Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Schmidt said, “Preliminary results say you had plastic explosives in that bag with a frequency trigger set to trip at the phone’s ringtone. Where is the phone, by the way? We’d like to take it if possible.”

Mahoney said, “It’s already on its way to Quantico, but we will share everything with BATF as soon as we have it.”

Schmidt puffed up his cheeks and blew out his mouth. “Fair enough. It’s cooled down enough in there to look around if you want.”

We walked back to room 15. The walls were scorched and blackened. So was the ceiling. There was an inch of dark water on the floor.

The near twin bed had been thrown over. The mattress lay in the slurry, coated in soot. The mattress of the far bed, the one where the bag and phone had been, now had a gaping charred hole in it almost the entire width and three-quarters of the length.

I stared at the blast hole. So did Ned, who said, “Darn happy to be here, Alex.”

I nodded, still stunned and thanking my guardian angel for helping me put the phone, the bag, and Varjan’s words together fast enough to clear the room and survive. I felt humbled and then desperate to go home and be with my family.

But I overrode that desire with the need to do my job. I turned from the mattress and looked at a table lamp, bent and twisted on the floor, and then at the night table flipped over on its left flank. The right side was caved in and scorched. The drawer was closed.

Beside the table on the floor was an open and partially burned Gideon Bible.

I looked at the closed drawer. I supposed it was possible the blast had driven the open drawer shut. Or that Gideon Bible had been out before the blast. Had I seen it?

I didn’t remember. If it was out, why? Would a professional assassin like Varjan seek spiritual solace in a motel Bible?

After putting on gloves, I picked the Bible up. A charred chunk of pages fell out from the back. I flipped through the Bible but found nothing tucked in it.

I was about to set it aside when I noticed that soot from the burned pages had streaked and smudged across the mostly white inside of the Bible’s back cover. Then I noticed that the soot had raised the impression of letters there. An e and an r .

Someone had obviously scribbled on the front of the back page, and the pressure had gone through to the cover. I was about to set it aside to be bagged again, but then I thought, What if Varjan scribbled there?

What were the odds of that? Hundreds of people must have used the room in the past twelve months, let alone years.

Still, I did not want to leave any stone unturned. I broke off the charred edges of the pages that had fallen on the floor, crumbled the charring into dust, and spilled it around the two visible letters and across the page.

Words appeared, a stack of them:

Celes Chere

Prelim 2 sharp

Marstons, same

Gabriel, same

Conker 3

Conker? Below that, there were other letters but they were indistinct. A b and an i or a t and then a c . Or an o?

I had no idea when the words were written or what significance they held. I took a picture of the list with my phone and left the Bible for the criminalists to bag and analyze further.

“Not much here that wasn’t here before she planted the bomb,” said Schmidt, the ATF agent.

“This was a kill zone for her, nothing more,” Mahoney said. “But we’ve got her phone, and we’ll be inside it in hours.”

“Why the hell is she here?” Schmidt said. “Who the hell is she trying to kill?”

“Besides us?” I said. “No clue. But when we find her, I sure plan to ask.”

Kristina Varjan drove a beater Dodge sedan she’d bought off a lot in College Park. It had a shimmy in the front end and almost a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, so she kept on at one mile under the speed limit, heading up I-95 toward Atlantic City, New Jersey, and an Airbnb apartment she’d rented online.

Varjan had cut her hair shorter, spiked it, and bleached the tips blond. She’d changed into skinny jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket, and a long-sleeved Sex Pistols T-shirt. Her makeup was heavy on the mascara. She’d pierced her own nose the night before, and her upper right lip and tongue too.

When she glanced at herself in the rearview, she looked nothing like Martina Rodoni, the fashionable European in for a week of sightseeing. Now she was Elena Wolfe, rebellious nonconformist over from Great Britain to play a few games.

Varjan shifted. She was sick of sitting, especially in this seat. She’d sat in it for almost two days, watching the Happy Pines Motel from well down the street.

She’d almost quit her surveillance the evening before, tried to tell herself that thirty-six hours watching her back trail was enough, that she’d been wrong, that she hadn’t seen the CIA op she’d fought with in Istanbul standing in the line for security at Dulles only minutes after her own arrival in the U.S.

Take off, Varjan had thought. You’re good. Get your game on. Leave everything else behind you.

Varjan had almost driven to the Happy Pines to retrieve the bomb, check out, and carry on with her more pressing plans. But some difficult voice in her head insisted she’d been spotted and that she needed to keep up her vigil.

The difficult voice had proved to be the right one.

What happened then had been reflexive, nothing she could have controlled. She hadn’t meant to blow the bomb unless that CIA agent, Edith, was with them. But then that guy who’d answered the phone, he’d known her real name.

He called me Kristina, Kristina Varjan.

The very words made Varjan feel exposed and angry, made her want to lash out. She preferred to go through life playing roles, only rarely showing her true self to anyone and never using her given name in any context.

But that man had known her. He’d used her real name!

And then it had been reflexive. Uncontrollable. She’d set off the bomb.

Varjan understood she needed to inform Piotr, or whatever his real name was, and explain the situation.

However, maybe the less he knew, the better. Given the contracts he’d assigned her the day before, she understood that any weakness would likely change their arrangement and make her a target for elimination at some point in the near future.

That was too complicated. That was just too much to handle while trying to execute multiple plays as fast as possible.

No, Varjan decided as she passed the exit for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. She’d keep her employer in the dark, get the jobs done, collect, and then vanish once and for all.

What was Varjan up to?

That question and others like it ran laps in my head as I got out of an Uber at my house. The sun had set. The lights glowed in the front room. So did the big screen, which was tuned to the news.

I climbed the front steps, thanking my Savior once again.

When I opened the door, I heard Bree cry, “Alex?”

“Dad!” Ali shouted.

They all came running to the front hall, Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama too. Bree had tears in her eyes. “It’s so good... you’re here.”

I hugged her, kissed her, whispered in her ear, “I’ll always be here.”

She squeezed me tight, then stood back while I hugged my daughter, son, and grandmother.

“The local news says an assassin set off the bomb, a lady assassin,” Ali said.

Jannie said, “They showed her picture. Did you see her, Dad?”

“No,” I said. “But she saw us. She called the phone for the first time after we were in the room, so we figure she had to have been in range, watching, when she made the second call to trigger the bomb.”