Target: Alex Cross

Chapter 91

On Sunday, as the sun was setting, Pablo Cruz plunged a thick knitting needle that he held with vise grips into the flames of a gas stove burner. He watched the metal tip turn a glowing red.

Cruz had given Kristina Varjan no chance to try to overpower him once they were in her car. He’d disarmed her right away. Then, at every stoplight or stop sign, he’d pressed the muzzle of her Glock into her side and given her directions that took them across one arm of the Chesapeake Bay and onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

According to the satellite radio, they’d gotten across the bridge just in time. News reports said the president’s assassin had been hiding in a veterinary hospital west of there and had managed to elude federal agents once again.

Cruz smiled. He liked elusion. He took pride in staying ahead of the dogs. It was an art form, as far as he was concerned, and he was the master of it.

Like his choice of safe house. He’d spotted the shuttered beach cottage from the road and had Varjan park the car behind an outbuilding. After looking for signs of an alarm system and finding none, he had her crowbar the back door open.

Cruz turned from the stove in the cottage’s kitchen with the glowing knitting needle before him and looked at Varjan, who was tied to a chair and eyeing him like she wanted to rip his throat out.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Cruz said. “Who hired you to kill me?”

She sneered. “I’m going to tell you again: I don’t know. He calls himself Piotr.”

“A Russian?”

“Who knows.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cruz said, bringing the still-glowing knitting needle by her cheek. “There is more you are not telling me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

Cruz dropped the nose of the needle to her collar and pushed it aside. Fabric burned before he touched her skin, right above the carotid artery. Her skin sizzled, and she shrank back, gritting her teeth.

He said, “A second or two longer and you’d be bleeding out, Varjan.”

Her pained expression returned to a snarl. “How do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to know my competitors,” Cruz said.

“Who are you?”

“Me? I am nobody, nowhere, in no time.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Cruz did not answer. He returned to the rustic kitchen and put the knitting needle back in the flame, saying, “I have nowhere to go, Varjan. I have nothing to do, and so I will do this until you tell me what I want to know.”

She said nothing, but watched him sidelong.

A few moments later, he came at her again. Varjan raised her head in contempt.

He stopped, laughed. “You don’t think you’re going to somehow reverse this situation and kill me, do you? Who hired you?”

Varjan did not reply and would not look at the red-hot knitting needle that he brought toward her neck again.

Cruz stopped the tip less than an inch away from her skin so she could sense the heat. Then he poked it through her shirt and bra into the side of her breast.

She screamed and cursed at him in Hungarian. He went back to the stove, saying, “Even if you could have somehow managed to kill me, Piotr wouldn’t have paid you. My payment request upon completion of task? Delayed, which is as good as denied in my book. Think about that. If I’m expendable, you are too.”

Varjan stayed mute, but something changed in her carriage. She’d relaxed slightly, a small reaction, but he’d gotten her attention.

“Think about it,” he said, watching the needle tip begin to glow again. “They’re stiffing me and trying to kill me. What do you think they’ll do to you? Pay? No way. You will be expendable, and dealt with appropriately. In our profession, to believe otherwise would be... well, stupid. And I know you’re not that.”

Varjan tried to remain contemptuous. He touched the needle to the collar of her shirt again, let the singed smell reach her nose.

“Where will it go next?” he asked, and he glanced down the front of her body.

After a pause, he gazed into her eyes. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another choice here.”

She twitched, and he knew he had her properly leveraged.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Cruz took a step back, set the knitting needle down. “I propose we join forces, find out who is behind this plot, and go get our money. Does that work? Or do I continue to knit?”

Varjan glanced at the needle, then at the floor, then up at him.

“We don’t need to find out who’s behind the plot,” she said evenly. “I already know. I laid a trap and caught them in it right from the start. They haven’t got a clue.”

Chapter 92

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Dana Potter paced in the hallway outside his son’s hospital room. Every two minutes, Potter thumbed Redial on his phone. SpoofCard, an app that disguised a caller’s number, took over and placed the call.

He heard ringing somewhere in St. Petersburg, Russia, but he got no answer and no voice telling him to leave a message. Hanging up, Potter wanted to hurl his phone against the wall, see it shatter into a million pieces.

But anger was useless, he told himself. Anger said you were out of control and feeling like you were cornered.

I am cornered, Potter thought. They’ve got all of us cornered.

Fighting against that idea, willing himself to be brave, Potter entered the hospital room and tried not to weep at the sight of his son wasting away in bed. Jesse’s eyes were closed, and Potter thought once again how much his boy resembled a baby bird fallen from its nest, all skin and sinew.

He looked to his wife, who sat by Jesse’s bed. She gave him a questioning raise of her eyebrow. Shaking his head, he wondered if God had inflicted this punishment on the poor innocent boy as payback for his father’s sins.

Jesse had been born just fine, ten fingers, ten toes, a healthy cry when the midwife delivered him. And he’d thrived through the age of five.

Then he started falling a lot for no apparent reason. Soon after, he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Duchenne, the deadliest form of muscular dystrophy, caused muscles to waste away. Boys around five or six were the most likely group to develop the disorder, and those boys usually died in their early twenties.

If we had until his early twenties, we could beat this thing, Potter thought bitterly. But here’s my Jesse dying at fifteen, and there’s hope, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

Potter cursed himself for a tactical error. He should have insisted on more of a payment up-front, enough to hire a private jet to fly his son to Panama and pay a doctor millions to administer a radical, controversial, and illegal stem-cell treatment that some said could stop the muscle wasting in its tracks. Even give Jesse back his strength.

Potter went to his son’s side and stroked his face before looking at his wife. “I don’t know how to think of life without him,” he choked out. “And they won’t answer the phone. They’re leaving us hanging in the wind, and I don’t know what to do.”

Mary had tears in her eyes when she nodded. She was barely able to say, “I know.”

Potter took his attention off his son. He could not bear to watch him just slip away in his sleep. He glanced at the television on mute. His wife had it turned to CNN.

The anchorman was jazzed up about something, but Potter had no idea what until a chyron appeared on the screen:

Potter looked over at his wife in disgust. “Was it for nothing?”

Before Mary could answer, their son moaned and stirred. The burn phone in Potter’s pocket began to buzz.

He yanked it out, saw a number like the one from St. Petersburg, and surged toward rage as he stomped back into the hallway and answered.

