Target: Alex Cross

Chapter 74

A door banged open that Saturday morning.

I startled awake, dazed and unsure where I was, and Ali rushed to my bedside and broke down crying.

“Dad,” he blubbered. “We’re all gonna die!”

I sat up, bleary-eyed, still in my clothes, and remembered I’d gotten home past three a.m. and collapsed into bed beside Bree.

I looked over at my wife, who was just stirring, and then back at my son, who was weeping with a pitiful expression on his face.

“We’re all gonna die, Dad!”

“Stop. What are you talking about?” I said, fighting a yawn.

“It’s what they’re saying on the news,” he insisted. “Larkin, he did something against Russia, China, and, like, North Korea. They think it’s war and, like, going nuclear.”

“What?” Bree said, shooting up.

I was already out of bed. I snatched up Ali and carried him downstairs into the kitchen to find Nana Mama in her robe and Jannie in her University of Oregon sweats, both staring at the big screen in the outer room where some talking head was babbling about the entire world being on the verge of war.

My grandmother looked at me, grayer than pale, and said, “It’s like the Cuban missile crisis all over again, Alex.”

Bree hustled into the room. “Explain what happened.”

Jannie said, “Larkin attacked Moscow and Beijing.”

“No,” I said, horrified. “Missiles?”

“No,” Ali said. “Cyberattacks, Dad.”

Nana Mama said, “Larkin ordered CIA hackers to shut down electrical power for ten minutes in those cities and whatever the name of the capital of North Korea is.”

“Pyongyang,” Ali said.

“We can do that?” Bree asked. “Shut down all power?”

“We’ve already done it,” Jannie said.

Up on the screen, the feed cut to President Larkin aboard Air Force One.

He stared into the camera with deep resolve and said, “To authorities in Russia, China, and North Korea, my message is simple. If you continue to hack us, we will be forced to counterattack on a larger scale than what you’ve already seen. If you send missiles, we will respond with quick and devastating force. Your move.”

The screen went blank for a moment and then returned to a flustered morning-news anchor used to delivering fluff. She couldn’t speak at first, and then she broke down. “What’s the point? The nukes could be coming, and I’m sitting in Washington while the president’s off in a jet somewhere trying to start World War Three!”

“See!” Ali said, and he started crying again. “We have to get out of here, Dad!”

“We can’t,” I said. “They’ve still got the city cut off, trying to catch President Hobbs’s assassin.”

Jannie started to cry. “No, Dad, they think he’s already dead.”

“What?” Bree said, shaking her head in confusion.

We’d both been asleep less than five hours, and the world felt like it had changed completely in that time.

Nana Mama was watching the poor news anchor who was being led off camera; her co-anchor looked like he wanted to follow her. My grandmother muted the TV.

She said, “He was in Rock Creek in a wet suit. Some homeless guys living under the Virginia bridge spotted him trying to swim to the Potomac. Multiple soldiers guarding the Thompson Boat Center opened fire on him with machine guns. They feel sure he’s dead. They’re dredging the... there.”

She unmuted the TV. The feed had shifted to a camera on Virginia Avenue aimed at the Thompson Boat Center. Beyond it, police and Coast Guard boats were plying the Potomac, looking for a body.

“Who cares?” Ali said, and he hugged me fiercely. “The Russians are going to nuke us, aren’t they? Or the Chinese?”

Feeling how terrified he was, I kissed him and hugged him back. “No one wants a war like that. Not even our enemies.”

“Then why did the president shut their lights off?”

“Because they were attacking us in the wake of the assassinations. They were trying to see if we were weakened. President Larkin was showing them we aren’t.”

“I’m scared, Dad,” Ali said.

“We’re going to be okay. No one wants a war like that,” I repeated. “You just have to have faith in—”

“But when we can leave, can we?”

I turned to Bree. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Nana Mama and the kids to go see my dad in Florida until things settle down.”

“What?” Jannie said. “No, Dad. My spring season’s coming up.”

“How would we get there?” my grandmother asked. “No planes. No trains.”

“We’ll cross these bridges when we—”

My phone buzzed. Ned Mahoney.

“You rested?” he said.

“Barely. You see what’s going on?”

“Yes, which is why they want us back at Andrews ASAP.”

Chapter 75

The rain had stopped at last, temperatures were rising, and the clouds were breaking up when a Gulfstream jet landed at Joint Base Andrews at 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, February 6.

As the jet taxied toward me and the hangar, I kept looking over my shoulder, back inside, to see hundreds of people trying to do their jobs as best they could. But the strain and worry showed.

Ever since President Larkin’s act of brinkmanship, the media had been going crazy, declaring the country on the verge of all-out war with two superpowers and a rogue regime. Protests were breaking out. People were panicking, and there were reports of widespread food shortages, violence, and looting. We were hearing of clogged highways as people fled the country’s larger cities.

But the threat of the entire Eastern Seaboard being leveled as mushroom clouds rose above it was what hung over everyone at Andrews, including me.

All morning I had tried to stay focused on what I could do: review all the new evidence coming in and look for something that would help us get a break. But then up on the screens, there would be some update on the secretary of defense’s status or a piece on CNN about the proper use of gas masks, and I’d be thrown into a loop of what-if questions that destroyed my concentration.

I could see the same happening to many others working the investigation. On the whole, it felt like we were making little if any progress.

Despite hours of searching, dredging, and diving near the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac River, there’d been no sign of the guy in the dry suit that the Virginia National Guardsmen had shot at in the early-morning hours.

Had “the Frogman,” as the media was calling him, been the president’s assassin? Why else would someone be in Rock Creek when the city was in total lockdown, the air temperature was in the thirties, and the water temperature was in the forties at best? Plus, he hadn’t been all that far from where Bree had had him almost cornered inside GW University Hospital.

In my gut, the Frogman was the blond minister who killed the president, shot the defense secretary, killed the pathologist, and skinned a corpse. And we’d lost him.

Mahoney tried to convince me that the cold river water could have sunk the corpse, that the body would surface downriver sooner or later. But I wasn’t so sure.

As the Gulfstream rolled to a stop and was surrounded by armed airmen, an alarm started whooping long and slow somewhere in the distance.

Time seemed to stand still.

Many of the airmen had taken their eyes off the jet and were searching the sky. You could see the fear in their faces. I could feel it in mine.

Was there a missile coming?

The alarms were sounding, but would that make a difference? I tried not to think about my family, but it was impossible not to.

I had an image of all of us at Sunday dinner, kidding one another, laughing, and debating the chances of Damon’s team surging enough to make the NCAA championships in March.

But in the next moment, as the Gulfstream’s hatch opened and the ramp unfolded, I was imagining a nuclear blast, fire, and devastating scorching gusts of wind that would leave everything in my life in smoke and ruin.

Had President Larkin made the right decision as a show of power? Or had he provoked our rivals and enemies to take unthinkable actions?

