Target: Alex Cross

Chapter 45

At one A.M. mountain time on Friday, February 5, Dana Potter parked his truck out of sight on a spur into BLM land off a desolate road in rural El Paso County, West Texas, hard by the New Mexico border.

“Check your phone,” he said as he put on an ultralight communication unit with a jaw microphone.

“It’s off for a reason,” Mary said.

“Let’s triple-check.”

His wife looked irritated but did as he asked while he got out into the cold air and retrieved their packs from the back of the pickup.

“Nothing, no service,” she said. “Dark hole.”

“Thank you.”

“You sure that thing’s going to work on sat phones?”

“Supposed to shut down a mile around,” he said, hoisting his pack onto his shoulders. “We’ll see.”

Mary looked uncertain as she put her pack on, put her boot in the stirrup, and then climbed onto her horse. She sighed.

“What’s the matter?” Potter said once he was in his own saddle.

“I was just thinking of what could go wrong.”

“I plan on seeing my boy day after tomorrow, tell him his life is saved.”

She gazed at him and nodded slowly and then sharply. “Me too.”

“Happy to hear,” Potter said.

They each tugged down infrared glasses that lit up the scrub and the low mesa before them. They kicked their horses and moved in silence and at a steady pace as they cut cross-country along the same route they’d used before.

At two-twenty, one hour and eleven minutes after they’d started out, they reached the arroyo, retrieved the still green paloverde boughs, and, as before, set them in a pile on the opposite bank of the sandy dry riverbed. They tied up the horses well upriver.

It was still pitch-dark, a moonless night, and the stars shone brilliantly when the two crested the hill above the agricultural fields and the ranch.

Potter felt a steady breeze hitting the back of his neck.

“Wait,” he said. “Wrong wind.”

They stood there, calmly waiting, for five, maybe six minutes before dogs barked in the distance.

Wordlessly, they backed down the side of the mesa and removed their packs. They each found an Ozonics device about the size of a thick paperback. The Ozonics was a miniature ozone generator that would destroy their scent; not even dogs would be able to detect them.

They turned the machines on, dressed warmer, and assembled their rifles. With their packs up on their shoulders again and carrying the weapons and the ozone machines, they climbed back up the hill and stood there waiting, listening.

When no dogs had barked after five minutes, they moved quickly forward to their chosen hides. Mary lay belly-down behind her rifle at 2:40 a.m. mountain time, almost ninety minutes before first light. Her husband laid a rectangle of camouflage material over her, from her boots to her head, where it draped across the top of her telescopic sight.

“Good?” he muttered.

“Real solid,” she said. “Night-night.”

“I’ll wake you.”

“Mmm,” his wife said.

Potter set up less than a foot away, got beneath another length of camouflage cloth, and put the Ozonics out in front of him downwind. He got behind his rifle, settled, and heard Mary rhythmically breathing. He still marveled at his wife’s ability to shut the world off at will and find refuge in catnaps that almost always made her sharper.

A match made in heaven, he thought, closing his own eyes. I still believe that.

Chapter 46

I couldn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned, my mind working in circles. Each trip through the puzzling events of the past week, cycling over and over, made me anxious and stirred up a metallic taste at the back of my throat.

That taste is a sure sign that you’re going to throw up or that you’re so tense you’re burning adrenaline. At four twenty a.m., I said good-bye to any notion of real sleep and got up slowly and quietly so as not to wake Bree.

She’d had a tough day and was back to making little headway in the Senator Walker murder investigation while dealing with Chief Michaels, who was renewing pressure on her.

I eased into our closet, shut the door, and turned on the light. Three minutes later, dressed in long underwear, FBI sweats, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, I shut the bedroom door behind me.

I stood there a moment at the head of the stairs, aware of the ticking of the furnace, the hum of the fan in Jannie’s room, and the squeak of a mattress in Ali’s. Behind the near door, I could hear Nana Mama’s gently rasping breathing.

Those familiar noises calmed me as I walked down to the front hall, where I put on a black watch cap, a headlamp, a windbreaker with reflective stripes front and back, and a pair of thin wool gloves. Outside, it was a clear, moonless night. The temperature hovered just above freezing, and I could see clouds of my breath while I went through some ballistic stretches.

At four forty, I turned on the headlamp, jogged down the stairs to the sidewalk, and took off at an ambitious pace toward Capitol Hill. I hoped vigorous physical activity would take my mind off that vicious circle of incidents, thoughts, and half-baked theories that had been plaguing me since Ned Mahoney and I left Atlantic City.

But no such luck. By the time I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and started chugging uphill toward the Capitol, they were back again. This time the facts, memories, and ideas flipped through my brain in near chronological order.

Senator Betsy Walker is ambushed and shot by a pro just feet from her front door. Shortly after Walker’s murder, Kristina Varjan, known assassin, enters the country with a fake passport and is spotted by a CIA operative.

Carl Thomas, the medical-equipment salesman from Pittsburgh, is found hours later and a few blocks away, garroted to death in an Airbnb. Access to his files is blocked by Scotland Yard.

Fernando Romero, sworn enemy of Senator Walker, drives cross-country to make a pile of Benjamins, gets caught in a snowstorm the night of Walker’s murder, and drives on into Washington only to die in a firefight with police.

Sergeant Nick Moon, one of the toughest, most skilled martial artists I’ve ever known, is killed in a hand-to-hand fight by another professional not two hours south.

Varjan tries to blow up me and Mahoney. Then she appears dressed in a costume at a video-gamers’ extravaganza. Was she going to be a contestant?

I tried to discount that idea, but then thought, Maybe she’s good at the game.

But then why set off a smoke bomb? She had to have recognized me somehow and was using it as diversion to make her escape.

But why? Why would she do that? She’d already gotten away from me. Why didn’t she just leave the building?

I thought about Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, how rattled they’d been to hear that a bomber, assassin, and fugitive from justice had been a registered contestant. They’d promised to turn over their data from all entries into the tournament.

As I ran between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building, heading north toward Independence Avenue, none of it made any clear sense. The circular thinking started again, upsetting me, and I ran faster, picking up the pace to a virtual sprint. Pumping my arms, lengthening my stride, I reached Independence and was going to run downhill all the way to Union Station before turning back toward home.

But then, right there at the corner of Constitution Avenue, just north of the Supreme Court Building and the Library of Congress, I was hit with a sense of foreboding so strong that I came to a full stop and stood there panting, sweat pouring off my brow and trickling down my back. I was overheated, but I shivered so hard my headlamp beam slashed back and forth, and my teeth chattered.

I looked down the hill and in my mind I saw the riderless black horse from President Catherine Grant’s funeral procession. It was so real, I could hear the stallion’s hooves clopping.

I’m not much for premonitions or gut instincts. For me, for the most part, it’s all about the facts and the way they fit together or don’t.

Standing there, however, sweating and shivering in the cold in the middle of the night and seeing that black horse so vividly in my mind, there was no denying the ominous sense I felt all around me. I couldn’t point to its source, and then, suddenly, I could.

Kristina Varjan. Senator Walker’s sniper. The gangbanger Romero. The strangled guy, Thomas. And Sergeant Moon’s killer.

What if they were all connected? What if every one of them was a professional assassin, including Thomas, the one Scotland Yard was keeping under wraps? What if they were cooperating? What if someone was directing them?

The sense of menace and apprehension kept building the more I thought about those questions, and finally I decided that a prudent man had to go forward on the assumption they were all trained professional killers.

Five professional killers, maybe more, and they were all within a hundred miles of Washington, DC. What they were here for was unclear, but the fact that one of them might have assassinated a U.S. senator came front and center in my thoughts.

This isn’t over.

I heard horse hooves in my memory and felt at a deep gut level that something bad was about to happen. Something very bad.

I pivoted and started sprinting back home.

I could feel the threat in my muscles and in my bones.

Chapter 47

At 4:30 A.M., Pablo Cruz encountered heavy security at the Washington, DC, arena that was the main venue for the World Youth Congress, which was opening that morning.

Cruz had shaved his head and the goatee and wore a blue work coverall embroidered with the DC arena’s logo. He carried a District of Columbia driver’s license and an arena employee ID card that identified him as Kent Leonard, a member of the setup and maintenance crew assigned to work the three-day event.

Cruz put thirty dollars, a cheap wristwatch, a key ring, reading glasses, sunglasses, a pack of gum, and three alcohol wipes in small foil packages in a tray and then turned to a U.S. Secret Service agent standing there. He gestured to his ears.

In a nasal, almost Donald Duck voice, he said, “I’m wearing bilateral hearing aids. Do I take them out?”

“If you don’t mind, sir. No cell phone?”

“They said no phones, and besides, I can’t hear for nothing on those things,” Cruz said before removing the hearing aids, placing them in the bin, and walking through a metal detector.

He’d used the IDs and worn similar hearing aids when entering the arena three times in the past two days, and he fully expected the venue’s security guards, DC Police, and members of the U.S. Secret Service to wave him through.

But after he’d cleared the metal detector, he was met by a Secret Service agent carrying a wand. Special Agent Crane, according to his ID, told Cruz to extend his arms and spread his legs.

Cruz acted as if he didn’t hear the order. Agent Lewis, Crane’s partner, went to the bin and got out his hearing aids.

The assassin put them on and this time followed Crane’s orders as the agent moved the detection wand over him. He ignored the cheeping noise when it passed the two hearing devices.

When he was done, Crane handed the wand to his partner, who had been typing on an iPad, and said, “I’m going to have to pat you down, Mr. Leonard.”

“Whatever,” Cruz said.

Agent Crane checked the assassin’s legs and pockets.

Lewis said, “He checks out.”

Crane nodded before patting both of Cruz’s arms. His expression changed.

“Please pull up your sleeves, sir,” he said.

Cruz calmly rolled back the sleeves of the jumpsuit, revealing the translucent spiderwebs wrapped around both forearms.

“What are those?”

“Braces for a repetitive-strain injury,” Cruz said in that quacking voice. “My cousin invented them. Did the same design for knees.”

“I could use one of those,” Agent Lewis said. “They on the market?”

“The website’s going up and the knee brace is coming out I think, like, next month? Spiderweb Braces,” Cruz said. “These are prototypes.”

“Work well?” the agent said, stepping back to let him pass.

Cruz smiled. “First day. I’ll let you know on my way out, even before I tell my cousin.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Leonard.”

“God willing, sir,” Cruz said, and he walked on.

Feeling like he’d already won a major battle and remembering the schematic maze he’d taped to the abandoned factory floor, Cruz worked his way through the perimeter corridors surrounding the arena and then used a key he’d stolen, copied, and returned to a janitor two days before to unlock an unmarked door.

He looked around, saw the hallways largely empty at that hour, and slipped into a utility stairwell. He clambered quickly down two flights of steel stairs, exited into a subbasement with narrower halls, and went through them confidently until he reached a T. He turned left and, to his relief, found the passage in front of him empty.

Cruz went straight to a door marked with an electrical warning symbol, unlocked it, and went through it into a small, very warm space with meters running on the wall, recording the energy the facility was consuming.

He removed his left hearing aid and tugged the ultrathin wire that linked the amplifier to the earbud. Four more inches of wire came out of the amp. He wound the cord around a connector that joined the largest electrical meter to the big power line feeding the facility. Then he opened one of the alcohol wipes and carefully cleaned the aid and everywhere he’d touched the meter.

He did the same to the doorknob in and out of the room before moving back toward the stairwell. Just shy of it, Cruz used his key to open a door on his right and went into a storage closet that held toilet paper, napkins, coffee cups, and the like.

Behind a stack of paper towels, he found the things he’d smuggled in two days before beneath his work clothes: the disassembled parts of his graphite derringers, a sandy-blond toupee, contact lenses, a set of clothes, and an ID.

Cruz stripped out of the jumpsuit, folded it, then assembled the weapons and attached one to the belly of each spiderweb. He put the contact lenses in; they made his eyes a dazzling blue. Then he donned black pants, black shoes, a black dress shirt, and a black V-neck sweater.