“My son is dying,” Potter said in a tense whisper. “We had a deal, and you aren’t paying, and—”

“Is this Mr. Marston?” a woman said in a slight Eastern European accent.

He stopped ranting. He’d never talked to a female before.

“Who is this?” Potter said.

“The woman hired to eliminate you and your wife. I suggest you destroy the phone you are using, find another, and call the number I’m about to give you if you want any chance of saving your son.”

Chapter 93

At seven thirty on Monday morning, February 8, three days after the assassinations and almost twenty-four hours since we’d lost our chance at the president’s killer, I sipped coffee and poked at the plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast Nana Mama had set before me.

I’d had less than ten hours of sleep in the past seventy-two, and we were no closer to the killers still at large. I was feeling grumpy, if not downright cranky, as I ate and gazed dully at the morning news on the television screen.

Anderson Cooper was up early, standing on the White House lawn and struggling to explain, first, the violent events that had seen President Hobbs and several successors assassinated and, second, the constitutional mechanics that had resulted in Attorney General Larkin assuming leadership. Then he began discussing the chief justice’s ruling that the Oval Office rightfully belonged to Senator Talbot.

“Will there be a power struggle?” the CNN anchor said. “Will we see yet another constitutional crisis if Larkin refuses to step down?”

The former attorney general, Cooper noted, had not been seen since the ruling had come down the evening before. He was rumored to have been flying in his airborne command post out west for the past two days, landing only to refuel at various air force bases across the country. But that was unconfirmed.

For his part, Senator Talbot had been holed up in his office on Capitol Hill all night while a steady stream of advisers had come and gone.

Cooper touched his earbud, then bobbed his head vigorously and stared into the camera with the peeved look of a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Evidently, Senator Talbot has a statement to make live outside his office on Capitol Hill.”

The screen jumped to an image of the Nevada senator fighting not to look like a deer in the headlights as he went to the microphones.

“My fellow Americans,” Talbot said, sounding like someone’s nice old uncle. “I am as surprised as you are by these strange turns of events. But the chief justice has ruled, and I am not one to question the Founders of our nation, men like Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, who anticipated these kinds of difficult days. The Founders believed in an order of succession. They crafted that order into our Constitution, the precious document that is the basis of our unique form of governance. And I, as a mayor, a congressman, and a senator, have long sworn allegiance to God, country, and our remarkable system of laws.”

Talbot paused and stood taller. “So, forthwith, I will assume the office of the president of the United States, and I want to assure every American that while I might be an old dog, I can certainly learn new tricks. I feel deeply humbled and honored to lead you in this time of crisis. My first act is to lift martial law. I want people to resume their lives. We must go on.”

I set my fork down.

Nana Mama said, “Did he say no more martial law?”

“He did.”

My grandmother threw her arms overhead. “I’ve got serious shopping to do.”

I laughed. “You sound like we’ve been imprisoned for months.”

“Feels like it to me.” She sniffed. “You know I like ingredients fresh.”

“I know you do,” I said, taking my plate to the sink and pecking her on the cheek as I passed.

“He doesn’t sound too bad,” Nana said. “That Talbot. Means well.”

“I get that sense too,” I said. “But then again, I thought Larkin was a natural leader until he taunted the Russians and the Chinese like that.”

“Any chance Larkin fights it?”

“What’s there to fight?” I asked. “The chief justice ruled.”

“But not the entire court,” she said. “I think it could be appealed on that basis.”

“I’m sure someone in Washington’s looking at the idea,” I said.

I didn’t want to go upstairs to shower yet. Everyone else was still sleeping. Even Bree, who’d been working just as hard as I had, if not harder. It was too cold to sit outside, so I went into the television room and sat with my coffee. I shut my eyes and let my thoughts roam.

Once again, I asked myself, Who benefits from the murders? What about in light of recent events? Talbot, of course. He benefits. But he’d struck me as a reluctant leader, someone who had never seen himself as presidential timber. And yet, now that he was called, he was willing to do his duty.

But what about Larkin? Why hadn’t he come forward to give the country his reaction to the ruling? For that matter, where was he? The last we’d heard he was at an air force base in Kansas. Doing what? Trying to figure out his next move?

If Larkin was involved in the assassination plot, I decided, he would emerge to fight tooth and nail to stay president. He would do as Nana Mama had suggested, at the very least: appeal to the full Supreme Court.

But until then, what was my best course of action? For several minutes, I couldn’t come up with a clear way forward. But then, as I opened my eyes to drink more coffee, I remembered something Viktor Kasimov said.

Follow the money.

Chapter 94

I was back in the hangar at Joint Base Andrews less than two hours later, standing with Ned Mahoney and Susan Carstensen. We were all once again looking over Keith Karl Rawlins’s shoulder.

The FBI cybercrimes expert was hacking into bank accounts that, according to British intelligence, belonged to Senator Walker’s killer. The accounts in Sean Lawlor’s name — gleaned upon request from British MI6 — were all in known money-laundering centers: Panama, Seychelles, and the Isle of Jersey.

“There we are,” Rawlins said when the screen jumped to the electronic ledger on Lawlor’s account in Panama.

He scrolled down. “Empty.”

“Find recent transactions,” I said.

He did and we saw that more than a million euros and a million British pounds had been transferred out the same day Lawlor was strangled.

“Where’d it go?” Mahoney asked.

“Bank in...” Rawlins said, typing frantically. “El Salvador.”

“Can you hack it?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I’d insulted him and soon had the account open on the screen. It, too, was empty.

“Whose account?”

“Esmeralda del Toro,” he said. “Address in Madrid.”

“Send it to me,” Carstensen said. “I’ll dispatch agents.”

Rawlins did, and then Mahoney said, “Where’d the money go from there?”

“Probably another empty account, probably belonging to a shell corporation, and on and on,” Rawlins said. “I’m betting Esmeralda is not at home in Madrid.”

“Or that she even exists,” I said.

“Humor me,” Mahoney said. “Push the ball ahead a few times.”

Rawlins sighed and gave his computer an order. Nothing. He gave another order. The screen didn’t budge.

“Interesting,” he said. “There’s a firewall around recent transactions that...”

The FBI contractor cocked his head, rattled away at his keyboard, and hit Enter. The screen didn’t change at first, but then it blinked to a new document.

“Ahhh,” Rawlins said. “The money went to an account on Kraken. It’s an exchange for cryptocurrencies in... Singapore.”