I kept wondering if Larkin was too rash to be leader of the free world. I kept asking myself if he would ever have come remotely close to occupying the Oval Office if President Hobbs, the Speaker of the House, and three members of Hobbs’s cabinet had not been shot down in cold blood.

Agents in SWAT gear exited the Gulfstream, leading a grizzled-looking, sunburned man in denim and handcuffs. Morris Franks, the father of the treasury secretary’s killer, was in his sixties with gray hair and an untamed silver beard. Despite the show of force all around him, Franks didn’t seem frightened as they led him past me. He didn’t seem angry either.

Indeed, when our eyes met for the first time, his affect was so flat, I thought I was looking at a man who had no real emotional center, a man who was dead inside.

Mahoney tapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go, Alex. The director wants us to interrogate him.”

As I turned to follow him, I felt my phone buzz, alerting me to a text.

I didn’t recognize the phone number, but I understood the text.

I texted her back immediately, telling her that I was part of the investigation into the assassinations and unavailable for the moment.

After hitting Send, I hurried after Ned.

Chapter 76

After attending a short briefing with the FBI agents who’d raided Morris Franks’s compound in Arizona and reviewing the list of initial evidence gathered there, Mahoney and I entered a makeshift interrogation room off the main hangar floor.

His handcuffs had been removed, but the professed anarchist was in a restraint belt and ankle irons. Chains ran from both to a steel desk freshly bolted into the concrete floor. Franks was drinking a Dr Pepper and smoking a filterless cigarette.

In my pocket, my phone buzzed.

I pulled it out, saw it was Nina Davis again.

This is important! An emergency!

Can’t. Sorry. Emergencies here as well, I messaged back. I sighed, pushed aside the guilt I felt putting a client off, and forced myself to stay focused on Franks.

“You good, Mr. Franks?” I said after Mahoney introduced us.

Franks took a drag on his cigarette and then a swig of his Dr Pepper, blew out cigarette smoke, burped, and said, “Been better. Been worse. I could use something to eat. Oh, and a Miranda warning if you don’t want the ACLU crawling up your shorts. And an attorney ASAP.”

Mahoney said, “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Franks? Martial law’s been declared. Things like Miranda warnings, habeas corpus, and the right to an attorney have been suspended along with all other rules of a free civilization.”

Franks blinked and looked at me.

I nodded to him, said, “Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“The tyranny and government oppression you’ve always predicted — they’re happening, and you know what? You’re one of the first victims.”

I saw a slight tic in the corner of his mouth, but that was all he gave me.

“What’s this about?” Franks demanded. “No one will tell me a damned thing.”

Mahoney slid a picture across the table to him. “That’s Abigail Bowman, the U.S. treasury secretary, lying dead in the rain there.”

He studied her, shrugged. “Yeah? So what’s that got to do with me?”

“Your son, Martin, killed her. Shot her down in cold blood.”

He looked at me and then Mahoney before saying, “That’s bull.”

I pushed a second photo across the table at him. “Nope. He killed Bowman and a Treasury agent and wounded a second one, but not before that agent got a slug in your son. Martin tried to flee Manhattan, but a rookie cop gunned him down.”

Franks stared at the image of his son sprawled on the rain-soaked sidewalk. His lower lip quivered, and then he appeared disgusted.

Oozing contempt, he said, “You looked for a scapegoat, and you found my boy.”

“Your son was an assassin,” Mahoney said. “He was wearing fake Treasury identification and a badge when he was killed.”

“Planted.”

“We didn’t even have to do that,” Mahoney said.

I switched topics. “Tell us about Martin. Where had he been living?”

“I’m not saying anything. And take that picture away. I don’t want to see it.”

I left it where it was, said, “Your son’s dead, Mr. Franks. Unless you want us to believe you were part of the assassinations, I suggest you start talking.”

“I got nothing to say. I haven’t seen Martin or been in contact with him in... gotta be two years now.”

“Not a peep?”

“Nada.”

Mahoney said, “That’s funny. The agents who arrested you said your place was full of new solar technology, appliances, sat dish, and stacks of cash.”

“So? I don’t trust banks, and I got an inheritance at the same time as a guy who owed me money paid up.”

I sighed. “The cash was in mailers with fake return addresses, and three of them had notes signed by your son. One said he’d see you again soon.”

“Turn of phrase,” Franks said. “And the cash? He was just helping his old man. Other than that, like I said, we hadn’t been in touch.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

“Can’t say. But last time I saw him — couple years back, after he left the Marines — he said he was getting into contract security work overseas. He said there’s real money in that these days.”

“You declare that cash to the IRS?” Mahoney asked.

Franks chuckled and picked up another cigarette. “What do you think?”

I lit the cigarette for him, waited until he’d had a few puffs.

“Was Martin political?”

“Hell no.” He snorted. “I swear to you, I never heard him once talk about politics unless I was baiting him. Even then, he’d change the subject.”

“To what?” Mahoney asked.

“Anything. When he was in it, you know, combat. He liked to talk about that.”

That last bit did not jibe with my own experience, which was that people who’d been in combat rarely talked about it. Then again, Martin Franks was given the soft boot out of the Marines because his superiors thought he had psychopathic tendencies.

My cell buzzed, alerting me to a text. I chewed my lip in frustration, figuring it was Nina Davis again. But I slipped the phone from my pocket, glanced at the screen, and saw a text from Bree:

Mahoney said, “Your son ever mention going to Russia? China? North Korea?”

Franks screwed up his face as he took a drag off the cigarette, then said, “Never. But you know? More I think about it, it sounds to me like my boy maybe came around to his pop’s way of seeing things. In my mind, Martin died to free us from tyranny. He sacrificed himself for the ideals of his country, and I salute him for his bravery. I predict Martin will go down in history as being as much of a patriot as one of them minutemen.”

I stood up to leave the room. “I hate to break this to you, Mr. Franks, but I am absolutely certain your son will go down in history as a coward and a traitor to his country. I have the distinct feeling you will too.”

Chapter 77

When making any long road trip, Dana and Mary Potter liked to travel around the clock. One would sleep while the other drove. Switching off every two hours and gassing up every four, they could cover close to eighteen hundred miles in a single day.

Indeed, they’d left Texas as fast as they dared, crossing on back roads into New Mexico in a stolen truck with stolen plates before any word of the assassinations surfaced in New York, Washington, or El Paso County.

But by the time they’d made the Colorado line, around five that afternoon, the news was full of the killings, with new, shocking developments almost every minute, very little of it coming out of the Lone Star State, which was exactly how they wanted it to stay.

The roads were dry. They made good time. Wyoming had come and gone before midnight. But the weather had turned sour south of Billings, Montana. Wind, snow, and bitter temperatures had plagued them in the long hours before dawn.

Shortly after daylight on Saturday morning, the storm intensified to near whiteout conditions. A prudent couple would have pulled off the road in Lewistown or Malta and waited it out.

But Mary wanted to be home, and her husband wanted as swift an escape as possible. And the storm wasn’t a bad thing when it came right down to it.

