs and lobsters. “Yeah, I’m not big on eels either.”

“I’d eat just about anything else, though,” Ali said.

That lasted until he spotted a sign for Burmese peppers, five thousand degrees of heat.

“Okay, so I wouldn’t eat those either,” he said. “Why do some people like their food so hot that it makes them cry?”

“I don’t really know. Ask your grandfather.”

“Yeah, he’s always putting hot sauce on things.”

We found a nice clerk in her twenties named Pam Pan and showed her Song’s list of ingredients.

“Judging by the ingredients, those are going to be yummy rolls,” Pan said.

“Old Hong Kong family recipe,” Ali said.

“Really?” Pan said.

“My girlfriend-in-law’s grandmother’s recipe.”

“Your girlfriend-in-law?”

“My brother’s girlfriend,” Ali said, smiling. “Makes sense, right?”

The clerk laughed and looked at me. “Is he like this all the time?”

“Twenty-four/seven.”

Ali went on to prove it as the clerk took us around, peppering her with questions about the ingredients and whether there were any “really weird” foods in the store. He got a kick out of pickled chicken’s feet, which, to his credit, he tried.

The faces he made caused Pan and me to crack up, and I felt like we’d made a friend by the time she’d found every ingredient in the recipe. Ali and I left the market and called for an Uber to take us home.

“I like that place,” Ali said as we stood out on the sidewalk.

“I could see that, especially when you ate that chicken foot.”

“I did it.”

“You did it. With style, I might add.”

He liked that and gave me a hug. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, buddy,” I said, hugging him back. “Pickled chicken feet and all.”

Chapter 29

An hour later, Nana Mama’s kitchen was smelling outrageously good as she and Ali stir-fried the stuffing for the rolls. My cell phone rang.

It was Ned Mahoney.

“Alex?” he said before I could greet him. “You alone?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, and I hit mute. “I have to take this.”

“Dinner’s at seven,” my grandmother said. “Bree said she’d be here by then.”

I went down to my office and shut the door behind me.

“Okay, I’m good,” I said.

“We’ve got a new potential suspect in Senator Walker’s murder case.”

Mahoney went on to describe Viktor Kasimov, a Russian businessman closely allied with the Kremlin. Kasimov acted as an envoy between Washington and Moscow from time to time. Back-channel stuff carried out under a diplomatic passport.

“He’s also a degenerate, a hypocrite, and possibly a rapist.”

Ned said that Kasimov had been a suspect in a string of rapes in the United States and Europe, starting during his graduate years at UCLA. Kasimov was smart, cunning, and unafraid to use cash and lawyers to shut women up, and he used the diplomatic passport to keep himself out of the hands of authorities.

Kasimov was also believed to be a liaison between Moscow and factions in the Middle East who were looking for an arms deal, an accusation he had emphatically denied.

“He’s slippery,” Mahoney said. “Half the time he lives out on a yacht in international waters where he can’t be arrested or detained. Two weeks ago, he made a mistake. After a night of partying in Mexico City, he flew on a private jet to Los Angeles. Guess who was waiting for him.”

“I can’t answer that.”

“California state troopers, the California state attorney general, and Senator Betsy Walker. Seems the last time Kasimov was in town, he forcibly raped Senator Walker’s best friend’s daughter after giving her a date-rape drug.”

I said nothing.

“He squealed diplomatic immunity, but he ended up in LA County Jail. He spent almost a week in there until his army of attorneys paid for by the Russians got some state judge to grant him a two-million-dollar bail.”

“There’s an idiot savant born every minute.”

“You know it. Kasimov came up with a check for the whole nut. No bondsman. But here’s the thing. He left jail seriously pissed off at Betsy Walker. He said that in Russia, she’d be in jail or shot.”

“In that same Russia, he should have his balls chopped off,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” Mahoney said.

“So, let me guess. He skipped bail on the full two million?”

“That’s the thing, Alex. He hasn’t left the country.”

“No surveillance post-release?”

“Sure,” he said. “Kasimov and a small entourage flew domestic charter from LA to DC last week. He had a meeting at the Russian embassy and took a suite at the Mandarin Oriental. He hasn’t been seen outside since. Six days. His people claim he’s fighting a nasty flu he picked up in jail courtesy of Senator Walker.”

“He’s not wearing an ankle bracelet?”

“Not a stipulation of bail.”

“An even more savant judge.”

“Or more corrupt.”

“You think Kasimov was angry enough at Betsy Walker to have killed her?”

“Or have her killed? Yes. That’s the word I’m getting. And there’s another thing.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s a hell of a marksman with rifle and pistol. He came in eleventh overall at the last Olympic Games.”

“Was he in town when Betsy Walker died?”

“He was indeed.”

“Then I think we need to talk with him sooner rather than later.”

“Meet me at the Mandarin in an hour?”

I looked at my watch. It was 6:20.

“Ali and Nana are making a special dinner, and I know Bree would like to be there. Better make it two.”

Chapter 30

At twenty past eight that evening, Ned Mahoney used a key card we’d gotten from the head of security at the Mandarin Oriental hotel to unlock elevator access to the suites-only fourteenth floor.

The doors shut. My mind was still processing what the security chief had told us.

Kasimov and his entourage of four were occupying the Jefferson Suite: three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a stunning view of the Jefferson Memorial. The Russian businessman had evidently been sick for days with an intestinal bug. A concierge doctor had been making twice-daily calls to his suite, and he was up there now.

Ned, Bree, and I got off on the fourteenth floor. The carpet was lush, like walking on spongy wool, and the air was scented from flowers in a vase on a table opposite the elevator.

“I kind of like this,” Mahoney said. “The ambience.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I said.

Bree laughed and shook her head.

We found the door to the Jefferson Suite and saw that the light near the bell was red, indicating the inhabitants did not wish to be disturbed. Mahoney rang it anyway.

When there was no answer, he rang it again, and then a third time, until a man barked in a thick accent, “Go away.”

“FBI. Open up please,” Mahoney said, showing his credentials through the peephole.

The locks were thrown open and the door moved to reveal a shaved-headed man built like an Olympic weight lifter wearing a pair of bulging gray slacks and a blue dress shirt.

“What do want?” he asked in the same thick accent.

“Who are you, sir?” Mahoney said.

“Boris,” he said.

“We’d like to speak with Mr. Kasimov, Boris.”

“Impossible. He has medical issues. Contagious.”

“We’ll take the chance.”

“No,” Boris said, his eyes dully locked on ours. “He is weak. They’re giving him the IV liquids and drugs. What is this about? More lies?”

“Just a few questions about Senator Walker,” Bree said. “She’s dead.”

Behind Boris, at the other end of the entry hall, a handsome, tall, and athletically built man in his late thirties appeared. He wore a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap over dark wavy hair and carried a large shoulder bag.