“Can you hack that account?” Mahoney demanded.

He cringed a little. “That will take time. Those crypto-exchanges have hired the best in the world to build their security systems.”

“I have faith in you,” Mahoney said. “Alex?”

I was staring off, blinking, trying to see what was bothering me through the fog of fatigue and ignorance. And then I flashed on the inner back cover of that Bible and saw a glimmer of hope.

“Can you call up the Kraken Exchange home page?” I said.

Rawlins did, and I saw more than hope. I saw possibility.

“What are you thinking, Cross?” Carstensen asked.

“Forget following the money,” I said. “Let’s play follow the Bitcoin.”

Chapter 95

Four hours later, with the help of Rawlins, Mahoney, Carstensen, and a dozen others assigned to the investigation, I believed I knew who and what was behind the plot to overthrow the U.S. government by assassination.

“Who does that?” FBI director Derek Sanford said, shaking his head after I’d explained my theory to him in the conference room. “Is there no end, no bottom?”

“We can’t prove it beyond a doubt yet, sir,” Carstensen said. “We’ve still got a lot of legwork to do before we know the details. In the meantime, I wish we were still under martial law. It would make things easier.”

Sanford paused, then said, “I can offer you extraordinary powers for now. Mirandize when you have to. Otherwise, do what you need to do.”

I heard his cell phone buzz. The FBI director glanced at the screen, said, “Larkin petitioned the full Supreme Court over the validity of Talbot’s claim to the Oval Office.”

“He’s still flying around?” Mahoney said.

“At his home in Kansas awaiting the court’s decision,” Sanford said. “Whatever. That’s outside our purview. Go make real arrests. When you’ve got the lot of them in custody, I want the perp walk to end all perp walks.”

“What about their homes? Offices?” Mahoney said.

“Search warrants will be executed within the hour. Once that has happened, I’ll contact my Russian counterparts and Interpol. They’ll handle everything outside our jurisdiction. And when it’s appropriate, I’ll personally notify the Secret Service of our intentions.”

After Sanford left the conference room, Carstensen pointed to me and then Mahoney. “You two are coming with me.”

“By car?” Ned asked.

“Helicopter,” she said, heading to the door.

“SWAT?” I asked.

Carstensen paused to check her watch. “What time did you say it started?”

“Seven p.m.”

“I’ll put a full SWAT team on standby,” she said, opening the door. “I’m hoping that given the setting and occasion, our targets will be easy to locate and subdue.”

Chapter 96

At six P.M., Kristina Varjan got out the carbon knife Pablo Cruz had given her and slid it up her sleeve, then she slipped through a throng of people packing a long, wide concrete hallway.

The assassin barely noticed them. She was focused. Prepared.

“Coming from the southwest,” she said, her voice picked up by and transmitted from the sensitive Bluetooth mike taped to her throat and hidden beneath her shirt.

“Coming from northwest,” Cruz said over a small earbud.

“Cutting east to west,” Dana Potter said. “I’ll approach up the near staircase.”

“Muscle?” Varjan said.

“Unseen,” Potter said. “But I’m sure it’s there.”

“No blood if possible,” Cruz said.

Varjan did not reply. She’d spotted a woman coming at her through the crowd. She was looking at her phone with a worried scowl on her face and had a VIP pass hanging around her neck on a lanyard.

Putting on sunglasses, Varjan looked down at the VIP pass she held and felt confident. She climbed stairs to a higher floor and ran into a security guard at the top who was looking at his phone. She smiled, then held out her VIP pass.

“The lanyard broke,” she said, acting embarrassed.

The guard appeared bored, waved her on, and went back to staring at his phone. Varjan went around him into a long hallway and saw Cruz coming at her from the far end, also wearing a VIP pass.

Between them stood a big white guy with a military haircut and military bearing. He was leaning with his back to a door. She noted a gun bulge, chest-high, under the suit jacket.

The muscle’s head swiveled, took them both in.

Varjan went by a staircase to her right, saw in her peripheral vision that Potter, the Canadian assassin, was climbing with a VIP badge around his neck.

She smeared an easy smile across her face and acted a little tipsy as she ambled to the security guy.

“This where the VIP bash is at?” she asked shyly.

“No, ma’am.”

“That right?” Cruz said, also acting like he’d had a few. “I was told this was the place too.”

“Me three,” Potter said behind her.

The bodyguard seemed relaxed, in control, not bothered by them or the odd outfits they wore.

“Well, I’m Philip Stapleton, director of security for Victorious, and I can tell you there’s no party up here. Yet.”

“Yet?” Varjan said, lifting her VIP pass to show him as she slid closer.

“So we’re early?” Cruz said.

The question distracted Stapleton just long enough for Varjan to spring at him and get the blade of the carbon knife up against the side of his neck, right under the jawbone and across his carotid.

“One wrong move, and I’ll bleed you right here,” Varjan whispered.

Cruz came in beside them, took the pistol from Stapleton’s chest holster.

“Open the door now,” Varjan said.

Cruz set the muzzle of the guard’s pistol against his temple. “Your call.”

“It’s coded,” the guard said. But he gave them the number.

Potter keyed the code into the pad by the door. They heard the door lock click open. Knife blade still tight to Stapleton’s jaw, Varjan pushed him through. The other two assassins followed her, stepping inside fast.

“Nobody move,” Varjan said to the people in the room as Cruz kicked the door shut behind him. “Or this man dies.”

Chapter 97

We reached the outskirts of Atlantic City at 6:40 on Monday evening. Out the window and far below the FBI helicopter, life was going on. From that height, you’d never have known that the country had been under martial law and in the grip of one constitutional crisis after another for the past several days.

My cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text. It was Nina Davis again.

Please, Dr. Cross. I need your help. I think someone is stalking me, not the other way around. And I’m scared.

I stared at the text, and then answered: Still tied up in the investigation. Stay home. If you feel threatened, call local police. I will call as soon as I can.

Rather than wait for an answer, I turned the phone off.

“Police lights,” Carstensen said, looking out the window on her side of the chopper. “Heading toward our landing zone. Pilot, can you find out why?”

“Roger that,” the pilot said.

Now I could see the police cars, five of them, racing east toward the ocean.

The pilot came back on. “Police in Atlantic City say there was a murder and a vicious assault and robbery in the Tropicana garage. Three victims, three assailants, all dressed in costumes.”

“As long as it’s not about us,” Carstensen said. “Put us on that roof.”