No one would be looking for assassins in a blizzard on Montana’s desolate Hi-Line highway. A killer could drive right by you, and you’d never know it because you’d be keeping your eyes on the white-knuckle road.

So the Potters had driven on toward Glasgow in northeast Montana, listening to the news coverage on the satellite radio. Word of President Larkin’s retaliatory cyberattack on the other nations had shocked them both.

“I want to get home, Dana,” Mary said in a fretful voice. “Before the world goes all to hell on us. My God, what have we done?”

He got angry. “We did a job to save our son’s life. That’s what we did.”

She got angrier. “They’re saying we may have helped start World War Three!”

“I’m a professional. You’re a professional. I did a job, and so did you. And we did it for a noble purpose.”

Mary said nothing, just stabbed off the radio. “I want to call home.”

“No sat phone,” he said firmly. “Radio silence until we’re in the...”

On the GPS navigation screen in the truck’s central console, he saw what he was looking for and slowed, feeling the trailer slide a little behind him before he came to a full stop and turned north onto Frenchman’s Creek Road.

The gravel road had not been plowed. They spun and almost jackknifed the trailer in nine inches of snow. But before they could go in the ditch, Potter wrestled the pickup and trailer back to the middle of the road.

When he was a full mile north of the Hi-Line, he stopped in a spot out of the wind, and they donned wool hats, quilted Carhartt parkas, and heavy leather mitts lined with sheep fleece. Both of them had already changed into insulated bib overalls and boots at the last gas stop.

While Mary saddled and fed the horses grain, he chained up all four tires and changed the stolen Wyoming plates for Montana tags. Despite their heavy clothes, they were cold to the bone when they climbed back in the pickup and started north again.

An hour later, the road doglegged and dropped down beside Frenchman’s Creek itself. The vague outlines of a ranch house and barns appeared through the snow.

Potter stopped and used binoculars to look at the windows for lights inside.

“She’s still in Arizona, right where she should be this time of year,” he said after a few minutes.

“Let’s get it over with, then,” Mary said. “We’ve got a cold ride ahead of us.”

They rolled into the ranch yard. Potter saw no tracks anywhere.

He stopped near a shed between the house and the barn, said, “Good a place as any. You clean up inside, and I’ll get the horses unloaded. We’ll put the truck and trailer back where we found them, and we’re out of here. No one the wiser.”

His wife nodded absently and put on latex gloves. The windows were already caked in rime, and Mary was spraying and wiping down the interior of the pickup when Potter climbed out.

The wind howled through the ranch yard. With the wind chill, it had to be fifty below.

Potter ducked his face away from the wind, went around the back of the horse trailer, and opened it. He got the horses out one by one and tied them to a tree on the leeward side of the ranch house.

The wind gusted. As he came around the porch to shut the trailer, he put up his arm to shield his eyes and face from snow.

At first Potter didn’t see the old woman in the wheelchair on the porch, buried under wool clothes and quilts, wearing ski goggles, and aiming a lever-action hunting rifle at him.

When he finally spotted her, he threw up his hands and said, “Don’t shoot!”

She wiggled her lower face out from beneath a scarf, revealing sagging gray skin and an oxygen line running to her nostrils. She glared at him venomously.

“That’s my damn truck!” she shouted in a thin, bitter voice. “That’s my damn trailer too!”

Chapter 78

Potter raised his leather mitts higher, thought fast, and said, “Please, Mrs. Linney, I work for the Montana Department of Justice. The truck and trailer were found abandoned down the Bitterroot Valley. Didn’t anybody call to tell you I was coming?”

The old lady’s glare did not diminish, but she lifted her head a few inches off the rifle sights before saying, “Phone’s been out since the storm hit. And the electricity. And the furnace.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Don’t you have anyone to help you?”

“My son’s coming for me.”

“Could you lower the gun, Mrs. Linney? It’s making me nervous.”

“You got ID? Badge?” she said, keeping the rifle trained on him.

“ID, no badge,” he said, lowering his arms. “The company I work for does contract delivery work for the state. I have papers for you to sign too. Can we go inside? Get out of the wind?”

Mrs. Linney hesitated until a frigid gale hit them. She grimaced and gestured with the rifle toward the closed front door. “You first.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Potter said. He bowed his head into the biting, whistling wind and started toward the door.

She’s an ornery old cuss, he thought, but he made sure he smiled at her over the barrel of her gun, which followed him in a way that let him know she knew how to use it. He twisted the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into a center hallway with old wide-planked wood floors.

There was a modern kitchen at the far end. He walked past a room with a television to his right and an old-fashioned formal parlor to his left. Both rooms were neat, tidy.

He stopped and pivoted to look back at Mrs. Linney, who was driving her motorized wheelchair with her left hand while her right gripped the rifle, which was now in her lap. That helped.

“Here,” Potter said, starting toward her. “I’ll shut the door for you.”

“No need,” she said, and she threw the chair in reverse and pushed the door shut.

She stared at him a moment, then pulled down her scarf. Her breath came in clouds. Even without the wind, it had to be near zero inside.

“Your pipes freeze?” he asked.

“Drained them, poured antifreeze down the lines,” she said. “I know how to survive up here.”

“I bet you do.”

She drove a few feet toward Potter and then stopped.

“Let’s see that ID and those papers,” she said.

He smiled again, unzipped his parka, and reached inside for his wallet. He dug out his fake Wyoming driver’s license and started toward her.

Mrs. Linney directed the gun toward him. “Just hold it up from there.”

Potter did.

“Wyoming?” she said.

“We deliver to both states and Idaho too. I kept my residence in Cheyenne because there’s no state income tax.”

“Montana takes ten percent of what’s mine,” she said, sounding disgusted. “What about those papers?”

Potter patted his chest, acted confused, said, “Darn, they’re in the truck. Can I get them?”

Mrs. Linney raised the rifle, aimed at his chest, said, “You do that.”

She put up the wool scarf, retreated, and reached around to twist the doorknob. The wind blew the door open. She drove a few feet toward him so the door was pinned against the wall, and then started to back out onto the porch.

Potter was beginning to regret his decision to borrow Mrs. Linney’s truck and trailer to bring his horses to Texas. But she was supposed to be in Tucson all winter.

Before Mrs. Linney’s wheels crossed the doorway, Mary stepped up behind the old bird, reached around, and tore out her oxygen line before clamping a leather mitten across her mouth and nose.

Instead of screaming and struggling, Mrs. Linney aimed wildly at Potter and pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Plaster exploded off the wall next to him.

She tried to run the lever. But he took two big strides and pinned the rifle against her thighs. Mrs. Linney showed no terror at being trapped and smothered. She just glared at him, making sputtering noises of hatred in her throat.

“Poor thing,” Mary said, keeping her grip firm. “Chair battery ran down in the cold. Oxygen tank empty.”

Potter nodded to his wife and to the old woman, who’d begun to struggle now and show fear.

