Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

He wasn’t quite fully turned when my first shot — in my off hand, and shaky — slapped him across the ham of his left leg. He jerked as he shot. I heard his bullet crack by my left ear, rattling me.

Because a trained assassin was not going to miss twice at this distance, I pointed the gun at him and fired again, just hoping to put him on the defensive.

But by some miracle, it center-punched him just below the sternum. He hunched over and then fell hard onto his side, gasping for air.

I ran up. When he tried to raise his gun, I kicked it out of his hand.

I squatted, pulled off the mask so he could breathe. His face was a swollen mass of stitches.

“Who are you?” I said. “Who hired you to kill Hobbs?”

He blinked at me dully, then shuddered and, through the blood that began to seep out his mouth, croaked, “I am... nobody... nowhere... in no—”

The assassin convulsed then, choked, and coughed up a gout of dark blood. He died quivering on the boardwalk.

I stared at him, hearing sirens closing on my location and a helicopter approaching, then turned to check on the two young women in raincoats.

Kristina Varjan was standing twenty feet behind me, squared off and looking at me over the barrel of a pistol.

“Drop the gun, cross,” Varjan said. “Or die.”

I let go of my weapon, heard it strike the concrete.

“There’s an army coming, Kristina,” I said. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”

I noticed her expression tightened when I said her name.

“I’ll take my chances,” she said. “I just wanted you to know I had nothing to do with the president’s death or the death of any of the others. I was a maid. Cleanup. That’s all.”

“Maid for who, Kristina?”

“You saw,” she said, angrier but glancing around.

“What did I see, Kristina?” I asked, hitting her given name hard.

“Stop that,” she said, shaking the gun at me, “or I’ll kill you anyway.”

Behind her in the sky, I saw the helicopter coming. And patrol cars had squealed to a stop back on Michigan, their bubbles flashing blue. From behind me, from the park, I heard tires skidding to a halt and sirens dying.

“It’s over, Kristina,” I said. “Drop the gun.”

Varjan looked at the beach and the water.

“They’ll get you out there too. Save yourself. Drop the gun.”

“The CIA takes me. No one else.”

“I can’t promise that.”

She processed my response, and then all the tension in her shoulders seemed to vanish, as if she’d come to some decision and was resigned to her fate.

“Then I take it all back,” Varjan said, her voice flat. “You’ll just have to die before me, Cross. You’ll have to lead the way into hell.”

“No—” I managed to blurt out before she pulled the trigger.

Her bullet blasted into me eight inches below my Adam’s apple.

I was hurled back and off my feet. I landed hard, choking for air in a whirling daze. I heard another shot and a third before a barrage of gunfire that was the last thing I remembered before everything vanished into darkness.

Dana Potter moved at a steady clip west from Boardwalk Hall, forcing himself to exude easy confidence and showing only passing interest in the police cars that blew by him, their sirens singing.

After he’d left the skybox, his business done, Potter had gone out a service entrance and immediately saw a garbage truck backing up to a full trash container.

He tossed the cowboy hat, the duster, and Sydney Bronson’s laptop computer into the bin just before it was lifted and dumped into the truck.

Both identifying articles of clothing and that weasel’s computer were leaving the area even before Potter reached the entrance to Caesar’s Palace and went inside. He strolled to a souvenir kiosk he’d scouted earlier in the day and bought a hooded sweatshirt with the casino’s logo on it.

He pulled the hoodie on and left the casino just in time to hear shots to the northeast, back toward the boardwalk and the beach, three in a cluster, and then four more shots in rapid succession. There was a break, and then a shot, and then another shot a minute later, and then multiples, a firefight.

But since then, as Potter walked farther and farther west, he’d heard only the sirens. When he saw a bus about to pull into a stop, he ran to catch it.

Potter took an empty seat, yawned, and shut his eyes. Ten stops later, he got off, went into a corner store, and bought a Bud tallboy. He drank it as he walked the seven blocks to the train station, where he bought a ticket to Newark Penn Station.

Eleven minutes passed. He was aboard the train and it was pulling out. Two stops later, he got off. He watched everyone else who’d exited the train until he was satisfied there was no tail. Then he bought another ticket, this time to Hoboken.

While he waited for that train, Potter walked down the platform, away from all the commuters. Only then did he pull the burn phone from his pocket and punch in the number of another burn phone.

“Paul?” Mary said, using the code they’d agreed on.

“Right here, Sal,” he said. “We’re good. Get him out of that hellhole now.”

He heard her break down crying.

“C’mon, now,” he said. “I need you to be strong. We’ve done it.”

“I’m just so relieved, so hopeful, is all.”

Potter smiled. “Me too.”

“You following?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But do not wait for me to start the therapy.”

“What about payment?”

“I got it. Now get to work.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too,” he said. He clicked off and broke the phone in two before tossing it in a trash can.

Potter pulled a USB drive from his pocket, looked at it, and imagined his son healed, on his feet, and walking again.

That will be worth the risk, he thought. Jesse is worth every risk.

He could even acknowledge that, sooner or later, U.S. federal agents would track him down. Sooner or later, he’d have to tell them he’d done the job in Texas alone, that his wife had no idea he’d assassinated the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state using two identical rifles set side by side on bipods.

Mary had no idea what Jesse’s stem-cell treatments cost. He’d been the one to go to Panama to learn about it. His wife had zero to do with any of it.

He’d say all that, and then he’d die somehow, death by cop or suicide to seal the deal and keep Mary free to raise Jesse.

As his train pulled into the station, Potter was at peace with his fate. He stuck the USB drive in his pocket and got on board. He could see Jesse walking in his mind, and for that, he would accept every punishment that might come his way.

My head spun a bit as the FBI helicopter lifted off from the beach by the boardwalk where Varjan had shot me high in my Kevlar vest.

The bullet at short range had been enough to knock me down and out.

But not for long. I’d come around within seconds and saw Carstensen, Mahoney, and a small army of Atlantic City police officers swarming past the bullet-ridden corpse of the Hungarian assassin.

They’d tried to make me lie still and wait for the medics, but I refused and was getting woozily to my feet when Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s director of security, staggered up to us. His face and suit were covered in blood. He held a wad of bloody napkins to his head.

“Arrest him,” Carstensen said.

“No,” Stapleton said. “I had nothing to do with this.”

“Arrest him and his bosses,” she snapped.

“They’re gone,” Stapleton said. “That’s why I came to you. They left me there for dead. I came straight here after they left.”