“Dr. Winters?” a voice called weakly.

The man in the Cowboys cap stopped and looked back. Another man dressed like Boris appeared, pushing a wheelchair. Kasimov sat in the chair under a blanket. An IV line ran from a pouch on a pole into his arm. He looked like death warmed over.

“Yes, Mr. Kasimov?” the doctor said.

“You will return tomorrow?” the businessman said.

“Yes. But the change in medications should help you tonight.”

“Thank you,” the man behind Kasimov said.

Dr. Winters started toward us again. Mahoney called out, “Mr. Kasimov? I’m with the FBI. Could I have five minutes of your time?”

“I said he’s sick,” Boris said loudly.

Kasimov peered down the hall a moment, blinked slowly, and then said, “No, Boris, let them in. Let’s see what they’re trying to frame me for this time.”

Chapter 31

Two floors below Kasimov’s suite, Martin Franks paced in his room. He whistled that Kansas tune again. Carry on, my wayward son...

He just couldn’t get the damn thing out of his mind.

But every time Franks passed his unmade bed, he glanced at the FedEx envelope lying there, bulging with documents regarding his target. He was always up for a challenge and never a man rattled by the implications of an assignment.

But this?

This was...

He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

But it was, wasn’t it?

He picked the envelope up, shaking his head in disbelief. I’d never have to work again.

Franks’s heart raced a bit at that thought before excitement was replaced by anxiety. Being a hired gun had made life simpler, turned his darkest impulses clean, orderly, and paid for. What if he stopped after this, made it his last for-hire job?

After several long moments he decided he could stop professionally and yet sate his particular hunger by continuing to look for those moments of chance, those prime targets of opportunity, like the logger.

Franks smiled. The logger.

He closed his eyes and let his mind dwell on the instant where he’d dodged the chain saw and driven the knife deep into the sawyer’s neck.

Wasn’t that something?

But wouldn’t this be something else again?

My biggest Houdini takeout ever.

Franks opened his eyes and read the payment schedule once more. With that kind of money, he could vanish into Bolivia or Uruguay, and...

He shut off that line of dreaming then, turned cold and professional, and forced himself to focus entirely on the assignment and whether or not he could get it done. He started by setting aside the target’s name and title and all the potential implications of the hit.

None of that meant a thing to Franks, at least for the moment. He drew out more documents from the FedEx envelope and studied rather than scanned them, as he had the first time through, seeing patterns and possibilities, the risks and the penalties.

An hour later, Franks believed that he was up to the task from a technical perspective. Only then did he pull out the photographs and biography of his target. Only then did he consider the idea of being tried and hung for his crimes.

Is it worth it?

He immediately knew the money alone was not enough. But Franks closed his eyes and imagined getting the job done and seeing himself slip away clean, and the sum of the payout plus the thrill of achievement was enough.

He opened his eyes. He felt a familiar want tickle and churn in his stomach. He looked to the photographs of his target again and started to whistle the Kansas tune.

In Franks’s mind, the job was already done. He picked up the burn phone from the bed and dialed. The phone rang twice before a computerized voice told him to leave a message at the beep.

“This is Conker, Peter,” Franks said. “I accept.”

Chapter 32

Somewhere in Kasimov’s suite, a phone rang twice, then stopped.

Boris was unhappy, but stood aside. Dr. Winters nodded to us uncertainly as we passed him in the hall.

Kasimov sagged more than sat in his wheelchair, his eyelids lazy, but he studied us when we held out our credentials.

“What’s this about?” the man behind the wheelchair said.

“And you are?” I asked.

“Nikolai,” he said. “Mr. Kasimov’s personal assistant.”

“I’m not dead, Nikolai,” Kasimov said weakly. “I can answer their questions.”

“I think it is unwise. Better to wait for the attorney.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Kasimov said, watching us all closely.

“Where were you around four thirty a.m. the day before yesterday?” I asked.

He let loose a phlegmy chortle. “You mean at the time Senator Walker died?”

“Exactly,” Mahoney said.

“See?” Kasimov said in a weak, sardonic tone. “I told you I’d hear about that sooner or later.”

“Please answer the question,” I said.

Kasimov was obviously not used to being talked to like this and glared at me a moment before saying, “I was in bed, here, Dr. Cross, sicker than a Siberian dog.”

“Can anyone corroborate that?”

Boris raised his hand. So did Nikolai.

Boris said, “And the hotel maid who was sent to clean up. And Dr. Winters.”

“Mr. Kasimov has not left this suite in six days,” Nikolai said.

“What’s got you so sick?” Mahoney said.

“My doctor says flu and food poisoning at the same time,” Kasimov said. “Worst illness I’ve ever had.”

“Did you consider Senator Walker an enemy?” Bree asked.

He coughed a laugh, said, “Certainly not a friend.”

“But you had nothing to do with her death?”

He blinked slowly, then turned his lazy attention on each of us in turn. “I had nothing to do with her death,” he said, and he smiled weakly. “Doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy about it, just that I had zero involvement.”

“Just a coincidence you being in town?” Mahoney said.

“As a matter of fact, yes. I came to visit my embassy, and I got sick. End of story. And now, please, I’ll ask you to leave. I’m feeling the need to sleep. Good night.”

Nikolai turned the wheelchair away from us. Boris gestured toward the door.

We said nothing in the hallway, but I noted the positions of the security cameras before we took the elevator back down to the lobby, again in silence. Only in the crowded lobby near the sound of the piano playing and the hubbub of the bar did we speak.

“He looked like hell,” Mahoney said.

“I agree,” Bree said. “He’s been through something rotten.”

Mahoney gestured ahead toward the lounge. I looked and saw Dr. Winters sitting at the bar drinking a martini and chatting up a very attractive woman whom unfortunately I knew fairly well.

I said, “I have a conflict here. The woman talking to Winters is an active patient of mine. You’re going to have to flush her out of there before I join you.”

“I’m going home,” Bree said. “I’m too wiped out to be much good. Let me know how it goes.”

I gave her a kiss and watched her go. Mahoney walked over and showed his credentials to Dr. Winters and Nina Davis. The Justice Department attorney was dressed for the hunt, her ash-blond hair swept back to reveal her high cheekbones, and her body stuffed into a strapless black cocktail dress that looked like a thousand bucks.

Davis peered at Ned’s badge, listened to him say something, and looked disappointed. She picked up her clutch and slid off the barstool. She moved confidently to the coat check, retrieved a coat, and then spotted me.

“Sorry about that, Nina,” I said, walking up to her. “I’m here with Special Agent Mahoney. My other life. We just needed to talk to the doctor alone.”

Davis watched me a moment, trying to see if I was judging her, then said, “What’s he done?”

