James Patterson - Kill Alex Cross

“That was it. A week later, I called a lawyer and filed for divorce. Rod didn’t contest it.”

“And you never pressed charges?” I asked.

“I never told anyone about this,” she said. “Not a soul. I know how that must sound, but... I don’t know. After losing Zach and everything else that happened, I just couldn’t stand to look back anymore. Like I’d go crazy if I thought about it too much. All I wanted was to move on.” She smiled again, sadly, down into her lap. “You must think I’m pretty pathetic.”

“No,” I said. I reached over and took her hand, fighting back my own tears. “Just the opposite. I think you might be a hero.”

On the way back to DC, I got Bob Shaw, the captain of MPD’s Homicide Unit, on the phone and started lining up an immediate mobile surveillance team on Rodney Glass. This detail needed to be as covert as possible. That meant pulling cars out of the pool that weren’t Crown Vics or Impalas — makes that screamed “undercover cop” to the informed eye.

I also gave Shaw a list of names from Narcotics and a few of the warrant squads — guys I knew had the look and skills to go unnoticed on the street. What I didn’t want was anyone who had been anywhere near the Branaff campus since this investigation had started.

That included myself. Glass knew me. I was going to have to stay on the fringes of this surveillance for the time being.

By four o’clock that afternoon, I was back in the city, and we had three cars positioned strategically around the school neighborhood, just as Glass was leaving for the day.

All of my team were carrying GPS locators so I could use a single laptop to track them from a distance in my own car. We had radio communication set up on an alternate, nonrecorded channel, which was as private as we were going to get on short notice. I parked several blocks away and listened in.

“This is Tango. He’s out the south gate. Green Subaru Forester, turning north on Wisconsin.”

“Go ahead, Tango. This is X Ray. I’ll cut around and get you somewhere after Thirty-seventh Street.”

“No problem. Bravo, hang back if you can.”

“Copy that.”

We had just enough units to run a floating box, with one car following for a while, then dropping off while another came in to take its place. I gave them some time to get ahead of me, then pulled around and brought up the rear from about half a mile back.

“Who’s got eyes on him?” I asked, once I was headed up Wisconsin the way they’d gone. “What’s he doing?”

“This is Bravo. He’s just driving. Listening to music, it looks like, tapping his hands on the wheel. Guy doesn’t seem like he’s got a care in the world.”

“Yeah, well, I think maybe he does.”

Glass stayed on Wisconsin for a couple of miles. It seemed like he might be headed into Maryland, but then I got word he was stopping in the Friendship Heights shopping mall. He parked in the lot outside Bloomingdale’s and walked over to the Mazza Gallerie mall.

I sent two guys inside after him and kept one circling the block, then parked myself just past the lot, where I could see Glass’s empty car.

For the next forty-five minutes, it was the usual kind of boring minutiae you get on ninety-nine percent of surveillance details. I sat and listened while Glass went to McDonald’s. Got a burger. Sat at one of the tables, reading a paperback copy of Sebastian Junger’s War , which I’d read myself. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. Nothing special about the day.

When he finally got up again, they followed him into Neiman Marcus, leapfrogging around the store while he looked at shoes and men’s shirts. It almost seemed like he was deliberately killing time for some reason.

And then suddenly he was gone.

“Tango, you got him?” I heard.

“Negative. Hang on a second. Hold on. I think he went into the bathroom.”

Another fifteen seconds ticked by. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!

“What’s going on there?” I said.

“This is Tango. It’s not him in the bathroom. I think we might have lost him.”

“Lost him?” I said, trying not to rip anyone’s head off — yet. “Or he gave you the slip?”

“I really don’t know,” he said. “But we’re going to want some more eyes in here.”

I resisted the urge to run inside myself. I didn’t want to lose my head and blow this thing. But I sure as hell didn’t want to lose Rodney Glass, either.

This was pure misery. A disaster — and I’d been in charge. I was so angry at myself, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently now.

I was going crazy, watching Glass’s Subaru from the confines of my own car, and listening to nothing but radio silence while my guys scoured the neighborhood.

Both malls.

The parking lots.

Side streets.

Then, just after seven o’clock, I spotted Glass .

He came sauntering around the corner from the front of the mall and cut diagonally across the parking lot. That son of a bitch!

“I got him,” I radioed. “He’s headed back to his car. Get out here, and get yourselves ready to go.”

It was dark by now, but the parking lot was well lit. I used a small pair of binoculars to try and see what Glass was carrying. He’d been empty-handed on the way in.

The shopping bag he had in one hand was from Anthropologie, I saw. The kind of place where my kids might shop. Or the president’s kids, for that matter. Nothing in there for someone like him. He was a tall, strapping guy — a grownup, for starters. He favored L. L. Bean and Carhartt, as far as I could tell. Not the trendy fashions of this place. What was that about?

In his other hand, he had a tall cup with a straw sticking out the top. The logo on the side said AMC. That meant the movie theater, not the food court.

Jesus. Had I been tearing out my hair for three hours while Rodney Glass had taken himself to a matinee?

Or was that just what he wanted us to think? Was this all for show? Where else might he have been all this time?

As I watched him throw his bag into the back of the car — casually, maybe too casually — I started to get a horrible, sinking feeling. It was nothing I could prove to myself either way, but my gut was starting to tell me what my head didn’t want to know.

He knew he was being watched, didn’t he? He knew .

Hala kept her head down, her face averted, as she walked up First Street.

She crossed K Street and then cut left into a narrow alley near the bus station.

It was well screened at the front by several large, gray dumpsters, with stacks of wooden pallets, abandoned furniture, and old bags of garbage at the back, where Tariq was waiting for her.

He was even paler than when she’d left him. It looked like he’d lost a good deal of blood. Tariq was becoming a liability.

“Did you get it?” he asked.

“Some of it,” Hala answered, and knelt down where he was sitting propped against the brick wall. From inside her shirt, she pulled out a small bottle of Tylenol, a roll of gauze, and an Ace bandage. It was as much as she’d been able to lift at the drugstore without being seen.

“Let me see your hand,” she said. “Please. Let me see .”

She pulled away the strip of shirt cloth she’d used to wrap Tariq’s wound the night before. It was in horrendous shape. The bullet had passed right through, probably shattering the metacarpal of his right thumb as it did. He had no flexion, no extension at all. If they didn’t get proper medical attention, and soon, she was going to have to start cutting away the dead and dying flesh.