He set the white cleric’s collar and the toupee next to him on the floor at the back of the storage unit and sat on several rolls of paper towels in total darkness, meditating and dozing while he waited for his moment.

Anxiety was not allowed to enter his brain.

Neither was fear. Or thoughts of the plan. Or dreams of the future.

Cruz became like death: nobody, nowhere, in no time.

Chapter 48

At 4:50 A.M. on Friday, Kristina Varjan got in an empty elevator in George Washington University Hospital and pushed the button for the fourth floor.

Wearing hospital scrubs, glasses, hazel contact lenses, and a long auburn wig gathered into a ponytail, she carried a blood-draw kit in her left hand and sported an excellent fake GW badge that read TERRI LE GRAND, PHLEBOTOMIST. A near-perfect forgery of an official GW employee pass hung from a clip at her waist.

As the elevator began to rise, Varjan was still debating whether she’d done the right thing by lighting two M-80 fire-crackers taped to two smoke bombs and dropping them in a trash can at the Victorious tournament.

She’d gotten out of there clean, hadn’t she? There was that, and more. Those were FBI agents in the tournament hall, the same FBI agents who’d gone to her motel room. She’d known that the second she’d laid eyes on them.

But what else was she going to do? She’d had to send a message, hadn’t she?

Yes, of that Varjan was certain. She’d been smart to use the smoke bombs for many reasons. But how had the FBI agents gotten there?

Before she could dwell any longer on the thought, the elevator slowed and dinged. The doors opened, and she exited.

Varjan ambled down the hall, yawning and covering her mouth with her sleeve.

She saw a nurse working at a computer at the dimly lit nurses’ station.

“Hi,” Varjan said, smiling at the nurse. “I’m here for Jones and Hitchcock?”

The nurse, a Filipina in her forties, wore a white sweater over her scrubs and a badge that said BRITA. She cocked her head. “You’re kind of early.”

“I’m working an early shift,” Varjan whispered. “Moonlighting. I’m usually at Georgetown Friday afternoons and I needed a double.”

Brita put on reading glasses, typed on the computer. “Who’s the draw for?”

Varjan looked at a clipboard, said, “Meeks for Jones. Albertson for Hitchcock.”

The nurse nodded. “Shame to wake them. Hitchcock had a rough night.”

“I could go upstairs and do my business and swing back if that would help.”

“No, go ahead. I have to deal with our shift change in five.”

“Thanks, Brita,” Varjan said, and she moved down the hall toward Hitchcock’s door. When she looked back, she saw the nurse busy at her computer again.

She went past Hitchcock’s door and the next one, took a deep breath, and used her elbow to push open the third door to a private room occupied by Arthur Jones.

Jones lay in bed, his gray skin lit by various monitors around him. In a chair on the far side of the bed, covered in a blanket, an older woman snored softly. Varjan swallowed. It could have been worse, but the woman did complicate things.

Varjan was flexible and adaptable, however. As she slipped toward the bed and the tangle of medical lines hooked to the old man, she was already spinning lies to use should the woman wake.

But the old woman showed no sign that she heard Varjan setting her kit on a table and opening it. Jones, however, stirred when she slipped a device on his finger to check his pulse ox and then put the blood pressure cuff around his upper arm.

“What the hell time is it?” he whispered grumpily.

Varjan held his gaze, smiled, whispered, “Little before five, sir.”

“Couldn’t this have waited a couple hours?”

The assassin acted sympathetic as she pumped the cuff. “I’m just following doctor’s orders.”

Varjan put on a stethoscope and took Jones’s blood pressure.

“Don’t tell me how bad my numbers are,” he grumbled. “Don’t mean a damn thing anyway, I’m going under the knife this afternoon.”

“People live through cardiac surgery every day,” she said, removing the cuff.

“That’s what they say. Where you poking me now?”

“Inner left arm.”

Without responding, Jones closed his eyes, adjusted the IV line sticking in the back of his left hand, and exposed the inside of his elbow. Varjan wrapped a length of tubing around his weak upper arm and felt for a vein.

She took a needle, attached it to a vacuum tube, and—

“Who the hell are you?” the woman in the chair said.

Chapter 49

Varjan started, said, “Sorry, Terri Le Grand. The phlebotomist. You?”

“Eddie, the sister,” the woman said, studying her critically. “He had blood taken last night.”

The assassin gazed at her. “And I’d think there’ll be more drawn before surgery.”

Eddie sniffed. “You’ll drain him before he can get on the table.”

“Surprise,” Jones said, his eyes still shut. “Dear sister woke up on the positive side of the bed again.”

“They’re taking a lot of blood, Arthur,” his sister said.

“Some of it’s being stockpiled for surgery,” Varjan said as she slipped the needle toward his arm. “Little pinch.”

“Ow,” Jones said, his eyes flashing open. “That hurt!”

Varjan, flustered, said, “I... I’m sorry. That never happens.”

“Torture him, why don’t you?” Eddie said.

“Eddie,” Jones said, looking away from Varjan. “Please.”

His sister sniffed again. “Just saying.”

Varjan watched blood flow into the vacuum tube and got a second tube ready. This one was not a vacuum but the barrel of a syringe. She set it into the back of the needle and pressed the plunger. The syringe contained a high dose of propranolol, a drug used to slow the heart rate and lower blood pressure.

Once the full dose was in, Varjan tugged back on the plunger until it was partially filled with blood. She slid out the needle, put cotton on the wound site, and taped it in place.

“There,” she said, smiling brightly. “Not so bad.”

Eddie said, “Do you get off on sticking people like that?”

“That’s it,” Jones said. “Can you have the nurse call Rebecca, my wife? Tell her to come early before I’m driven mad?”

Eddie acted offended. “What? I slept in a chair for you, Arthur.”

Varjan did not know what to make of the siblings and didn’t much care.

“Well,” she said awkwardly, “I hope surgery goes well.”

“If I don’t die from my sister’s bleak outlook on life,” Jones said.

“Rational outlook on life,” Eddie said. “The cold hard facts.”

Varjan smiled halfheartedly and left. She could hear them bickering softly as she walked down the hall toward the nurses’ station, where the shift change was under way. Brita, the Filipina nurse, looked up from her chart.

“Good?”

“Better than good,” Varjan said. “Have a nice sleep.”

She walked directly to the elevator and pushed the down button. Several moments passed before alarms began to sound in the hall.

Eddie ran out of her brother’s room, yelled, “He’s not breathing!”

Nurses and orderlies from both shifts grabbed crash carts and raced toward Jones’s room. The elevator doors opened.

Varjan took one last look at the team racing past Eddie, who trembled at the doorway. She looked in at the doctors and nurses and then glanced down the hall at her brother’s assassin. “You bled him dry!” she cried. “I knew that would happen!”

Varjan vanished inside the elevator, keeping her face turned away from the cameras while the doors slid shut behind her.

Chapter 50

I was drenched when I ran back up the front steps to my home. Inside, I didn’t bother taking off my jacket or watch cap; I just went straight to the kitchen and punched Redial on my cell.

“C’mon, Ned,” I said. “Pick up.”

I’d tried to call Mahoney six or seven times on the run home, but every call to his personal phone immediately jumped to voice mail. And every call to his work phone ended with a federal robot telling me his voice mail was not yet set up.

That was impossible. Mahoney had had the same work number for eight years. We talked all the time on the work phone.

Five assassins, I thought as I started making coffee. No, three. If Thomas was an assassin, he was a dead one. So was Romero.

Were there more than the three left?

It could have been just the three at that point, but that seemed unlikely to me. If there were three, there could be four or five or even six.

Five or six. I knew those numbers were a pure guess, but that didn’t matter. A prudent man should assume the worst and prepare for it.

Was five or six the worst-case scenario? Or were there even more than that?

Or was I just imagining this? A tired, frazzled brain searching for answers?

Pouring myself a cup of coffee, I decided to go with my instincts because I did not have enough facts. After trying both of Ned’s phones again, I poured coffee into a second cup and took it and mine upstairs to our bedroom, where I flipped on the lights.

Shutting the door, I said, “Bree, wake up.”

She groaned and pulled the pillow over her head. “Go away. I need to sleep.”

I walked over and grabbed the pillow away.

“Alex!” she shouted angrily. “Bree needs to—”

“I know Bree needs to sleep,” I said. “But I need to talk to Chief Stone. Or do you want me to leave you out of the loop and go straight to Chief Michaels?”

Her brow knitted and she squinted at me and some of the stiffness in her shoulders eased. “What time is it?” she grumbled.

“Just after five,” I said.

“You’ve been out running already?”

I put her coffee on the night table. “Couldn’t sleep, figured I’d go for a run and think some things through.”

Bree yawned and struggled to sit up. “Okay?”

“I think there’s a conspiracy going on,” I said. “A conspiracy of assassins.”

She sipped the coffee, listening and saying nothing as I tried to explain the fractured logic of my theory.

“Something bad is about to happen. I know this doesn’t sound like me, but I can feel it.”

Bree was quiet for several moments before saying, “This doesn’t sound like you at all, Alex. Seeing riderless horses. How much sleep have you been getting?”

“This has nothing to do with sleep, and I didn’t see the horse. I just remembered it. This really has to do with Senator Walker getting killed, probably by Thomas, who was then killed either by Varjan or whoever beat Sergeant Moon to death.”

“Alex, there’s a lot of conjecture in what you’re saying. Especially the idea that there are more assassins than we know about.”

“I’m saying we should be proceeding based on that assumption. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.”

Bree was quiet again but studying me. “What do you think these assassins are going to do?”

“I... I don’t know. But if they were part of a plot that begins with the killing of a sitting U.S. senator, draw your own conclusions.”

“I can’t draw any conclusions,” she said. “We don’t have enough facts.”

“I’m telling you, something brutal is going to happen in the District, maybe today.”

I could see her getting more frustrated by the moment. “What do you want me to do? Put all my detectives on the streets? Ask Michaels to double the shift? Put every cop on patrol because your gut says so?”

“That would be a start,” I said.

She threw up her hands. “Well, I’m not in a position to do that.”

“You should at least tell Michaels.”

“Tell him what? That a consultant to the department wants a small army to take over the District of Columbia because of a gut feeling?”

I could see I was getting nowhere fast. “Okay,” I said, heading toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To my office to see what patients I can cancel and then to find Mahoney to see if he can understand what I’m saying.”

“Alex,” Bree said as I opened the door. “Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

I felt the skin around my temples relax. “I know. I love you too. Go back to sleep.”

“That’s not happening,” she said ruefully, and she took another sip of coffee.

I went out the door and back down the stairs, feeling confused and wondering whether this was just a theory cooked up by my tired mind. But by the time I reached the kitchen, I was certain again that I was right.

After pouring another cup of coffee, I went down the stairs, hitting Redial on my cell. Again I heard that infuriating recording about the voice mail not being set up.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and I was about to dial Ned’s personal phone again when I noticed an envelope on the floor below the mail slot. I picked it up, saw my name and address and a stamp but no postmark and no return address.

I slit the envelope open as I walked to my office. There was a single piece of white paper inside. Across the page, scrawled in lurid red crayon, it said:

Chapter 51

Two time zones to the west of DC, Mary Potter whispered, “Dana?”

Hearing his wife’s voice in his earbud, Potter jerked awake, saw the hillside and the valley floor below in a pale gray light. A rooster crowed.

“Shit,” he said. “Time is it?”

“Time to get ready,” she said. “There’s lights on in the hacienda.”

Twenty minutes later, the winter sun crested a hillside to the east and behind them. Warmth swept in over them and continued across the valley to the terrace they’d watched two days before.

It was broad daylight before the first person appeared, a young man wearing a sweater and apron who laid out dining service at the four tables on the terrace. He also switched on a tall portable heater. They could see the steam rising off the top of it through their scopes.

“Let’s go hot,” Potter said. He extracted from his pocket three 6.5mm Creedmoor cartridges that he fed into the magazine of his rifle and a fourth that he seated in the chamber before closing the bolt and engaging the safe.