“You know him?”

“Sure,” she said. “Chad Winters. He’s an... old acquaintance.”

“Trustworthy?”

She hesitated. “I’d ask the medical board. See you tomorrow afternoon?”

I nodded.

When I reached Mahoney and Winters, the doctor was acting the defensive professional. “There is still such a thing as doctor-patient confidentiality,” he complained.

“We’re not asking about Kasimov’s medical history,” Ned said. “Just trying to corroborate his statements. He says he was sick early Tuesday morning and that you were there.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Winters said. “He was projectile vomiting. High fever. I had to give him a shot of trimethobenzamide so he could keep food down.”

“He said a combination of the flu and food poisoning?” I said.

The doctor nodded. “Simultaneous viral and bacterial infections. He’s over the bacterial thing, but that’s a nasty strain of flu he’s fighting. It’s been a killer across Africa and Asia and can go on for a full two weeks.”

Mahoney and I looked at each other. The Russian’s alibi sounded bombproof. He wasn’t the killer. But he still could have been involved.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Mahoney said. “We appreciate it, and we’re sorry to interrupt your talk with the lovely lady.”

“No worries,” Dr. Winters said, and he laughed. “That lovely lady’s got a dark side, and it’s probably better for me to keep clear of her, if you know what I mean.”

Chapter 33

West Texas

At the first hint of dawn on February 3, Dana Potter looked over at Mary. His wife was staring through the windshield of their pickup truck as he drove along a red clay range road that cut through more of that scrubby, broken West Texas country.

The horses shifted in the trailer behind them, causing the truck to sway.

Mary swore under her breath.

“You okay?” Potter asked.

“Just processing,” Mary said, but she didn’t look at him.

“It’s the only answer.”

“I get it, and I’m here, aren’t I?” she said, and she paused to brood. “I just can’t help thinking what we’re risking, eh? We might never see...”

“It’s a job, just like every other job we’ve ever done,” Potter said.

“No, Dana, it’s not.”

“You have to think that way or we should have turned it down.”

There was a silence before she responded with raw emotion, “I love my boy.”

Potter choked up. “And we’re going to get him the help he needs, and then some, give Jesse the life he deserves.”

Mary teared up. “I’m so frightened for him.”

“We do this, he’s got a real chance. You saw the reports.”

“I keep wanting to believe, but...”

“We can do this,” Potter said. “We’re professionals, eh?”

She wiped at her tears and smiled, but it was weak. “Keep reminding me of that over the next two days.”

“Course I will. Just keep thinking: It’s a game. A game we always win. I mean, when it’s come right down to it, have we ever been close to losing?”

Mary smiled more broadly then and shook her head. “Not once.”

“There you go. We’ll just play our game, and things will go fine.”

She sighed and squeezed his hand. “How much farther?”

“Twenty minutes?”

“Peter should have put us closer,” she said.

“Better to be far away,” he said, glancing at a Garmin Montana GPS unit mounted on the dash. “Keeps things simpler.”

The GPS was loaded with a topographical map and an overlay that identified property ownerships. Texas was largely privately held, but there were slivers of federal land in the wilder sections of the state.

When it was almost full daylight, Potter spotted a two-track leading to a heavy steel gate with a sign from the Bureau of Land Management saying the road was closed. He stopped, said, “I cut the lock. Close it behind us.”

Mary did, and they quickly pushed on up the track and down the other side of a rise where they could not be seen from the country road. He parked, turned the truck off.

It was cold, just above freezing, when they climbed out, both wearing dull tan camouflage that matched the vegetation. They got the horses from the trailer. After shouldering heavy day packs, they climbed into the saddles and set off up a game trail that climbed the flank of a low mesa covered in scrub oak and creosote that grabbed and tore at them.

The temperature rose with the sun. The horses began to sweat. Two miles in they dropped off the mesa into a dry wash, an empty streambed that crawled off through a maze of brush and low trees. Two more miles on, they climbed a rocky out-cropping and stayed high and trending southwest for another mile.

One hour and nine minutes after they had started out, they dropped into an arroyo. They left the horses in shade. Potter got out a handsaw and cut boughs of thin green leaves from a paloverde tree and set them in a pile on the bank when they left the sandy riverbed.

The hill beyond was steep, with little vegetation and loose rocks everywhere.

“Take our time,” he said. “No noise to set the dogs off. And wind’s in our favor.”

Mary nodded and followed him slowly up the hill, putting her boots where he’d put his. They reached the crown of the hill and heard a cock crow in the distance, then a cowbell or two followed by the neighing of horses.

They dropped their packs and dragged them as they crawled across the hill and caught the first glimpse of the long, narrow valley beyond. Strips of cultivated ground separated by thickets cut the valley floor from side to side all the way past barns and corrals to a low, Spanish-style hacienda with whitewashed walls, a terra-cotta-tile roof, and a terrace bathed in warm sun even at that early hour.

Lying on his side, Potter opened his pack and removed a pair of Leica Geovid binoculars. He trained them on the terrace and saw twelve people at the three tables, all middle-aged men, having breakfast and drinking coffee. Most of them wore canvas jackets, some with hunter-orange fabric across the shoulders.

“Right where he said they’d be,” he said.

“I see them,” Mary said, looking through her own set of binoculars.

Potter pressed a button on the binoculars that activated a range-finding system. He aimed the red glowing square on the nearest man and clicked the button a second time.

“Five hundred and twelve meters to the first table,” he said.

“Five twenty-six to the doors,” Mary said.

He put his binoculars down after taking several more distance readings and memorizing them.

“I’m good.”

“I am too,” she said. “This spot will do nicely.”

“Perfect line of sight.”

They sneaked out backward and didn’t stand until they were ten feet down the other side of the hill. Back at the arroyo, they took the paloverde boughs and used them to brush out their tracks going into the sandy bottom and all the way to the horses.

“Ready?” Potter asked when they were saddled.

Mary nodded. He set his watch to stopwatch mode, started it, and said, “Go!”

The Potters kicked up their horses and took off back the way they’d come, pushing their rides hard and taking chances where they could have slowed.

It had taken them sixty-nine minutes on the way in, but only twenty-eight minutes had passed when they reached the truck and trailer. Five minutes after that, they pulled out on the country road and headed north.

Ten miles farther on, Potter drove through another BLM gate, this one open, and again stopped out of sight of the road at the back of an escarpment overlooking a big dusty flat. He and Mary gave the horses water before walking down onto the flat carrying two milk jugs filled with a special punch.

Using range finders, they placed one jug at 512 meters and the second at 526.

Back at the truck, they took out the components of their ultralight rifles from their packs, put them together, and finished the process by attaching bipods and screwing in matte-black sound suppressors.

