Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,41
on the Happy Pines Motel. Two fire trucks. Five police cruisers. Four vans bearing a small army of crime scene techs and special agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Mahoney was standing next to me, elbows on the balcony railing, still shocked by how close we’d come to death.
“Wish I’d never quit smoking,” he said, and I heard a quiver in his voice.
“Close,” I said, equally shaken. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”
I’d called Bree to let her know what had happened, and Mahoney and I had already spoken about Varjan with a parade of agents assigned to the case. Our theory was that she suspected she’d been spotted after arriving at Dulles and had tested that suspicion by renting the motel room under the name Martina Rodoni.
“She sat on us, waiting,” I said. “For two days.”
“She’s disciplined, I give you that,” Mahoney said.
“Is she? Why try to kill us? It only increases the heat on her.”
“I’ll set aside the why for now. She did it is all I need to know. We have to get her face everywhere. She’s got other business planned.”
“I agree. Enhance and enlarge the security photo of her. She’ll be recognized.”
He nodded and took out his cell phone.
Almost directly below us in the parking lot, Rani Yasant was yelling at her husband, who was looking up at the smoldering hole that had once been room 15.
“You see?” Mrs. Yasant cried, hands on her belly. “If you had been brave and gone up there, you would have died, Vash, and then where would I be? Answer me that, where would I be?”
Yasant put both hands to his head as if squeezing it in a vise. “Why do you always think this way, Rani? I did not go up there. I am alive. And you wish me to be a coward in every aspect of my life!”
He shouted this last bit, and it caused his wife to step back and start crying.
“What are we going to do?” she said, sobbing. “I told you not to buy that extra fire insurance. I said it was too expensive!”
Her husband softened and walked over to her. He put his arms around her.
“It’s okay, Rani. I did not listen to you.”
His wife looked up at him through tears. “Is that true?”
“We’re covered,” he said, and he kissed her forehead.
“Agent Mahoney?”
Mahoney and I turned to find Tim Schmidt, the supervising special agent with BATF, coming toward us. Mahoney finished his call and hung up.
Schmidt said, “Preliminary results say you had plastic explosives in that bag with a frequency trigger set to trip at the phone’s ringtone. Where is the phone, by the way? We’d like to take it if possible.”
Mahoney said, “It’s already on its way to Quantico, but we will share everything with BATF as soon as we have it.”
Schmidt puffed up his cheeks and blew out his mouth. “Fair enough. It’s cooled down enough in there to look around if you want.”
We walked back to room 15. The walls were scorched and blackened. So was the ceiling. There was an inch of dark water on the floor.
The near twin bed had been thrown over. The mattress lay in the slurry, coated in soot. The mattress of the far bed, the one where the bag and phone had been, now had a gaping charred hole in it almost the entire width and three-quarters of the length.
I stared at the blast hole. So did Ned, who said, “Darn happy to be here, Alex.”
I nodded, still stunned and thanking my guardian angel for helping me put the phone, the bag, and Varjan’s words together fast enough to clear the room and survive. I felt humbled and then desperate to go home and be with my family.
But I overrode that desire with the need to do my job. I turned from the mattress and looked at a table lamp, bent and twisted on the floor, and then at the night table flipped over on its left flank. The right side was caved in and scorched. The drawer was closed.
Beside the table on the floor was an open and partially burned Gideon Bible.
I looked at the closed drawer. I supposed it was possible the blast had driven the open drawer shut. Or that Gideon Bible had been out before the blast. Had I seen it?
I didn’t remember. If it was out, why? Would a professional assassin like Varjan seek spiritual solace in a motel Bible?