Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,68

paid them no attention, just bounded down the stairs and trotted out the open overhead door into chill pouring rain. He zipped the jacket to the collar and tugged on the hood strings to tighten it before lowering his head and walking very fast south on Twenty-Third Street.

A knot of four or five people in raincoats or carrying umbrellas hurried ahead of him on the sidewalk, medical personnel, judging from the way they were talking. They were worrying about how they’d get home with all the public transit shut down.

A block away, a police cruiser was parked across the intersection, its blue lights flashing. The shooter moved closer to the group ahead of him.

When they were near the intersection with H Street, Cruz held the hood tight and turned his head briefly toward the police car, as if he were curious.

Then he looked away, having given them just enough to know his face wasn’t bandaged but not enough to see he wore a dead man’s skin.

Cruz crossed the street behind the others and heard no one call out. He stayed with them as the rain fell harder, and still he heard no one yell after him.

It wasn’t until he was a block and a half south of the medical center that he heard a symphony of sirens start up, all of them getting closer, trumpeting and wailing their way toward a hospital where the president’s shooter wasn’t anymore.

CHAPTE

68

I HAD TAKEN off from Andrews sitting in the rear seat of an air force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet, as stunning and exhilarating an experience as I’ve ever had.

Mahoney had gone in a second one. With U.S. airspace empty, the pilots were free to fly near the Strike Eagles’ blistering top-end speed of more than eighteen hundred miles an hour. We covered the 1,624 miles to an air force base west of San Antonio in less than fifty-five minutes.

As the planes were coming in for a landing, Director Sanford told Mahoney that Kasimov had not arrived in London. Ned relayed the information to me over my headset.

“Where’d he go?” I asked.

“Toward North Africa,” Mahoney said. “Before he disappeared off the radar.”

“No,” I said as we touched down.

“Yup. His jet was picked up crossing Majorcan airspace, and then nothing.”

Was this an act of war? With Kasimov on the inside, choreographing the attacks from his suite at the Mandarin Oriental?

A Texas National Guard Apache helicopter flew us thirty-five minutes southwest of the air base over dry, broken country pocked with scrub brush to the remote Garand Ranch, reputed to be one of the Lone Star State’s finest quail-hunting lodges.

We flew in over harvested agricultural fields. Deer scattered and bounded from the stubble as we dropped in altitude and landed near a barn and a hacienda-style lodge.

A small contingent of local law enforcement waited for us along with an FBI forensics crew that had just arrived on the scene from the Dallas office. To my surprise, I recognized someone in the crowd right away: U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee looked shell-shocked when I walked up and shook his hand.

“What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”

Lee shook his head in disbelief. “Bill Johnston, Speaker Guilford’s usual body man, got sick, and I got assigned to come down and watch Guilford and the secretary of state take a much-needed break and hunt quail. First Betsy Walker and now Guilford, both on my watch? I … it makes me look—”

“Dr. Cross?”

I looked to Terrance Crown, the U.S. Diplomatic Service agent who’d been assigned to protect secretary of state Aaron Deeds and his wife, Eliza.

“I’m glad you’re here, sir,” Crown said, shaken. “I’ve heard you’re the best, and we need the best right now.”

Eldon Pritchard, a lean man in his forties with a waxed mustache who was wearing a white cowboy hat, boots, jeans, and the badge of a Texas Ranger, was also there, but he seemed thoroughly unimpressed by our presence.

They took us out on the terrace, where the bodies of the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state were still lying where they’d fallen, covered with clear plastic sheeting. It was warm in the sunshine, but they were in shade. Eliza Deeds, the secretary of state’s wife, had been medevaced to a hospital in Dallas hours ago.

“We haven’t touched a thing,” Lieutenant Lee said. “I insisted. And the staff is waiting to talk.”

“Take us through it,” Mahoney said.

We heard about breakfasts on the terrace in the morning sun, a Garand Ranch tradition even in winter.