“What did they steal?” I asked.

“VIP passes to the big show.”

“What kind of costumes?”

“Didn’t say,” the pilot said. “But I’ll ask.”

We circled, the helicopter shuddering in the wind before landing on a helipad atop the Tropicana casino. We jumped out into a chill, raw sea breeze.

Carstensen spoke with the casino’s head of security while Mahoney and I hustled to a hatch and a stairway. We waited for her outside, and then we all walked together north several blocks toward Boardwalk Hall, a famous sports and entertainment venue where some of history’s greatest boxing matches had been held.

That night, however, the marquee read

The three of us went to the main gate and showed our badges and credentials to security. Carstensen quietly told the guard in charge to let us in and keep our presence to himself or she’d have him arrested for obstruction of justice.

The lobby and the hallways of the venue were jammed with video-gamers, most dressed as Victorious avatars, all pressing toward the event hall itself.

“Ten thousand five hundred capacity,” Mahoney said.

“Narrow the search,” Carstensen said. “We’re not looking in the cheap seats.”

We split up. Mahoney headed north, and Carstensen went south. I climbed as high as I could go and came out in the nosebleed section. The auditorium was already more than half full. There was rap music playing and a festive atmosphere around a large wrestling ring that filled the center of the floor. Inside the ring, there were six empty gaming stations, and television cameras on arms swung around above them.

I got out my pocket binoculars and used them to peer beyond the ring to a stage at the other end of the hall where a band was setting up. I scanned everyone on the stage but did not see who I was looking for.

Remembering Carstensen’s remark about ignoring the cheap seats, I looked all around the wrestling ring, the first ten rows, best seats in the house. Nothing.

But then I looked directly across the auditorium and one deck down, toward a row of skyboxes. Most were dark, which surprised me. Maybe e-sports weren’t a big enough business yet to attract a skybox sort of corporate clientele.

Whatever the reason, there was only one that appeared occupied. The lights were on. I moved over until I was directly across from that box and looked through the binoculars.

The first thing I saw was a woman with her back to me. She wore a glam outfit and a black wig, like the avatar Celes Chere. Beside her, also with his back to me, stood a big lanky guy wearing a black cowboy hat and the sort of long, hemmed duster that horsemen wear in the rain. Just like the avatar Mr. Marston.

I almost took my attention off the skybox but then noticed movement beyond the two. I moved another five feet to my left and saw Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the wunderkind founders of Victorious Gaming, and Philip Stapleton, the company’s director of security.

Crowley was sitting forward in a club chair, fingers pressed in a steeple pose, staring through his thick black glasses at Bronson, who had his head down and was working furiously on a laptop. Stapleton was slumped in a chair behind Crowley. His eyes were closed and he was bleeding profusely from a head wound. Standing behind Bronson was a man wearing the white robes of the Victorious avatar Gabriel.

I could see only part of the angel. The cowboy blocked my full view of his head.

“Cross?” the pilot called. The static was heavy.

“Copy.”

“You asked how the assailants at the Tropicana were dressed. A cowboy, an angel, and a punk rocker.”

In the skybox, Bronson took his attention off his computer, looked toward the big cowboy, and nodded.

The cowboy walked away from the window and straight across the room to Bronson, then paused, his back to me. Bronson handed the cowboy his computer, and the cowboy left the skybox.

But if I hadn’t been standing in that exact spot, I might have missed the latex mask the guy dressed as Gabriel wore, the way his left arm dangled oddly, and what looked like a pistol in his right hand. The veterinarian and Jared Goldberg both said that the president’s killer had been wounded in the left elbow.

I fiddled with the focus, trying to make sure. But then the woman dressed as Celes Chere turned to peer out the window and down on the building audience.

I lowered the glasses and triggered my mike, trying to remain calm.

“This is Cross. I’ve got Bronson, Crowley, and Stapleton in the middle skybox, south side of the auditorium. If I’m right, there are three assassins in there with them, including Kristina Varjan and possibly the president’s killer.”

Before Mahoney or Carstensen could reply, I raised my binoculars again and found Varjan, hand to her brow to cut the spotlight glare, staring right back at me.

Chapter 98

My earbud crackled.

Mahoney said, “Alex, repeat the location, you’re garbled.”

Varjan had seen enough. She spun around and headed away from the window fast. Before following her, Gabriel clubbed Bronson across the back of his head with the butt of his pistol, sending him sprawling.

“Cross?” Carstensen said. “Repeat?”

I jammed the binoculars in my coat pocket, pivoted, and headed for the exit. When I hit the hallway, I hesitated, knowing the skyboxes would be closer if I went left. Instead, I went right and broke into a dodging run through the growing crowd of fans, triggering my mike as I did.

“This is Cross,” I said. “Repeat, we’ve got two, probably three of the assassins right here in the building. The president’s killer and Varjan. She just made me. They’re fleeing the sky-boxes. Look for a glam girl, a cowboy in a black hat and a long brown duster, and an angel in white robes and a latex mask. The angel has a clipped left wing, like the president’s assassin, and he is armed. Assume others are as well.”

“Copy,” Mahoney said. “I’m heading toward the closest exit to the skyboxes.”

Carstensen said, “I’m calling in SWAT, sealing the entire venue.”

I spotted a stairway finally and wanted to bound down it, but there were too many people coming up. I had to squeeze hard right against the flow, which cost me more time.

When I made it to the skybox level, I decided to keep going down. There was no doubt in my mind they were trying to get the hell out of the venue.

Varjan saw me just now. She saw me at the motel, and again the first day of the e-sports championships. She knows I’m FBI. They’ll all be on high alert.

I reached the hall’s lowest level and almost went toward the west entrance where Mahoney had gone in anticipation of the shortest line of flight from the skyboxes. But something told me to do the opposite, to double back and go east.

Moving as fast as the crowd would let me, I kept one hand ready to draw my service weapon and swiveled my head as I ran, scanning the faces and costumes.

I got a look at several girls dressed as Celes Chere and two cowboys in black hats. But they weren’t wearing the horseman dusters, and—

An alarm began to whoop.

Diversion, I thought. Just like the last time.

Fans froze in place, not knowing what to do. Several panicked and I heard people saying, “Fire?” Then I heard screaming ahead of me.

I yanked out my badge and gun and yelled, “FBI! Get down!”