“Poor thing froze to death, right on her front porch,” Potter said, more to Mrs. Linney than to Mary. “Her son found her.”

They left Mrs. Linney like that, sitting there in her wheelchair, dead on her front porch, eyes open, with the gun in her lap and her oxygen line back in place. By the time they’d dropped the trailer, put the truck in the barn, and mounted the horses, the snow was already collecting on the quilts in the old woman’s lap.

They trotted out of the ranch yard, heading true north along the creek. The cold and the wind were beyond bitter. But they forged on. The snow and the gales would soon obliterate their tracks. And they hadn’t far to go.

Seven miles farther on, the Linney ranch road became a cattle trail that snaked another three miles to a gate in a barbed-wire fence cutting across a vast, empty, broken prairie.

Beyond the fence, they’d be in Saskatchewan.

Beyond the fence, the Potters would almost be home.

Chapter 79

Out in the hangar at Joint Base Andrews, I called Bree back. She answered at the first ring.

“Read the file I just sent you,” she said, sounding breathless. “I’m positive he’s Senator Walker’s killer, and wait until you see who’s mentioned in there!”

“Who?”

“Read it.”

I told her I’d call her back, went to my workstation, and downloaded the file.

It turned out that Carl Thomas, the medical-equipment salesman from Pennsylvania, was actually Sean Patrick Lawlor, fifty-four, a former member of the British elite SAS counter-terror team. Lawlor was a long-range sniper who’d gone rogue during the first Gulf War and shot forty-one of Saddam Hussein’s palace guards as they retreated from Kuwait toward Iraq.

Lawlor was court-martialed for mass murder. The prosecutors said he had acted mercilessly in the killings of the retreating Iraqi forces. His defense argued that he’d been given no written orders of engagement beyond stopping any Iraqi soldiers from using the road, north or south.

The British military court decided that Lawlor’s judgment at shooting forty-one of the men may have been beyond the pale, but given the lack of clear orders and the fact that he had been in a war zone engaged in mortal combat with the enemy, he was not guilty of mass murder, or of murder in any way.

Lawlor’s superiors let him know, however, that he’d never again return to the field for Britain, and he was offered an honorable discharge. He took it.

Afterward, Lawlor was approached by MI6 agents to engage in contract work as a killer for hire. He did so for more than a decade, but then he became too expensive, and they severed their relationship with him.

At that point, in his early forties, Lawlor became a shooter for hire, rumored to have worked at times for Russian, Chinese, and North Korean interests.

I scrolled down the names with which Lawlor had been associated and recognized none until three-quarters of the way down the list.

“There he is!” I cried. I jumped up and pumped my fist.

I turned to find Mahoney and FBI deputy director Carstensen coming toward me.

“There who is?” Carstensen said.

“Viktor Kasimov,” I said, my heart still beating fast. “At least twice, Kasimov seems to have hired a man named Sean Lawlor, a former British SAS operator who assassinated Senator Walker at the beginning of all this.”

“Where did you come by all that?” Mahoney said.

“DC Metro chief of detectives Bree Stone,” I said to Carstensen. “My brilliant wife, who got it from Scotland Yard. I think Kasimov has disappeared for a reason. As in a Kremlin reason.”

I shared the file with Carstensen and Mahoney. While they read it, I called Bree back to congratulate her.

“This could be the big break we needed,” I said. “Everyone here knows that if we find Kasimov, we might find the other assassins.”

“Good,” she said, sounding pleased. “Do me a favor? Have whoever’s in charge there drop a line to Chief Michaels to that effect?”

“Done,” I said.

“I love you,” she said. “It’s been only a few hours, but I can’t wait to see you.”

“I can’t wait to hold you,” I said, and I flashed for a terrifying split second on that threat of a nuclear bomb going off before adding: “And the kids. And Nana.”

“Talk soon,” she said, and she cut the connection.

I walked back toward Mahoney and the deputy director, who were no longer reading Lawlor’s file but standing with their eyes on the big screens overhead.

Mahoney saw me and shook his head in disbelief. “As if this whole thing couldn’t get any crazier.”

Chapter 80

Up on the screens, veteran NBC journalist and anchorman Lester Holt appeared doing a standup on the steps of the U.S. Senate.

“Is Samuel Larkin the legitimate president of the United States?” Holt asked. “Or, according to the arcane rules of Congress and presidential succession, should someone else be in the Oval Office with a finger on the cyber and nuclear buttons?”

The broadcaster asked us to recall that, prior to the attacks, the late President Hobbs had been in office less than two weeks and had not yet nominated a new vice president.

“That’s important to understand,” Holt said. “The president nominates his vice president, who must then be confirmed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress.”

The anchorman said this was different from the Speaker of the House, normally third in line to the presidency, in that the most powerful person in the House of Representatives had to be elected by the members of the majority party.

Like the vice president, members of the president’s cabinet, including the secretaries of treasury, state, and defense and the attorney general, were nominated to their posts by the president. The Senate had to confirm their nominations.

“We nominate and congressionally confirm a vice president,” Holt said, ticking off points on his gloved fingers. “We elect a Speaker. And we nominate and confirm cabinet members at the Senate.”

Holt started to walk up the Senate steps. “Only one position in the immediate order of succession to the Oval Office is automatic. The person fourth in line to the presidency, the Senate president pro tempore, is always the most senior member of the majority party. When that senator dies, the next in seniority automatically and immediately inherits the position and title.”

The scene jumped to inside the Senate, with Holt standing outside the chambers.

“In the chaos of the hours that have passed since the attacks, a single fact seems to have been forgotten, or perhaps ignored,” he said. “When the Senate president pro tempore, West Virginia senator Arthur Jones, had a heart attack and was pronounced dead, the next senator in line automatically and with zero fanfare became Senate president pro tempore.”

The anchorman paused for effect. “This all happened a good four hours before the assassinations. In light of this obscure but very real rule, should Samuel Larkin be running the country? Launching attacks against the power grids of other nations? Provoking nuclear war? Or should the new Senate president pro tempore — Bryce Talbot of Nevada — be president of the United States?”

The screen cut to show archival footage of Senator Talbot, a slick, smart, silver-haired former prosecutor from Reno in his late sixties. I knew Talbot, or knew of his reputation, anyway, and it made me slightly unsettled.

The senator from Nevada was one of the top fund-raisers on Capitol Hill, and he held the power of the purse strings as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Talbot was reputed to be in the back pocket of, among other special-interest groups, the gambling industry. Then again, what senator from Nevada wouldn’t be?

The screen cut to Senator Talbot in his office. Talbot looked genuinely stunned when Holt said that according to the Constitution and rules of the Senate, he should be the president of the United States.

“Is that true, Lester?” he asked, shocked.

“I believe it is, Senator,” Holt said. “Will you seek to remove Mr. Larkin and take his place in the Oval Office?”

Talbot looked deeply conflicted but said, “Well, I’ll have to talk to people smarter than me about this before I make any firm decisions. But if what you’re saying is true, Lester, then it is my solemn duty to take office, regardless of the high esteem in which I hold Sam Larkin.”

