James PATTERSON: Cross Country

He opened a glass-fronted cooler and took out a can of Coke. “Anyone thirsty? Two dollars.”

“I’ll take one,” Glazer said. He cupped a couple of bills into Ramirez’s hand, and they didn’t look like singles.

Then Glazer turned to me. “And I will collect from you too. Count on it.”

“Africans,” Ramirez repeated as we headed toward the door, “from Africa.”

THIS WAS THE last place I wanted to be in DC, or probably anyplace else.

So unbelievably sad, and eerie, and tragic. So many memories rising to the surface for me.

Ellie’s office was up on the second floor of the house in Georgetown. It was as tidy and meticulously organized as I remembered her being back when we thought we might love each other.

A copy of Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man was open on the arm of an easy chair. I’d liked the autobiography and remembered that Ellie and I had similar tastes in books, music, and politics.

The shades were all drawn to exactly the same height. The desk held an iMac, a phone, an appointment book, and a few family photos in silver frames. The room felt strange compared with the downstairs of the house, which had been ransacked by the killers last night.

I started with Ellie’s appointment book and then went on to the desk drawers. I wasn’t sure yet what I was looking for, only that I’d had to come back here with a clearer head than I’d had last night.

I booted up Ellie’s computer and went into her e-mail- checking the in-box, sent items, and deleted folders, working backward in time. I was trying to get as close as possible to the moment of the murders. Had Ellie known the killers?

The first thing to catch my attention was a note from an editor at Georgetown University Press. It concerned her completion schedule for “the new book.”

Ellie had a new book coming out? I knew she was on the history faculty at Georgetown, but I didn’t know much more than that. We had seen each other at a few charity events during the past fifteen years or so, but that was about it. She was married, I wasn’t for much of that time, and that fact can sometimes cut down contact and communication.

I ran her name through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and found three book titles. Each had something to do with African sociopolitics. The most recent one, Critical Juncture , had been published four years ago.

So where was the new book? Was there a partial manuscript I could read?

I swiveled around to look over the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that took up two entire walls of the office. Ellie had hundreds of volumes here, mixed in with a collection of awards and citations.

Kids’ artwork and framed photos covered the rest of the space.

Then all of a sudden I was looking at a picture of myself.

IT WAS AN old snapshot from our college days. I remembered the time as soon as I saw it. Ellie and I were sitting on a blanket on the National Mall. We had just finished finals. I had a summer internship lined up at Sibley Memorial, and I was falling in love for the first time. Ellie told me that she was too. In the photograph, we were smiling and hugging one another, and it looked as if we could be that way forever.

Now here I was in her house, responsible for Ellie in a way I never could have imagined.

I let myself stare nostalgically at the picture for a few more seconds, then forced myself to move on, to come back to the present mess.

It didn’t take long to find three hundred typed pages of a manuscript titled Deathtrip . The subtitle on the title page read Crime as a Way of Life, of Doing Business, in Central Africa .

A copy of a plane ticket had been inserted in the manuscript. The ticket was round-trip from Washington to Lagos, Nigeria. Ellie had returned from there two weeks ago.

I looked through the index at the back of the manuscript and found a listing for “Violence, African Style,” and a subhead, “Family Massacre.”

I turned to the relevant manuscript page and read:

“There are gang leaders for hire all through Nigeria and especially in Sudan. These brutal men and their groups – often made up of boys as young as ten – have an unlimited appetite for violence and sadism. A favorite target is entire families, since that spreads both news and fear the farthest. Families are massacred in their huts and shacks, and even boiled in oil, a trademark of a few of the worst gang leaders.”

I decided to take the partial manuscript with me to get it copied. I wanted to read everything that Ellie had written.

Was this what had gotten her killed – her book?

Next, I stared for a long time at a striking, poignant picture of Ellie, her husband, and their three beautiful children.

All dead now.

Murdered right here in their home. At least they hadn’t been boiled in oil.

I took one more look at the photo of the two of us on the National Mall. Young and in love, or whatever it was that we were feeling.

“Ellie, I’ll do what I can for you and your family. I promise you that.”

I left the house, thinking, What did you find in Africa?

Did somebody follow you back?

EVERYBODY THERE KNEW there was trouble, but no one knew what kind or how bad it was.

A dark green panel van had screeched to a stop in front of a low-level mosque in Washington called Masjid Al-Shura. More than one hundred fifty peaceful congregants were crowding the sidewalk in front.

Even so, the very moment Ghedi Ahmed saw the gunmen scrambling out of the van, saw their gray hoodies, their black face masks and jaunty sunglasses, he knew they had come for him. They were just boys – the Tiger’s boys.

The first gunshots were aimed into the sky. Just warnings. Men and women screamed, and some scurried back into the mosque.

Others flattened themselves on the sidewalk, shielding their children’s bodies as best they could.

His hands held high, Ghedi Ahmed made his decision and moved away from his family. Better to die alone than to take them with me, he was thinking, shaking like a leaf now.

He hadn’t gotten far when he heard his wife, Aziza, scream, and he realized what a terrible mistake he’d made. “Ghedi! Ghedi!” He turned as the wild boys carried, then threw, Aziza into the waiting van. And then – his children! They were taking the children, too! All four of them were hustled into the van.

Ghedi reversed direction quickly, and now he was screaming, more loudly than anyone in the crowd, even more than Aziza.

A courageous man from the congregation took a swing at one of the kidnappers. The boy yelled, “Dog!” and shot the man in the face. Then he fired again, where the man lay spread-eagled and already dying on the sidewalk.

Another bullet took down an elderly woman just as Ghedi pushed past her.

The next shot found his leg, and running became falling. Then two of the boys snatched him up off the ground and threw him into the van with his family.

“The children! Not our children!” sobbed Aziza.

“Where are you taking us?” Ghedi screamed at the kidnappers. “Where?”

“To Allah,” came the answer from the driver, the Tiger himself.

THE MYSTERY WAS deepening and getting worse each day, but much of Washington didn’t seem to care, probably because this one happened in Southeast, and only black people were killed.

Lorton Landfill is the final destination for much of Washington’s garbage. It is two hundred and fifty acres of foul and disgusting refuse, so we were fortunate the bodies had been found at all. I drove the Mercedes in through valleys of trash that rose thirty feet high on either side. I continued on to where the response team was parked around an orange-and-white DC sanitation truck. The gauze masks they’d provided Bree and me at the gate didn’t do much against the nauseating smell.