Only then did he reach in his pack for the signal jammer. The device was anodized black, about the size of a paperback, and made of some light alloy. Potter didn’t know where the jammer had come from or how it worked, and he didn’t much care. It had been with their briefing package in the ranch house when they arrived.

He set it in front and to the left of the Ozonics, where his forward hand could reach it in a hurry. Eight minutes later, the first to breakfast, a polished, fit blonde in her late thirties, came out onto the terrace wearing dark sunglasses and canvas bird-hunting gear that she made appear stylish.

Potter reached into a side pants pocket, retrieved his cell phone, and thumbed it on. No service. Excellent.

“Here comes my baby,” Mary sang softly. “Here he comes now.”

Her target, a man in his sixties wearing canvas pants, a vest, and a ball cap, walked to the now-seated woman, engaged in some pleasantries with her, and then moved on to a table closer to the heater. He settled into a chair facing the length of the valley.

“Green,” she said. “Five hundred and nine meters. The right ethmoid bone.”

The ethmoid bone. The perfect aiming point if you meant to shatter a skull and drop a man in his tracks. Or in his chair, as the case may be.

“Adjust your turret four clicks and stay right there,” Potter said. “No drift in this tailwind.”

They waited fifteen minutes while five more people, all middle- to late-middle-aged men, came slowly streaming onto the terrace for breakfast. Two sat with the polished woman. Two sat by themselves. One sat to the left of Mary’s target.

He was peach-skinned, heavyset, and gregarious. Mary’s target seemed to enjoy the man’s presence and threw back his head to laugh twice.

Then a tall woman in her forties, big-boned with short dark hair, appeared. She was wearing a green down vest over her canvas jacket.

“That’s the missus,” Mary said. “You’re on deck.”

Chapter 52

The missus seemed to know everyone, and she worked the terrace before taking a seat at the empty fourth table with her right shoulder to the heater and in full profile.

Potter instinctively didn’t like her in that position and had to ponder why before he understood that her husband was likely to sit to her left, facing the full view of the valley, obstructed by his wife.

Potter’s target, who was five six in his hunting boots, ambled onto the terrace and greeted the eight folks already drinking coffee and giving their breakfast orders to the waiter. Potter had his crosshairs on the man from the second he appeared and he kept them there as he moved across the terrace to shake the hand of Mary’s target. The crosshairs stayed with him even as he went over to his wife, kissed her forehead, and took the exact wrong seat.

The missus was so tall and broad-shouldered that her husband was all but blocked. Depending on the angle at which she faced him, Potter could only find small parts of the man’s body to aim at, none of them lethal.

“Red,” he said.

“Change angle?” Mary said.

“Wait.”

He deliberately tensed and relaxed his shoulders, calmly watching through the scope as the waiter brought espresso to his target’s table. The wife took a sip and sat back, crossing her legs and exposing the left side of her husband’s body and head.

“Green,” he said. He reached forward and flipped the switch on the jamming device.

Mary said, “Same.”

Potter adjusted his upper body and the gun. The crosshairs of his scope found the bridge of the man’s nose and settled there.

He pushed forward the three-position safety on the rifle to fire and brought the pad of his right index finger to the curl of the trigger. No pressure. Not yet.

“Green,” he said, and they both went into a pattern of thinking and action that had been pounded into them.

“Breathe,” Mary said.

Potter took a deep breath and let a quarter of it out, saying, “Relax.” He dropped all tension in his body. “Aim.” His crosshairs were exactly where he wanted them.

“Sight picture,” Mary said.

Potter’s attention leaped from his target to his target’s wife and behind them. He was about to say Squeeze when the missus leaned forward for her espresso, blocking the shot.

“Red,” he said, and he exhaled.

“Still green,” Mary said.

Potter said nothing until the wife reclined in the chair again, though not quite as far. Still, he had a clear look at the target’s frontal bone just above his left eye.

“Green,” he said.

They went back into that sequence again, both of them in sync: breathe, relax, aim, sight picture...

“Squeeze,” Potter said.

Their triggers broke crisply. Their bullets made thudding noises leaving the suppressors at the same instant the wife sat forward. Seeing the vapor trails of both their projectiles rip over the fields and the treetops, Potter knew even before impact that Mary’s shot was true, and that he had screwed up big-time.

The 127-grain bullet smashed into his target’s wife’s lower right cheek. Her head and torso whipped around left and seized up. Beyond her, Potter’s target was half on, half off the chair. There was blood on his right chest wall, but he was very much alive and looking dumbly around.

People were screaming and shouting. Their voices carried to the assassins.

But Potter paid them no mind. He cycled the bolt on his rifle, thinking that the bullet must have gone through the wife’s mouth, ricocheted, exited, and slammed into her husband’s chest.

Those thoughts vanished when he found his target’s sternum in his crosshairs, skipped shooting protocol, and tapped the trigger. The Creedmoor cracked. He stayed on the scope, watching the vapor trail all the way to the center of his target’s chest.

“Dead man,” Mary said.

Potter came off the gun, took his spent cartridge, pocketed it, then grabbed the gun, pack, and camo netting. He scooted backward, still hearing faint shouts, dragging his rifle, pack, and netting with him. Mary was already out of sight of the hacienda and pulling a spray bottle full of bleach from her pack.

After stuffing the camo net in the pack, she took the bottle, crouched, and duck-walked forward right in her tracks. She got to where she’d lain for the shots and sprayed pure bleach on the Ozonics device, which she left running in place to keep destroying scent after they left. Then she retreated, spraying the whole time.

Potter took his Ozonics but left the signal jammer to keep all communications with the ranch cut off as long as possible. He sprayed the jammer and where he’d lain and all along his exit path, sweeping his gloved hand back and forth through the loose dirt, mixing it with the bleach.

Back over the side of the mesa, they shouldered their packs and guns before scrambling down and to the arroyo. They swept their way up the dry riverbed, jumped on the horses, and kicked them up hard.

They rode northeast toward the truck and trailer as fast as they could go, their jobs done, and already thinking of home.

It was 7:32 a.m. mountain time.

Chapter 53

At 9:40 A.M. eastern time, Martin Franks whistled as he glanced at his reflection in the window of a car on South End Avenue in Battery Park, Manhattan. Franks looked nothing like the man who’d checked out of the Mandarin Oriental the morning before and taken an afternoon Amtrak train to Penn Station.

Franks’s hair was cut military-short now. His dark blue suit, white shirt, and tie fitted him well, but not impeccably. Aviator sunglasses and the bud in his ear screamed law enforcement. On a chain around his neck, he carried the badges and identity cards of a U.S. Treasury Department special agent.

He had makeup on to tone down the bruising he’d received when the trooper had punched him, and a story to explain that bruising.

Carrying a cardboard tray with three Starbucks coffees and a stack of napkins beneath, Franks walked to the Gateway Plaza Garage and entered just as it started to rain. He took an elevator to the third floor and got out with every bit of badass, walking-boss bravado he could muster.

To his right, he saw a custom black Chevy Suburban parked sideways across three spaces. Two men dressed in dark suits and wearing earbuds stood outside and immediately fixed their attention on Franks, who balanced the coffee with one hand and held up his agent’s badge with the other.

“You Penny and Cox?” he said in a soft Southern drawl.

“Cox,” said the redhead.

“Penny,” said the thick-necked guy.

“Kevin Stoddard,” Franks said, dropping the badge and holding out his free hand. “On temporary assignment to the New York office. My boss said I should come out to spell you if you need to take a leak and at least get you some coffee.”

Penny shook his hand, took a cup, looked Franks in the eye. “Who’s your SAC?”

“Warner,” Franks said. “I’m on the assignment sheet.”

Cox pulled out his phone, started typing with his thumbs. Franks acted serene but inside he was praying the hacker had done his work the right way. Otherwise, Franks was going the wrong way and fast.

Cox looked up and nodded. “Where you based usually, Stoddard?”

“Big Easy,” Franks said. “Past nine years.”

“Counterfeiting?” Penny asked.

“Mostly,” Franks said. “But you get threats now and then you have to investigate. Some of those backwoods-bayou boys got tempers and go spouting off about killing the Fed chairman. That kind of thing.”

Penny laughed. “I’ve heard a few of those. What’re you doing up here?”

“There’s a flood of well-crafted bogus fifties down our way,” Franks said. “Two months ago, the same quality bills started showing up in Queens. We’re trying to trace the common denominator.”

Cox took a coffee, said, “Those guys are getting damn good with the digital stuff.”

Penny said, “What happened to your cheek?”

Franks made a show of looking disgusted and amused. “My eleven-year-old nephew, my sister’s kid, he’s been taking tae kwon do? He asked me if he could show me some moves the other night. I wasn’t expecting a spinning roundhouse to the side of my head. Almost knocked me cold!”

Penny and Cox started laughing.

Franks did too, said, “So much for my badassery.”

He set the cardboard tray and napkins on the hood of the Suburban, took the third cup of coffee for himself. “What time are you boys in the air?”

Penny looked at Cox, said, “Wheels off the ground at eleven.”

Franks said, “Helps when you have a motorcycle escort clearing the way to JFK.”

Cox shook his head. “No escort. Bowman doesn’t like them, prefers to blend in.”

Penny said, “I think she’s right. Once she’s in and we’re rolling, we’re just another mobile master of the universe heading toward the corporate jet.”

Franks drank from his coffee. He liked these guys. Salt of the earth, as his mother used to say. Ex-military. Wife. Kids.

Deep down, however, he felt no pity, just building anticipation and thrill.

At four minutes to ten, the agents put their hands to their earbuds.

Cox said, “Roger that.”

Penny headed toward the passenger door. “Thanks for the designer mud, Stoddard.”

“Glad to be of service,” Franks said. He picked up the empty coffee carrier and stripped off a.25-caliber Ruger pistol taped to the bottom.

He shot Penny through the skull from three feet away, then turned the gun on Cox and said, “Don’t.”

Chapter 54

Cox’s hand froze in mid-reach for his weapon.

“Both guns on the hood,” Franks said. “Don’t screw around. I can do this with you living or dying. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Cox reached in, got out his service weapon, then took a backup from his ankle. He put them on the hood.

“Steady,” Franks said, still aiming across the hood as he took the smaller weapon and put it in his pocket, then squatted and tore Penny’s earbud and radio off his corpse.

“Get in,” Franks said, opening the passenger-side door. “You’re driving.”

Cox said, “Whatever you’re planning—”

“Save it for someone who cares.”

Cox hesitated but then climbed behind the wheel.

Franks got in, nudged aside a closed umbrella on the floor, and shut the door.

“Drive.”

“Where?” Cox said.

“Don’t be cute,” Franks said. “I know the plan. Follow it.”

The Treasury agent made a show of putting the Suburban in gear and then tried to backhand Franks.

The assassin anticipated the move and swatted the blow away, then put the Ruger against Cox’s temple. “I’m so far ahead of you, Agent Cox. Do what I say, and you get to live to see the wife and kids. One more dumb move like that, you won’t.”

The agent was furious but put both hands on the wheel. He drove. His service weapon slid off the hood and clattered onto the parking-garage floor.

They exited the garage into drizzle that had turned to steady rain by the time Cox turned on Broadway, heading south into the financial district.

In Franks’s earbud, a man said, “This is Thomas. Shamrock wants to move.”

“Roger that,” Cox said.

“Minute out,” Franks said.

“Copy.”

Franks said, “When you get there, pull over smooth, put it in park.”

“What the hell are you going to do?”

The assassin said nothing as they rolled to a stop in front of Trinity Episcopal Church. The second Cox put the SUV in park, Franks put his finger in the agent’s free ear, aimed behind Cox’s jaw, and shot him through the top of his spine, killing him instantly.

The shot sounded loud to Franks, but it was buffered by the bulletproof glass; people on the sidewalk, rushing to get out of the rain, didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed the umbrella, stepped out, shut the door, and put the umbrella up just before the front door to the church opened.

A big black man in a suit and trench coat came out, carrying an umbrella above a short, dark-haired Caucasian female in her fifties wearing a long blue rain jacket and pumps. The muscle was taking pelting rain to his eyes.