People started running away instead of getting down, but it opened up a path through the crowd that allowed me to quickly round a curve in the passage and to see a red light flashing below an emergency exit sign. A security guard was lying in a pool of blood below the flashing light in front of an emergency door that was ajar.

“Help’s on the way,” I shouted at the wounded man as I vaulted over him, seeing that his pistol was missing from his holster before I threw my shoulder into the door.

It flew open, revealing a steel staircase landing and a short flight of stairs leading down to an empty ambulance parked in a bay.

Behind the ambulance, the overhead door was up. I ran toward it. Two EMTs carrying cups of coffee appeared.

“FBI!” I shouted. “Did you see people come out this door?”

“Two of them, a guy dressed as an angel and a glitter girl,” one of them said. He gestured with the coffee cup. “They ran like hell toward the boardwalk.”

Chapter 99

I sprinted along the north side of Boardwalk Hall and triggered my mike.

“This is Cross again,” I said, gasping. “Two of them have escaped the venue. Repeat, escaped the venue. Get that helicopter in the air. They’re on the boardwalk somewhere ahead of me. Male in angel costume. Female dressed glam.”

“Copy,” Carstensen said.

I reached the boardwalk with a stitch in my side but managed to calm down enough to look through the binoculars south toward the Tropicana.

Despite the raw conditions, there were knots of people along the boardwalk, some coming at me, some walking away. No angel. No glam girl. No cowboy either, for that matter.

I swung around to look north along the boardwalk and saw similar small groups of pedestrians braving the—

“I got a visual!” I barked into the mike as I took off again. “Heading north on the boardwalk, two blocks north of the hall, near the pier!”

I’d caught a solid look at the back of a man dressed in white robes far ahead of me, and I’d gotten a glimpse of a woman at his side. There was no chance they were getting away again, I told myself, and I picked up the pace.

For the better part of a block, I couldn’t locate either of them ahead of me, and I was starting to doubt what I’d seen. But then I spotted the angel again, still with his back to me, still heading north, going past Bally’s Beach Bar.

He was alone now and no longer running. His left arm looked useless. Sirens began to wail to my west, north, south.

My earbud crackled with static. I could tell it was Carstensen, but I could not tell what she was saying.

I hit the mike, said, “Suspect dressed as angel heading north on boardwalk north of Michigan Avenue toward Brighton Park. Suspect is alone now.”

I could barely make out Mahoney saying, “Copy.”

I ran on, trying to keep the few people on the boardwalk in front of me so the assassin wouldn’t see me gaining ground if he happened to look back.

I was less than half a block away from him when the tragedy happened.

A young Atlantic City uniformed police officer came out of the park in front of the killer. The patrol cop was moving quickly, and when he saw the angel, he started to skid down into a combat shooting position, his hands and pistol already rising.

The assassin was quicker; he threw up his gun and fired, hitting the officer square in his bulletproof vest. As the cop staggered backward, he pulled the trigger on his pistol. The bullet went wide, hit the boardwalk, and ricocheted out to sea.

The angel’s second shot caught the young policeman through the throat and dropped him in his tracks.

I was closing fast on him then. Two hysterical young women in raincoats were fleeing toward me.

“FBI!” I yelled to the angel. “Drop your gun! Put your hands up!”

The two girls dived to either side of me. The president’s assassin had already looked over his shoulder and started to spin in his tracks, his gun up.

He wasn’t quite fully turned when my first shot — in my off hand, and shaky — slapped him across the ham of his left leg. He jerked as he shot. I heard his bullet crack by my left ear, rattling me.

Because a trained assassin was not going to miss twice at this distance, I pointed the gun at him and fired again, just hoping to put him on the defensive.

But by some miracle, it center-punched him just below the sternum. He hunched over and then fell hard onto his side, gasping for air.

I ran up. When he tried to raise his gun, I kicked it out of his hand.

I squatted, pulled off the mask so he could breathe. His face was a swollen mass of stitches.

“Who are you?” I said. “Who hired you to kill Hobbs?”

He blinked at me dully, then shuddered and, through the blood that began to seep out his mouth, croaked, “I am... nobody... nowhere... in no—”

The assassin convulsed then, choked, and coughed up a gout of dark blood. He died quivering on the boardwalk.

I stared at him, hearing sirens closing on my location and a helicopter approaching, then turned to check on the two young women in raincoats.

Kristina Varjan was standing twenty feet behind me, squared off and looking at me over the barrel of a pistol.

Chapter 100

“Drop the gun, cross,” Varjan said. “Or die.”

I let go of my weapon, heard it strike the concrete.

“There’s an army coming, Kristina,” I said. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”

I noticed her expression tightened when I said her name.

“I’ll take my chances,” she said. “I just wanted you to know I had nothing to do with the president’s death or the death of any of the others. I was a maid. Cleanup. That’s all.”

“Maid for who, Kristina?”

“You saw,” she said, angrier but glancing around.

“What did I see, Kristina?” I asked, hitting her given name hard.

“Stop that,” she said, shaking the gun at me, “or I’ll kill you anyway.”

Behind her in the sky, I saw the helicopter coming. And patrol cars had squealed to a stop back on Michigan, their bubbles flashing blue. From behind me, from the park, I heard tires skidding to a halt and sirens dying.

“It’s over, Kristina,” I said. “Drop the gun.”

Varjan looked at the beach and the water.

“They’ll get you out there too. Save yourself. Drop the gun.”

“The CIA takes me. No one else.”

“I can’t promise that.”

She processed my response, and then all the tension in her shoulders seemed to vanish, as if she’d come to some decision and was resigned to her fate.

“Then I take it all back,” Varjan said, her voice flat. “You’ll just have to die before me, Cross. You’ll have to lead the way into hell.”

“No—” I managed to blurt out before she pulled the trigger.

Her bullet blasted into me eight inches below my Adam’s apple.

I was hurled back and off my feet. I landed hard, choking for air in a whirling daze. I heard another shot and a third before a barrage of gunfire that was the last thing I remembered before everything vanished into darkness.

Chapter 101

Dana Potter moved at a steady clip west from Boardwalk Hall, forcing himself to exude easy confidence and showing only passing interest in the police cars that blew by him, their sirens singing.

After he’d left the skybox, his business done, Potter had gone out a service entrance and immediately saw a garbage truck backing up to a full trash container.

He tossed the cowboy hat, the duster, and Sydney Bronson’s laptop computer into the bin just before it was lifted and dumped into the truck.

