Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Six days later, six riderless black horses clip-clopped down Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by six coffins on horse-drawn caissons, all draped in U.S. flags.

Once again, I stood with my family at the corner of Constitution and Louisiana. Well, most of my family. Damon had exams, and Bree had just been called away.

“I can’t get over this,” Nana Mama said as the funeral cortege approached. “Crowley and that Bronson, they didn’t think twice about taking all those brilliant lives to gain control of the presidency and make billions. Who thinks like that?”

“At least three people do,” Ali said.

“All it takes, I guess,” Jannie said. “If you can work the dark web.”

Later, during the eulogy he gave at the service for the fallen leaders at the National Cathedral, the acting president, Larkin, talked about the fragility of life. He also spoke of the strength and resiliency of our nation.

“The simple fact about our country that has been undervalued time and again is that we are by design a government that continues to function no matter the tragedy or turmoil,” Larkin said. “If you kill one of our leaders, another rises, and the country goes on. If you assassinate two, three, or even six of our leaders, there is a natural succession laid out by the Framers, and the country and the government go on.

“These gifted, patriotic men and woman who lie before us lived in service to the people, and I believe they did not die in vain,” he said. “They are martyrs, and I will always think of them as such, martyrs to the ideals of our country as laid out in our brilliantly conceived Constitution.”

I left the service thinking how right Larkin was. We had just endured one of the biggest upheavals in our country’s history, but life would continue. And America would go on trying to create a more perfect union of the people, by the people, and—

My cell phone buzzed. Bree.

“Funerals done?” she asked.

“They all left for Arlington a few minutes ago. Figured it was for family. I’m heading home.”

“Not so fast,” she said. “I need you to come see something. Right now.”

“I told Jannie we’d go for a run. Can’t it wait?”

“I’m sorry, baby, but no.”

She gave me an address in Foggy Bottom that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I called an Uber, and even with the traffic, I got there fifteen minutes later.

Bree met me outside an old restored town house with a freshly painted green door. “You’ve never been here, right?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. Why? Who lives here?”

“I’ll show you.”

She gave me blue booties and latex gloves. We walked inside a few feet to a steep narrow staircase. Bree went up it before I could look around.

I followed. We reached a narrow landing and entered a bedroom.

I took one look and felt my knees wobble.

My patient Nina Davis, Justice Department attorney and stalker of men, was naked and hanging by her neck from a rope tied through an eyebolt screwed into a beam above the bed. Her wrists were handcuffed in front of her. She had a red ball-gag strapped into her mouth. Her eyes were open, bulging, and dull.

Sprawled in an overstuffed chair to the right of the bed, Dr. Chad Winters wasn’t breathing either. His eyes were rolled up in his head, and his jaw sagged open. An Hermès silk scarf was cinched around his neck.

There were mirrors on the ceiling and above the headboard.

In scrawled lipstick on the mirror behind Nina Davis’s body, someone had written this:

I asked you to stop me, please, Alex Cross. And you didn’t. Now look what I’ve gone and done.—M.