James PATTERSON - Cross Fire

“What are you saying?” she snapped. “Brianna Stone, this woman I hardly even know, can pick my son up from school and I can’t? Half the teachers here still know who I am!”

“You’re not listening,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to squirm out of this or if she truly believed she was in the right. “What exactly were you planning to do with him anyway?”

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said dismissively. “I was going to call.”

“But you didn’t. Again.”

“When I got him out of school, I mean. We were going to go for ice cream, and he would have been home for dinner. Now he’s all confused and upset. It didn’t have to be this way, Alex.”

It was like listening to an out-of-tune piano. Everything just seemed a little off. Even her clothes. She was dressed to the nines today, in a fitted white linen suit, sling-back heels, and full makeup. In fact, she looked absolutely gorgeous. But who was she trying to impress?

I took a deep breath and tried again to get through to her.

“What happened to your conference?” I said.

For the first time, Christine looked away from me. She stared over at one of the bulletin boards in the hall. It was covered in crayon drawings of cars, planes, trains, and boats, with the word TRANSPORTATION in construction paper letters across the top.

“Did you see Ali’s?” she said, pointing at his sailboat. Of course I had seen it.

“Christine, look at me. Did you even have a conference?”

She crossed her arms and blinked several times as she met my eyes again.

“Well, what if I didn’t? Is it such a crime that I missed my son? That I thought he might want to see his mommy and daddy in the same room, just for once? God, Alex, what’s happened to you?”

It seemed as if there were an answer for everything here, except my questions. The only part I really trusted was that she loved and missed Ali. But that wasn’t enough.

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “We’re going to go get some ice cream. You can say your good-byes after that, and then you’ll see him again in July, like always. Anything else, and we’re going back to mediation. That’s a promise, Christine. Please don’t test me on this.”

To my surprise, she smiled. “Make it dinner. Just the three of us, and then I’ll get on my plane to Seattle like a good little girl. How’s that?”

“I can’t,” I said.

Her mouth tightened into a hard, straight line again. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

The answer was both, but before I could say anything else, the office door opened and there was Ali. He looked so all alone, and scared.

“When can we go?” he wanted to know.

Christine scooped him up just as she had the night before. To her credit, there was none of the thunderstorm in her eyes that I’d seen a second ago.

“Guess what, honey? We’re going to go out for some ice cream. You, me, and Daddy, right now. What do you think of that?”

“Can I get two scoops?” he asked right away.

I couldn’t help laughing – for real. “Always the broker, aren’t you, little man?” I said. “Yeah, two scoops. Why not?”

As we left the school, Ali took each of us by the hand, one on either side, and it was smiles all around. But it still wasn’t lost on me that Christine hadn’t committed to a thing.

BY THE TIME I finally got to the Hoover Building for my five thirty meeting, it was quarter after six. I signed in and took the elevator.

The Information Sharing and Analysis Center where Agent Patel worked could have been anywhere in corporate America, with its ugly tan-and-mauve cubicle maze, low ceiling tiles, and fluorescent box lights. The only tip-off was the endless computers, at least one internal and two outside machines at every desk. The real sci-fi-looking stuff – the enormous servers and surveillance banks – was elsewhere on the floor, behind closed doors.

Patel jumped when I knocked on the half wall of her work space.

“Alex! Jesus! You scared me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “And sorry I’m so late. I don’t suppose Agent Siegel’s still around?” I wasn’t keen to end my day with him, but in the name of collaboration, here I was.

“He got tired of waiting,” she said. “We’re supposed to meet him in the SIOC conference room.”

She called his extension and left a message that we were on our way, but when we got there – surprise, surprise – no Siegel. We waited a few more minutes and then started our meeting without him. Fine with me.

PATEL QUICKLY BROUGHT me up to speed on the True Press e-mails. Actually, there wasn’t that much to tell, at least not at this point in her investigation.

“Based on the header, the IP address, and what I got from the registry over at Georgetown, Jayson Wexler’s account was open and active at the time both messages were sent,” she told me.

“Which is not to say that Wexler sent them himself,” I said.

“Not at all. Just that they either originated from or somehow passed through his account.”

“Passed through?”

“It’s possible someone used an anonymous remailer from a remote location, but really they’d have no reason to. A stolen laptop that never turns up is a perfect dead end, forensically speaking. You’re better off looking for any witnesses to the theft itself.”

“We canvassed up, down, and sideways where Wexler claims the computer was taken,” I told her. “Didn’t get anywhere. And the closest surveillance cameras are DDOT’s, over on K Street. There’s nothing from the park at all. No one saw a thing – which is a little odd.”

Patel sat back, twiddling a pen between her fingers. “So should I keep going? Because there’s more bad news.”

I ran my hand over my mouth and jaw, an old tic of mine. “You’re just full of sunshine today, aren’t you?”

“Technically, this is Siegel’s piece, so you can’t hold it against me,” she said. I liked working with Patel. She seemed to keep her sense of humor no matter what, and the humor was dark and deep.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I can take whatever you’re dishing out here.”

“It’s about this ‘Patriot’ moniker they used in one of the e-mails. Ever since True Press ran the story, the name seems to have stuck, in a really scary way. We’ve got people at both ends of the spectrum foaming at the mouth, from the radical antiglobalization types all the way over to the hard-right survivalists. The Bureau’s already working up contingencies around the possibility of tribute killings.”

She ran a simple open-source search on her laptop. Less than a minute later, I was looking through pages of results – websites, blogs, vlogs, chat rooms, mainstream commentary, fringe press – all of it giving credence to the supposed “patriotism” behind these sniper murders.

I’d certainly seen this kind of thing before. Kyle Craig alone had legions of fans, or disciples, as he liked to call them. But Patel was right. This had the potential to be something else again – a whole grassroots movement of people who saw nothing less than America at stake, and nothing short of wholesale violence as the only solution with a chance of working.

“Best way to stir the crazy pot?” she said over my shoulder. “Wrap your dogma in an American flag and wait to see who bites. Like I said – scary.”

AROUND SEVEN THIRTY, Patel and I finally got up to go. As we did, though, she turned away from the door and toward me. The sudden look in her eyes was all but unmistakable – and it was scary in a whole other way.

“Have you ever had homemade chana masala?” she asked.