Franks kept his umbrella tilted to block his face. As the pair crossed the sidewalk, he reached as if to open the rear door and then swung toward the woman and shot her in the face at point-blank range.

The agent exploded toward Franks, slashing the umbrella at him and then getting his shoulder into the assassin, driving him back against the SUV. Franks went ragdoll, as if he’d been stunned.

The second he felt the agent go for the submission, he aimed through the umbrella and fired. He heard a grunt before the man fell at his feet, wounded but not dead and going for his weapon.

Franks aimed at the middle of the agent’s forehead.

He pulled the trigger.

Click.

Franks whipped the empty gun at the wounded man’s face, hitting him. He pivoted, raced around the SUV to the driver’s side, pulled Cox’s corpse out, and left him there sprawled in the bus lane.

He threw the car in drive, put on his blinker, and started to pull out into traffic just as the agent started firing. The first round punctured the rear window, blew through both seats, and shattered the radio display.

The second shot...

Chapter 55

As nobody lost in nowhere in no time, three hours passed like minutes for Pablo Cruz. His watch beeped at 8:00 a.m.

He woke feeling deeply rested and ready for the task at hand.

Cruz got up, dusted off his pants, put the cleric’s collar on, and then put on the excellent toupee. Then he exited the darkened storage facility into the basement hallway.

He put on a pair of conservative black-framed glasses fitted with photochromic lenses that adapted to changes in light, darker in sunlight, almost clear inside. Walking quicker now, Cruz left the subbasement and climbed the staircase. Beyond the door, he heard the din of a gathering crowd.

Cruz crisply opened the door and eased out into a stream of earnest youth from all over the world and their adult leaders and chaperones. He smiled at a young woman guiding a group of Asian teens, and she grinned back.

He got nods and smiles for the next five minutes as he circled the arena, taking note of all law enforcement before heading inside. Cruz entered from the rear, farthest from a stage set in a rainbow of bunting.

Many of the seats off the floor were already taken. To get on the floor, Cruz showed badges identifying him as the Reverend Nicholas Flint of the First Baptist Church of Nebraska, part of a church group that included a choir from Omaha that was set to sing as part of the congress’s opening ceremony.

He showed his badges three more times, moving past television cameras, and soon found himself at the back of a throng of people, young and old, who were pressed up against barriers set well back from the stage. His glasses kept lightening in tint until they showed just a hint of gray.

Cruz reached up to adjust his collar and withdrew a sliver of translucent graphite as sharp as a sewing needle.

The assassin fitted it between his right index and middle finger, waited until more people filled in tightly behind him, then used it to prick the rear end of a young woman in front of him. She yelped, grabbed her butt, and spun around. Cruz looked at her through the glasses.

“I just got bit too,” he said. “Someone told me the place is infested.”

That made her frown. “Really?”

“Just heard it,” he said. “Can I get by? I’m supposed to get pictures of the choir. They’re in my group.”

She brightened. “Sure, Reverend.”

“Bless you, child,” he said, and he slipped past her.

Forty minutes later, the arena was packed, and Cruz was where he needed to be, one row of bodies off the front and to the far right of the stage behind a contingent of teenagers rallying around a sign that said FLORIDA. There were signs from fifty states and one hundred countries all over the arena.

Cruz kept looking around in wonder and awe, as if he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to be there. The stage began to crowd with dignitaries. The small church choir from Kansas filled the risers to stage left, almost directly in front of the assassin.

At 9:57 a.m., a silver-haired woman with a big smile on her face walked to the dais and tapped the microphone.

“Welcome to this year’s meeting of the World Youth Congress!” she cried, and the arena erupted in applause.

Cruz clapped his approval, keeping his eyes fixed on her, not glancing at any of the eight burly men wearing suits and earbuds with their backs to the stage who were scanning the audience.

When the clapping died down, the woman said, “My good young friends, I am Nancy Farrell, chairman of this year’s congress. Today, I have the distinct honor of introducing a new friend who will open your congress with an exciting announcement. Young ladies and gentlemen of the world and of the future, it is with great pleasure that I introduce the president of the United States, James B. Hobbs.”

Chapter 56

The U.S. marine corps band came onto the stage playing “Hail to the Chief.”

Secret Service agents came out from behind curtains at floor level, followed by President Hobbs, in office now less than two weeks. The president strode out, waving and smiling the way any good politician will when the crowd is sure to be on his side.

Tall, silver-haired, and lanky, Hobbs had grown up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He had weathered good looks and a reputation in the U.S. Senate as a man of integrity and geniality, traits that had attracted the late president Catherine Grant.

On paper, you couldn’t ask for a better guy to lead the country, Cruz thought.

But as the president began to work the barricade, shaking hands with kids and adults, Cruz could see Hobbs was showing signs of being uncomfortable with the job, or at least with the way the Secret Service men moved in a tight protective phalanx around him on three sides.

Two tall agents walked behind Hobbs. Each of them had one hand resting gently on the president’s back and the other close to his weapon. Two more agents moved laterally off his left shoulder. The one closest to Cruz was scanning ahead.

Cruz forced himself not to look at the lead agent but beyond him and his partner to the president. The assassin grinned broadly as if one of the higher points of his life was coming his way.

He reached up to his hearing aid, pressed on it for ten seconds, then turned it off. He watched the nearest television camera, to his right about ninety feet. It appeared to be trained on the president. The green light on the front of the camera flickered and died. The cameraman’s head popped up, his expression puzzled.

Cruz looked around and saw the other camera operators doing the same.

He stood up on his toes and made a show of clapping as Hobbs and his entourage came closer. He glanced around, caught young person after young person’s excited eyes, and nodded to them, mouthing, Isn’t this incredible?

Still clapping, still up on his toes and delighted, Cruz saw how the lead agent was already peering past him and how the agent closest to the president was signaling when each person could reach out to shake Hobbs’s hand. Only then did the assassin glance beyond the president to the ramrod-straight man following the entourage.

Military bearing. Tight haircut. Gray business suit.

Those things instantly registered in Cruz’s mind before his happy attention snapped back to Hobbs, now less than six feet away, so close the assassin could hear him saying, “So glad to meet you. Wonderful. Wonderful to see you, young ladies.”

The three teens directly in front of him pressed forward. Cruz did too, saw the lead agent putting his hand on the arms of the kids. Still clapping, Cruz smiled, looked at the Secret Service agent, and raised his brows quizzically.

The agent held up a finger. Cruz nodded, glanced at Hobbs shaking the hand of a fifteen-year-old girl and then posing for a selfie with a pimply boy before moving directly in front of him.

The kids that separated them shook the president’s hands before the leader of the free world looked up and directly into his killer’s eyes. Cruz gave him nothing but heartfelt admiration as he reached over the heads of the kids and extended his hand.

Hobbs grabbed it, shook it, and winked at him. As the president released his grip, the assassin snapped his hand back and felt the thud of the air gun going off, felt it vibrating through his retreating forearm, no noise at all in that din.

The 90-grain graphite bullet hit the president square in the chest. Hobbs lurched backward, wild-eyed, not understanding what had happened as he collapsed into the arms of the bodyguards behind him.

Cruz reacted with immediate shock, drawing his head and upper body back with an exaggerated gape of disbelief as the agents grabbed the president and lowered him to the floor. Kids began to scream.

Hobbs’s assassin watched, mouth wide in puzzlement. He swung his attention to his left, hands to his head as if he wasn’t sure of what he’d seen. The crowd around him surged back as more agents and a doctor rushed to the stricken president.

Cruz saw the man with the military bearing, tight haircut, and business suit eight feet away, looking scared and incredulous. He was standing sidelong to the assassin, offering a narrow profile, not the broadside shot Cruz wanted, but Cruz believed in taking the first solid opportunity he had at a target.

He raised his left hand, snapped his wrist back. Again, he felt the thud but heard no report of it. The man twisted at the graphite bullet’s impact, spiraling, tripping, and sprawling onto the concrete floor.

People near him started yelling and ducking down. More in the crowd were trying to get away from the stage. Cruz went with them.

Then medics rushed in. As quickly as the hysteria had built, it lulled and died in the arena. All the assassin could hear was children crying as he kept slowly retreating, trying to act in fear and bewildered disbelief.

Fifteen seconds later, when he’d moved far enough to see a clear path to an exit, he reached up to the hearing aid and pressed the on button three times.

Twelve seconds after that, the lights in the arena wavered, dimmed, and then died.

Chapter 57

“Alex!”

Nana Mama screamed so loud I heard her in my basement office. I had been unable to get hold of Mahoney, so I decided not to cancel my office hours.

“Alex, come up here now!”

I was between patients and heard the horror in her voice. I bolted up the stairs into the kitchen.

My grandmother was standing by the kitchen table, her mouth open, tears streaming down her cheeks. “They just interrupted my Rachael Ray, ” she said. “They think the president’s been shot.”

“What?” I said, my stomach plunging as I moved around to see the television. “Where? When?”

“The DC arena,” she said. “Some youth congress. Maybe ten minutes ago.”

Nana had the screen tuned to CNN, which was in full alert mode. Wolf Blitzer was talking nonstop over looping video that showed President Hobbs entering the arena and working the rope line, upright and smiling, before the camera went dark.

“Every network feed was hacked and cut just a few moments before the president collapsed,” Blitzer said. “Witnesses said Hobbs appeared to jerk as if shot before falling back against his Secret Service agents. There have been no reports of guns seen or fired inside the arena, which has lost power and is under lockdown.

“We have confirmed reports that President Hobbs is being rushed to Walter Reed. We also have confirmed that Secretary of Defense Harold Murphy, widely considered the top candidate to be named Hobbs’s vice president, was also wounded and en route to... hold on.”

The feed cut to Blitzer, who was listening to his earbud, his expression turning graver and graver before he looked up into the camera and said, “We have just confirmed that U.S. treasury secretary Abigail Bowman has been shot and killed near the New York Stock Exchange along with two of her bodyguards.”

“Jesus,” I said, shocked, even though I’d suspected something terrible was in the works. “The president? Treasury? Defense?”

“It’s a plot, a conspiracy!” Nana Mama said. “Just like JFK! Someone’s trying to overthrow the government!”

Before I could agree, Blitzer announced that trading at all U.S. financial markets had been suspended, and the U.S. Capitol Building, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and all federal buildings in the District of Columbia were being locked down.

My cell phone rang. Bree.

“Are you seeing this?” she said, sounding unnerved.

“I’m watching with Nana,” I said.

“I should have listened to you.”

“Doesn’t matter, and I’m not happy about being right. What’s going on there?”

“It’s chaos. We’re deploying around the DC arena. I’m heading there now.”

“Keep me posted. I’ll try Ned again.”

I hung up and hit Mahoney’s number on speed dial even as I watched the feed jump to Walter Reed and footage of an ambulance racing through the gates.

Blitzer said, “That was the scene two minutes ago as the president’s medical team tried to keep him alive and get him to an operating room. We’re awaiting a statement on President Hobbs’s condition, but early reports indicate he was badly wounded.”

The screen jumped to the scene outside the DC arena, where FBI SWAT officers were piling out of vans armed with automatic weapons.

Blitzer said, “No one is being allowed in or out of what has become without a doubt the biggest crime scene in the world. CNN will be focused exclusively on this fast-breaking story and—”

Mahoney’s work cell rang and didn’t go to that robotic voice. I went into the other room, listening to the ringing. He never answered. I left a message, went back to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

Nana Mama said, “Capitol Hill Police are ordering congressmen and senators to stay in their offices while dogs are searching all federal buildings.”

On the screen, Blitzer sent coverage live to the White House, where the press corps was in pandemonium, shouting questions at Dolores St. Mary, President Hobbs’s shocked and rattled press secretary.

“What’s the president’s condition?” one yelled.

“Who’s in charge, Dolores?” shouted another.

“Who’s running the country?” a third demanded.

