Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

“I’m betting it’s not anymore,” I said. “How long to drive there?”

“We’ll have to loop all the way around. Forty minutes?”

“We’ll fly,” Mahoney said.

We did. Following Pritchard’s directions, the helicopter took us to a heavy-duty gate off a spur of a country road. A sign said ROAD CLOSED. BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT. The lock had been cut. We opened the gate and started on foot up a terrible, washed-out rock-and-sand road.

“No tire tracks,” Ned said.

“But look at all the little lines in the sand,” I said, kneeling. “It’s like whoever drove in and out was pulling brooms behind them.”

“Special Agent Mahoney?” the copter pilot called from the other side of the gate. “We just got the call, sir. President Hobbs is dead.”

Darkness had fallen when Mahoney and I touched down at Andrews. With the tailwind, we’d made even better time on the return flight.

As we climbed out of the Strike Eagles, it seemed surreal that we’d been in West Texas less than an hour before. We hustled across the tarmac. My phone beeped, alerting me to several calls from Bree.

I slowed, told Ned I’d be right along, and called her back.

“Thank God,” she said. “Have you heard?”

“That Hobbs died?”

“No, that we had his assassin on a gurney right in front of us and let him slip. Then we had him almost cornered in GW Medical Center, and he got past us again wearing a dead guy’s facial skin.”

That struck me as gruesome. “For real?”

“I found the skinned body myself! Someone’s keeping him just ahead of us. I think there’s a traitor, Alex.”

“Ned does too,” I said.

“Maybe Lance Reamer with the Secret Service,” she said, her voice hardening as she recounted how Reamer had waved the bleeding assassin through the checkpoint over her protests and then balked at providing an agent to accompany the killer to the hospital.

“I know you lost an officer, but you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“I know,” Bree said, and she exhaled hard.

I told her about the old mining road north of the hunting ranch that looked swept.

“But we found some fresh tire imprints about three hundred yards up the road when whoever it was bounced over rocks and hit sand,” I said. “Looks like a big pickup pulling a horse trailer. Trouble is, those happen to be everywhere in Texas and all points north, south, east, and west of it. Mahoney’s got agents and police canvassing in a fifty-mile radius around that ranch, but nothing yet.”

I told her I’d text if I thought I could make it home, and then I went inside the hangar.

In the hours we’d been gone, the vast space had been transformed into a teeming hive. There were several hundred people inside, uniformed and not. At least a hundred of them had already been assigned workstations complete with ultra-secure computers linked to the databases of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and Homeland Security. Four huge TV monitors hung above the work area.

They were tuned to CNN and the network news. The nation was in shock at the four assassinations. People were fearing an attempt to topple the government altogether, and they spoke of potential anarchy and despair. President Larkin was due to speak to the country in less than an hour.

I spotted Keith Karl Rawlins, and then I saw Mahoney talking to a trim, fit woman in a business suit. I vaguely recognized her as a high-ranking FBI official. She didn’t look happy and seemed to find my arrival a cause for more sourness.

Mahoney introduced her as Susan Carstensen, the Bureau’s deputy director for investigations. Carstensen shook my hand and said, “We won’t be jetting about at supersonic speeds like that again unless I give the go, are we clear, Dr. Cross?”

“Director Sanford ordered us to go,” I said.

“Just the same. I won’t have this spin out of control with cowboys riding off on a whim.”

Mahoney gritted his teeth. “With all due respect, ma’am, that was no whim, and we’re hardly cowboys. We were able to see the entire crime scene as well as find the odor destroyers I described, a signal jammer, and the tire prints.”

Carstensen lost the attitude, became all business. “The jamming device. Russian-made?”

“On its way to Quantico for testing,” Mahoney said. “Kasimov?”

“Nothing,” she said. “But you should know that NSA is reporting we’re getting scores of attempts to hack us coming out of Russia, China, and North Korea.”

“You mean they’re trying to hack us in here?” I said.

“The word is out. They seem to know this is the center of the investigation.”

“Feeling us out,” Mahoney said. “Seeing if we can be compromised.”

“What’s Larkin going to say tonight?”

“We don’t know.”

An agent rushed up. “Sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but we’ve got a positive ID on the treasury secretary’s killer.”

Ten minutes later, on all four screens, a photograph went up of a burly man with a shock of unruly dark hair, a thick beard, and sunglasses. He was standing on a high point somewhere, rock and desert behind him. He wore faded military camouflage and a black-and-white-checked scarf around his neck. A black assault rifle hung from his chest harness, and he was smiling over ten dead bodies at his feet.

“Martin Franks,” Carstensen said through a microphone so everyone in the hangar could hear. “Former U.S. JSOC operator, former Marine MARSOC operator, honorably discharged under an odious plea agreement four years ago. His COs came to suspect Franks had psychopathic tendencies. He liked to kill.

“This picture shows the result of his unauthorized one-man foray into a suspected Taliban village. He claimed he was discovered and had to fight his way out. There was an investigation, but it was one live man versus ten dead, and it had happened at night. No one else in the village could say exactly what had happened. Or would. The JAGs cut a deal to let him walk out and save the country further embarrassment.”

The screen split, and a photo appeared showing an older man among saguaro cacti. He wore green work clothes and carried an AK-47.

“This is Morris ‘Moe’ Franks,” she went on. “Martin Franks’s father. Moe has been on and off our watch list for more than two decades. Lives off the grid in southwest Arizona. Been involved in various militia groups over the years and has published tracts espousing anti-globalist views and stating his belief that only an armed uprising will cure the country’s ills.”

“So Moe is alive?” an analyst asked.

“Far as we know,” Carstensen said. “I’ve dispatched a team to his compound. In the meantime, I want everything you can find about his son’s activities since his discharge. You have an open warrant to search. Dismissed.”

She turned to me and Mahoney. “Thoughts?”

“I think homing in on Franks and squeezing the old man are smart moves,” Mahoney said.

“I’m sensing a but coming,” she said, crossing her arms.

Ned said, “We just can’t lose track of the big picture in all this. The assassinations. The hacks. This all could be provocation to war.”

“I think President Larkin has that covered.”

I cleared my throat. “I think there’s also the possibility that this is not state-sanctioned, that we have a single, ruthless Machiavellian mind at work behind the scenes. In light of that, I keep asking myself, Who benefits here? ”

“And?” Carstensen said.

“There’s no way around it,” I said, lowering my voice. “Who benefits? Larkin. He most certainly benefits.”

Carstensen shook her head, incredulous, and laughed. “You think Sam Larkin orchestrated the assassination of all the people above him in the succession chain so he could take over the country?”