Джеймс Паттерсон - Criss Cross

What if Ali came up here and looked around in the files? What if he took them to his room and is studying them? How perceptive can a ten-year-old be?

But then I lifted up an old army blanket and found them, four boxes, each marked m.e.

Part of me wanted to lower the army blanket back over the Mikey Edgerton files and leave them alone, just as I had for years. But the idea of Ali finding the files forced me to put the blanket aside and grab the boxes.

When they were restacked next to my desk, I considered what to do with them. Why did I even still have them? I should have burned them all years ago, turned the secrets in those files to smoke and ash.

But I had not.

John Sampson had done that with his. He told me so two months after Edgerton’s conviction, said he took them to a friend’s cabin in the Poconos and fed the files one by one into a roaring fire. Put it all behind him.

Try as I might, I couldn’t do it, although I couldn’t have said exactly why.

Something had stopped me from destroying the evidence of guilt as well as the evidence of innocence in those boxes. It wasn’t shame or contrition on my part, because I felt none whatsoever when it came to Mikey Edgerton.

So what was it?

I stared at the boxes and told myself to go back to sleep. But deep inside, another voice was telling me there might be answers in the boxes, clues that could lead me to M.

Or doom me .

Once I’d thought that, there was no pushing ahead. I threw the blanket over the boxes and left.

CHAPTER 32

MY CELL PHONE BUZZED, SNAPPINGme awake. I picked it up and saw a Northern Virginia area code and an unfamiliar number. I thought about letting the call go to voice mail, but then I answered. “Alex Cross.”

“Mr. Cross, this is Captain Arthur Abrahamsen. I hope you don’t mind that Ali shared your number with me.”

“Not at all,” I said, sitting up. “How can I help, Captain?”

“Ali has been asking to go on rides with me, but honestly, sir, the training runs scheduled over the next few weeks will be tough on me, let alone on a ten-year-old.”

“I pretty much told him that,” I said.

“Sure, and thank you, sir. But, anyway, I mentioned Ali to a friend of mine, and he pointed me to a kids’ riding group called Wild Wheels. You can look them up on the web. There are several chapters locally, one of them geared toward mountain bikers. I was thinking, with your permission, I could go to one of their evening rides with Ali. That way we could kill two birds with one stone—he gets to go for a ride with me, and he gets introduced to more age-appropriate friends and training partners for the future.”

“I appreciate that. Let me take a look at the website and show it to him,” I said. “But it sounds as if he’d like it. Especially riding with you.”

Abrahamsen laughed. “He’s a ball of fire.”

“He is that,” I said. “And thank you for taking an interest in him.”

“It’s the least I can do for someone with as much passion for the sport as Ali has. Next Wild Wheels ride is Thursday, seventeen hundred hours, in Rock Creek, which works for me. I’m on recovery that day, training-wise.”

“Okay, we’ll get back to you.”

“Look forward to it,” he said, and he said goodbye and hung up.

I looked at the phone for a moment, then looked over and saw Bree’s side of the bed was empty. I glanced at the clock and groaned. It was almost nine.

But before I got up myself, I called Ned Mahoney. “Do me a favor?” I asked.

“Depends.”

“Can you run a U.S. Army captain named Arthur Abrahamsen? Works as a liaison between the Pentagon and the Hill.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Abrahamsen’s a big road racer, sponsored by the military, and he’s taken an interest in Ali. I just want to make sure he is who he says he is.”

“For you, Alex, anything,” Mahoney said.

I took a shower and was dressing when my phone rang.

“U.S. Army captain Arthur Abrahamsen, defense intelligence liaison to the House Armed Services Committee. West Point graduate. Two tours in Afghanistan. Heck of a bicycle racer. Your kid’s lucky he’s taken an interest.”

“Thanks, Ned.”

“What are uncles for?” he said and hung up.

I put on my shoes, feeling a little down. I appreciated someone of Captain Abrahamsen’s caliber helping Ali, and I’d had male coaches and teachers who’d been big influences on me. But there was also a certain sadness in realizing that Ali, my baby boy, was moving to a time where he’d rely on me for guidance less and less.

My cell phone rang again. This time it was Keith Karl Rawlins.

“The Ethereum stopped moving,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Where is it?”

“In two hundred and fourteen accounts spread out all over the world. Some of it has been downloaded to so-called hard wallets, but I have the codes for them. Not a Bitcoin of it has been spent, though. As far as I can tell.”

“So it’s just sitting there?”

“Correct.”

“We know who owns the accounts?”

“Shell companies of one sort or another. I haven’t been getting far in that regard. But I might have something else for you. There’s an idea I’ve been toying with, and I wanted your input. Can you come to the lab at Quantico?”

CHAPTER 33

LESS THAN THIRTY HOURS AFTERI spoke to Rawlins, John Sampson was driving us down a winding backcountry road in western Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, not far from the village of Graves Mill. I had an iPad in my lap and was studying an OnX Maps app that showed the land on both sides of the road, the property boundaries, and the names of the properties’ owners.

We’d gone past a couple of new subdivisions before entering farmland interrupted by fingers of timber spilling out of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Beautiful country,” Sampson said.

“Perfect place for a troll to build his troll hole.”

“Mahoney said he calls it an anthill.”

“I read the reports. Sounds more troll than ant to me. His property line is coming up in a mile.”

“Left or right?” Sampson said.

“Right side for three miles and west all the way to Shenandoah National Park. It’s a big piece. Seven hundred and fifty-some acres.”

“He’s got the money to do whatever he wants.”

“And get away with it,” I said.

It was the money, almost thirty million by some estimates, that had brought the landowner to our attention. Or at least, the money was part of what made him stand out for us. Or what helped us sift him out from the others.

Not long ago, it had felt like our investigation had ground to a halt. Then I’d gotten that call from Keith Karl Rawlins.

When I got to Quantico, the FBI contractor asked me if I’d done a behavioral profile of M. The question surprised me because, strangely, I had not, even though creating those kinds of profiles was what I had done at the FBI.

Why hadn’t I considered doing a profile before?

Before I could come up with an answer, Rawlins proposed writing an algorithm designed to sift for the kind of person M most likely was, based on my behavioral assessment. But he added that he didn’t want me to do the assessment the way I normally did.

Instead, the computer wizard asked me, John, and Ned to create a string of search words that described our suspect in as much detail as possible. We did, starting with wealthy .

Given the scope of what we believed M had been involved in, including tracking down and killing the human traffickers, the three of us agreed that he had to be rich. But why would he ask for ransom for Mrs. Jenkins? We couldn’t answer that but left the wealthy filter in there nonetheless. Cold-blooded was another term we wrote down, along with forward-thinking and amoral .