Chapter 58

The press secretary held up her hands, said, “Please, we are going to handle your questions as best we can, but today’s events are unprecedented and evolving at a rapid pace. We don’t yet know the president’s condition other than he is alive, as is the secretary of defense. We’re waiting and praying for them just like everyone else.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to introduce U.S. attorney general Samuel Larkin, FBI director Derek Sanford, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Alan Hayes.”

The three men looked like they’d been through a firefight when they climbed onto the dais. Attorney General Larkin went to the lectern.

Larkin, a powerfully built man in his fifties, was no stranger to controversy or conflict. He’d had a reputation as a crusader and social climber when he was U.S. attorney for Lower Manhattan, and he often was accused of grandstanding in events. The late president, Catherine Grant, had named him to the post, and he’d had to survive a difficult nomination and confirmation process.

Since then he’d been an attorney general with remarkably good approval ratings, so good that James Hobbs had kept him on after taking the oath of office.

But that day Larkin was profoundly somber as he put on reading glasses and glanced at a prepared statement before looking straight at the cameras.

“President James B. Hobbs was shot by an unknown assailant this morning. Seconds before that attack, treasury secretary Abigail Bowman was shot and killed in cold blood in New York. Seconds after the president was shot, Secretary of Defense Harold Murphy was also severely wounded.”

He paused, looked down as if he could not believe what he was about to say, and then raised his head up and went on in a commanding voice. “Under the Twentieth and Twenty-Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and by the Succession Act of 1947, with the president incapacitated and the office of vice president vacant, power passes to the Speaker of the House, and if that office is vacant, to the Senate president pro tempore, and if that office is vacant, to the secretary of state. If that office is vacant, the secretary of the treasury assumes power. If that office is vacant, the secretary of defense is president.”

Larkin swallowed hard then firmed the set of his jaw. “It is my miserable task to inform the nation that West Virginia senator Arthur Jones, the Senate president pro tempore, died of a heart attack at GW Medical Center earlier this morning.”

He held up his hands, shouted, “Let me speak!”

The rabble quieted.

Larkin said, “I must also inform the nation that about an hour ago, at a quail-hunting ranch in West Texas, Speaker of the House Matthew Guilford and Secretary of State Aaron Deeds were assassinated by long-range snipers. We’ve only just gotten word.”

Gasps went up from a shocked press corps.

“It’s a coup,” I said in shock and awe. “A coup attempt in the United...”

“What does this mean?” a reporter shouted. “So who takes office?”

The attorney general said, “Under the order of succession, with the secretary of defense incapacitated, I do.”

More shouting. “You’re assuming the office of presidency?”

“I am,” Larkin said. “I did not seek this role, but our nation is under attack. Make no mistake, our country, our Constitution, our way of life, it’s all under attack, and because of that I will take the oath of office as acting president, working closely with General Hayes and FBI director Sanford in defense of our country.”

Before the reporters could yell anything, Larkin said, “To that end, after my swearing-in, I will sign executive orders giving full authority to Mr. Sanford and the FBI to implement the U.S. Justice Department’s assassination-contingency plans and to lead the investigation to uncover who was behind this coordinated attack on our democracy. I will also sign orders instituting a state of martial law in the United States of America for the next one hundred hours.”

“What?” I said. “Holy... has that ever happened?”

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” Nana said.

Larkin ignored the reporters freaking out in the White House press room and left.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hayes went to the microphone.

“All travel in U.S. airspace is suspended for the duration of martial law. All planes currently in the air out of New York, Washington, and Texas are being ordered to the ground and impounded. All other flights in the air will proceed to their destinations.

“All public-transit systems will halt. Drive if you have to, but know that your vehicle, especially in and around the District of Columbia, is subject to search. We will find whoever is behind these assassinations, and we will find them—”

I heard the doorbell before the front door opened and I went to the hall to see Mahoney rushing toward me. “Let’s go, Alex,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

Chapter 59

Sitting in the Suburban in the driving rain, snarled in traffic trying to get on the Brooklyn Bridge leaving Manhattan, Martin Franks was listening to 1010 WINS all-news radio about the attacks.

Franks swallowed hard against the searing pain in his upper right arm. Waiting for the narcotics to kick in, he checked the belt he’d placed as a tourniquet just below his shoulder and just above the gaping wound.

The treasury secretary’s bodyguard’s second shot had blown through Franks’s upper right shoulder, shattering the humerus bone and destroying nerves. Years of training was the only thing that kept Franks from blacking out in agony.

At the first stoplight south of the church, the assassin had looked in the rearview, saw no flashing lights, and dug with his left hand in his pockets for the two things he always carried into battle: commercially made foil packages that contained bandages treated with clotting agents and antibiotics and a small envelope containing forty OxyContin pills.

Franks shook six pills into his mouth and chewed them as he tore open his shirt. Swallowing the pills, he used his teeth to rip one clotting bandage free of the foil.

He slid it in under his shirt. When he stuffed the bandage in the entry wound, he almost fainted. When he got a second bandage and used it to stuff the exit wound, he’d dry-heaved and moaned.

The light turned green. Shaken, woozy, not thinking straight, Franks drove on rather than trying to take a left onto John Street.

His original escape plan called for him to abandon the Suburban as soon as possible, then get off the streets and use the subway to get uptown to Penn Station, where he’d catch an Amtrak to Albany and points north.

But being wounded like this changed everything.

Franks had to use the car to take him someplace far away where he could call for a specialist to help. The specialist would cost Franks hundreds of thousands of dollars, no doubt, but he’d live. He’d live and he’d...

In his daze and looking through the slapping windshield wipers and the driving rain, Franks tried to stay in his lane and focus on his options. He could get to the Carey Tunnel from here. But there was a toll, wasn’t there? Brooklyn Bridge, then.

He moaned when he realized he’d just missed another chance to go east. The intensity of the rain made traffic crawl as he drove farther south toward Battery Park and finally got on Water Street, where he turned and headed north.

When traffic came to a stop, Franks checked the wound again. The bleeding was slowing, and he didn’t feel like his lung had been damaged. The drugs kicked in like a warm fountain, going up his spine and into his head. He swooned.

A car honked. Franks came around, feeling better, sweeter. Traffic rolled forward half a block and stalled again. Then, on the radio, he heard the attorney general, now acting president, Larkin describe the scope of the conspiracy.

Five of them, Franks thought in awe. Coordinated attacks on the top five. Who does that?

Traffic started to move before he could consider his own involvement. He was a traitor, wasn’t he?

“Yes, that’s what I am,” he said, and he laughed bitterly and ate two more painkillers. “Just like dear old dad.”

Two minutes later, he heard Larkin institute martial law. The drugs became a wave, then, that washed over the assassin, and he barely kept the SUV in the lane.

The rain came in sheets. The windshield wipers swept wildly back and forth. He tried to use that visualization method that had served him so well in Afghanistan, tried to see what he was about to do, and he asked the universe to signal him if he was in danger.

Franks felt hypnotized and numb when he finally took a left on Beekman Street and crawled toward the right turn on Park Row and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Traffic slowed to a halt again.

On the radio, some army general was ordering people to get off the streets.

Where do they expect people to go? Franks thought, and he laughed at the absurdity of it.

Looking ahead through the rain and the wipers, he saw cruisers with lights flashing at the bridge entrance. He thought he saw dark figures walking between the cars, coming at him. And then he didn’t need a sign from above. He was positive that the police, five of them, guns drawn, were knocking on car windows and speaking to drivers and passengers alike.

Franks started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son” and then pushed the button that popped the rear hatch. He yanked the car into park left-handed and grabbed his pistol. He forced himself over the front seat and then over the backseat, then rolled out into the pelting rain.

A young woman was driving the Land Rover behind him. She was peering at Franks through the windshield. He ignored her and took two steps, figuring out the route he would take, when the woman started honking her horn.

Franks considered shooting her but instead lowered his head to the rain and hurried diagonally away from the police across Park Row. He made the sidewalk by City Hall Park, and kept moving away from the bridge. The woman kept honking her horn.

He never looked back and thought he’d make the corner onto Vesey Street.

Twelve steps from being out of sight, he heard a woman shout, “Stop where you are. Show me your hands!”

For some reason, Franks thought of the logger, then he stuffed the barrel of his gun under his right armpit, lifted the Treasury agent badge up with his left hand, and turned to find a young female uniformed cop about thirty feet away.

She was shakily aiming her service pistol at him, and he could see doubt and fear all about her.

“Federal agent!” Franks cried, showing her the badge and ID. “Don’t shoot!”

“Down on the ground!” she shouted.

“You’re making a mistake, rookie,” he warned her as he started to lower himself down. “I was chasing the killer. He’s getting—”

A squall of rain hit them. He dropped to his knees, went for the gun, snagged it expertly, and whipped it out, intending to shoot the young cop.

She shot first and hit Franks square in the chest. He staggered back in disbelief but still tried to aim at her. She shot him twice more.

He fell on his back, dying.

Franks’s last vision was of the cop standing over him, aiming at him.

“No rookie mistake, man,” she said, her voice taunting and quivering both. “No rookie mistake at all.”

Chapter 60

Roughly two hours after President Hobbs was shot, Mahoney and I lifted off the roof of FBI headquarters in a helicopter bound for Joint Base Andrews, which used to be known as Andrews Air Force Base.

Looking down on the nation’s capital, I saw tanks flanking the bridges and armed soldiers amassing on every corner. There were cops and FBI agents searching every vehicle trying to leave Washington. In all my years in DC, I had never seen this level of military presence, not even after 9/11.

The media was painting the mood of the country as bordering on panic. There were reports of runs on grocery stores and on guns and ammunition. People were frightened and desperate to know what was happening.

“We’ll catch him,” Mahoney said, breaking into my thoughts. “With or without professional footage of the actual shooting.”

“Krazy Kat said he thought he could do something,” I said.

Ned cringed. “Did we have to bring him in?”

“Rawlins is the best there is,” I said. “I figure he’s our only chance of getting a look at the killer anytime soon.”

Mahoney grunted and looked at his phone screen. We flew within sight of my home, and I looked toward it, wondering when I’d return. For a moment, I shut my eyes and prayed it would happen sooner rather than later.

We landed on a helipad at Andrews, not far from Marine One, the president’s helicopter. Air Force One was there, but it looked different to me. There were three other planes just like it, all unmarked, all Boeing E-4s, sitting on the tarmac along with ten fighter jets and half a dozen private jets.

Armed airmen inspected our FBI identifications. Everywhere we looked, we saw battle-ready soldiers and airmen.

For the first time, it felt to me like we really could be a nation at war.

My generation of Americans had never experienced political assassination. And nothing of this magnitude had ever happened in U.S. history.

That shook me. It really did. I understood why people might feel on the verge of panic. No one knew who or what was behind the attacks or what might be coming next. That dread and uncertainty were enough to push people right to the edge psychologically, and I expected to hear about looting and civil unrest before too long.

A soldier led us into an open hangar, and we entered a space big enough to hold a C-130 cargo jet or two. As we crossed the hangar floor, I looked down at my casual clothes and felt underdressed to meet the president, even given the circumstances. Nana Mama would have been appalled.

The soldier stopped and stood aside, and I followed Mahoney into a large room with six long rectangular tables.

Around the tables sat perhaps twenty people, several of whom I knew at a glance. Samuel Larkin, the acting president, was huddled at the far end of one table with FBI director Sanford, General Hayes, and Homeland Security director Elaine Monroe as well as CIA director Felix White.

I recognized the upset faces of enough other people at the table to realize they were the surviving members of the cabinet. John Watts, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was there as well. So were the leaders of both parties in both houses of Congress.

“What in God’s name am I doing in this room?” I whispered to Mahoney.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Mahoney said.

“Mahoney, Cross,” FBI director Sanford said, waving us toward the president.

We shook hands with Larkin.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Dr. Cross,” he said in a grave voice. “Director Sanford said you and Special Agent Mahoney were the people he wanted involved in the investigation immediately.”

“Well,” I said, taken aback. “I’m honored to be here to help in any way I can, and please excuse the clothes.”