They walked to the edge of the escarpment, extended the bipod legs, and lay prone behind the rifles before finding their targets. Potter settled the crosshairs of his telescopic sight on the jug at 526 meters.

“Green?” he asked.

“Green. On five,” she said. “Four, three, two—”

Both rifles went off in unison, making thumping noises, and the bullets smashed into the jugs. They erupted into thin, billowing pillars of flame.

Chapter 34

Inside a large storage unit in Fairfax, Virginia, the man calling himself Pablo Cruz smiled when a bell dinged. He reached into an Ultimaker 2+ desktop 3-D printer and retrieved an appliance made of translucent high-detail resin that looked like a spider’s web that was about nine inches long and six wide.

The long edges of the appliance were turned toward each other, forming a shape that failed to connect by two inches. The resin was warm to the touch, and as he flexed the web he found it strong but malleable in all directions.

When it had cooled more, he squeezed open the edges and slipped the entire web onto his right forearm. It extended from just below his elbow over and around his wrist and fit snug, as if it had been crafted specifically for him, which it had.

Cruz slipped it off and set it beside its twin on a workbench he’d brought in to the storage unit the week before. There were two small, translucent brackets on the bench that were made of Kevlar-reinforced nylon, a material stronger than block aluminum and neutral when scanned with a metal detector.

The underside of the brackets held swivel balls in sockets attached to tiny, T-shaped valves. The brackets fitted to the underside of the forearm appliances.

Cruz put on reading glasses to attach small hoses made of translucent carbon fiber to the T-valve. An inch long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter, the hose was designed to handle sudden and extreme pressure.

He picked up a piece of clear Kevlar-reinforced nylon the shape and size of a.25-caliber bullet. Cruz placed the projectile in the head chamber of a clear three-inch barrel, then screwed the barrel into the free end of the T-valve. To the other end of the hoses, he attached Kevlar-reinforced nylon canisters the size of small cigarette lighters that fit snugly in the webbed appliance as well.

His burn phone rang. He answered.

The man he knew as Piotr spoke Russian. “We are good, Gabriel?” he asked.

Cruz replied in Russian. “Actually, there is a problem with compensation.”

A cold silence followed. Cruz waited him out.

“We had a deal,” Piotr said at last.

“Until I knew the subject.”

“I thought you were the best.”

“I am the best. It’s why you came to me.”

There was another long pause.

“How much?”

“Thirty-five million. Ten now, twenty-five when the job’s done.”

“I can’t authorize that.”

“Then get it authorized. Now.”

Piotr, sounding furious, said, “Hold on.”

Cruz switched the phone to speaker and set it on the bench. While he waited for a reply, he squeezed the appliances onto his forearms and fitted the crowned ends of the barrels through loops on the webbing below his wrists.

Piotr came back on the line. “Deal,” he said. “Final payment upon deed accomplished.”

Cruz hung up the phone, put it on the bench, and took a deep breath before picking up a hammer and crushing the device.

Only then did he turn his attention to the fashion mannequin he’d set up at the other end of the storage unit. He walked to within ten feet, raised his right hand, and flicked his hand sharply back, arching his fingers toward his upper forearm.

He felt the webbed appliance stretch. The ball pivoted in its socket and tripped a trigger in the valve that, with a thud, released a powerful burst of highly pressurized helium from the carbon canister.

The gas drove the nylon bullet out of the barrel at fourteen hundred feet per second. It hit the mannequin in the chest, blew through the foam, and disintegrated into shards that hit the steel back wall of the unit.

Cruz smiled, raised his left arm, and flicked that hand back, triggering the second of his hybrid, undetectable derringers. This bullet struck the mannequin on the bridge of the nose and blew out the back of its head.

Chapter 35

Nina Davis was right on time. She knocked on my basement door at half past one and swept in with a smile that was, well, beguiling, not at all the troubled woman who’d showed up yesterday.

“Hello, Dr. Cross,” she said pleasantly as she moved by me toward my office.

Nina wore a hint of jasmine perfume that lingered in the air as I followed her. Inside, she shrugged off her trench coat, revealing a clingy black cashmere turtleneck sweater and snug matching slacks and heels. Gold earrings dangled from her earlobes.

When she sat, she looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes. “I must say, you lead an exciting life, Dr. Cross.”

“How’s that?”

She adjusted her position, crossed her legs, smiled, said, “Last night. Chad Winters and a Russian honcho?”

“Winters told you about the Russian?”

“It was all he talked about, how he and the Russian were tight.”

“He told us the Russian had been very sick.”

Nina studied me in amusement, as if she knew something I did not.

“The honcho was sick. But not his men. They come and go all the time. Chad’s seen them do it.”

“Okay?”

“They have disguises. Makeup. Latex prosthetics.”

“Why?”

“To fool the CIA. Chad says they’re watching the honcho and his men.”

I didn’t doubt it but said, “You’d swear to the FBI about that? What Dr. Winters told you?”

She gave me a look that suggested I was daft and said, “I do work for the Justice Department. If it helps, of course I’d swear.”

“I’ll have Mahoney — the agent you met last night — call you after we’re done.”

“Sure. After we’re done.”

“What am I going to find if I look into Winters?”

She paused. “I believe there was an issue with overprescribing pain meds that he managed to beat.”

I let that sink in. “Okay, can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Nina cocked her head. “You said this is a safe place. No judgments, right?”

“Correct,” I said. “Last night, before Special Agent Mahoney approached you, was I seeing Nina or Kaycee?”

The barest of smiles crossed her lips. “Guess.”

“Kaycee.”

“She hadn’t decided,” Nina said. “Kaycee, I mean. She hadn’t decided she wanted him. Winters.”

“Because?”

She laughed. “He’s easy. Kaycee stalked him a long time ago.”

“So no risk, no reward?”

“What’s the point to anything if there is no real challenge?” she said, and she shifted again so her sweater moved across her breasts.

“No danger?”

“From Chad? I suppose. There are rumors he’s into pain. Sexually.”

“But you enjoy the dangerous aspects of stalking men like Chad and seducing them.”

Nina tapped a fingernail against her lips and thought about that.

“Maybe,” she said. “But then again there’s always danger when you’re a woman venturing into the unknown.”

“You like the unknown.”

“I’m comfortable there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not wary?”

Nina shook her head, causing her ash-blond hair to come loose and fall gracefully across one shoulder. “No, Kaycee is oblivious, but I have a sense for creeps. And besides, as I said, I study them for quite a while before I make my move.”

“You do understand that some people might find a woman stalking men as disturbing as a man stalking women?”

“Would they? I suppose. But it’s not like I’m obsessive or violent. Ultimately, they have free will. The guy always has to make the final move in my little game.”

“You enjoy that moment, when they make the final move?”

“Very much so.”

