James Patterson: Kill Alex Cross

“Junk food and nothing else,” Hala said with derision. “Welcome to America.”

They were standing beneath an overhang to an office building, when a man suddenly stepped out from the shadows. He had a pistol in his hand and waved it at them. “Give me the pocketbook. Wallet. Loose change, watches,” he growled.

Hala put her arms across her chest and spoke in a high-pitched voice. “Please, don’t hurt us. We’ll give you our money — of course. No problem there. Just don’t hurt us!”

“Shoot you both dead, motherfuckers!” said the thief.

In their country, there were few men as desperate as this, Hala thought. A criminal like him would have his hand cut off if he were caught.

“No problem, no problem,” she answered, nodding. She offered up her knockoff Coach handbag with one hand, and then with the other — pepper spray! She doused the young fiend’s eyes with it.

He screeched and raised both hands to his face, trying to scrub away the burning poison. But his pain was only just starting. Hala dropped the spray and easily grabbed his gun.

She was so angry now. She sent a sharp kick to the boy’s kneecap, buckling it in the wrong direction. He went down screaming, and she kicked at his chest, fracturing a few ribs while she was at it.

Hala’s movements were fast and instinctual and athletic. She never seemed to be more than a foot or two away from the boy. He moaned on the ground — until her foot snapped into his throat. She kicked him in the forehead. The jaw. She broke bone there, too.

“Don’t kill him!” Tariq said, placing a hand on her arm.

“I’m not going to,” she said, and she stepped back. “A dead body would raise too many questions. We mustn’t draw attention. Not yet.” She leaned down to speak directly to the boy on the ground. “But I could have killed you — easily! Remember that the next time you put a gun in somebody’s face.”

They left the moaning boy in the shadows and crossed the street, then hurried back to the Wayfarer. There was nothing decent to eat out there anyway. This country was like the desert — just an arid wasteland that ought to be destroyed.

Without a doubt, it would be soon.

The FBI’s strategic information operations center was overflowing with somber, stressed-out police personnel that Sunday afternoon. This was a full-court press if there ever was one. The main briefing theater on the fifth floor of the Hoover Building was standing room only.

Ned Mahoney rocked back on the heels of his black boots and tried to take the situation in. He could feel exhaustion taking over his body, but his mind was running full tilt. Odds were good that everyone in the room felt the same way. Ethan and Zoe Coyle had been missing for fifty-two hours and twenty-nine minutes , according to the red-digit count clock on the wall.

The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, had insisted it go up and stay up, front and center, until they got the kids back. One way or the other .

There were live camera feeds from the Branaff School playing on several of the big screens, and area maps of a fifty-mile radius of Washington. Some of those had blinking red flags on them, though Mahoney wasn’t sure what they meant. The Bureau was operating like the well-oiled octopus it could be, with everyone on a strictly need-to-know basis.

The briefing came to order as soon as Director Burns arrived, trailing half a dozen harried-looking ADs and addressing the room even as he came in the side door at the front of the theater.

“Okay, I want a rundown from section heads right now,” he said. “Have we got Counterterrorism here yet? Ops Two?”

“Over here, sir.” Terry Marshall, the deputy section chief from that branch, held up her hand and hurried to the front. When she pointed a small remote at the wall of screens, Mahoney was surprised to see two grisly morgue photos come up. They were from the double suicide at Dulles.

“Farouk and Rahma Al Zahrani,” Marshall said. “Both Saudi citizens, educated at UCLA. He taught in the physics department at King Saud University; she worked for a small import-export house in Riyadh. No criminal records, no known criminal or terrorist associations, no known aliases.

“We’ve double-checked all threat lists, repeat, all , and they’re not on any of them. Same goes for every other passenger on their flight.”

“Yes, and?” Burns said. Thirty seconds in the room, and already he was impatient and demanding of his staff. Burns was infamous around the Bureau for the line “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother to come in on Sunday.”

“On paper, these are still separate incidents,” Marshall reported. “But the timing is suspect, to say the least. The Al Zahranis flew in Thursday afternoon, approximately eighteen hours before Zoe and Ethan disappeared. Given that nobody’s claimed responsibility for the abduction, or for the Al Zahranis, for that matter, we can’t afford to rule out a connection between the two.”

The room went quiet for several seconds. This was exactly the problem — since the twenty-four-hour mark had come and gone, the silence was killing them.

“Okay, what else?” Burns demanded. “Where are we with the driver of that van?”

Matt Salvorsen from the DC field office took Marshall’s place at the front of the room.

“So far, his story checks out,” Salvorsen said. He brought up an image of a Maryland driver’s license. The name on it was Ray Pinkney. The picture was of the driver.

“We’ve been over his home computer, and he did in fact receive a private IM from this ‘NE1NE1’ character. Contact was made four days before the abduction.”

“Which my ten-year-old granddaughter could have faked,” Burns said.

“Yes, sir,” Salvorsen answered. “Even so, we don’t believe that Pinkney had the means to pull off the larger operation. He’s kind of...”

“Thick?”

“Something like that, sir. In any case, we’re sitting on him twenty-four/seven at the hospital. He knows he’s up a creek now, and we’re fairly confident he’s giving us everything he’s got.”

“Who else talked to him?” Burns said. “Besides EMTs and hospital staff.”

“Secret Service Agent Findlay,” Salvorsen said. “He’s been temporarily decommissioned. And then Detective Cross, from MPD’s Major Case Squad. He managed to interview Pinkney before the Bureau took jurisdiction.”

Mahoney looked up from his notes when he heard Cross’s name. He was surprised to find Director Burns looking right back at him.

“Ned, you know Alex Cross pretty well?”

“Sure,” Mahoney said.

“Get him in on this, but light duty. We don’t need any more chiefs. Just close enough to keep an eye on him. Don’t tell him anything you don’t need to. I don’t want MPD in our way . Understood?”

Mahoney nodded several times, trying not to say what he was thinking — that Alex deserved better than this. “Sir, Cross was instrumental in the Soneji case—”

“Not looking for your opinion right now. I respect Cross. Just get it done, please. We don’t want MPD involved in this, and Cross is MPD!” Burns said briskly.

Mahoney gave the only answer there was to give at that point. “Yes, sir. Will do.”

Freeze out Alex .

Already, the high-energy director was onto something else on his busy agenda. A crew-cut assistant, female, had just come into the briefing theater, and she whispered in Burns’s ear. Didn’t seem like good news. What was happening now?

At the same time, two Secret Service agents entered from the back, strode up the center aisle, and took a position at the front.