Both identifying articles of clothing and that weasel’s computer were leaving the area even before Potter reached the entrance to Caesar’s Palace and went inside. He strolled to a souvenir kiosk he’d scouted earlier in the day and bought a hooded sweatshirt with the casino’s logo on it.

He pulled the hoodie on and left the casino just in time to hear shots to the northeast, back toward the boardwalk and the beach, three in a cluster, and then four more shots in rapid succession. There was a break, and then a shot, and then another shot a minute later, and then multiples, a firefight.

But since then, as Potter walked farther and farther west, he’d heard only the sirens. When he saw a bus about to pull into a stop, he ran to catch it.

Potter took an empty seat, yawned, and shut his eyes. Ten stops later, he got off, went into a corner store, and bought a Bud tallboy. He drank it as he walked the seven blocks to the train station, where he bought a ticket to Newark Penn Station.

Eleven minutes passed. He was aboard the train and it was pulling out. Two stops later, he got off. He watched everyone else who’d exited the train until he was satisfied there was no tail. Then he bought another ticket, this time to Hoboken.

While he waited for that train, Potter walked down the platform, away from all the commuters. Only then did he pull the burn phone from his pocket and punch in the number of another burn phone.

“Paul?” Mary said, using the code they’d agreed on.

“Right here, Sal,” he said. “We’re good. Get him out of that hellhole now.”

He heard her break down crying.

“C’mon, now,” he said. “I need you to be strong. We’ve done it.”

“I’m just so relieved, so hopeful, is all.”

Potter smiled. “Me too.”

“You following?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But do not wait for me to start the therapy.”

“What about payment?”

“I got it. Now get to work.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too,” he said. He clicked off and broke the phone in two before tossing it in a trash can.

Potter pulled a USB drive from his pocket, looked at it, and imagined his son healed, on his feet, and walking again.

That will be worth the risk, he thought. Jesse is worth every risk.

He could even acknowledge that, sooner or later, U.S. federal agents would track him down. Sooner or later, he’d have to tell them he’d done the job in Texas alone, that his wife had no idea he’d assassinated the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state using two identical rifles set side by side on bipods.

Mary had no idea what Jesse’s stem-cell treatments cost. He’d been the one to go to Panama to learn about it. His wife had zero to do with any of it.

He’d say all that, and then he’d die somehow, death by cop or suicide to seal the deal and keep Mary free to raise Jesse.

As his train pulled into the station, Potter was at peace with his fate. He stuck the USB drive in his pocket and got on board. He could see Jesse walking in his mind, and for that, he would accept every punishment that might come his way.

Chapter 102

My head spun a bit as the FBI helicopter lifted off from the beach by the boardwalk where Varjan had shot me high in my Kevlar vest.

The bullet at short range had been enough to knock me down and out.

But not for long. I’d come around within seconds and saw Carstensen, Mahoney, and a small army of Atlantic City police officers swarming past the bullet-ridden corpse of the Hungarian assassin.

They’d tried to make me lie still and wait for the medics, but I refused and was getting woozily to my feet when Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s director of security, staggered up to us. His face and suit were covered in blood. He held a wad of bloody napkins to his head.

“Arrest him,” Carstensen said.

“No,” Stapleton said. “I had nothing to do with this.”

“Arrest him and his bosses,” she snapped.

“They’re gone,” Stapleton said. “That’s why I came to you. They left me there for dead. I came straight here after they left.”

“Where’d they go?” Mahoney demanded.

“The airport,” Stapleton said. “They have a jet.”

“Arrest him anyway. Get him to a hospital.”

“No! Believe me. I served my country. I love my country. I would never... I faked being unconscious in there. I heard everything they said. Everything.”

Which is how Stapleton came to be sitting in the jump seat across from me and Mahoney, his wrists in handcuffs, and an FBI SWAT medic working on his head wound.

“Talk,” Carstensen said.

Stapleton didn’t stop talking as we picked up speed, and the pilot attempted to call the air traffic control tower at the Atlantic City airport. I admit to being fuzzy on that flight, but everything the security director was saying fit with what we’d suspected.

The pilot called out, “Are they in a Gulfstream?”

“Yes,” Stapleton said. “Don’t let them off the ground. They can fly more than six thousand miles in that thing.”

“That’s them,” the pilot said. “They are taxiing toward the runway and ignoring air traffic control orders to turn about.”

“Move!” Carstensen shouted.

The pilot juiced the chopper to its limits, one hundred and forty-five miles an hour. Then he dropped speed and swung the bird past the airport tower.

The Gulfstream was just making the turn onto the runway when the pilot flew over the top of the jet, passed it, and hovered broadside over the runway. The jet kept coming. Carstensen slid back the side door of the chopper. Five FBI SWAT agents aimed automatic weapons at the cockpit and the pilot.

The jet stopped. The engines died. The jet’s pilot put his hands up.

We landed. The SWAT officers surrounded the jet.

“This is the FBI; open the door and come out with your hands up,” Carstensen said over the helicopter’s loudspeaker. “Now.”

Two minutes later, the airplane door slowly opened and let down the staircase.

Austin Crowley came first, blinking nervously behind his thick glasses, the fingers of both hands interlaced on his head. Crowley’s partner, Sydney Bronson, had his hands up but was openly defiant.

“What the hell is this?” he cried after agents grabbed Crowley and slammed him facedown onto the tarmac. “Why are you—”

Two agents dragged him off the staircase, threw him down beside his partner, and restrained his wrists behind his back.

I looked at Carstensen, who nodded and said, “All yours, Dr. Cross.”

“Austin Crowley, Sydney Bronson,” I said. “You are both under arrest for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.”

Chapter 103

At ten o’clock the following morning, outside the northeast gate to the White House grounds, Bree and I met Mahoney, Carstensen, and FBI director Sanford. After presenting our credentials, we were waved in and soon found ourselves standing in the hall outside the Oval Office.

“You good?” Bree whispered to me.

“Slight headache.”

“I didn’t mean your head.”

“I know. I’m good.”

I don’t know why, but I was good, strangely calm when the door opened and we walked in. The room was fairly crowded with people I recognized. Some were cabinet members. Others were leaders from both houses of Congress and from both sides of the political aisle.

All nine Supreme Court justices were there as well. And Secret Service special agent Lance Reamer, and Lieutenant Sheldon Lee of the Capitol Police. Bree went and stood by them.

