Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

They tore out their pistols. In the room where the CT scanner was still running, they found two female techs in hospital scrubs sprawled on the floor, dead.

Bree called dispatch for backup from the FBI and all available law enforcement.

“Surround George Washington University Hospital,” she said. “The president’s shooter is in here somewhere.”

Bree listened to the radio chatter as FBI and Metro Police descended on the medical center.

Sampson said, “They’re going to have to clear every room in this place and get all nonessential personnel out of here before they do it.”

“We can get that started down here,” Bree said.

She took a long look at Pettit before she followed Sampson, feeling her stomach churn at her role in the young officer’s death. There would be time for regret and guilt later, she told herself. Once the man who’d killed Pettit and shot the president was caught.

With pistols still drawn, they exited the radiology suite and retraced their steps. They went into the pathology department and found no one at the front desk.

They went around the desk and into a short hallway with autopsy rooms to either side. All were empty, and the stainless-steel equipment inside was spotless.

They reached the door at the end of the hall and found it locked with an electronic key-card slot.

“Probably goes to the morgue,” Sampson said.

That made sense to Bree, and she led them in the opposite direction, past the autopsy rooms and into a separate hallway with office doors on both sides. The first three were empty.

As they headed toward the fourth office, a woman in surgical scrubs crawled out of the door, bleeding from her ears and nose. Bree and Sampson ran to her and called for help from the ER.

A name tag identified the woman as CHRISTINE WILLIS, MD, DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY. She was rambling and in pain, but they figured out that while listening to music, she had been attacked by someone from behind and knocked out.

She said she came around and saw her attacker, who had bandages all over his face, leaving her office with her key card.

“He’s gotta be hiding in the morgue,” Sampson said. “Or was.”

Dr. Willis told them where to find another pass key in a drawer at the front desk. On her radio, Bree heard that nurses and a doctor were arriving from the ER.

Only then did she leave the pathologist and follow Sampson back to the morgue door. He slid the key card in the slot and heard it click.

He opened it slowly. The lights were off.

Sampson reached around, groped for a moment, then flipped a switch. The morgue lights lit, and they eased inside, backs to each other.

Bree saw nothing but rows of cold-storage lockers.

“Over there,” Sampson said.

She turned and peered around him to see a male, Asian, in boxers slumped against the far wall. Sampson went to the man, checked for a pulse, looked for breathing, then shook his head at Bree. She called in the homicide and started opening the cold lockers.

Every one she opened was full. Corpses were stacked like cordwood in—

She opened the second-to-last locker and gaped at the corpse of an obese man.

Three surgical scalpels lay on his chest. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, he’d been skinned.

Pablo Cruz stepped off a maintenance elevator that put him in a narrow hallway behind the hospital cafeteria. Despite the opiates the ER docs had given him, he was in ferocious pain from the broken teeth and facial bones.

And it was taking everything in his power to block out the clammy, sticky feel of the cowl of cold, dead skin that he’d pulled down over his head to cover the bruising and bandages on his face. That’s who they’d be looking for if they were looking. The guy with the bandages. Not some old man with saggy gray skin.

Cruz had tied on a surgical cap to hide part of the incision lines he’d had to make to skin the corpse’s head. He’d put the female pathologist’s headphones on to hide another four inches of cut skin. The hooded rain jacket covered the incisions down the sides of the neck. So did an ID on a chain he’d taken from the dead pathologist in the morgue.

But he was worried about how it looked around his eyes, nose, and lips. Did they sag too much? Would someone know?

He put the hood of the rain jacket up and cast his eyes down while he walked along the hallway, nervous that a hospital worker might appear; he didn’t want to test his disguise up close in any way.

Cruz passed the cafeteria, hearing pots and pans banging and a woman singing in Spanish. Then he smelled garbage.

He followed the smell out a door onto a loading dock. To his right there were men unloading a linen-service truck.

Cruz paid them no attention, just bounded down the stairs and trotted out the open overhead door into chill pouring rain. He zipped the jacket to the collar and tugged on the hood strings to tighten it before lowering his head and walking very fast south on Twenty-Third Street.

A knot of four or five people in raincoats or carrying umbrellas hurried ahead of him on the sidewalk, medical personnel, judging from the way they were talking. They were worrying about how they’d get home with all the public transit shut down.

A block away, a police cruiser was parked across the intersection, its blue lights flashing. The shooter moved closer to the group ahead of him.

When they were near the intersection with H Street, Cruz held the hood tight and turned his head briefly toward the police car, as if he were curious.

Then he looked away, having given them just enough to know his face wasn’t bandaged but not enough to see he wore a dead man’s skin.

Cruz crossed the street behind the others and heard no one call out. He stayed with them as the rain fell harder, and still he heard no one yell after him.

It wasn’t until he was a block and a half south of the medical center that he heard a symphony of sirens start up, all of them getting closer, trumpeting and wailing their way toward a hospital where the president’s shooter wasn’t anymore.

I had taken off from Andrews sitting in the rear seat of an air force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet, as stunning and exhilarating an experience as I’ve ever had.

Mahoney had gone in a second one. With U.S. airspace empty, the pilots were free to fly near the Strike Eagles’ blistering top-end speed of more than eighteen hundred miles an hour. We covered the 1,624 miles to an air force base west of San Antonio in less than fifty-five minutes.

As the planes were coming in for a landing, Director Sanford told Mahoney that Kasimov had not arrived in London. Ned relayed the information to me over my headset.

“Where’d he go?” I asked.

“Toward North Africa,” Mahoney said. “Before he disappeared off the radar.”

“No,” I said as we touched down.

“Yup. His jet was picked up crossing Majorcan airspace, and then nothing.”

Was this an act of war? With Kasimov on the inside, choreographing the attacks from his suite at the Mandarin Oriental?

A Texas National Guard Apache helicopter flew us thirty-five minutes southwest of the air base over dry, broken country pocked with scrub brush to the remote Garand Ranch, reputed to be one of the Lone Star State’s finest quail-hunting lodges.

We flew in over harvested agricultural fields. Deer scattered and bounded from the stubble as we dropped in altitude and landed near a barn and a hacienda-style lodge.

A small contingent of local law enforcement waited for us along with an FBI forensics crew that had just arrived on the scene from the Dallas office. To my surprise, I recognized someone in the crowd right away: U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee looked shell-shocked when I walked up and shook his hand.