Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Varjan stayed mute, but something changed in her carriage. She’d relaxed slightly, a small reaction, but he’d gotten her attention.

“Think about it,” he said, watching the needle tip begin to glow again. “They’re stiffing me and trying to kill me. What do you think they’ll do to you? Pay? No way. You will be expendable, and dealt with appropriately. In our profession, to believe otherwise would be... well, stupid. And I know you’re not that.”

Varjan tried to remain contemptuous. He touched the needle to the collar of her shirt again, let the singed smell reach her nose.

“Where will it go next?” he asked, and he glanced down the front of her body.

After a pause, he gazed into her eyes. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another choice here.”

She twitched, and he knew he had her properly leveraged.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Cruz took a step back, set the knitting needle down. “I propose we join forces, find out who is behind this plot, and go get our money. Does that work? Or do I continue to knit?”

Varjan glanced at the needle, then at the floor, then up at him.

“We don’t need to find out who’s behind the plot,” she said evenly. “I already know. I laid a trap and caught them in it right from the start. They haven’t got a clue.”

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Dana Potter paced in the hallway outside his son’s hospital room. Every two minutes, Potter thumbed Redial on his phone. SpoofCard, an app that disguised a caller’s number, took over and placed the call.

He heard ringing somewhere in St. Petersburg, Russia, but he got no answer and no voice telling him to leave a message. Hanging up, Potter wanted to hurl his phone against the wall, see it shatter into a million pieces.

But anger was useless, he told himself. Anger said you were out of control and feeling like you were cornered.

I am cornered, Potter thought. They’ve got all of us cornered.

Fighting against that idea, willing himself to be brave, Potter entered the hospital room and tried not to weep at the sight of his son wasting away in bed. Jesse’s eyes were closed, and Potter thought once again how much his boy resembled a baby bird fallen from its nest, all skin and sinew.

He looked to his wife, who sat by Jesse’s bed. She gave him a questioning raise of her eyebrow. Shaking his head, he wondered if God had inflicted this punishment on the poor innocent boy as payback for his father’s sins.

Jesse had been born just fine, ten fingers, ten toes, a healthy cry when the midwife delivered him. And he’d thrived through the age of five.

Then he started falling a lot for no apparent reason. Soon after, he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Duchenne, the deadliest form of muscular dystrophy, caused muscles to waste away. Boys around five or six were the most likely group to develop the disorder, and those boys usually died in their early twenties.

If we had until his early twenties, we could beat this thing, Potter thought bitterly. But here’s my Jesse dying at fifteen, and there’s hope, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

Potter cursed himself for a tactical error. He should have insisted on more of a payment up-front, enough to hire a private jet to fly his son to Panama and pay a doctor millions to administer a radical, controversial, and illegal stem-cell treatment that some said could stop the muscle wasting in its tracks. Even give Jesse back his strength.

Potter went to his son’s side and stroked his face before looking at his wife. “I don’t know how to think of life without him,” he choked out. “And they won’t answer the phone. They’re leaving us hanging in the wind, and I don’t know what to do.”

Mary had tears in her eyes when she nodded. She was barely able to say, “I know.”

Potter took his attention off his son. He could not bear to watch him just slip away in his sleep. He glanced at the television on mute. His wife had it turned to CNN.

The anchorman was jazzed up about something, but Potter had no idea what until a chyron appeared on the screen:

CHIEF JUSTICE RULES TALBOT RIGHTFUL SUCCESSOR TO PRESIDENCY. LARKIN MUM.

Potter looked over at his wife in disgust. “Was it for nothing?”

Before Mary could answer, their son moaned and stirred. The burn phone in Potter’s pocket began to buzz.

He yanked it out, saw a number like the one from St. Petersburg, and surged toward rage as he stomped back into the hallway and answered.

“My son is dying,” Potter said in a tense whisper. “We had a deal, and you aren’t paying, and—”

“Is this Mr. Marston?” a woman said in a slight Eastern European accent.

He stopped ranting. He’d never talked to a female before.

“Who is this?” Potter said.

“The woman hired to eliminate you and your wife. I suggest you destroy the phone you are using, find another, and call the number I’m about to give you if you want any chance of saving your son.”

At seven thirty on Monday morning, February 8, three days after the assassinations and almost twenty-four hours since we’d lost our chance at the president’s killer, I sipped coffee and poked at the plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast Nana Mama had set before me.

I’d had less than ten hours of sleep in the past seventy-two, and we were no closer to the killers still at large. I was feeling grumpy, if not downright cranky, as I ate and gazed dully at the morning news on the television screen.

Anderson Cooper was up early, standing on the White House lawn and struggling to explain, first, the violent events that had seen President Hobbs and several successors assassinated and, second, the constitutional mechanics that had resulted in Attorney General Larkin assuming leadership. Then he began discussing the chief justice’s ruling that the Oval Office rightfully belonged to Senator Talbot.

“Will there be a power struggle?” the CNN anchor said. “Will we see yet another constitutional crisis if Larkin refuses to step down?”

The former attorney general, Cooper noted, had not been seen since the ruling had come down the evening before. He was rumored to have been flying in his airborne command post out west for the past two days, landing only to refuel at various air force bases across the country. But that was unconfirmed.

For his part, Senator Talbot had been holed up in his office on Capitol Hill all night while a steady stream of advisers had come and gone.

Cooper touched his earbud, then bobbed his head vigorously and stared into the camera with the peeved look of a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Evidently, Senator Talbot has a statement to make live outside his office on Capitol Hill.”

The screen jumped to an image of the Nevada senator fighting not to look like a deer in the headlights as he went to the microphones.

“My fellow Americans,” Talbot said, sounding like someone’s nice old uncle. “I am as surprised as you are by these strange turns of events. But the chief justice has ruled, and I am not one to question the Founders of our nation, men like Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, who anticipated these kinds of difficult days. The Founders believed in an order of succession. They crafted that order into our Constitution, the precious document that is the basis of our unique form of governance. And I, as a mayor, a congressman, and a senator, have long sworn allegiance to God, country, and our remarkable system of laws.”

Talbot paused and stood taller. “So, forthwith, I will assume the office of the president of the United States, and I want to assure every American that while I might be an old dog, I can certainly learn new tricks. I feel deeply humbled and honored to lead you in this time of crisis. My first act is to lift martial law. I want people to resume their lives. We must go on.”