“What do you feel right then?”

“Desire, of course.”

“Beyond desire?”

Nina twisted her chin slightly, gazed downward and diagonally a few moments, then met my eyes and said, “I guess I feel liberated, a primal woman in her essence.”

“No guilt. No remorse.”

“None,” she said firmly. “No boundaries. I am in the feminine and free.”

“Kaycee is, you mean,” I said.

“I know Kaycee’s spirit.”

“Is that the moment when you feel closest to love? When the man becomes the aggressor?”

“No. That’s later. During.”

“When he’s choking you?”

Nina’s eyes shimmered ever so slightly, as if she were replaying a memory.

“Not always,” she said at last. “But often enough.”

“Where did that come from? The choking?”

Nina frowned slightly. “Where? I don’t know. I think I read about it in a book, The Joy of Sex?”

“How old were you?”

“When?”

“When you read the book.”

Her frown deepened. “I... I can’t remember. In my teens?”

“And when did you first experiment with asphyxiation?”

She turned defensive. “What does this have to do with an inability to love?”

I held up both hands. “You’ve told me that the closest you come to feeling love is during rough sex when you’re choking to orgasm. I’m trying to understand why that turns you on so much.”

Nina looked past me. “I... I don’t know. I just tried it once, and it felt so good, I wanted to do it again. And again.”

“How old were you when you first tried it?”

She squinted, blinked, and then looked at me with slight puzzlement. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Sometime in law school, I think. There was a guy, Bill. We used to hook up, more for stress release than anything romantic. And I just asked him to do it, choke me, and he did, and the rest is history.”

I sat there, giving no response, aware of the clock ticking away and chewing on what she’d told me.

“Let’s change direction,” I said at last. “Tell me about life with your mother after your father died.”

Some of her billowing female essence seeped away. Her skin paled, and her face sagged, weary.

The alarm on my phone rang, ending the session.

Nina looked relieved, brightened, and then beamed at me. “Saved by the bell.”

“Saved by the bell.”

By the time the Justice Department attorney stood up from the chair, she was radiating the feminine again, from her smell to her beauty to her confidence as she put on her coat. Nina extended her hand. I took it, surprised at how delicate it was. She gazed at me with a sweet, intoxicating expression.

“Thank you, Dr. Cross,” she said softly. “Kaycee and I look forward to the next time we meet.”

Chapter 36

Around three in the afternoon, Martin Franks flipped the blinker on his pickup truck and turned right off a state route south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Franks headed west. On the pickup’s navigation screen, he saw that the road ahead climbed into rural, forested country, and he started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son.”

The ex — Special Forces operator liked this scenario. The rural ground. The woods. It brought back waking-dream images of the logger.

Places like abandoned farms, big tracts of timber, they tended to isolate people. That was always good, in Franks’s opinion. Fewer eyes meant more latitude in the games he liked to play.

Franks crossed a bridge above a stream lined with leafless hardwood trees. On the other side of the stream, he crossed a railroad track, and the road surface changed to hard-packed dirt and gravel.

Now it was up to chance, synchronicity, serendipity, three powers Franks was used to cultivating. Franks had once dated a beautiful young woman named Ella. She was his opposite in almost every sense, a pacifist given to hippie clothing who taught him the power of imagining what he wanted and then asking the universe for some sign that his vision was being seen and shared.

This unorthodox approach to life had saved Franks more than once when he was operating in Afghanistan. Every morning and every night on tour, he asked the universe for a warning if danger loomed.

Twice, he had been on the verge of walking into a Taliban ambush. The first time, a kid goat scampered out of hiding, blatting as if a dog were after it.

The second time, Franks had seen vultures flying above a village they were about to enter.

Both times he’d halted his team and waited and watched. In the first case, he saw human movement among the rocks where the goat had run from, and in the second, he’d realized that the carrion birds were there because Taliban fighters had already killed enough civilians in the village to attract them.

“C’mon,” Franks said to the sky and the universe beyond. “Give me a sign here. Tell me I was right to come up this road. Show me a worthy opponent.”

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.

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.

When they radioed us that they were ready, we spilled out of the car, all of us dressed in jeans, work boots, and oversize rain jackets that hid our Kevlar vests. Remembering what we’d been told about the Hungarian assassin, I wondered if I was wearing enough armor.

As we crossed the street, I said, “You don’t find it odd she used the same name she used coming into the country? Edith, that spook we spoke with at the CIA, said she switches identities constantly.”

Mahoney shrugged. “She didn’t know she’d been spotted, so she stuck with it.”

We went into the office where we were met by the owner, Vash Yasant, a young, nervous Indian immigrant who’d bought the motel three months before.

“What’s this about?” Yasant said. “What’s she done?”

“Let’s make sure of something first,” Mahoney said, and on the counter he put a still from the surveillance footage at Dulles airport.

“Is that her?” I asked.

Yasant studied it, stroking his chin, then nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s her. I’d swear on it. Especially that bag. She had it with her when she checked in.”

“She have a car?”

“She said she came by Metro and bus.”

“Room?” Mahoney said.

“Number fifteen, right above us,” Yasant said, pointing upward. “She wanted a room facing the street.”

I sighed. “She saw us coming in.”

“If she was looking,” Mahoney said.

“She went out two hours ago,” the motel manager said. “What has this Martina Rodoni done?”

“Nothing so far,” I said. “We just want to talk to her.”

“I will take you to her room,” Yasant said. “I’ll bring the master key.”

I thought that was a mistake, but Mahoney said, “You’ll stay well behind us, and you will move only when told to.”

“Yes, sir!” the innkeeper cried, and he stood up straight.

“Yes, what?” his wife said, coming out from behind a curtain. She was dressed in a colorful sari and was very pregnant.

Her husband said, “Rani, these men are with the FBI, and that woman up in fifteen, she is very, very dangerous. They have asked me to assist them with the key!”

Mrs. Yasant looked at her husband, at us, and then at her husband again. “You will do no such thing, Vash! The baby comes any day, and you cannot go playing policeman!”

The innkeeper looked ready to argue, but Mahoney said, “On second thought, Mr. Yasant, your wife’s probably right. Why don’t you just give us the key? We’ll drop it on the way out.”

The father-to-be looked chagrined and deflated, but he handed us the key from a hook on the wall behind him.

“You will report what you find up there?” he asked. “This is my place, yes?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

We went out of the door and drew weapons and put them in our raincoat pockets before climbing the near staircase and walking back toward the main drag and room 15. It was mid-morning, no new hourly customers, and the long-termers had gone off to scavenge their lives.

Every room we passed was quiet. Even room 15, which had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the door handle.

Mahoney stood to the side of the door, looked at the window and tight curtains beyond it, then knocked sharply.

No answer. After thirty seconds, Mahoney knocked again.