Chapter 81

Shortly before six that Saturday evening, I was on my second cup of coffee at the Mandarin Oriental bar when the man I was waiting for entered, looking harried and jittery, a backpack slung over his shoulder.

I left my coffee cup to cut across the lobby to intercept him.

“Dr. Winters?” I said.

The concierge doctor started and seemed puzzled and then threatened by my presence.

“Dr. Cross? What are you doing here?”

“Can I have a few moments of your time?”

“I have a patient waiting.”

“The patient’s me.”

He looked confused. “What’s wrong?”

“Just a few questions we need answered sooner rather than later.”

Winters, who was in his early forties, scratched at his hand. “I get paid for this, you know, making calls.”

“The FBI will cover your fee. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Bourbon,” Winters said.

A few minutes later, a waitress set a tumbler with two fingers of Maker’s Mark in front of Winters; he raised it, drank it down, and ordered another.

“What do you need?” he said.

“What was your relationship to Viktor Kasimov?”

“I was his doctor.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“I’ve read the file on your medical-license review,” I said.

Winters got disgusted and then angry. “I’m clean, and I have been clean for almost four years.”

“You were reprimanded for overprescribing pain medication,” I said.

“Four years ago,” he said.

“So you didn’t give Kasimov a script for Oxy?”

“No. He had a stomach bug. Why would I?”

“What about seeing makeup and masks? You neglected to tell us about that when we spoke.”

Winters ducked his chin, and you could tell he was wondering how the hell I knew that, and then he did know.

“That psycho bitch tell you that?” he asked. “Kaycee?”

I was almost going to correct him, tell him her real name, but instead I nodded. “She did. She thought it was the right thing to do.”

“I’m sure she did,” the concierge doctor said, almost sneering. “But so what? Is it a crime?”

“Depends,” I said. “If Kasimov’s men donned disguises to go to a liquor store, no. But if they went out and were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president, it’s quite a different story. A case could be made for your aiding and abetting murder.”

Winters’s hands flew up in surrender. “No way. They told me they just needed to be able to visit the Russian embassy without attracting attention. I swear to God.”

I studied him, thinking that I didn’t trust him. “Kasimov or his men mention where they were going the last time you saw them?”

“London,” the doctor said. “I told him to see a doctor there if he was feeling dehydrated after his sickness and the flight. That’s it. End of story.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you think of anything else, here’s my card.”

He took it without enthusiasm, didn’t look at it, and stuffed it in his pocket.

The waitress came with his second drink. I threw down two twenties and got up.

“My address is on the card,” I said. “Send your bill there.”

“No. No charge.”

I started to walk away.

“Dr. Cross?”

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

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

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

“So someone else can’t stop you?”

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

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

“Anytime.”

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

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

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

Chapter 82

Pablo Cruz was nothing if not patient.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That works, the assassin thought.

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

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

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

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

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

“You have a car?” Cruz asked.

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

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

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

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

“Keys?”

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

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

“I can’t leave.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 83

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But having fellow politicians murdered to become president?

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

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

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

Mahoney came up to my workstation.

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

“Do we have agents at the cabin?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 84

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go west,” Cruz said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kerry Hospital,” she said.

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

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

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

“I don’t know you.”

“I’m the new hired hand, ma’am.”

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

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

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

“She’s coming,” Goldberg said.

“Step back and smile, Jared.”

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

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

Goldberg looked confused.

“The cow?”

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

Chapter 85

Dr. Kerry’s eyes widened in shock and fear. She stepped back, and then she saw his face and registered the fact that he was wearing a wet suit and booties. She turned, terrified.

“Now!” Cruz said.

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

“You too, Jared.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

Her chin dipped. “I’m not an MD.”

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

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

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

Cruz grunted and felt himself on the verge of nodding off, something he could absolutely not do. Not when the veterinarian or Goldberg might overpower him. He shook his head to clear it.

He’d refused general anesthesia, though he’d let the vet shoot lidocaine into the wound before she gave him IV antibiotics. But he’d taken less than half the dose of painkiller she recommended in an effort to stay conscious as long as possible.

Cruz motioned with the pistol in his right hand. “I see zip ties all over the place. Get me six long ones.”

Kerry hesitated, then went to a closet and found six.

Cruz had her put zip ties around her ankles and the marina security guard’s. Then he had them restrain each other’s wrists. With the last two zip ties, Cruz bound their wrists low and tight to one of the steel bars that supported the kennel cages.

“I won’t gag you,” he said. “But if you start yelling, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

Goldberg looked petrified as he bobbed his head. Dr. Kerry just nodded.

Cruz needed sleep desperately, but he had things to do first.

He left them. He turned off the outside lights and found Kerry’s personal office. He sat at the veterinarian’s desk and used Goldberg’s cell phone to dial a number from memory. He heard clicks and hissing before the man he knew as Piotr came on.

“Talk,” Piotr said in Russian.

“It’s Gabriel,” Cruz said, also in Russian. “I want payment.”

A pause. “Are you insane? We had a deal. You were to wait until things cool down. Then you’ll get exactly what we contracted for. Where are you?”

“If you don’t put the money in my account, I will come find you,” Cruz said, and he hung up.

He looked at the couch in the vet’s office and almost lay down.

But then he retrieved the little black book from his dry bag and made one more call, this time on the desk phone. A woman’s automated voice answered and prompted him to enter a series of codes and passwords.

There was a short delay before a woman with an Eastern European accent said, “Universal Rescue. How may I be of assistance this evening?”

“I need full service. These coordinates. Medical and relocation specialists.”

She was silent. Then: “Given your location and the current circumstances thereof, that will be quite expensive, I’m afraid.”

“Two, six zeros, in BTC?”

After a longer silence, she said, “Three point five, six zeros.”

“Three.”

“Agreed. Make the transfers. Expect delivery shortly after your curfew lifts.”

Chapter 86

In the hangar at Joint Base Andrews, I glanced at the clock, saw it was almost midnight, yawned, and contemplated another strong cup of coffee.

My cell phone rang. It was Bree.

“Hey, you,” she said, sounding bushed herself. “Coming home soon?”

“Looks like I’ll be bunking here tonight. They put up a tent city for us in an adjoining hangar. Think I’ll catch a few hours right now.”

“Me too. I’ll miss you, but sweet dreams, and I love you.”

“I love you too, baby.”

I carried the warm memory of her voice over to the hangar next door and found a cot in the corner. After a few prayers, I lay down. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and slept dreamlessly until Mahoney shook me awake at four a.m.

“He’s here,” he said. “Viktor Kasimov.”

Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee once again and listening to the brief on the suspect awaiting us in the same room where we’d spoken to Morris Franks.

When the briefing was finished, Carstensen said, “You ready, Dr. Cross?”

“Yes,” I said. “Cameras?”

She nodded. “Running on the other side of the mirror, trained tight on his face. If the body-language experts catch anything, we’ll call it in to you.”

