Джеймс Паттерсон - The People vs. Alex Cross

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

The ATV was equipped with a heavy-duty muffler, so the engine barely made any noise as I drove on the two-track deeper and deeper into the estate.

Edgars’s side-by-side was no more than three or four minutes in front of me. I couldn’t see tracks in the frozen mud, but the leaves were broken and shiny where it had passed.

Snowflakes hit my face. With my free hand, I tugged out the radio and turned it up. There was no longer screeching coming over it, just a dense hiss.

“This is Alex Cross,” I said. “Copy?”

Out of the static, I heard clicking and fragments of an unfamiliar voice. I turned it off, stuffed it back in my coat, tried my cell. No service.

The snow flurries turned to thick heavy flakes.

They’re going to get away, I thought. The sadistic bastards are going to get away.

There was an intersection ahead, and I stopped. The snow covered the leaves, making it impossible for me to say which way Edgars had taken Gretchen Lindel.

I tried to recall the satellite view of the property. The shed and the wounded HRT agent were somewhere to my left. The knoll at the rear of the property — where Mahoney had sent four agents — was somewhere straight ahead of me. That unidentified smudge on the satellite picture was down the right fork in the trail.

I went with my instincts, twisted the ATV throttle, and went right. The snow slapped my face, got in my eyes, and forced me to drive at a crawl.

Ten minutes later, the snow squall ended as abruptly as it had started. I rolled downhill to a wide, shallow, iced-over creek, seeing where Edgars’s machine had broken up the ice. My instincts were dead-on. I drove across the creek, noticing the sky brightening in the east.

How far ahead were they? Were those four people back in that booby-trapped building all dead? The HRT guys said they hadn’t moved when the booby trap went off. Or was Edgars taking Gretchen to where he had the other blondes stashed?

One hundred yards beyond the creek crossing, I lost the tracks and drove on through virgin snow to a turnabout walled in by pines. A dead end.

But Edgars had come this way. I was positive. That ice had absolutely been freshly broken, and those tracks...

I drove back, shining the headlights on the crossing, seeing ice covering the creek upstream. I used my flashlight to look downstream. The ice there had been broken up to where the stream disappeared beneath a steep embankment, eight, maybe ten feet high, and covered with green and tan vegetation frosted with new snow.

Where the hell had they gone? I couldn’t imagine any machine climbing straight up the side of that wall of...

I looked closer at the embankment. Green plants? That was impossible. The leaves had fallen. The ferns were dead.

I drove into the creek and rolled slowly to the embankment, headlights on and my flashlight playing around. Even through the frosting of snow, I could see I hadn’t been looking at plants but at thin strips of dull green, gray, and brown cloth, thousands of pieces sewn into a huge swath of camouflage fabric that hung from a stout length of black metal bolted into the rocks above me.

I grabbed the radio again and turned it on. The static was weaker. I triggered the transmit button, said, “This is Alex Cross, come back.”

Almost immediately a garbled, oddly familiar voice answered.

“Batra?” I said.

The voice replied, but I couldn’t understand a word.

I said, “Repeat, this is Alex Cross. I am in pursuit of Edgars, who has Gretchen Lindel. I am somewhere in the northeast quadrant of the estate.”

The voice came back even more garbled.

I almost stuffed the radio in my pocket but then had a moment of inspiration and said, “If you can hear me, track me by Find My iPhone.”

I put away the radio that time, traded it for my service weapon. Staring at the camouflage curtain, I hesitated, anxious about what might be waiting on the other side. I killed the headlights, teased the throttle. The bumper touched the fabric and then ripped apart the Velcro that had been keeping it closed.

I held my pistol in my left hand, rested the barrel on the handlebar, eased off the safety, gave the throttle more gas, and went through into darkness.

Bree gaped at the smoking Uzi machine pistol mounted on a thin metal post inside the open cabinet. A long banana clip hung below the gun, too big for just ten or fifteen shots.

Mahoney coughed and shifted. The gun pivoted his way, and she saw the thin scarlet line of the laser sight fixed to its barrel pass six inches over the wounded agent’s head. It stopped.

“What the hell’s going on?” Sampson whispered, crawling up beside her.

She pulled back, said, “Remote-control Uzis. Unless...”

Bree peeked around the corner again, flashed the light at the machine pistol and the cabinet, looking for a camera.

Mahoney groaned and shifted, and the couch moved, hitting a table behind it. The lamp on the table wobbled.

The Uzi opened up again, that same left-to-right, right-to-left spray of bullets; it cut the lamp in half, and then the gunfire continued on toward the kitchen. Bree looked up after the shooting stopped, saw that the slugs had hit some of the same things they’d hit during the first barrage.

No, she took that back. They had ripped into the exact same things at the exact same height .

“No one’s operating that gun, Ned!” Bree shouted. “I think there’s a motion detector involved. See it?”

“No,” he grunted, sounding weaker.

An agent yelled down from upstairs that he had to move his wounded men.

“The whole place is booby-trapped!” Sampson yelled. “Hold your position!”

“One’s critical! He’ll die if we don’t move him!”

“You’ll all die if you come down those stairs,” Bree shouted as she wriggled back past Sampson and crawled to a low line of untouched cabinets next to the stainless-steel stove.

She looked in three cabinets before she finally found the items she wanted. She grabbed them and scooted back to Sampson.

“What’s with the cookie sheets?” he asked.

“Motion,” Bree said, then she called out, “Ned, if you can, get down.”

She flung one of the cookie sheets over the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area.

The Uzi lit up, rattling bullets left to right, right to left again. She threw another cookie sheet and then a third before the action of the machine pistol locked open, the breech and barrel smoking hot.

She stood up cautiously, saw Ned lying on his side by the couch. His eyes were open but glassy, and his breathing looked shallow.

“We’re clear!” she shouted to the FBI agents upstairs as she ran to Mahoney. “Get your men out!”

Kneeling by Alex’s old FBI partner, Bree refused to cry. “You with me, Ned? Talk to me.”

Mahoney nodded and blinked. “Gut shot.”

“I can see that.”

Sampson came up behind her. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital, and the jamming’s still going on.”

“Help me get him up,” Bree said.

They lifted Ned to his feet. Mahoney passed out from the pain, becoming deadweight, and Sampson got him up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Bree ran in front of him to the front door and stepped out into the falling snow, shouting, “Alex? Agent Batra?”

A flashlight went on. Keith Rawlins called timidly, “Just me, Chief Stone.”

Sampson came out the door with Mahoney over his shoulder.

The snow fell in big flakes and coated the pavers as they hustled across the courtyard to the Tahoe Mahoney had driven into the estate. Rawlins stood outside it, looking as bedraggled as a cat in the rain.