Larkin put his hand on my shoulder and gazed at me evenly. “We’ve got more dire things to deal with.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

He held my gaze a moment and then nodded and said softly, “Good. Take a seat, Dr. Cross. And keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”

Chapter 61

As Mahoney and I took seats, we saw members of the cabinet, one of the congressional leaders, and several others I did not recognize sizing us up. My first inclination was to ignore them, but then I realized that all of the people in the room feared for their lives but were also probably jockeying for position in the power vacuum created by the assassinations.

The killings were an act of war or a coup, something huge and sinister — I was in such a deep state of shock that for the moment I couldn’t do anything but heed Larkin’s advice to sit down, listen, and watch.

The acting president said, “The purpose of this meeting is twofold. All members of the current cabinet are to serve through the period of martial law at least. You will be separated, however, and flown with your families aboard one of the E-fours, the advanced airborne command posts, to secure locations.”

Several of them started to protest. Larkin held up his hand and said, “There is no discussion. This is being done for your own safety and for the good of the country. I will be doing the same thing in the near future.

“In any case, we will stay in close contact via secure satellite transmission. You will be involved in all major policy debates and made aware of decisions in real time.

“Chief Justice Watts and leaders of the majority and minority parties, I ask that you remain readily available in the coming days. In an emergency like this, I will need clear legal guidance on what I can and cannot do to try to defend the nation.”

The chief justice hesitated but then said, “It’s highly unorthodox, but I think in this time of crisis, it’s a smart idea, Mr. President.”

Larkin nodded, leaned forward, and looked around the table.

“Let me be clear about something,” he said. “In this case, no one is above the law or outside our jurisdiction. I am instructing Director Sanford and all intelligence agency leaders to follow the investigation wherever it leads.

“If this is the work of a hostile nation, we will declare war. If this is the work of any ideological group, domestic or foreign, we will root them out and bring them to justice. I will not have these heinous acts wreck the country, not on my watch.”

Many at the table nodded and voiced their approval.

Larkin started signing executive orders that put the Justice Department’s assassination-contingency plan into effect. In line with that plan, he sought and received approval from the congressional leaders and from the chief justice to temporarily amend the rules of Congress to limit members’ access to classified information as the investigation rolled forward.

The plan also called for a rapidly deployed investigative group answering to the FBI director, the AG, the president, and those gathered in the room. Larkin asked the majority leaders of both houses to form select committees on the assassinations that would provide independent oversight and reports.

“I will not allow this to be like the JFK investigation,” Larkin said. “I will not have some future panel judge us deficient in our investigation. This is no lone gunman. These coordinated assassinations are clearly the result of a massive conspiracy, the most outrageous attack on our democracy since Pearl Harbor, and I plan to tell the nation just that when I address them later in the day.”

For a moment Larkin seemed excited by that prospect, the idea of speaking to the nation in a time of great crisis, and I wondered whether he’d ever imagined himself president of the United States. He certainly had been a brilliant careerist.

I knew his résumé; he’d been a decorated army captain before going to Yale Law School and then joining the Justice Department. It was almost as if he’d planned his rise. And now here it was, his moment, probably a lot sooner than he’d expected.

The acting president looked down the table at me and Mahoney. “Dr. Cross, SAC Mahoney, for the next one hundred hours I am allocating unlimited resources to bring to bear on these crimes. Advise us on how best to proceed.”

Chapter 62

Metro police chief of detectives Bree Stone and Metro detective John Sampson walked the perimeter of the DC arena as a mix of FBI, Secret Service, and Metro investigators manned a system to get the children out of the venue while interviewing anyone with any information, anything at all.

The main security checkpoint was clogged with kids and their parents and chaperones trying to get out of the arena. Bree spotted Secret Service Agent Lance Reamer, who looked beyond agitated.

“Anything?” she asked.

He shook his head. “They cut the—”

“Please, coming through!” a woman called out.

Bree looked up to see two paramedics flanking a man on a rolling gurney who had bloody bandages all over his head and face. A DC SWAT officer trailed them.

Several of the children got upset at the sight of the wounded man.

The paramedics pushed the gurney through. Bree walked with them toward a waiting ambulance. “What happened?”

The SWAT officer said, “We found him in the basement in a pool of blood from four different head wounds. Name’s Kent Leonard. Works here. Lost some teeth, probably some broken bones in his face. Looks like he was hit with a piece of iron. They destroyed his hearing aids too. Guy’s stone-deaf without them.”

“Hearing aids?” said a Secret Service agent coming their way.

Another agent came over too. “We know this guy.”

They introduced themselves as Agents Crane and Lewis, then Agent Crane went to the wounded man’s side, made eye contact, and nodded.

Leonard looked at him fuzzily, then reached his hand up to the side of his head and said in a duck-like voice. “Where are my hearing aids?”

Bree tugged out a notebook, scribbled: They’re broken. Do you sign?

He shook his head no.

“Can we do this later?” the EMT said. “He could have a skull fracture.”

“And the president’s been shot,” Bree said to him, scribbling again. “I just want him to answer one question.”

She flipped the pad around. What happened?

He gazed at the question a moment before coughing and saying in that nasal quacking voice, “I was down getting paper towels from storage when the lights went out. I used the light on my watch to go to the room with the big electrical panels. I got there and started to open the door. Someone hit me from behind. I bounced off the door, and then fell to the ground, and he just kept hitting me until I blacked out.”

He? Bree wrote. You saw him?

He nodded. “In the watch light. Blond guy. Weird blue eyes. I...” His eyes fluttered, and he moaned. “My head hurts.”

The EMT said, “I need to get him to a level-one trauma center.”

Bree wanted to ask him more questions, but Reamer said, “Go ahead.”

She looked at the man’s face, which was swollen and an angry purplish color.

“Load him,” she said. “But I want someone with him in case he remembers anything else. He’s the only one who’s come in direct contact with one of the assassins.”

“You think there were two?” Sampson said.

“Someone shot the president upstairs in the arena. A blond man with weird blue eyes cut the lights. Mr. Leonard surprised that person and got beaten.”

“I’ll go with him,” Agent Crane said.

“No,” Reamer said. “I need you here. The Secret Service may not be in charge, but we are involved.”

“I’ll go,” Sampson said.

“I need you here,” Bree said. “I’ll get a uniform to go with him.”

“I’m off,” Reamer said as he turned away. “I’m still looking for an eyewitness to the shooting.”

Chapter 63

In the conference room off the hangar at Joint Base Andrews, I looked at the president and the country’s leaders and saw them all studying me.

I said, “If I had unlimited resources, I’d bring in the best investigative coordinator the FBI has to oversee four distinct teams. One team should focus on forensics and generating swift, accurate test results. The second team should be composed of the Bureau’s best investigators dispatched into the field, starting at the three assassination sites. Intelligence analysts from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Homeland Security should staff the third team and should have an eye on every piece of evidence that comes in.”

President Larkin nodded. “And the fourth?”

I said the last team should be composed of a smaller group of elite investigators, analysts, and forensics specialists assigned to look at the crimes from a loftier perspective. What was the purpose of the assassinations? Why did they have to happen? Whom and what did they benefit? Whom and what did they destroy?

Mahoney agreed with my rough design but added, “That fourth team should also be charged with identifying and arresting the person or persons in government who helped coordinate the attacks.”

There was dead silence in the room.

Finally, Director Sanford said, “You believe there’s a traitor, Agent Mahoney?”

“Without question, sir,” Ned said. “Probably several.”

An older man with a professor’s manner whom I later learned was NSA director John Parkes leaned forward and said, “Or whoever is behind this has completely compromised our cybersecurity system. You’ll want to consider this as well.”

Parkes typed on a laptop. A screen on the wall flashed, then showed a map of the world with continents and countries connected by strands, streams, and rivers of tiny shimmering lights.

Parkes said, “You’re looking at the data flow on the dark web forty-eight hours ago, then twenty-four hours ago, and now.”

The lines of sparkling light ebbed and flowed. Roughly thirty-six hours ago, a big dense river of data connecting the United States, Russia, North Korea, and China had appeared, then widened and deepened, building toward a flood.

Linda Johnson, the Senate minority leader, said, “Are we looking at the start of World War Three?”

Before anyone could reply, Director Sanford looked at his phone, said, “Abbie Bowman’s assassin was killed ten minutes ago. New York rookie cop shot him. He was carrying perfect forgeries of Treasury Department IDs. They’re fingerprinting him and checking dental records as we speak.”

Mahoney said, “That’s a big break.”

“Here’s another,” Felix White, the CIA director, said, gesturing at his laptop. “We’ve picked up satellite chatter, Russian satellite chatter. Three-quarters of the Kremlin think the motherland is behind the assassinations.”

“Maybe it is,” I said. “Maybe through Viktor Kasimov.”

“Son of a bitch,” White said, and he threw a pencil on the table. “We keep an eye on Kasimov when he’s not here assaulting women. We were alerted this morning that his pilot filed flight plans to London. Kasimov and his crew took off around nine.”

“Right before the shooting started,” General Hayes said.

President Larkin said, “Have our agents waiting for Mr. Kasimov at Heathrow. I don’t give a damn about his diplomatic status. The second he touches down, grab him and put him on a return flight in handcuffs and ankle irons.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the CIA director said. “With great pleasure, Mr. President.”

There was a soft knock at the door. It opened, and a flustered air force captain said, “Excuse me. There’s a Keith Karl Rawlins, an FBI contractor, who just landed from Quantico. He says he might have figured out who shot the president.”

Chapter 64

Keith Karl Rawlins, Aka Krazy Kat, entered the room a few moments later. Rawlins usually worked in a subbasement at Quantico; he was a very highly paid contractor who offered his unique expertise exclusively to the FBI.

Rawlins had dual PhDs from Stanford, one in physics and a second in electrical engineering. In his spare time, he was working on a third doctorate from MIT in computer science.

The last time I’d seen him, he’d cut his hair in a Mohawk and dyed it flaming red. That was all gone now. He’d shaved his head, grown a beard and braided it, and he wore camo fatigues, sandals, and two new nose rings.

You could tell from the expressions on the faces of the people in the room that they didn’t know what to make of Rawlins, even if Director Sanford had described him before he came in as “possibly the smartest person on earth when it comes to harnessing data.”

Rawlins nodded to me, said, “Good idea, Dr. Cross.”

“It worked?”

“Well enough,” Rawlins said as he got out a laptop and started typing.

“What are you talking about?” President Larkin demanded.

“Dr. Cross asked if I could harvest pictures and videos from cell phones in the DC arena being posted on social media. The challenge was putting it all together in a meaningful way. But even that wasn’t like learning to speak Cantonese in ten days.”

Rawlins hit a button and looked up at the screen on the wall. The NSA director’s map showing the ballooning dark-web activity among the U.S., Russia, North Korea, and China vanished.

In its place we saw a digital, somewhat disjointed, almost 3-D rendition of the inside of the DC arena and the crowd of excited youngsters as President Hobbs came down the rope line surrounded by Secret Service agents.

Rawlins slowed it after Hobbs took a selfie with a young boy, then spun the view around so we were looking over shoulders and around heads at the president, who shook hands and talked with three tween girls.

A grinning blond man, camera left, reached over the girls to shake President Hobbs’s hand. Hobbs smiled at the man, who wore a cleric’s collar and tinted glasses.

President Hobbs released the blond man’s hand, moved toward the next person, and then suddenly fell backward into his bodyguard. The blond man’s smile turned puzzled and then alarmed before the screen froze.

“I didn’t see a gun,” Chief Justice Watts said.

“Swing us around,” I said. “Let’s see him from the front.” Rawlins gave his computer an order. The media swept back in time and went around again before zooming in on the blond man reaching for the president’s hand. We watched the same events unfold: the handshake, the release, President Hobbs stumbling.

“I still don’t see it,” the chief justice said.

“I think I did,” I said. “Take us in super-slo-mo. Watch his right hand, his loose shirt cuff, and the belly of his coat sleeve right after the president ends the handshake.”