Again, no answer.

Mahoney took his pistol out. I did the same. He fitted the key in the lock and turned it.

I pushed the door inward, revealing twin beds, unused, still crisply made. Dead center of the bed deeper into the room was the same roller bag we’d seen Varjan wheeling in the Dulles airport security footage.

Beside it was a cheap cell phone.

Mahoney went over to the bag, but I stopped him.

“Why leave it like this?” I said. “Why not put it in the closed closet?”

Ned did not have time to answer before the cell phone on the tacky bedspread began to ring and buzz.

I was closer, so I picked it up and answered on speaker.

“Hello?” I said. “Kristina? Kristina Varjan?”

There was a moment before Varjan said, “Good-bye. Whoever you are.”

The phone went dead.

My eyes darted to the bag.

“Run!”

We spun and bolted toward the open door. I was behind Mahoney and one step onto the balcony when the phone in my hand began to ring with a different ringtone.

I threw myself completely out of the room a split second before the bomb went off behind us, blowing out the windows and blasting the metal door off its hinges.

Chapter 40

Two hours later, the blast was still ringing in my ears as I looked down on the carnival that had descended on the Happy Pines Motel. Two fire trucks. Five police cruisers. Four vans bearing a small army of crime scene techs and special agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Mahoney was standing next to me, elbows on the balcony railing, still shocked by how close we’d come to death.

“Wish I’d never quit smoking,” he said, and I heard a quiver in his voice.

“Close,” I said, equally shaken. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”

I’d called Bree to let her know what had happened, and Mahoney and I had already spoken about Varjan with a parade of agents assigned to the case. Our theory was that she suspected she’d been spotted after arriving at Dulles and had tested that suspicion by renting the motel room under the name Martina Rodoni.

“She sat on us, waiting,” I said. “For two days.”

“She’s disciplined, I give you that,” Mahoney said.

“Is she? Why try to kill us? It only increases the heat on her.”

“I’ll set aside the why for now. She did it is all I need to know. We have to get her face everywhere. She’s got other business planned.”

“I agree. Enhance and enlarge the security photo of her. She’ll be recognized.”

He nodded and took out his cell phone.

Almost directly below us in the parking lot, Rani Yasant was yelling at her husband, who was looking up at the smoldering hole that had once been room 15.

“You see?” Mrs. Yasant cried, hands on her belly. “If you had been brave and gone up there, you would have died, Vash, and then where would I be? Answer me that, where would I be?”

Yasant put both hands to his head as if squeezing it in a vise. “Why do you always think this way, Rani? I did not go up there. I am alive. And you wish me to be a coward in every aspect of my life!”

He shouted this last bit, and it caused his wife to step back and start crying.

“What are we going to do?” she said, sobbing. “I told you not to buy that extra fire insurance. I said it was too expensive!”

Her husband softened and walked over to her. He put his arms around her.

“It’s okay, Rani. I did not listen to you.”

His wife looked up at him through tears. “Is that true?”

“We’re covered,” he said, and he kissed her forehead.

“Agent Mahoney?”

Mahoney and I turned to find Tim Schmidt, the supervising special agent with BATF, coming toward us. Mahoney finished his call and hung up.

Schmidt said, “Preliminary results say you had plastic explosives in that bag with a frequency trigger set to trip at the phone’s ringtone. Where is the phone, by the way? We’d like to take it if possible.”

Mahoney said, “It’s already on its way to Quantico, but we will share everything with BATF as soon as we have it.”

Schmidt puffed up his cheeks and blew out his mouth. “Fair enough. It’s cooled down enough in there to look around if you want.”

We walked back to room 15. The walls were scorched and blackened. So was the ceiling. There was an inch of dark water on the floor.

The near twin bed had been thrown over. The mattress lay in the slurry, coated in soot. The mattress of the far bed, the one where the bag and phone had been, now had a gaping charred hole in it almost the entire width and three-quarters of the length.

I stared at the blast hole. So did Ned, who said, “Darn happy to be here, Alex.”

I nodded, still stunned and thanking my guardian angel for helping me put the phone, the bag, and Varjan’s words together fast enough to clear the room and survive. I felt humbled and then desperate to go home and be with my family.

But I overrode that desire with the need to do my job. I turned from the mattress and looked at a table lamp, bent and twisted on the floor, and then at the night table flipped over on its left flank. The right side was caved in and scorched. The drawer was closed.

Beside the table on the floor was an open and partially burned Gideon Bible.

I looked at the closed drawer. I supposed it was possible the blast had driven the open drawer shut. Or that Gideon Bible had been out before the blast. Had I seen it?

I didn’t remember. If it was out, why? Would a professional assassin like Varjan seek spiritual solace in a motel Bible?

After putting on gloves, I picked the Bible up. A charred chunk of pages fell out from the back. I flipped through the Bible but found nothing tucked in it.

I was about to set it aside when I noticed that soot from the burned pages had streaked and smudged across the mostly white inside of the Bible’s back cover. Then I noticed that the soot had raised the impression of letters there. An e and an r.

Someone had obviously scribbled on the front of the back page, and the pressure had gone through to the cover. I was about to set it aside to be bagged again, but then I thought, What if Varjan scribbled there?

What were the odds of that? Hundreds of people must have used the room in the past twelve months, let alone years.

Still, I did not want to leave any stone unturned. I broke off the charred edges of the pages that had fallen on the floor, crumbled the charring into dust, and spilled it around the two visible letters and across the page.

Words appeared, a stack of them:

Conker? Below that, there were other letters but they were indistinct. A b and an i or a t and then a c. Or an o?

I had no idea when the words were written or what significance they held. I took a picture of the list with my phone and left the Bible for the criminalists to bag and analyze further.

“Not much here that wasn’t here before she planted the bomb,” said Schmidt, the ATF agent.

“This was a kill zone for her, nothing more,” Mahoney said. “But we’ve got her phone, and we’ll be inside it in hours.”

“Why the hell is she here?” Schmidt said. “Who the hell is she trying to kill?”

“Besides us?” I said. “No clue. But when we find her, I sure plan to ask.”

Chapter 41

Kristina Varjan drove a beater Dodge sedan she’d bought off a lot in College Park. It had a shimmy in the front end and almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, so she kept on at one mile under the speed limit, heading up I-95 toward Atlantic City, New Jersey, and an Airbnb apartment she’d rented online.

Varjan had cut her hair shorter, spiked it, and bleached the tips blond. She’d changed into skinny jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and a long-sleeved Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her makeup was heavy on the mascara. She’d pierced her own nose the night before, and her upper right lip and tongue too.

When she glanced at herself in the rearview, she looked nothing like Martina Rodoni, the fashionable European in for a week of sightseeing. Now she was Elena Wolfe, rebellious nonconformist over from Great Britain to play a few games.