President Talbot was on his feet behind the Lincoln desk, looking grim.

“What the hell happened in Atlantic City? No one will tell us anything.”

“We’ve been sorting that out all night, Mr. President,” Director Sanford said. “It seemed easier to brief everyone who needed to know at once.”

“Well, then,” Talbot said, irritated, as he sat down. “Get on with it.”

Sanford glanced at Carstensen, who said, “Two of the assassins are dead.”

That set off a hubbub that lasted several moments before she continued, “They were killed on the boardwalk in Atlantic City last night.”

Chief Justice Watts said, “Who were they?”

I said, “One was a notorious Hungarian contract killer named Kristina Varjan. The other, who we believe was President Hobbs’s killer, is as yet unidentified.”

The Senate majority leader said, “Explain how you caught up to them.”

“A fluke, Senator,” Mahoney said. “We were up in Atlantic City following a different thread of the investigation, and we spotted them.”

“Doing what?” the House whip asked.

Carstensen said, “They were shaking down their employers.”

“You mean whoever hired them to do the killings?”

“That’s correct,” the FBI director said.

“So who are they?” the secretary of the interior asked.

“Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, co-founders and owners of the largest e-sports company in the world.”

That set off another animated reaction in the room. E-sports? What?

“You’re sure about this?” the Senate majority leader said.

“Yes,” I said. “When I spotted the three assassins in Crowley and Bronson’s skybox, they evidently were there demanding payment for the killings. They got Bronson to transfer millions of dollars in Bitcoin to so-called hard wallets — small, densely encrypted thumb drives — that the killers took with them.”

I could see skepticism on the faces of many in the room, including the president.

“They told you this?” President Talbot said. “They confessed?”

Sanford said, “No, Crowley and Bronson tried to tell us the three were just sophisticated robbers who’d heard about the purse for the tournament being in Bitcoin and taken advantage of the situation.”

I said, “That was nonsense. Stapleton, their director of security, was beaten by the assassins, and he overheard the conversations that occurred in that skybox. When we hit Crowley and Bronson with what Stapleton told us, they denied it and said they’d sue us and him.”

Carstensen smiled. “Until we showed them that Stapleton had recorded almost the entire thing on his iPhone. Then they caved, admitted they were the masterminds.”

The chief justice said, “Why in God’s name would they do such a thing? These are video-game people, right?”

“Sophisticated video-game people,” I said. “Expert coders. MIT- and Harvard-smart. And arrogant about it. I think they thought they’d never get caught, that they knew enough about the dark web to get away with playing behind the scenes, anonymously hiring assassins to topple the U.S. government.”

“But why?” the chief justice said again, growing irritated.

Carstensen told him that Bronson and Crowley said that they hadn’t planned to kill the president. Not at the outset, anyway. They had been spending more and more of their time exploring the dark web, doing research for future games, and they’d come upon a site that offered killers for hire.

“They claim they got on the site to see if a game they were designing was plausible,” Mahoney said.

“I’m confused,” Talbot said. “This was a game? A goddamned game to them?”

“At first, sir,” I said. “Then President Grant died. And someone made them realize they had a unique opportunity.”

“What opportunity?” the House whip said.

“Ultimately?” I said. “The opportunity to make Bitcoin, lots and lots of Bitcoin.”

Chapter 104

Most of the people in the Oval Office that day had vaguely heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but we gave them a crash course in the so-called block-chain technology that underlies digital money and keeps trade in it relatively anonymous.

“A lot of very smart people think this is the radical future of money,” Director Sanford said. “So ask yourself: What would you do if you were Crowley and Bronson, two of those very smart people who think Bitcoin is the future, and you owned a huge e-sports company? Being entrepreneurs, you’re looking to the future, trying to tie your company to potentially radical change. What business would you want to be in? What business would it make sense to be in?”

No one in the room said anything. Sanford looked to me and nodded.

“Gambling,” I said.

“What?” the chief justice said.

“Consider these facts,” I said. “E-sports are the fastest growing participatory and spectator sport in the world. The only thing that isn’t happening there is what has happened with all other sports in the world: Betting. Wagering. Gambling.”

Carstensen said, “And now imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when you could bet on e-sports, all digitally, potentially from any computer in the world. And every smart-phone. And every tablet. And all of the betting is occurring via hard-to-trace Bitcoin.”

Director Sanford said, “We’re talking billions upon billions upon billions of untraceable dollars. If it had worked, Crowley and Bronson could have been among the wealthiest people on earth, if not the wealthiest.”

“Who would take such a chance?” the House minority leader said, disgusted.

“Two super-nerds, young brilliant dropouts with no social skills and zero empathy for their fellow man,” Carstensen said. “They see little difference between real-life humans and game avatars. They’re all expendable. And they believed that they were so good at game theory and design, at thinking their way through the ramifications of every possible move, that they could cover all their bases. Only they didn’t. Evidently, the first time Varjan, the Hungarian assassin, was contacted by them anonymously, she attached some kind of electronic bug to her reply that followed it to the source. She knew who they were from the start.”

“Fatal mistake on their part,” Mahoney said. “I mean, they were good enough hackers to know the itineraries of every one of their targets, but they missed her bug.”

The Senate majority leader said, “Idiots. Congress would never have allowed uncontrolled gambling like that.”

I shrugged. “Congress might have if the president thought it was a good idea.”

All around the Oval Office, brows knitted and then heads turned to look at President Talbot, who appeared puzzled. “What are you saying?”

“I said that, hypothetically, sir, if the president thought unfettered gambling on e-sports was a good idea, their scheme might have worked. Such a president could have lent his popularity and influence to see it through Congress, sold it as a way to bring in new sources of revenue to do governmental good.”

“Well, hypothetically or not, I don’t support anything like that,” Talbot said. “Never have. Never would.”

There was silence in the room.

Director Sanford ended it by saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but you must know that’s not true.”

The president raised his head and glared at Sanford. “How dare you tell me what I support and don’t.”

Carstensen said, “The Senate bill that would have allowed digital gambling as a means to collect tax revenues and so decrease the national debt. You’re familiar with it, aren’t you, Mr. President? You’re listed as a co-sponsor.”

Talbot laughed. “Young lady, do you know how many cockamamie bills a senator will cosign in a career? Hell, half the time you don’t know what it is you’re supporting. You’re just doing a colleague a favor. Making him look good.”