They all leaned forward as Rawlins rewound the footage and stayed on President Hobbs, still smiling as he released the blond man’s hand. When their fingers had drifted ten, maybe twelve inches apart, the minister arched his hand backward as if to wave. The belly of his sleeve billowed. The cuff distorted.

A split second later, President Hobbs staggered back into his Secret Service agents. Rawlins froze the image.

“No one heard a gunshot,” Director Sanford said.

“Because there was no gun,” I said. “No conventional one, at least. Can we see him shoot the secretary of defense?”

Rawlins said, “I didn’t look.”

He stayed with the suspect as he moved with the crowd past the fallen president. Then the shooter shifted his hips toward the stage and raised his left hand toward Harold Murphy.

The footage got a little jerky, but you saw the blond man’s hand arching again, and the secretary of defense going down.

“What’s he doing with his hand?” President Larkin said.

“I think he’s triggering an air gun of some sort,” I said.

Sanford looked up from his phone. “Which explains the pieces of bullet they took out of President Hobbs twenty minutes ago.”

The FBI director forwarded an image to Rawlins, who put it on the screen: a photograph of dark gray pieces lying in a steel pan.

“It will have to be analyzed, but I’ll bet that’s graphite or carbon,” I said. “His weapons were probably made out of polymers that are undetectable by current methods.”

Rawlins typed again. The screen filled with a clear shot of the blond man in the tinted glasses.

He said, “I’d get this picture in the hands of all law enforcement at that arena and everywhere else in the country.”

“Wait,” I said, studying the picture. “He’s posing as a cleric, presumably. Who says he really has blond hair and wears glasses?”

Rawlins smiled. “I’m barely a half a step ahead of you, Dr. Cross.”

Chapter 65

Bree and Sampson were still working outside the main entrance to the DC arena, interviewing kids, parents, and guardians, when Bree’s phone buzzed.

After she had finished talking to a young girl from the Philippines, she got out her phone and found a text from Alex. He’d sent a link labeled Hobbs’s shooter.

She clicked on it, saw the blond minister, and remembered Leonard, the guy found beaten in the basement. He’d said he was hit by a blond man.

But how did that work? Did the blond have time to shoot Hobbs and the secretary of defense and then go down to club the maintenance man?

Or were there two assassins, both dressed similarly? One in the basement cutting the lights, one upstairs trying to kill a president?

Her phone buzzed; another link from Alex: Shooter in left profile.

She clicked it, saw the same blond minister reaching out his right hand toward President Hobbs. The next link showed his right profile, but it was blurry. Bree tried to blow it up, but the resolution got too grainy.

The fourth link showed him from behind, arm stretched out toward Hobbs.

The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth images came in with a note that read

She thumbed the first new image. The blond hair and glasses were gone, leaving the man bald and blurry about the eyes. The two profile pictures were of interest, but it wasn’t until she opened the eighth link that she really paused.

With the blond hair gone, as she looked at the shooter from behind, she could see something odd about his right ear. She zoomed in on it and felt her stomach drop.

It was a hearing aid. No doubt.

Feeling confused, then certain, and then panicked, Bree yelled at Sampson, “We’re leaving, John!”

Sampson apologized to the woman he was interviewing and ran after Bree as she barked into her radio. “This is Stone! An ambulance left the arena forty minutes ago. Where’d it go?”

“GW,” the dispatcher said. “EMTs handed him off twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Who’s the officer with him?”

“Pettit. You want me to raise him?”

Bree stopped at the car and tossed the keys to Sampson, weighing the pros and cons of alerting a young patrol officer that he might be sitting on a would-be presidential assassin. And what if the shooter was with Pettit and heard her warning?

“Chief?” the dispatcher said.

“No,” Bree said, climbing into the front seat. “Get me Pettit’s cell phone number.”

Sampson threw a bubble on the roof and hit the siren. They roared off across town, running red lights in virtually zero traffic as they closed in on George Washington University Hospital in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of the District.

“What’d he do?” Sampson said. “Beat the snot out of himself? Knock out his own teeth?”

“It worked,” she said, furious. “His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.”

“And being deaf?”

“No idea.”

The dispatcher came back with Officer Pettit’s cell phone number.

“Good,” Bree said. “How many patrol cars available to respond?”

“Four. FBI’s using the rest to keep the city tied down.”

Bree gave orders to move the four cruisers to the roads that formed the perimeter of the medical center, and then she called Pettit.

It went immediately to voice mail. She tried again. Same thing.

Bree still didn’t want to call the officer on the radio for fear he’d be in range of Leonard, or whoever the shooter really was. After trying a third time, she called Alex.

“Hi,” he said, sounding out of breath. “Where are you?”

“About to get on a military jet at Andrews.”

“Going where?”

“West Texas.”

“Why? The president was shot here.”

“We want to see every crime scene.”

She heard the heavy whine of a jet engine on his end.

“When are you coming back?”

His voice was almost drowned by the noise. “I don’t know.”

“I think we’ve got Hobbs’s shooter,” she said. “He’s at GW.”

“What’s that? I can’t hear you.”

The engine roar got worse and the connection died just as Sampson pulled over at the entrance to the GW emergency room. It had started to rain again.

“Chief,” Sampson said. “You need to tell the FBI he’s here.”

Bree had intentionally delayed, but now she nodded and told dispatch to notify FBI command that she and Sampson were investigating a possible suspect at the hospital. She didn’t give any more than she had to, figuring if she and Sampson made the collar on Hobbs’s shooter, she’d never hear another discouraging word from Chief Michaels — or anyone else, for that matter.

Inside, they showed their badges and IDs to the charge nurse and asked where Leonard was being treated. The nurse looked it up, said, “Multiple facial cuts and fractures. He was stitched, bandaged, and moved to radiology. He’s getting a CT.”

She gave them directions to the CT scanner, which had been temporarily moved to a lower level in an older part of the complex while new facilities were being built.

Bree and Sampson followed her directions, getting off an elevator just as a male doctor in scrubs, Crocs, a surgical cap, and a hooded rain jacket entered the elevator next to theirs. Bree caught a glimpse of an older man with gray, loose skin, wavy dark gray hair, and glasses.

He wore headphones but was also talking on his cell phone. Bree heard him complaining about the number of autopsies he had to do before he could go home.

“They’re stacked like cordwood in there,” the pathologist said as the elevator doors shut.

Walking down a hallway with an industrial feel, Bree and Sampson passed pathology and the morgue. They pushed through double doors at the far end of the corridor and took a right into an empty passage with a small sign that read RADIOLOGY.

Bree got her badge out and loosened her service weapon in its holster.

Sampson opened the door.

“No!” Bree said, staring in disbelief at Metro PD Officer Walter Pettit who was lying on the floor with a neck that looked broken and his service revolver missing.

They tore out their pistols. In the room where the CT scanner was still running, they found two female techs in hospital scrubs sprawled on the floor, dead.

Bree called dispatch for backup from the FBI and all available law enforcement.

“Surround George Washington University Hospital,” she said. “The president’s shooter is in here somewhere.”

Chapter 66

Bree listened to the radio chatter as FBI and Metro Police descended on the medical center.

Sampson said, “They’re going to have to clear every room in this place and get all nonessential personnel out of here before they do it.”

“We can get that started down here,” Bree said.

She took a long look at Pettit before she followed Sampson, feeling her stomach churn at her role in the young officer’s death. There would be time for regret and guilt later, she told herself. Once the man who’d killed Pettit and shot the president was caught.

With pistols still drawn, they exited the radiology suite and retraced their steps. They went into the pathology department and found no one at the front desk.

They went around the desk and into a short hallway with autopsy rooms to either side. All were empty, and the stainless-steel equipment inside was spotless.

They reached the door at the end of the hall and found it locked with an electronic key-card slot.

“Probably goes to the morgue,” Sampson said.

That made sense to Bree, and she led them in the opposite direction, past the autopsy rooms and into a separate hallway with office doors on both sides. The first three were empty.

As they headed toward the fourth office, a woman in surgical scrubs crawled out of the door, bleeding from her ears and nose. Bree and Sampson ran to her and called for help from the ER.

A name tag identified the woman as CHRISTINE WILLIS, MD, DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY. She was rambling and in pain, but they figured out that while listening to music, she had been attacked by someone from behind and knocked out.

She said she came around and saw her attacker, who had bandages all over his face, leaving her office with her key card.

“He’s gotta be hiding in the morgue,” Sampson said. “Or was.”

Dr. Willis told them where to find another pass key in a drawer at the front desk. On her radio, Bree heard that nurses and a doctor were arriving from the ER.

Only then did she leave the pathologist and follow Sampson back to the morgue door. He slid the key card in the slot and heard it click.

He opened it slowly. The lights were off.

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

Bree saw nothing but rows of cold-storage lockers.

“Over there,” Sampson said.

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

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

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

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

Chapter 67

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 68

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

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

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

“Where’d he go?” I asked.

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

“No,” I said as we touched down.

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”

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

“Dr. Cross?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Take us through it,” Mahoney said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t know that,” the tech said.

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

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

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

Chapter 69

Pritchard had us climb into his truck. A black Malinois shepherd paced behind a screen in the back of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seek!” Pritchard said again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why’s that?” I asked.

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

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

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

“Got your radio, Devin?”

The deputy nodded.

“Call me.”

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

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

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

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

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

Mahoney said, “You know this country?”

The Ranger nodded. “Lot of it.”

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

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

“Northeast? Northwest?”

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

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

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

“We’ll fly,” Mahoney said.

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

“No tire tracks,” Ned said.

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

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

Chapter 70

Darkness had fallen when Mahoney and I touched down at Andrews. With the tailwind, we’d made even better time on the return flight.

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

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

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

“That Hobbs died?”

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

That struck me as gruesome. “For real?”

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

“Ned does too,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s Larkin going to say tonight?”

“We don’t know.”

An agent rushed up. “Sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but we’ve got a positive ID on the treasury secretary’s killer.”

Ten minutes later, on all four screens, a photograph went up of a burly man with a shock of unruly dark hair, a thick beard, and sunglasses. He was standing on a high point somewhere, rock and desert behind him. He wore faded military camouflage and a black-and-white-checked scarf around his neck. A black assault rifle hung from his chest harness, and he was smiling over ten dead bodies at his feet.

“Martin Franks,” Carstensen said through a microphone so everyone in the hangar could hear. “Former U.S. JSOC operator, former Marine MARSOC operator, honorably discharged under an odious plea agreement four years ago. His COs came to suspect Franks had psychopathic tendencies. He liked to kill.

“This picture shows the result of his unauthorized one-man foray into a suspected Taliban village. He claimed he was discovered and had to fight his way out. There was an investigation, but it was one live man versus ten dead, and it had happened at night. No one else in the village could say exactly what had happened. Or would. The JAGs cut a deal to let him walk out and save the country further embarrassment.”

The screen split, and a photo appeared showing an older man among saguaro cacti. He wore green work clothes and carried an AK-47.

“This is Morris ‘Moe’ Franks,” she went on. “Martin Franks’s father. Moe has been on and off our watch list for more than two decades. Lives off the grid in southwest Arizona. Been involved in various militia groups over the years and has published tracts espousing anti-globalist views and stating his belief that only an armed uprising will cure the country’s ills.”

“So Moe is alive?” an analyst asked.

“Far as we know,” Carstensen said. “I’ve dispatched a team to his compound. In the meantime, I want everything you can find about his son’s activities since his discharge. You have an open warrant to search. Dismissed.”

She turned to me and Mahoney. “Thoughts?”

“I think homing in on Franks and squeezing the old man are smart moves,” Mahoney said.

“I’m sensing a but coming,” she said, crossing her arms.

Ned said, “We just can’t lose track of the big picture in all this. The assassinations. The hacks. This all could be provocation to war.”

“I think President Larkin has that covered.”

I cleared my throat. “I think there’s also the possibility that this is not state-sanctioned, that we have a single, ruthless Machiavellian mind at work behind the scenes. In light of that, I keep asking myself, Who benefits here? ”

“And?” Carstensen said.

