Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

“What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”

Lee shook his head in disbelief. “Bill Johnston, Speaker Guilford’s usual body man, got sick, and I got assigned to come down and watch Guilford and the secretary of state take a much-needed break and hunt quail. First Betsy Walker and now Guilford, both on my watch? I... it makes me look—”

“Dr. Cross?”

I looked to Terrance Crown, the U.S. Diplomatic Service agent who’d been assigned to protect secretary of state Aaron Deeds and his wife, Eliza.

“I’m glad you’re here, sir,” Crown said, shaken. “I’ve heard you’re the best, and we need the best right now.”

Eldon Pritchard, a lean man in his forties with a waxed mustache who was wearing a white cowboy hat, boots, jeans, and the badge of a Texas Ranger, was also there, but he seemed thoroughly unimpressed by our presence.

They took us out on the terrace, where the bodies of the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state were still lying where they’d fallen, covered with clear plastic sheeting. It was warm in the sunshine, but they were in shade. Eliza Deeds, the secretary of state’s wife, had been medevaced to a hospital in Dallas hours ago.

“We haven’t touched a thing,” Lieutenant Lee said. “I insisted. And the staff is waiting to talk.”

“Take us through it,” Mahoney said.

We heard about breakfasts on the terrace in the morning sun, a Garand Ranch tradition even in winter. We heard about soft, distant thuds, and how the Speaker had been hit first and the secretary of state wounded and then killed with another shot.

Mahoney said, “And that was at roughly what time?”

Both Lieutenant Lee and Agent Crown agreed it was 7:28 a.m. local time when the shooting ended, plus or minus thirty seconds.

“Why did it take so long for word to reach Washington?” I asked.

Lee said, “This whole area is a dead zone as far as cell service. They usually have satellite coverage, but it was out too. We had to drive twenty miles on dirt roads to call it in.”

Mahoney said, “Which gave the other assassins back east time to act.”

“The coordination in this is breathtaking,” I said.

“Who knew the Speaker was coming?” Mahoney said. “And the secretary of state?”

Lee said Guilford’s wife knew about the trip, of course, and his two sons, his chief of staff, and his personal secretary. Other than that small circle, the Speaker tended to keep his hunting life quiet.

Likewise, Secretary of State Deeds had told few people that he and his wife were going off for a few days with the Speaker of the House. But Deeds’s bodyguard did say the secretary’s top tier of foreign policy advisers all knew he would be at the ranch.

“They were in a tizzy, afraid there would be no cell service,” Crown said. “I guess they were right.”

I said, “We’ll come back to that. Do we know where the shots came from?”

One of the FBI forensics techs said, “Haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Pritchard, the Texas Ranger, spat tobacco into a Styrofoam cup and said, “I already eyeballed it. They came from out on that bluff beyond the ag fields. I’m figuring five hundred to five twenty-five meters out.”

“You don’t know that,” the tech said.

Pritchard shot him a sour look as he smoothed his mustache. “Son, I promise you, I can walk you to within ten feet of where those snipers were lying.”

Mahoney said, “So you’ve been out there to look already?”

Pritchard smiled. “I may be a hick, Special Agent Mahoney, but I am not stupid.”

Pritchard had us climb into his truck. A black Malinois shepherd paced behind a screen in the back of it.

“My boy Samba back there’s an asset to you,” Pritchard said. “Best man-tracker in the state, and that’s no BS. Won down to Houston, fair and square.”

Mahoney said, “You don’t think they’ve left the county by now?”

“Probably so,” the Texas Ranger said. “But at least Samba can tell us the way they went and where your forensics team should focus.”

It made sense to me. Pritchard drove a ranch road to the base of the bluff. We got out and climbed a rocky, sandy wall through sage and other desert plants blooming.

It smells too good for a murder scene, I thought as we crested the rise. Mahoney puffed up beside me, with the Texas Ranger, his dog, and the FBI forensics crew trailing.

Pritchard adjusted his belt and then released the Malinois. “Seek, Samba. Seek!”

The dog’s ears went up. He bounded forward, arcing across the wind with his tail up. We watched him dodge sage plants and then slow, his muzzle raised and his nostrils flaring. I didn’t know dogs that well, but he seemed confused.

“Seek!” Pritchard said again.

The Malinois’s vigor renewed. He trotted forward again some forty yards, looking confident, then looped back toward us. His tail was all we could see for a few moments, wagging there above the brush.

Samba halted. He started to wheeze, then whimper, then shriek in pain. He exploded away from the spot and spun in circles, digging frantically at his nose and muzzle with his paws.

“Damn it!” Pritchard said, running after the dog. “He get into a porcupine?”

When the Ranger caught up to Samba, the dog was still crying and scratching at his face.

“Damn it,” the Ranger said again. “No quills,” he called back to us. “They must have sprayed the place with bleach or cayenne or both!”

I held up a hand, telling the forensics team to stay put. Mahoney and I donned blue booties. Ten feet apart, we walked abreast, searching the undergrowth separating us from Pritchard and his dog, which was still whimpering.

“I got something,” Mahoney said just as my eyes came to rest on a rectangular box lying in the sand.

“I do too,” I said, easing around a bush and putting on latex gloves.

I squatted down and picked up the box, which was about the size of a paperback novel. It had slits on the front, a fan on the bottom, a complicated control panel, and a logo.

“Anyone know what an Ozonics is?” I asked.

Pritchard had calmed his dog and reclipped his lead. “Portable ozone machine,” he said. “Hunters use them to kill odor. Makes sense.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Wind’s blowing from us to the hacienda,” the Texas Ranger said. “If the ranch dogs had smelled them out here, they’d have barked, probably come to investigate. Sumbitches really thought this through, you know. Contingencies.”

Before I could agree, Mahoney held up a smaller, thinner metal box. “Any idea on this one, Mr. Pritchard?”

He told his dog to stay and came over to look. After several moments, he looked over at one of his deputies.

“Got your radio, Devin?”

The deputy nodded.

“Call me.”

He did, but Pritchard didn’t get the transmission on his end.

“Jammer,” the Ranger said. “No wonder the satellite phone wasn’t working.”

Mahoney said, “Looks like the ground’s been swept for a ways,” he said.

“Samba good enough to pick up scent back there?” I asked.

Pritchard shook his head. “His nose is toast for today.”

Mahoney said, “You know this country?”

The Ranger nodded. “Lot of it.”

“Where would their natural line of travel be? How would they likely go if they were heading, say, roughly north?”

Pritchard thought a moment. “Straight north, there’s a whole lot of nothing but BLM land, broken country, and box canyons for twenty miles, maybe more.”

“Northeast? Northwest?”

The Texas Ranger thought about that, then said, “Northeast, maybe four, five miles, there used to be an old road into a mining claim on the federal land, but I want to say its gated or blocked.”