“Translator?”

“There will be one in the booth with me, but you’ll find he’s fluent in English.”

In both English and Russian, Viktor Kasimov told us he was spitting mad when Ned and I entered the interrogation room and found him manacled and chained to the table.

“You!” Kasimov shouted at me and Mahoney. “You two think crazy imbecile thoughts! Invent these things!”

“I could say the same about you, Viktor,” Ned said, unruffled.

Kasimov looked like he wanted to rip both our heads off, but he took several deep, trembling breaths before saying, “I am a Russian diplomat, an envoy of the Kremlin, and there will be serious repercussions if—”

Mahoney cut him off. “We don’t care about your bona fides or your diplomatic passport.”

I said, “We’ve gone far beyond the normal rule of law here, Mr. Kasimov. Martial law allows us to do pretty much whatever we want. And I can tell you that there could be painful and perhaps deadly repercussions for you if you don’t start helping us right now.”

“I have no idea how to help you,” he snapped.

“Tell us about Sean Lawlor.”

There was a twitch at the corner of his lips before he said, “Who?”

Over the earbud I wore, I heard Carstensen say, “That’s a lie.”

I said, “Lawlor, Sean. The former SAS sniper you hired to perform at least three murders in the past four years. Your name turned up in his Scotland Yard file after he was killed following the assassination of Senator Walker. But of course you know all that.”

“I do not know what you’re talking about.”

Mahoney said, “You understand that by refusing to cooperate, you are aiding forces hostile to the sovereign security of the United States?”

“I am not cooperating with any—”

“You could be taken out and shot or hung, Mr. Kasimov,” I said. “It’s not what we want, but it is what could happen if you don’t start speaking truthfully.”

When Kasimov glared at us, we both returned flat gazes.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I did know this Lawlor person. He did two jobs for me, not three. Both domestic affairs. Russian domestic affairs.”

We asked him how he’d contacted Lawlor. Through a middleman, a number he called when he needed such work done. He agreed to give the number to us but said the access code was usually changed every six months, and he hadn’t needed any such services in more than a year.

“Beyond that, I tell you for certain, and on my mother’s grave, I know nothing more,” Kasimov said.

“I think you’re in it up to your eyeballs,” Mahoney said.

The Russian threw back his head and laughed. “I am not that smart or cunning or ruthless, Mr. Special Agent of the FBI. Believe it or not, I think we should all coexist in peace. I mean, who needs war?”

“Right,” I said, “who needs war if you can achieve the same ends through political assassinations?”

Kasimov sighed. “Whoever are these masterminds you look for, they are playing games with you, I think. Yes, they are theorists, like the chess player. You know, somebody who thinks ahead twenty, fifty steps, this is the kind of person you search for, Dr. Cross. Me? My mind is simple. I do what I’m told.”

“Unless you’re raping women,” Ned said.

He gave us a weary expression. “I don’t know how these lies follow me.”

I decided a different route might be more helpful. “So what else do you think was behind the assassinations? Hypothetically. What’s the purpose? A takeover?”

Kasimov perked up, thought about that, and then shook his head. “If it was to be an attack on your shores, it would have happened already.”

“We had multiple cyberattacks coming out of your country and China and North Korea in the immediate wake of the assassinations,” Mahoney said.

“Just what you’d expect,” he said dismissively. “The sudden shift in power leaves a vacuum and gives an excuse and opportunity to look around, to — how do you Americans say it? To see what’s what? The U.S.A. would do the same thing if the situation were reversed. Look, in my humble opinion, the money is where you should focus your attention. The whole Russia thing? It’s a dead end, I tell you. What did your Watergate Deep Throat teach you? Follow the money.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, and I was thinking Bree had better get back on the phone with her contacts at Scotland Yard to find out if they’d managed to track down Lawlor’s bank accounts. But then there was a knock at the door.

In my ear, I heard Carstensen say, “Who the hell is that?”

I got up, opened the door a crack, and saw Rawlins standing there.

“Keith, I’m in the middle of—”

“Take a break,” he said. “Your trap? It caught a bug, maybe two.”

Chapter 87

When I looked up from the screens and data the FBI consultant had been showing me, it was 5:21 a.m. on Sunday, February 7, two days after President Hobbs and the others were assassinated.

“Do that second sweep we talked about, and I’ll be right back,” I said, and I ran to the booth outside the interrogation room where Kasimov was still talking with Mahoney.

I knocked sharply, stuck my head in. “Madam Deputy Director, I need to show you something ASAP.”

Carstensen looked annoyed at having to leave the Russian, who was explaining how he’d paid Lawlor for his services, but she came out into the hall.

“What is it?”

“Probably better to let Rawlins explain,” I said. “Mahoney needs to see this too. Kasimov can wait a few minutes.”

Rawlins soon had the three of us looking over his shoulders at the trio of screens before him.

“The algorithm’s function was Dr. Cross’s idea,” the FBI consultant said. “He asked me to write it to sift through NSA-gathered data limited to international phone calls and international data transmissions cross-referenced with proximity to eight specific locations and times.”

He typed on his keyboard. The screen changed to a satellite image of the lower forty-eight states. Seven digital pins glowed on the map.

Rawlins zoomed in on each, and I identified them.

1. Senator Walker’s murder scene in Georgetown

2. The murder scene of the assassin Sean Lawlor, a few blocks away

3. GW University Hospital, where the former Senate president pro tempore had died two mornings ago

4. The DC arena where the late president and the secretary of defense had been shot

5. The street where Bree and DC Metro SWAT had engaged in a firefight with West Coast gangbangers

6. The West Texas ranch where the Speaker and secretary of state were assassinated and, to the north of it, the site of the remote cabin that had been burned down

7. The motel room that Kristina Varjan had booby-trapped

8. Lower Manhattan, where the treasury secretary had been shot

“My idea was to look for commonalities in and around these areas,” I said. “Phone numbers used or large data transmissions going to a specific site.”

“And?” Carstensen said.

Rawlins said, “The algorithm found nothing unusual in Texas, around Senator Walker’s home, by the DC arena, near the gangbanger scene, or around GW Hospital. But...”

He typed again, and a new file came up. He tapped on an international phone number: 011-7-812-579-5207.

“This number was called from inside or near Lawlor’s death scene well before discovery of the body. The number was also dialed on Skype from inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel in DC two days before the assassinations, and on a phone in Lower Manhattan shortly after Abbie Bowman was shot.”

“The Mandarin Oriental,” Carstensen said. “Kasimov is lying. He is the mastermind.”

“Or someone else staying at the hotel or working at the hotel was involved,” I said, thinking about Dr. Winters and wanting to go back to ask Kasimov about the makeup and masks the doctor had seen.

“Whose phone number is that?” Mahoney asked.

“Someone in St. Petersburg, Russia,” Rawlins said. “Beyond that, I don’t know yet. If we could get some cooperation from the Russians, it would be a bit easier.”

