Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,101
his bulletproof vest. As the cop staggered backward, he pulled the trigger on his pistol. The bullet went wide, hit the boardwalk, and ricocheted out to sea.
The angel’s second shot caught the young policeman through the throat and dropped him in his tracks.
I was closing fast on him then. Two hysterical young women in raincoats were fleeing toward me.
“FBI!” I yelled to the angel. “Drop your gun! Put your hands up!”
The two girls dived to either side of me. The president’s assassin had already looked over his shoulder and started to spin in his tracks, his gun up.
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.
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“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.
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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.