James PATTERSON - Cross Fire

At the evidence tent, the whole world was waiting for us. Outside, there was a crowd of cops and agents, including most of Tambour’s unit from NSID. Inside, we found Chief Perkins, Jim Heekin from the Directorate, Max Siegel, various assistant chiefs from MPD and assistant SACs from the Bureau, and a few reps from ATF. Jerger looked around at the sea of expectant faces and then dove right in as if she and I were the only ones there.

Each of the four slugs was bagged separately on a long folding table. Three of them were in relatively good shape; the fourth was badly mangled, for obvious reasons.

“Well, they’re definitely rifle shot,” Jerger said right away. “But these weren’t fired from an M110 like the previous incidents.”

She took a pair of tongs off the table and plucked one of the good slugs from its bag. Then she used a magnifier from her pocket to look at the base.

“Yeah, I thought so, .338,” she said. “And see this ‘L’ stamped here? That tells me it’s an original Lapua Magnum. They were developed specifically for long-range sniping.”

“Can you get any kind of weapon report off of these?” I asked her.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Depends. I’ll look for rifling patterns back at the lab, but I have to tell you ahead of time – these puppies have some pretty tough jackets on them. Striations are going to be minimal.”

“How about first impressions?” I asked. “We’re really in a jam here.”

Jerger took a deep breath. I don’t think she liked speculating. Her job was all about precision.

“Well, outside of equipment failure, I don’t know what the motivation would be for coming off an M110 and using something else.”

She held up another evidence bag and looked at it. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. This is damn fine ammo, but in terms of long-range shooting, the 110’s a Rolls-Royce, and everything else is just… well, everything else.”

“So you think this was a different gunman?” Chief Perkins asked, probably leading her more than he should.

“I’m saying it would be kind of strange if it wasn’t, that’s all. I don’t know the shooter’s motivations. As for the weapon itself, I can tell you that some possibilities are more likely than others.”

“Such as?” I asked.

She rattled them right off. “M24, Remington 700, TRG-42, PGM 338. Those are some of the most common applications, militarily anyway.” Then she looked right at me, with a grim kind of smile on her face. “There’s also the Bor. Ever heard of it?”

“Should I have?” I said.

“Not necessarily,” she said, and continued to stare at me. “Just that it would be a really weird coincidence. The .338 variant on that one’s called an Alex Rifle.”

KYLE CRAIG WORE a ridiculous grin on his face – on Max Siegel’s face – all the way home to Second Street. He couldn’t help himself. In his entire career and all of its incarnations, he’d never had such a good time as tonight.

Big kudos went to Agent Jerger for picking up on the Alex Rifle reference, and so quickly!

Maybe the Bureau still had a few sharp knives in the drawer after all. These arcane little clues of his had become something of a hallmark, but to actually be there when one of them was discovered? A unique thrill, to say the least. A total blast.

But also just a prelude. This little drama down by the river was the “one” in a one-two punch that nobody was going to see coming – and no one would feel more than Alex when it landed.

Brace yourself, my friend. It’s on the way!

Kyle checked his watch as he closed the front door behind him. It was only twelve thirty, and the sun didn’t come up for hours. There was still plenty of time for what he had to get done.

FIRST THINGS FIRST, he unlocked the basement door and let himself down the narrow stairs to the cinder-block-walled workshop underneath the house. It wasn’t exactly his father’s old walnut-paneled den, with the twelve-foot fireplace and rolling ladders, but it did the trick and would work just as well. A big bulkhead door at the back had allowed him to bring down a new chest freezer the other day, and he went to it now.

Agent Patel was sleeping peacefully inside. She still looked basically like herself, but she’d grown quite stiff, which seemed fitting. The girl had been pretty much the same way when she was alive.

“Ready for a change of scenery, my dear?”

He lifted her out and laid her on a sheet of four-millimeter painter’s plastic to loosen up while he went about his other business. It reminded him of his not so dear but very much departed mother, Miriam – the way she used to leave a frozen tray of pork chops or a flank steak on the counter in the morning so it would be ready to cook up for dinner that night. He couldn’t say the old girl never taught him anything useful.

Next, he tackled the walls. Dozens of new photos were taped up alongside the old, the result of several mind-numbing days of additional surveillance on Cross’s movements. Not the most stimulating part of the process so far, but it had certainly paid off.

Here were Alex Cross and John Sampson, working the scene of that wonderfully twisted new case in Franklin Square.

And there was Alex with his son Ali, and the mother, Christine, who seemed to have brought quite a bit of Sturm und Drang of her own to the table.

It all came down now – every picture, every map, every clipping he’d collected since coming to Washington. None of it was necessary anymore. He’d committed it all to memory. And besides – now was the time to get the details out of his head and really start to fly!

Once upon a time, Kyle knew, he would have wanted – no, needed – to have this thing mapped out down to the finest details. But that wasn’t true anymore. Now his options just hung there in the air, like so many pieces of fruit waiting to be picked.

Maybe the final narrative went something like this: Alex wakes up on the bathroom floor, the knife still in his hand. He gets up, disoriented, and stumbles into the bedroom to find Bree gutted in their bed. When he runs to check on the children, it’s more of the same. The grandmother, too. Alex can’t remember a thing, not even how he got home that night. Flash forward a year or two, and he’s learning all about the unique hell that is maximum-security lockup, festering in his own innocence while the walls close in around him a little more every day.

Or – maybe not.

Maybe he’d take Alex out definitively, once and for all. Good old-fashioned torture and murder, not to mention getting to actually watch Cross die, had considerable appeal, too.

In the meantime, there was no specific hurry to decide the final option. His only job for now was to breathe Max Siegel’s air, stay open to the possibilities, and focus on whatever was right in front of him.

And, at the present moment, that was Agent Patel.

When he went back to check on her, she was just starting to soften up around the edges. All well and good. By the time she started putting up any kind of smell, he’d be rid of her.

“Fun while it lasted, roomie,” he said, and leaned down to give her a chaste good-bye kiss on the lips. Then he rolled his departing guest into a standard white body bag and zipped her up for transport.

ANOTHER EARLY MORNING, and another phone call from Sampson. This time, I wasn’t even out of bed. “Listen, sugar, I know you had a hell of a night out on the parkway, but I thought you’d want to know. We just got another body in this numbers case.”

“Great timing,” I said, still flat on my back with Bree’s arm slung over my chest.