“Fat chance,” I said. “Did you do that second sweep we talked about?”

“I started it but haven’t taken a look at the results yet.”

The FBI contractor pivoted in his chair and started typing. Carstensen and Mahoney were puzzled.

I said, “I asked him if he could look for that phone number being used in any call coming to or leaving the continental United States in the past ten days.”

“Bam!” Rawlins said. “Look at that!”

The map of the U.S.A. now showed five glowing blue pins. One was in West Texas, not far from the burned-down cabin. Another was close to Varjan’s motel in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The third was near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The fourth was well south of Washington, DC, near I-95 in Ladysmith, Virginia. The fifth pin was not far away from the fourth, near rural Storck, Virginia.

“Can you give us the times with the locations?” Carstensen asked.

Rawlins nodded and gave his computer a command.

The screen blinked and showed dates, times, and whether the connection was incoming or outgoing beside the blue pins.

There was a call from the Russian number to a burn cell in rural West Texas that had occurred late in the afternoon a few days before.

There was a call to the Russian number from near Varjan’s motel that was made the evening before she almost blew us up.

The call near Lancaster was also to the Russian number and had occurred the day before that in the afternoon. The fourth call was from the St. Petersburg number to a burn phone several hours later.

“Look at the one near Storck, Virginia, though!” I said. “My God, that was outgoing to St. Petersburg last night! Less than seven hours ago!”

Chapter 88

Seventeen Minutes later, along with eight heavily armed and experienced agents in full SWAT gear, Mahoney and I boarded an air force helicopter. We were all harnessed into jump seats, radioed up, and in direct contact with Carstensen and Rawlins, who’d identified the final phone number as that of twenty-two-year-old Jared Goldberg, a resident of Stafford, Virginia.

“I wonder what Jared’s doing down in Storck?” I asked.

Carstensen said, “We’ve got agents working on Mr. Goldberg right now.”

“Any luck getting us a tighter location on the call? Or Goldberg’s phone?”

“I’ve got you down to a five-mile radius,” Rawlins replied. “Sorry, there are only two towers in the area. Meantime, I’ll try to ping the phone.”

“Can you send that radius superimposed on sat images?” Mahoney asked.

“Already on its way to the pilot and to your e-mail accounts.”

We lifted off. Mahoney had an iPad, and he called up Rawlins’s link. The screen launched Google Maps and showed the circular search area, which was bisected by Virginia State Route 17, a four-lane highway.

Storck itself didn’t look like much. No stores. No gas stations. It was all farmland, small subdivisions, and dense forest.

“I pinged Mr. Goldberg’s number three times,” Rawlins said. “It’s been turned off.”

“We’re going to need him to turn it on and make another call or we’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Mahoney said.

I said, “Rawlins, can you further refine what we’re looking at? Show us property ownership?”

“Give me a few minutes.”

The first gray light of a winter day showed in the east as we hurtled south beyond the nearly empty Beltway and over suburban sprawl that soon gave way to leafless wooded lots, farms, and the odd tract-home development. Shortly after 6:30 a.m., we passed Fredericksburg and flew over Civil War battlefields and then large stretches of forest broken up by farms.

“We’re three minutes out from the perimeter,” the pilot said.

“What are we looking for?” one of the SWAT agents said.

“Something out of place,” Mahoney said. “If we don’t see it from the air, I’ll fly in twenty agents and we’ll hit the pavement and knock on doors until we find something.”

That didn’t seem to satisfy the SWAT agent, nor did it satisfy me. Goldberg, or someone using Goldberg’s phone, had called that number in St. Petersburg not eight hours before, and...

“Rawlins,” I said, triggering the mike. “Can you do another sift? Seven to nine hours ago, any other international calls out of the Storck area?”

There was a pause before he came back, sounding stressed. “You’re next, Dr. Cross. Sorry, this map’s being a pain.”

We flew over Route 17 and headed west toward Storck. Out both sides of the chopper, I saw farms and cows and then, near the exit to County Road 610, a small business of some sort with a large steel building and a smaller structure set near a large paved parking lot.

There were two vehicles there. A wine-colored sedan was parked nose in to the smaller building. A tan panel van was parked a few feet away, pointing nose out. Its rear doors were wide open to a walkway and front door.

That was all there was to Storck. If I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.

We kept flying above the highway until we reached the southwestern edge of the search area. The pilot turned south, meaning to trace the perimeter so we understood the full lay of the land.

Our radios crackled.

“Link to the map with property owners on its way,” Rawlins said. “And, Dr. Cross, yes, there was a call from a phone near Storck a few minutes following the one made to St. Petersburg. That second call went to Pretoria, South Africa.”

“Pretoria?”

“Affirmative,” he said. “I’m trying to get a reverse ID on both the—”

Carstensen cut him off, excited. “Stafford police just called our hotline. The owners of a marina on the Potomac there found drops of blood on their dock and no sign of their young security guard, Jared Goldberg, or his burgundy Toyota Camry.”

“The Frogman got him!” Mahoney said.

“There’s a wine-colored car back there at that exit north of Storck,” I said, and I swiped Ned’s iPad with my finger until I could see the parking lot and the buildings and the name of the property owner.

“If he’s wounded, he’s in there!” I said. “It’s an animal hospital!”

“That is where the second call came from,” Rawlins said over our headsets. “Kerry Large Animal Hospital.”

Less than two minutes later, we circled high and well wide of the Kerry Animal Hospital. The tan van was gone, but the burgundy Toyota Camry was still there. We got an angle and binoculars on the license plate. It was the missing security guard’s car.

“Land right in the parking lot,” Mahoney said.

“We lose the surprise factor,” one of the SWAT agents said.

I said, “There was a tan panel van here when we flew by. I saw it. We need to know who or what’s in it.”

Mahoney said into his mike, “Cap, can you call Virginia State Police or the local sheriff? Get them to cordon off this area and look for a tan panel van? Don’t have a license plate.”

“Done,” Carstensen said.

The SWAT team went first, storming the veterinary hospital from all four sides.

They threw flash-bang grenades the second they were all in position and then went in.

Thirty seconds after they entered, our radios crackled with urgency.

“We’ve got two alive,” the SWAT team leader barked. “Goldberg and the vet. Rest of the place is clear.”

The pilot began to speak, but I cut him off.

“Get us back in the air!” I shouted. “We’ve got to find that van!”

Chapter 89

Early Sunday morning, Kristina Varjan was traveling north on County Road 610 in a black Audi Q5. She lowered the driver-side window and picked up a black Glock pistol with an after-market sound suppressor.

There was forest on both sides of the lightly traveled road. She waited until she could see a long empty stretch in the other lane before sliding the pistol out the window, resting the barrel on the side mirror, and stomping on the gas. The Audi roared and closed the gap between it and the tan van ahead of her in seconds.

Varjan knew she had one good chance of this working. If she missed the opportunity, the equation changed, tilted against her.

