Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

I saw the gouge in the road where the little finger had come from, and then behind that and to the left, I saw another gouge and two pieces of asphalt. As I photographed it all, I heard the sirens closing on our position from two directions. I looked north and saw the flashing red lights of a fire truck, followed by the lights of an ambulance.

I ran toward the smoking wreckage of the van. Mahoney had come back up the bank onto the road and was talking to Susan Carstensen on the radio.

The van was no longer burning, just belching caustic smoke.

“Anything?” Mahoney called to me.

“Don’t let them spray down the van. I want a closer look at it just as it is,” I said. “And let’s keep them away from those skid marks until forensics gets here.”

Ned nodded and turned to meet the firemen. I scrambled down into the ditch and got much closer to the van.

The metal was still throwing enough heat that I had to stop a good fifteen feet away. After shooting a video and stills of the scene from that perspective, I used the binoculars again to study the corpse in the front seat.

The jaw was frozen open, not unusual for a burn victim. Though the face was charred beyond recognition, I could make out big fissures in the skin where it had split in the heat, several on what was left of his cheeks, and another that started between the eye sockets and ran up onto the forehead.

Something about that one looked strange, but I couldn’t tell why. I shifted the binoculars lower and adjusted the focus so I could peer at the ground between myself and the van.

The forest floor was a tangle of old leaves, dormant vines, and thorny stalks that were charred close to the vehicle. Behind me, up on the road, I could hear the firemen calling out to one another.

Two of them looped around me and the van with axes and shovels, heading toward the trees. More firemen maneuvered a hose across the ditch and sprayed down the struggling blaze in the woods.

I kept moving around the van, fifteen feet back, peering at the ground through the glasses. I’d taken six or seven steps counterclockwise before I spotted something that made me lower the binoculars.

I couldn’t make it out with the naked eye, so I looked again with the glasses and figured out exactly what it was. Holding my arm up to protect my face from the heat, I hurried to within six feet, squatted, and pushed aside a singed leaf that half covered a nine-millimeter shell casing.

Of course, it was a rural area. The brass could have been there from something unrelated, but I didn’t think so. Leaving it in place, I went around the smashed front end of the van to look in at the corpse from the passenger side.

At a glance, I was positive. After walking to the rear of the van and peering inside with the binoculars, I was dead certain.

“What are you seeing?” Mahoney called from the road.

I went around and climbed up to him. “This wasn’t an accident, Ned. And neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin.”

“Okay?”

I gestured south. “There are gouges in the pavement over there that I think were made by bullets, two of them. Someone very good shot out the tires, which sent the van into this curving skid and off the road. The shooter skidded to a stop right there, climbed out, went into the ditch, and shot those two.”

After that I described the position of the spent shell casing, the weird fissure between the driver’s eye sockets, and the hole the size of a fist in the back of his skull.

“The corpse in the rear has a head wound too,” I said.

Mahoney looked beyond frustrated. “But how do you know neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin?”

“The one in the rear’s too small in stature to match Bree’s description of him,” I said. “I’m guessing a woman. And the driver had all his teeth. The president’s killer had knocked out or broken several. Remember?”

“Now that you reminded me. But I’m still confused. Did Hobbs’s assassin go off with this shooter of his own free will? Or was he forced out of here?”

“One or the other. Unless he took off into the woods. We should check, but I don’t think so.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ned said, furious. “Now we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. We had him, Alex. We had him, and we let him slip away again!”

On Sunday, as the sun was setting, Pablo Cruz plunged a thick knitting needle that he held with vise grips into the flames of a gas stove burner. He watched the metal tip turn a glowing red.

Cruz had given Kristina Varjan no chance to try to overpower him once they were in her car. He’d disarmed her right away. Then, at every stoplight or stop sign, he’d pressed the muzzle of her Glock into her side and given her directions that took them across one arm of the Chesapeake Bay and onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

According to the satellite radio, they’d gotten across the bridge just in time. News reports said the president’s assassin had been hiding in a veterinary hospital west of there and had managed to elude federal agents once again.

Cruz smiled. He liked elusion. He took pride in staying ahead of the dogs. It was an art form, as far as he was concerned, and he was the master of it.

Like his choice of safe house. He’d spotted the shuttered beach cottage from the road and had Varjan park the car behind an outbuilding. After looking for signs of an alarm system and finding none, he had her crowbar the back door open.

Cruz turned from the stove in the cottage’s kitchen with the glowing knitting needle before him and looked at Varjan, who was tied to a chair and eyeing him like she wanted to rip his throat out.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Cruz said. “Who hired you to kill me?”

She sneered. “I’m going to tell you again: I don’t know. He calls himself Piotr.”

“A Russian?”

“Who knows.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cruz said, bringing the still-glowing knitting needle by her cheek. “There is more you are not telling me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

Cruz dropped the nose of the needle to her collar and pushed it aside. Fabric burned before he touched her skin, right above the carotid artery. Her skin sizzled, and she shrank back, gritting her teeth.

He said, “A second or two longer and you’d be bleeding out, Varjan.”

Her pained expression returned to a snarl. “How do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to know my competitors,” Cruz said.

“Who are you?”

“Me? I am nobody, nowhere, in no time.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Cruz did not answer. He returned to the rustic kitchen and put the knitting needle back in the flame, saying, “I have nowhere to go, Varjan. I have nothing to do, and so I will do this until you tell me what I want to know.”

She said nothing, but watched him sidelong.

A few moments later, he came at her again. Varjan raised her head in contempt.

He stopped, laughed. “You don’t think you’re going to somehow reverse this situation and kill me, do you? Who hired you?”

Varjan did not reply and would not look at the red-hot knitting needle that he brought toward her neck again.

Cruz stopped the tip less than an inch away from her skin so she could sense the heat. Then he poked it through her shirt and bra into the side of her breast.

She screamed and cursed at him in Hungarian. He went back to the stove, saying, “Even if you could have somehow managed to kill me, Piotr wouldn’t have paid you. My payment request upon completion of task? Delayed, which is as good as denied in my book. Think about that. If I’m expendable, you are too.”