Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

When no dogs had barked after five minutes, they moved quickly forward to their chosen hides. Mary lay belly-down behind her rifle at 2:40 a.m. mountain time, almost ninety minutes before first light. Her husband laid a rectangle of camouflage material over her, from her boots to her head, where it draped across the top of her telescopic sight.

“Good?” he muttered.

“Real solid,” she said. “Night-night.”

“I’ll wake you.”

“Mmm,” his wife said.

Potter set up less than a foot away, got beneath another length of camouflage cloth, and put the Ozonics out in front of him downwind. He got behind his rifle, settled, and heard Mary rhythmically breathing. He still marveled at his wife’s ability to shut the world off at will and find refuge in catnaps that almost always made her sharper.

A match made in heaven, he thought, closing his own eyes. I still believe that.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned, my mind working in circles. Each trip through the puzzling events of the past week, cycling over and over, made me anxious and stirred up a metallic taste at the back of my throat.

That taste is a sure sign that you’re going to throw up or that you’re so tense you’re burning adrenaline. At four twenty a.m., I said good-bye to any notion of real sleep and got up slowly and quietly so as not to wake Bree.

She’d had a tough day and was back to making little headway in the Senator Walker murder investigation while dealing with Chief Michaels, who was renewing pressure on her.

I eased into our closet, shut the door, and turned on the light. Three minutes later, dressed in long underwear, FBI sweats, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, I shut the bedroom door behind me.

I stood there a moment at the head of the stairs, aware of the ticking of the furnace, the hum of the fan in Jannie’s room, and the squeak of a mattress in Ali’s. Behind the near door, I could hear Nana Mama’s gently rasping breathing.

Those familiar noises calmed me as I walked down to the front hall, where I put on a black watch cap, a headlamp, a windbreaker with reflective stripes front and back, and a pair of thin wool gloves. Outside, it was a clear, moonless night. The temperature hovered just above freezing, and I could see clouds of my breath while I went through some ballistic stretches.

At four forty, I turned on the headlamp, jogged down the stairs to the sidewalk, and took off at an ambitious pace toward Capitol Hill. I hoped vigorous physical activity would take my mind off that vicious circle of incidents, thoughts, and half-baked theories that had been plaguing me since Ned Mahoney and I left Atlantic City.

But no such luck. By the time I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and started chugging uphill toward the Capitol, they were back again. This time the facts, memories, and ideas flipped through my brain in near chronological order.

Senator Betsy Walker is ambushed and shot by a pro just feet from her front door. Shortly after Walker’s murder, Kristina Varjan, known assassin, enters the country with a fake passport and is spotted by a CIA operative.

Carl Thomas, the medical-equipment salesman from Pittsburgh, is found hours later and a few blocks away, garroted to death in an Airbnb. Access to his files is blocked by Scotland Yard.

Fernando Romero, sworn enemy of Senator Walker, drives cross-country to make a pile of Benjamins, gets caught in a snowstorm the night of Walker’s murder, and drives on into Washington only to die in a firefight with police.

Sergeant Nick Moon, one of the toughest, most skilled martial artists I’ve ever known, is killed in a hand-to-hand fight by another professional not two hours south.

Varjan tries to blow up me and Mahoney. Then she appears dressed in a costume at a video-gamers’ extravaganza. Was she going to be a contestant?

I tried to discount that idea, but then thought, Maybe she’s good at the game.

But then why set off a smoke bomb? She had to have recognized me somehow and was using it as diversion to make her escape.

But why? Why would she do that? She’d already gotten away from me. Why didn’t she just leave the building?

I thought about Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, how rattled they’d been to hear that a bomber, assassin, and fugitive from justice had been a registered contestant. They’d promised to turn over their data from all entries into the tournament.

As I ran between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building, heading north toward Independence Avenue, none of it made any clear sense. The circular thinking started again, upsetting me, and I ran faster, picking up the pace to a virtual sprint. Pumping my arms, lengthening my stride, I reached Independence and was going to run downhill all the way to Union Station before turning back toward home.

But then, right there at the corner of Constitution Avenue, just north of the Supreme Court Building and the Library of Congress, I was hit with a sense of foreboding so strong that I came to a full stop and stood there panting, sweat pouring off my brow and trickling down my back. I was overheated, but I shivered so hard my headlamp beam slashed back and forth, and my teeth chattered.

I looked down the hill and in my mind I saw the riderless black horse from President Catherine Grant’s funeral procession. It was so real, I could hear the stallion’s hooves clopping.

I’m not much for premonitions or gut instincts. For me, for the most part, it’s all about the facts and the way they fit together or don’t.

Standing there, however, sweating and shivering in the cold in the middle of the night and seeing that black horse so vividly in my mind, there was no denying the ominous sense I felt all around me. I couldn’t point to its source, and then, suddenly, I could.

Kristina Varjan. Senator Walker’s sniper. The gangbanger Romero. The strangled guy, Thomas. And Sergeant Moon’s killer.

What if they were all connected? What if every one of them was a professional assassin, including Thomas, the one Scotland Yard was keeping under wraps? What if they were cooperating? What if someone was directing them?

The sense of menace and apprehension kept building the more I thought about those questions, and finally I decided that a prudent man had to go forward on the assumption they were all trained professional killers.

Five professional killers, maybe more, and they were all within a hundred miles of Washington, DC. What they were here for was unclear, but the fact that one of them might have assassinated a U.S. senator came front and center in my thoughts.

This isn’t over .

I heard horse hooves in my memory and felt at a deep gut level that something bad was about to happen. Something very bad.

I pivoted and started sprinting back home.

I could feel the threat in my muscles and in my bones.

At 4:30 A.M., Pablo Cruz encountered heavy security at the Washington, DC, arena that was the main venue for the World Youth Congress, which was opening that morning.

Cruz had shaved his head and the goatee and wore a blue work coverall embroidered with the DC arena’s logo. He carried a District of Columbia driver’s license and an arena employee ID card that identified him as Kent Leonard, a member of the setup and maintenance crew assigned to work the three-day event.

Cruz put thirty dollars, a cheap wristwatch, a key ring, reading glasses, sunglasses, a pack of gum, and three alcohol wipes in small foil packages in a tray and then turned to a U.S. Secret Service agent standing there. He gestured to his ears.

In a nasal, almost Donald Duck voice, he said, “I’m wearing bilateral hearing aids. Do I take them out?”