She drove up behind the van and weaved slightly right, toward the shoulder of the road, giving her a good look at the van’s rear tires. Varjan shot them both out with hollow-point bullets.

She slammed on her brakes. The van swerved hard into the other lane, tires smoking as they disintegrated. The van’s back end swung around almost a hundred and eighty degrees.

Varjan saw the horrified look on the driver’s face before the van careered sideways off the far shoulder. It had smashed and rolled over twice before she brought the Audi to a screeching stop. The assassin jumped from her car and sprinted across the narrow road and down the short embankment.

There was tire smoke in the air, but no smell of spilling gas, so she went straight to the van, which had landed more or less upright. The roof and side door were partially caved in. Blood dripped down the driver’s face as he lifted his head to look at her.

“Help,” he said.

She shot him between the eyes.

Varjan moved down the side of the van and around the back, seeing one door shut and the other almost torn off. Gun up, she looked inside and saw the ruins of a full ambulance setup. A woman was sprawled on the floor by an overturned gurney. She was bleeding and struggling to move. Varjan shot her through the top of her head before checking behind the closed door.

No one.

She heard a soft thump and a twig snapping. She jerked back, then took two cautious steps toward the opposite side of the van, where the sounds had come from. When she took a quick peek, she saw nothing but burned brush and the edge of the woods.

She pivoted back the other way, but it was too late.

Quiet as a leopard, Cruz had slipped up behind her, and now he stuck the muzzle of his pistol against her forehead.

“You didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you, Varjan?”

Chapter 90

Route 17, southeast toward the town of Brera and I-95, was my best guess of where the president’s assassin was headed. Mahoney thought so too.

But when we lifted off, we immediately saw a plume of black smoke rising above the forest canopy not far to the northeast. Give credit to Ned’s instincts. He told the pilot to check it out before we went all the way to the interstate.

We flew over a lumberyard and a farm toward a big chunk of forest. Within it, the black smoke had quickly become flames that fully engulfed the van, and now the fire was dying down.

“Get us on the pavement,” Mahoney said.

As we swung around to land, I punched in 911 and was surprised to be almost instantly connected to a dispatcher for Stafford County emergency services. After identifying myself, I reported the fire and asked that the Storck road be closed in both directions.

We touched down north of the van. The flames coming from it were all but done, leaving the smoking, scorched shell. Tendrils of fire were consuming leaves and pine needles but not spreading widely or rapidly; they were hampered by the recent wet conditions.

I went toward the burning vehicle, stopped at a safe distance, and used the pocket binoculars I always carry to study it.

“Body in the front seat,” I said.

Mahoney had already gone down the bank, and was looking at the van from behind through his own binoculars. “And a second in the back here.”

We heard the first sirens in the distance. I knew the fire trucks would want to get close, and there’d be hoses, and water, and boots.

While Mahoney called for an FBI forensics team, I lowered my binoculars and got out my cell phone. I walked past the van and started taking pictures of the scene, especially the skid marks that told a story in reverse from the tire tracks in the softer soil on the shoulder where it left the road to the beginning of the skids a good eighty yards beyond.

Right away I saw that there could be two vehicles involved, the van and another one that had come to a stop almost parallel to the wreck. Was this second set of marks from before?

If the marks had ended anywhere but in front of the van, I might have discounted them. But they did stop by the van, so I went on the assumption that they were new.

Had someone seen the accident, stopped, saw the van was on fire, and left? Who? And why hadn’t that person called it in?

I looked beyond the start of the van’s skid, no more than forty feet, and saw what seemed at first to be a piece of tire rubber. I walked to it and realized that it was actually a shard of pavement about three inches long and the shape and thickness of my pinkie.

I saw the gouge in the road where the little finger had come from, and then behind that and to the left, I saw another gouge and two pieces of asphalt. As I photographed it all, I heard the sirens closing on our position from two directions. I looked north and saw the flashing red lights of a fire truck, followed by the lights of an ambulance.

I ran toward the smoking wreckage of the van. Mahoney had come back up the bank onto the road and was talking to Susan Carstensen on the radio.

The van was no longer burning, just belching caustic smoke.

“Anything?” Mahoney called to me.

“Don’t let them spray down the van. I want a closer look at it just as it is,” I said. “And let’s keep them away from those skid marks until forensics gets here.”

Ned nodded and turned to meet the firemen. I scrambled down into the ditch and got much closer to the van.

The metal was still throwing enough heat that I had to stop a good fifteen feet away. After shooting a video and stills of the scene from that perspective, I used the binoculars again to study the corpse in the front seat.

The jaw was frozen open, not unusual for a burn victim. Though the face was charred beyond recognition, I could make out big fissures in the skin where it had split in the heat, several on what was left of his cheeks, and another that started between the eye sockets and ran up onto the forehead.

Something about that one looked strange, but I couldn’t tell why. I shifted the binoculars lower and adjusted the focus so I could peer at the ground between myself and the van.

The forest floor was a tangle of old leaves, dormant vines, and thorny stalks that were charred close to the vehicle. Behind me, up on the road, I could hear the firemen calling out to one another.

Two of them looped around me and the van with axes and shovels, heading toward the trees. More firemen maneuvered a hose across the ditch and sprayed down the struggling blaze in the woods.

I kept moving around the van, fifteen feet back, peering at the ground through the glasses. I’d taken six or seven steps counterclockwise before I spotted something that made me lower the binoculars.

I couldn’t make it out with the naked eye, so I looked again with the glasses and figured out exactly what it was. Holding my arm up to protect my face from the heat, I hurried to within six feet, squatted, and pushed aside a singed leaf that half covered a nine-millimeter shell casing.

Of course, it was a rural area. The brass could have been there from something unrelated, but I didn’t think so. Leaving it in place, I went around the smashed front end of the van to look in at the corpse from the passenger side.

At a glance, I was positive. After walking to the rear of the van and peering inside with the binoculars, I was dead certain.

“What are you seeing?” Mahoney called from the road.

I went around and climbed up to him. “This wasn’t an accident, Ned. And neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin.”

“Okay?”

I gestured south. “There are gouges in the pavement over there that I think were made by bullets, two of them. Someone very good shot out the tires, which sent the van into this curving skid and off the road. The shooter skidded to a stop right there, climbed out, went into the ditch, and shot those two.”

After that I described the position of the spent shell casing, the weird fissure between the driver’s eye sockets, and the hole the size of a fist in the back of his skull.

“The corpse in the rear has a head wound too,” I said.

Mahoney looked beyond frustrated. “But how do you know neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin?”

“The one in the rear’s too small in stature to match Bree’s description of him,” I said. “I’m guessing a woman. And the driver had all his teeth. The president’s killer had knocked out or broken several. Remember?”

“Now that you reminded me. But I’m still confused. Did Hobbs’s assassin go off with this shooter of his own free will? Or was he forced out of here?”

“One or the other. Unless he took off into the woods. We should check, but I don’t think so.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ned said, furious. “Now we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. We had him, Alex. We had him, and we let him slip away again!”