Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

“I’m telling you, something brutal is going to happen in the District, maybe today.”

I could see her getting more frustrated by the moment. “What do you want me to do? Put all my detectives on the streets? Ask Michaels to double the shift? Put every cop on patrol because your gut says so?”

“That would be a start,” I said.

She threw up her hands. “Well, I’m not in a position to do that.”

“You should at least tell Michaels.”

“Tell him what? That a consultant to the department wants a small army to take over the District of Columbia because of a gut feeling?”

I could see I was getting nowhere fast. “Okay,” I said, heading toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To my office to see what patients I can cancel and then to find Mahoney to see if he can understand what I’m saying.”

“Alex,” Bree said as I opened the door. “Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

I felt the skin around my temples relax. “I know. I love you too. Go back to sleep.”

“That’s not happening,” she said ruefully, and she took another sip of coffee.

I went out the door and back down the stairs, feeling confused and wondering whether this was just a theory cooked up by my tired mind. But by the time I reached the kitchen, I was certain again that I was right.

After pouring another cup of coffee, I went down the stairs, hitting Redial on my cell. Again I heard that infuriating recording about the voice mail not being set up.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and I was about to dial Ned’s personal phone again when I noticed an envelope on the floor below the mail slot. I picked it up, saw my name and address and a stamp but no postmark and no return address.

I slit the envelope open as I walked to my office. There was a single piece of white paper inside. Across the page, scrawled in lurid red crayon, it said:

Two time zones to the west of DC, Mary Potter whispered, “Dana?”

Hearing his wife’s voice in his earbud, Potter jerked awake, saw the hillside and the valley floor below in a pale gray light. A rooster crowed.

“Shit,” he said. “Time is it?”

“Time to get ready,” she said. “There’s lights on in the hacienda.”

Twenty minutes later, the winter sun crested a hillside to the east and behind them. Warmth swept in over them and continued across the valley to the terrace they’d watched two days before.

It was broad daylight before the first person appeared, a young man wearing a sweater and apron who laid out dining service at the four tables on the terrace. He also switched on a tall portable heater. They could see the steam rising off the top of it through their scopes.

“Let’s go hot,” Potter said. He extracted from his pocket three 6.5mm Creedmoor cartridges that he fed into the magazine of his rifle and a fourth that he seated in the chamber before closing the bolt and engaging the safe.

Only then did he reach in his pack for the signal jammer. The device was anodized black, about the size of a paperback, and made of some light alloy. Potter didn’t know where the jammer had come from or how it worked, and he didn’t much care. It had been with their briefing package in the ranch house when they arrived.

He set it in front and to the left of the Ozonics, where his forward hand could reach it in a hurry. Eight minutes later, the first to breakfast, a polished, fit blonde in her late thirties, came out onto the terrace wearing dark sunglasses and canvas bird-hunting gear that she made appear stylish.

Potter reached into a side pants pocket, retrieved his cell phone, and thumbed it on. No service. Excellent.

“Here comes my baby,” Mary sang softly. “Here he comes now.”

Her target, a man in his sixties wearing canvas pants, a vest, and a ball cap, walked to the now-seated woman, engaged in some pleasantries with her, and then moved on to a table closer to the heater. He settled into a chair facing the length of the valley.

“Green,” she said. “Five hundred and nine meters. The right ethmoid bone.”

The ethmoid bone. The perfect aiming point if you meant to shatter a skull and drop a man in his tracks. Or in his chair, as the case may be.

“Adjust your turret four clicks and stay right there,” Potter said. “No drift in this tailwind.”

They waited fifteen minutes while five more people, all middle- to late-middle-aged men, came slowly streaming onto the terrace for breakfast. Two sat with the polished woman. Two sat by themselves. One sat to the left of Mary’s target.

He was peach-skinned, heavyset, and gregarious. Mary’s target seemed to enjoy the man’s presence and threw back his head to laugh twice.

Then a tall woman in her forties, big-boned with short dark hair, appeared. She was wearing a green down vest over her canvas jacket.

“That’s the missus,” Mary said. “You’re on deck.”

The missus seemed to know everyone, and she worked the terrace before taking a seat at the empty fourth table with her right shoulder to the heater and in full profile.

Potter instinctively didn’t like her in that position and had to ponder why before he understood that her husband was likely to sit to her left, facing the full view of the valley, obstructed by his wife.

Potter’s target, who was five six in his hunting boots, ambled onto the terrace and greeted the eight folks already drinking coffee and giving their breakfast orders to the waiter. Potter had his crosshairs on the man from the second he appeared and he kept them there as he moved across the terrace to shake the hand of Mary’s target. The crosshairs stayed with him even as he went over to his wife, kissed her forehead, and took the exact wrong seat.

The missus was so tall and broad-shouldered that her husband was all but blocked. Depending on the angle at which she faced him, Potter could only find small parts of the man’s body to aim at, none of them lethal.

“Red,” he said.

“Change angle?” Mary said.

“Wait.”

He deliberately tensed and relaxed his shoulders, calmly watching through the scope as the waiter brought espresso to his target’s table. The wife took a sip and sat back, crossing her legs and exposing the left side of her husband’s body and head.

“Green,” he said. He reached forward and flipped the switch on the jamming device.

Mary said, “Same.”

Potter adjusted his upper body and the gun. The crosshairs of his scope found the bridge of the man’s nose and settled there.

He pushed forward the three-position safety on the rifle to fire and brought the pad of his right index finger to the curl of the trigger. No pressure. Not yet.

“Green,” he said, and they both went into a pattern of thinking and action that had been pounded into them.

“Breathe,” Mary said.

Potter took a deep breath and let a quarter of it out, saying, “Relax.” He dropped all tension in his body. “Aim.” His crosshairs were exactly where he wanted them.

“Sight picture,” Mary said.

Potter’s attention leaped from his target to his target’s wife and behind them. He was about to say Squeeze when the missus leaned forward for her espresso, blocking the shot.

“Red,” he said, and he exhaled.

“Still green,” Mary said.

Potter said nothing until the wife reclined in the chair again, though not quite as far. Still, he had a clear look at the target’s frontal bone just above his left eye.