Varjan shifted. She was sick of sitting, especially in this seat. She’d sat in it for almost two days, watching the Happy Pines Motel from well down the street.

She’d almost quit her surveillance the evening before, tried to tell herself that thirty-six hours watching her back trail was enough, that she’d been wrong, that she hadn’t seen the CIA op she’d fought with in Istanbul standing in the line for security at Dulles only minutes after her own arrival in the U.S.

Take off, Varjan had thought. You’re good. Get your game on. Leave everything else behind you.

Varjan had almost driven to the Happy Pines to retrieve the bomb, check out, and carry on with her more pressing plans. But some difficult voice in her head insisted she’d been spotted and that she needed to keep up her vigil.

The difficult voice had proved to be the right one.

What happened then had been reflexive, nothing she could have controlled. She hadn’t meant to blow the bomb unless that CIA agent, Edith, was with them. But then that guy who’d answered the phone, he’d known her real name.

He called me Kristina, Kristina Varjan.

The very words made Varjan feel exposed and angry, made her want to lash out. She preferred to go through life playing roles, only rarely showing her true self to anyone and never using her given name in any context.

But that man had known her. He’d used her real name!

And then it had been reflexive. Uncontrollable. She’d set off the bomb.

Varjan understood she needed to inform Piotr, or whatever his real name was, and explain the situation.

However, maybe the less he knew, the better. Given the contracts he’d assigned her the day before, she understood that any weakness would likely change their arrangement and make her a target for elimination at some point in the near future.

That was too complicated. That was just too much to handle while trying to execute multiple plays as fast as possible.

No, Varjan decided as she passed the exit for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. She’d keep her employer in the dark, get the jobs done, collect, and then vanish once and for all.

Chapter 42

What was Varjan up to?

That question and others like it ran laps in my head as I got out of an Uber at my house. The sun had set. The lights glowed in the front room. So did the big screen, which was tuned to the news.

I climbed the front steps, thanking my Savior once again.

When I opened the door, I heard Bree cry, “Alex?”

“Dad!” Ali shouted.

They all came running to the front hall, Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama too. Bree had tears in her eyes. “It’s so good... you’re here.”

I hugged her, kissed her, whispered in her ear, “I’ll always be here.”

She squeezed me tight, then stood back while I hugged my daughter, son, and grandmother.

“The local news says an assassin set off the bomb, a lady assassin,” Ali said.

Jannie said, “They showed her picture. Did you see her, Dad?”

“No,” I said. “But she saw us. She called the phone for the first time after we were in the room, so we figure she had to have been in range, watching, when she made the second call to trigger the bomb.”

Nana Mama patted her heart. “Thank God, you got out of there in time.”

“I’ve been weak-kneed and grateful a thousand times since it happened,” I said.

We went into the kitchen, where my grandmother had a steaming pot of soup made from chicken, celery, onions, basil, garlic, oregano, and halved cherry tomatoes. She’d also made two big loaves of garlic bread slathered with lots of butter.

While Jannie helped Bree ladle the soup into bowls that Ali ferried to the kitchen table, I was feeling almost overjoyed. It was such a simple thing, being with family, preparing for dinner, but that evening, it made me want to cry.

“What else, Dad?” Ali said. “Do you know where she went? Varjan?”

Ordinarily I would have deflected further conversations about an ongoing case, but since Mahoney had let the cat out of the bag with the media, I shared with them what I knew. I explained Varjan’s reputation as a ruthless killer for hire, her recent arrival in the U.S. under the name Martina Rodoni, and our belief that she was in the country to kill someone other than me and Mahoney.

Nana came to the table and we all held hands to say grace.

My grandmother finished with “Thank You for getting Alex out of that motel room this morning. And bless him in the days ahead.”

“Amen,” we all said.

After I’d eaten two slices of homemade bread, finished a bowl of the delicious soup, and gone back for seconds, Bree said, “I don’t suppose there was any evidence left in the motel room? Other than the bomb material, I mean.”

I started to shake my head, but then I remembered something. I dug in my pocket for my phone.

“About the only thing I could find that survived was a Bible, and I don’t know if this has a thing to do with anything, but there was this list of...”

I found the picture on my phone and tapped it to open it. “Here.”

I turned it and showed them the list raised by the soot:

“What does that mean?” Jannie asked, passing the phone to Nana. “Did she write it?”

“Who knows?” I said. “It was just there on the inside back cover, so I shot it.”

Ali took the phone from Nana Mama, who shrugged, said, “What’s a Conker?”

Staring at the screen, Ali said, “Well, a Conker is this...” He looked up at me. “Dad, Kristina Varjan. No doubt about it.”

“How do you know that?” Jannie asked, her brow knitted.

“So, first, Conker? He’s like this crazed squirrel. Drinks. Smokes. Likes to smack people in the face with a frying pan.”

“What?” my grandmother said.

“In a really good video game, Nana,” Ali said. “Conker’s the hero avatar in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Check it out, Dad, for real.”

“I will, but how do you know that Varjan wrote the list?”

He pointed to the list. “Marstons? Gabriel? Those are avatars in other video games made by the same company, Victorious Gaming.”

Bree said, “I still don’t see how that links—”

Ali held up his hand, said, “Celes Chere? I swear to God, she has her own Victorious game too. I’ve got friends at school who are obsessed with going to—”

He grabbed up his phone, started tapping with his thumbs. “Oh my God, I think it starts tomorrow!”

“What does?” Bree asked.

“Just let me make sure,” Ali said, and then he looked up at us, grinning, and pumped his fist. “Victorious promotes these big e-sports tournaments where people obsessed with the games go to play for like a gazillion in Bitcoin. The biggest tournament of the year starts tomorrow in Atlantic City! Prelims for Blade Girl, featuring Celes Chere, start at two p.m. Same thing for the Marstons. And Conker prelims get under way at three!”

Chapter 43

At 1:40 the next afternoon, February 4, a Thursday, techno music pulsed and blared through the Atlantic City Convention Center. The raucous crowd was not at all what Mahoney and I expected. Yes, there were lots of eager tweens and doughy adolescent males who looked like they tended toward the stoner-slacker end of the spectrum. But there were also young women and grown men and women, many dressed as their favorite avatars in a Victorious game. We saw six or seven Conkers in the kind of squirrel outfits you might see at a rave concert, several women dressed as glam avatar Celes Chere, and two couples sporting the sort of futuristic cowboy garb the Marstons supposedly favored in their game.

Vendors sold fast food. Hawkers offered tournament programs and other Victorious-branded souvenirs.

Mahoney said, “Feels like we’re going into a combination of a prize fight, a rock concert, and a Star Wars convention.”