Sanford said, “So you don’t support digital gambling, sir?”

“I just said that, didn’t I?” Talbot snapped. “Frankly, I think this is outrageous. You don’t honestly think I colluded with these two clowns on the autism spectrum to overthrow the government just so they could make billions, do you?”

Chapter 105

There was another long, tense silence in the room, with everyone either looking at us or at Talbot.

I cleared my throat, said, “Well, sir. There’s also the presidency. The ultimate office. The dream of every senator. Even you, sir.”

“Bull turd,” Talbot sputtered. “I have never—” He laughed caustically and shook his head. “How in God’s name do you think this all happened? I mean, I became Senate president pro tempore by accident. My good friend and colleague Senator Jones — who was expected to recover just fine after his heart operation — died before he even got on the operating table. Explain that.”

Bree said, “Senator Walker was assassinated, sir, and if she hadn’t died, she’d have been in line to take Senator Jones’s place as Senate president pro tempore. Not you.”

His face reddened and tightened. “And who are you?”

“DC Metro chief of detectives Stone, sir,” Bree said. “I solved Senator Walker’s murder. And again, if Walker wasn’t dead, she would have been standing where you are now.”

“Exactly right, but so what?” Talbot said dismissively. “Arthur wasn’t killed. He just died. Things happen randomly.”

“They do sometimes,” I said. “But not in this case. Senator Jones did not just die. He was helped.”

Mahoney held up a photograph of Kristina Varjan in death. “We showed this picture to Senator Jones’s sister, who was in the room when he coded. We also showed it to the night nurse on the cardiac unit. Both women identified this assassin as the phlebotomist who was with the Senate president pro tempore shortly before his heart attack.”

I said, “Which put you behind Abraham Lincoln’s desk, sir. The most powerful man on earth. Capable of bestowing unfathomable wealth on a favored few.”

Talbot shook his head like a horse at biting flies. “This is not true. You will not find any tie between me and—”

The door to the Oval Office swung open. Samuel Larkin walked in.

“Larkin?” Talbot said, growing furious. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“I’m here to place you under arrest for treason,” the former acting president and attorney general said, unruffled. “I’ve seen the interrogations of Stapleton, Crowley, and Bronson. They all say it was your idea, cooked up the day after President Grant died. You and Bronson and Crowley were eating at a restaurant in Reno and talked out the whole thing.”

“That’s not true!” Talbot said.

“There’s security footage of you all together.”

“It’s fabricated! Fake news!”

“You’ll get your day in court to prove that. A lot more than your victims got,” Larkin said, nodding to Secret Service agent Reamer. “Arrest him.”

Reamer smiled, said, “With pleasure, Mr. President.”

“What?” Talbot shouted, backing up. “They’re giving the presidency back to you, Larkin? This is illegal! This is a coup!”

“I’ll be taking over temporarily,” Larkin said. “By all accounts, Harold Murphy is going to live and make a full recovery, thank God. The secretary of defense is the rightful successor to the office and will take over as soon as he’s physically able.”

“No!” Talbot said when the Secret Service agent came around the desk. He stormed over to the French doors that led to the west colonnade of the White House, threw them open, and stepped outside. He looked ready to try to make his escape, but he froze when two Marine MPs walked up and blocked his path.

“Stand aside,” Talbot said. “I’m your commander in chief!”

“Not anymore, you’re not,” Agent Reamer said from behind him, and he roughly snapped the cuffs on the former leader of the free world.

Chapter 106

Six days later, six riderless black horses clip-clopped down Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by six coffins on horse-drawn caissons, all draped in U.S. flags.

Once again, I stood with my family at the corner of Constitution and Louisiana. Well, most of my family. Damon had exams, and Bree had just been called away.

“I can’t get over this,” Nana Mama said as the funeral cortege approached. “Crowley and that Bronson, they didn’t think twice about taking all those brilliant lives to gain control of the presidency and make billions. Who thinks like that?”

“At least three people do,” Ali said.

“All it takes, I guess,” Jannie said. “If you can work the dark web.”

Later, during the eulogy he gave at the service for the fallen leaders at the National Cathedral, the acting president, Larkin, talked about the fragility of life. He also spoke of the strength and resiliency of our nation.

“The simple fact about our country that has been undervalued time and again is that we are by design a government that continues to function no matter the tragedy or turmoil,” Larkin said. “If you kill one of our leaders, another rises, and the country goes on. If you assassinate two, three, or even six of our leaders, there is a natural succession laid out by the Framers, and the country and the government go on.

“These gifted, patriotic men and woman who lie before us lived in service to the people, and I believe they did not die in vain,” he said. “They are martyrs, and I will always think of them as such, martyrs to the ideals of our country as laid out in our brilliantly conceived Constitution.”

I left the service thinking how right Larkin was. We had just endured one of the biggest upheavals in our country’s history, but life would continue. And America would go on trying to create a more perfect union of the people, by the people, and—

My cell phone buzzed. Bree.

“Funerals done?” she asked.

“They all left for Arlington a few minutes ago. Figured it was for family. I’m heading home.”

“Not so fast,” she said. “I need you to come see something. Right now.”

“I told Jannie we’d go for a run. Can’t it wait?”

“I’m sorry, baby, but no.”

She gave me an address in Foggy Bottom that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I called an Uber, and even with the traffic, I got there fifteen minutes later.

Bree met me outside an old restored town house with a freshly painted green door. “You’ve never been here, right?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. Why? Who lives here?”

“I’ll show you.”

She gave me blue booties and latex gloves. We walked inside a few feet to a steep narrow staircase. Bree went up it before I could look around.

I followed. We reached a narrow landing and entered a bedroom.

I took one look and felt my knees wobble.

My patient Nina Davis, Justice Department attorney and stalker of men, was naked and hanging by her neck from a rope tied through an eyebolt screwed into a beam above the bed. Her wrists were handcuffed in front of her. She had a red ball-gag strapped into her mouth. Her eyes were open, bulging, and dull.

Sprawled in an overstuffed chair to the right of the bed, Dr. Chad Winters wasn’t breathing either. His eyes were rolled up in his head, and his jaw sagged open. An Hermès silk scarf was cinched around his neck.

There were mirrors on the ceiling and above the headboard.

In scrawled lipstick on the mirror behind Nina Davis’s body, someone had written this:

I asked you to stop me, please, Alex Cross. And you didn’t. Now look what I’ve gone and done.—M.