“There’s no way around it,” I said, lowering my voice. “Who benefits? Larkin. He most certainly benefits.”

Carstensen shook her head, incredulous, and laughed. “You think Sam Larkin orchestrated the assassination of all the people above him in the succession chain so he could take over the country?”

“I think we have a duty to investigate that possibility, don’t you?”

Chapter 71

President Larkin spoke to the nation from Air Force One at nine p.m. eastern time.

Mahoney and I watched it on the big screens in the hangar. In the immediate run-up to the speech, the media noted that in city after city across America and despite the imposition of martial law, tens of thousands of young people had shown up in public places carrying flags and waiting to watch Larkin on their mobile devices.

When Larkin came on, he was grave, not at all the crusader he’d once been.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “I come to you in a time of peril. We have been attacked in an effort to destabilize our great nation. The assassinations of our president, Speaker of the House, the secretaries of state and the treasury, and the assassination attempt on the secretary of defense are acts of war on America and its people, and those acts will not go unanswered.”

Larkin said this last with such deep intensity and resolve that I was having trouble seeing him as part of a great plot to take power. But he’d been such a brash and ambitious man when he was younger. Could leopards change their spots?

The acting president went on, outlining the steps being taken to identify the assassins and the people behind them. He asked for calm while the investigative team did its business.

“I know the idea of martial law in the United States is a frightening one,” Larkin said. “But I believe it is necessary if we are to get to the heart of the matter fast and understand the identity of our common enemy. Until then, we cannot respond. Until then, we are in pure defensive and investigative modes.

“I never sought this office. I believed I had reached the pinnacle of my career as your attorney general, and I was proud of my performance there. But now this responsibility has come to me, and I promise each and every one of you that I will try to make the best decisions for the survival of our great nation and our way of life.”

He paused to smile a bit and nod his head. “Now, I’m not saying I won’t make mistakes or act in ways that you disagree with. But if I make a mistake, I’ll take responsibility, and if I act in ways that you don’t agree with, I’d ask you to give me a little time. There’s a method to my madness.

“Good night, and God bless the United States of America.”

The screens went dark and then jumped to various anchors and commentators, who were quick to describe the nation as being “under siege” and “ramping up for combat.”

“What’d you think?” Mahoney asked.

“I thought it was a little odd that he said there was a method to his madness, but otherwise, it was calming. I felt like the guy was trying to do what he said he would.”

Ned glanced up at the screens, where pieces of Larkin’s short speech were being replayed. “I hope you’re right, Alex,” he said. “Because if you’re wrong, whatever trust people have left in Washington will evaporate, and God only knows what could happen after that. Riots. Chaos. Lawlessness.”

“Not if we catch who’s behind it all,” I said.

Chapter 72

Past midnight and beneath a chill, driving rain, a pile of leaves stirred in a gully in Rock Creek Park, below Twenty-Sixth Street. A hand emerged slowly and pushed the sopping dead leaves off the cowl of dead skin Pablo Cruz still wore.

The skin and the jacket had kept his upper body mostly dry, but when Cruz sat up, he was drenched from the waist down and using every breathing skill he knew to keep his core warm.

His feet were numb, and when he stood, his knees were stiff. The narcotics the doctors had given him were wearing off. His face ached. His broken teeth screamed.

An ordinary man might have succumbed to hypothermia by now. A weaker man might be focused on finding drugs to kill the pain.

But Cruz was neither ordinary nor weak. He’d long ago trained himself to be a superior man, one who could control his emotions, mind, and pain. Whatever it took to survive, he would do, and he would deal with the physical damage later.

The assassin peeled off the cowl of skin and buried it before he crawled out of the gully about three-quarters of the way up the slope above the creek bed. Blue lights flashed far to the northwest, down through the trees, down there on the parkway.

Forcing his mind to his contingency plans, Cruz figured he had only one chance of getting out of the nation’s capital alive. He’d heard all the sirens heading toward the hospital and seen the roadblocks at the bridges to Virginia from a distance.

Cruz expected that all major and minor roads leading out of the District were now closed. The Metro was down. He hadn’t heard a plane in the sky in hours. Few cars had passed, and even fewer helicopters were flying in the relentless rain.

He traversed north along the muddy slope, using the shadows thrown by streetlights and buildings up on Twenty-Sixth to make out downed logs and low-hanging tree branches. He reached the M Street bridge and crawled through the brush and up the side of the embankment by the abutment.

Above him on the bridge, he heard two distraught-sounding women hurrying toward Georgetown and talking about President Hobbs’s death. Cruz allowed himself a moment of congratulation, a mental pat on the back for a job not only complete but well executed. All in all.

He considered climbing the rest of the way up to the street and just crossing it with his head down to the rain, the way he imagined the women who’d just passed him had done. But instinct overruled the idea. He scrambled back down and beneath the bridge.

Cruz stopped there when he heard a mechanical noise in the distance. Tanks!

They were bringing in soldiers and tanks. Of course they were. Larkin had declared martial law, hadn’t he?

For a moment, the assassin felt unnerved. It was one thing to evade police and even federal agents, but an army?

It won’t be an army, he told himself. They’ll be brought in as a presence, a threat. There won’t be a soldier on every corner. Or will there?

Cruz shook off the questions. In dire situations such as this, he’d always found it better to stick to the plan and execute it rather than ponder it to death.

He kept on to the north of the bridge where Twenty-Sixth hit that dead end. When he climbed up to the edge of the park, he could see back to M Street, where one tank had blocked the entrance to the bridge. A second was continuing on toward Georgetown.

Cruz crept across the slope, peering up at the lights in the nearest apartment building, then focusing on two windows on the third floor on adjacent walls of a corner. When he got the angle right, and still watching those two windows, he slid down the hill and shuffled his feet through the leaves, wondering if the dry bag could have been found by a kid exploring in the park or by a nosy dog. Or maybe the rain had flushed the drain cover off and then out and...

His heel found the edge of the corrugated drainpipe, which was belching water. Cruz got around and below it, felt for the edge of the cover, and pried it off. The dry bag slid out and fell at his feet before he could reach inside. He knew smiling would be torture, but he grinned anyway.

Cruz did his best not to moan at the pain as he stooped to pick the dry bag up, thinking, Now? Now I’ve got a real chance.

Chapter 73

Cruz sidestepped slowly down the steep slope, the rubber bag held out in front of him to block the branches he couldn’t see in the darkness and rain. Several hundred yards to his north and down on the parkway, those blue lights were still flashing, and behind them he saw the bulk of yet another tank.

He stopped in a thicket above Rock Creek itself and opened the dry bag. He found the headlamp, but he did not use it. And he tossed the hammer and chisel before feeling around for and tugging out a Bare X-Mission dry suit made tough enough and warm enough for cave divers.

Black, and made of nylon ripstop, the suit could withstand extreme climates and still keep the wearer alive. He stripped out of his wet clothes, and, teeth chattering, he struggled into the suit, booties, and gloves.

From neck to toe, he almost immediately started to warm.

Only then did Cruz fish in the bag for the hood, a dive mask, and a smaller dry bag that contained a brick of cash in various currencies, several identifications, and a small book with critical phone and account numbers. He also got out a combat knife in a sheath on a nylon-webbed belt and a small Ruger pistol in a holster before finding the first-aid kit and the antibiotics and painkillers.

Cruz figured the massive dose of antibiotics the doctors at George Washington had administered were enough to hold him for a while, but ate four painkillers and then a fifth before strapping the Ruger and the knife to his waist.

He got his arms in the shoulder straps and hoisted the smaller bag onto his back. Carrying the hood and the dive mask, he eased in the shadows, going tree to tree, until...

The assassin stopped, catching movement no more than ninety yards away. Across the creek, up on the parkway, a soldier stepped beneath a street lamp, and then more soldiers. A squad of them were moving on patrol and slowly coming his way.

With a dog.

A black and tan German shepherd.

Even in the rain, Cruz knew, the dog would alert to his scent sooner rather than later. He yanked the hood down over his battered face, fought off the urge to curse at the agony that caused, and then tugged the dive mask on. He sat and then slid feetfirst down over mud and slick leaves, losing sight of the soldiers before plunging into the rushing muddy Rock Creek itself.

With the bag on his back causing drag, Cruz had difficulty keeping his feet out in front of him. He got sideways quickly, hit a submerged rock with his hip, and was swept over it.

Then his arm snagged on a branch, and he had to struggle against the current to get free; he turned around on his back, feet leading again. It was all he could do to keep his head above the water as he searched downstream for the shape of rocks and sharper obstructions.

He hit several, all unseen, but took the blows without a sound. The raging creek was doing its job, whisking him farther and farther from that patrol.

Ahead, however, up on the parkway to his right, Cruz soon saw flashing blue lights. Above them, on the M Street Bridge, soldiers were shining powerful spotlights down into the park.

Other flashlights appeared behind the cruisers on the parkway. Another patrol of multiple soldiers were headed north toward him, shining their beams down into the creek bed, crisscrossing like so many light sabers.

When the president’s assassin realized he could die in the next few moments, he turned reptilian, cold-blooded, as he took and released several deep, sharp breaths and then plunged his head back and under the raging water. Rather than fight the current, he relaxed, let the flood have its way with him, smashing him against a boulder and then flinging him into deeper water just as the flashlight beams cut across the surface of the creek eighteen inches above him. He was soon past the soldiers on the parkway, but he remembered the ones on the bridge and stayed submerged.

Forty seconds. Fifty seconds. Sixty.

His lungs were close to bursting, but he did not lift his head until those lights had passed over him, and he was looking up through the heavily silted water at the dark underside of the bridge. Cruz surfaced, took four deep breaths, and ducked back down beneath the water.

The creek was straighter there, and he went with the flow out from under the bridge and down a long dark stretch away from prying lights. Feeling the current slow as the creek widened and deepened, he surfaced and breathed deep again.

It was remarkable just how warm he was. The suit was lined with material that reflected and trapped his body heat. The water was probably forty-five degrees, judging from the way it felt on his chin and lower cheeks, but the rest of his body might as well have been in Florida.

Twenty minutes later, he floated beneath the off-ramps from K Street and the Whitehurst Freeway. Over the thrum of rain, Cruz could hear tanks clanking up on the overpasses, and he could smell their burning diesel.

The current slowed even more as he approached the Swedish embassy, which was up on the western bank of the creek and lit up like a fortress. He swam to the opposite side of the waterway and stayed tight to its east bank until he was well clear of the place.

Beneath the Virginia Avenue bridge, he stopped and crouched in the shallows.

The lights were on ahead of him at the Thompson Boat Center. He could see Humvees and soldiers in the parking lot and imagined that others would be guarding the docks on the Potomac side.

Cruz peered down the east bank of the creek and decided he’d hang tight to it, maybe even crawl up into the brush if it looked like a better—

“Hey, what?” a man’s drunken voice said from Cruz’s left, high up the bank below the bottom of the bridge. “Frick’s that, Mikey?”

“Huh?”

“Down there, bro!” he said, and a flashlight went on.

Before Cruz could move, the beam found him. He took two strides and dived toward midstream, hearing shouts behind him.

He swam deep, let the current take him for a count of twenty, then cut left, trying to make it back to the vegetation overhanging the eastern shore. He reached it, grabbed onto roots, and lifted his head for air.

The two drunken bums under the bridge were still yelling.

“Hey! Hey, soldier man! There’s a frickin’ frogman in the creek! Frickin’ frogman in the water, dude!”

Soldiers were running toward the creek, guns up, shining their lights. They were all to Cruz’s right, and looking back toward the bridge and the men shouting. He didn’t notice the two coming from the dock side of the boathouse until their lights had found him. The assassin wasn’t sixty yards from the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac when the soldiers started shouting at him to freeze and put his hands up.

Cruz dived again and swam deep and blindly downstream, wishing for a surge of storm water to speed him into the Potomac.

Even submerged like that, a good six feet under, he heard the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic-weapon fire and the shrill whine of the bullets cutting through the water all around him.