“With three million in Bitcoin to the winner,” said Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s security director.

“Why Bitcoin?” I asked.

Stapleton shrugged. “My bosses think it’s edgy.”

Stapleton was in his early forties, a former navy NCIS investigator who’d been shot in the hip in the line of duty, left the military, and joined Victorious two years ago.

We’d given him the gist of what had brought us to the event and a copy of Kristina Varjan’s photograph to distribute via text to his team. He’d been concerned that a wanted bomber might be in the complex, but we told him it was unlikely she was there.

He took us through open double doors into a sprawling exposition space. There were five raised stages, four of them set up to look like boxing rings but without the highest rope around their perimeters.

There were seats surrounding the rings and the main stage, fifty rows deep and filling with fans. Above each ring were four large screens facing the growing crowds. The pulsing techno grew louder.

Stapleton explained that during the preliminary rounds, each of the four rings would serve as a battleground for one of the four big Victorious games.

The first ring would feature contestants in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the game Ali described the night before. The Ruins would play in ring number two, starring the Marstons, a couple in a dystopian world searching for their lost children.

Competitors in ring three would vie in Avenging Angel, which featured the avatar Gabriel in a fantasy scenario. Ring four’s contestants were looking to advance in Blade Girl, starring Celes Chere, a badass with mad martial arts skills facing danger in an unnamed urban setting.

I wanted to head straight to the Blade Girl ring but was stopped by a booming voice over the PA system: “Let’s get ready to rumble! Let’s get ready to be Victorious!”

The fans jumped up, raised their fists overhead, screamed, whistled, and stomped their feet. The music took on a frenetic, infectious pace and beat.

Stapleton led us to the central stage where Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the young co-founders of Victorious, were dancing and imploring the crowd to join them. They were dressed like hipsters, Crowley in thick black glasses and a nerd cut and Bronson in a black-and-white-checkered jacket and a red porkpie hat.

I’d read up on them on the way over. Crowley and Bronson had met by chance at a party in Boston. Crowley was a sophomore and standout student at MIT who spent his free time gaming. Bronson was a bored freshman at Harvard who also spent most of his free time playing games.

In their first conversation, both said they thought they could come up with better games than any on the market. They decided to try, and they had enough success with their first effort that they both quit school. The rest was history. According to Forbes, six years after they left academia, they were worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

The music died. Bronson went to the mike, said, “That’s the energy we want in this room! Am I right, right, right?”

The crowd hooted and howled back its approval.

“We hear you,” Bronson said. “We see ya, and we feel ya too!”

The fans erupted again.

Over their clapping, Bronson said, “I am Sydney Bronson, chief visionary officer at Victorious! And I’d like to introduce my partner and our chief geek, the man who takes my ideas and makes them come alive, Austin Crowley!”

Crowley came somewhat reluctantly to the mike. His eyes swept the crowd, hesitated, then pushed on. He looked like he was suffering from stage fright as he said, “Well, do they make you happy? Our games?”

The crowd cheered. He gained confidence, threw his fist overhead, and roared, “Will Victorious rule the gaming world?”

The fans went wild.

“All right!” Bronson said, coming back to the mike and throwing his arm around his partner. “Austin and I welcome you to the Victorious world championships, the richest e-sports event on the planet, an event that is only going to get bigger and richer in the years to come!”

The men gave each other high-fives and then shouted in unison, “We declare these games open!”

Crowley threw both hands over his head, and Bronson pumped his fist and crowed, “First bouts start in five minutes!”

They waved and walked offstage.

Fans started to push toward the various rings.

I was about to suggest to Ned that we take a walk around when, across the sea of people moving in all directions away from the stage, I saw a woman dressed as Celes Chere gazing back at me. She had a green lanyard around her neck and a green badge that identified her as a contestant.

Pretty face, short, spiky blond hair, shiny white coat, and pale skin. She looked away, put on cat’s-eye sunglasses, and merged with the fans heading toward rings one and two. I stared after her, seeing the structure of her cheekbones, jaw, and nose in profile before the crowd blocked my view.

“Alex,” Mahoney said. “Let’s—”

I started pushing into the crowd, calling over my shoulder, “I think I just saw Varjan!”

Chapter 44

The current in the river of fans was moving against us, and we didn’t want to pull our badges and set off a panic. It was slow getting through, but we finally reached the left side of the stage and entered into a flow of people moving in the direction I had seen her.

“There she is,” Mahoney said.

I stopped to see him pointing at a woman about thirty yards away, also dressed as Celes Chere. But she had thirty pounds on the woman I’d just seen.

“Not her,” I said, catching sight of another Celes Chere, but she was too tall. In frustration I looked at Stapleton, who’d followed us. “Can we get up on the stage?”

He hesitated, and then nodded. “You’re sure it was her?”

“Not one hundred percent, no,” I said, climbing the stairs.

On the stage, I pivoted to scan the crowds on the north side of rings one and two. Mahoney climbed up beside me.

I spotted a third Celes Chere with her back to us, and then two more, and then six or seven others just entering the venue in a pack.

“They’re everywhere!” Mahoney said.

“We’ll have to check every one.”

A voice behind us said, “Who are these guys, Phil?”

Mahoney and I turned to find the founders of Victorious looking at us. We pulled out our credentials and introduced ourselves. They were alarmed when Stapleton said we were searching for an assassin and bomber.

“In here?” said Bronson, the one who’d left Harvard. “Why would he come here?”

“She,” Mahoney said. “And we don’t know. Maybe she’s a fan of your games.”

I said, “She was wearing a contestant’s badge.”

Crowley, the one who’d dropped out of MIT, had a mild stammer. “What d-does she look like?”

“She’s dressed as Celes Chere.”

Bronson laughed. “Good luck finding her. There’ll be two hundred of them in here by the time we get to the semifinals.”

Crowley studied me. “Do we need to clear this hall? Sweep the place?”

“We can’t do that,” Bronson said. “We’re not doing that. It’s all we’d need to—”

Over the crowd noise, the first explosion was muffled. The second was louder but nothing like the bomb that had torn apart the motel room the day before.

Still, gray and brown smoke boiled and billowed from the northeast corner of the space. People there began to scream and run toward the exits.

That set off a stampede. The smoke rolled forward and swallowed the crowd, which turned hysterical. Fire alarms went off. The sprinkler system was triggered.

That set off more hysteria, and people began to slip and fall as they scrambled toward the doors.

Stapleton grabbed Bronson and Crowley. “Until we know what’s going on, we need to get you both out of here, now!”

The video-game creators looked frightened but nodded.

Bronson said, “You don’t think this assassin woman did this, do you?”

Peering through the mist and the smoke at the knots of fans fleeing the building, I said, “There’s not a bit of doubt in my mind she did it. The question is why.”