I couldn’t argue with Sampson’s concern. Condon had graduated from the Naval Academy and been a sniper, a damned good one, with a SEAL Team 6 unit. A week after he had mustered out of the military for medical reasons, a company called Dyson Security gave Condon a contract and sent him to Afghanistan.
Condon’s reputation for having a cool head even in the most extreme conditions continued after he left the military, and he soon led a Dyson team that specialized in protecting political and corporate dignitaries and rescuing private contractors taken hostage by the Taliban.
One of those private contractors was an American woman named Paula Healey who worked trying to improve the lives of Afghani girls, which had made her a target for the fundamentalists. Healey was also the love of Condon’s life.
She and three other women were taken outside of Kandahar. After several months, Condon learned where Healey was being held—in a remote village in a region known for poppy cultivation and opium production.
Condon and a team of his men went in under cover of night. After a firefight with the local Taliban, he found Healey strung out on opium and stabbed in the chest. She was the only one of the four women left alive. She’d been raped repeatedly and died in Condon’s arms.
What happened then depends on whose testimony you believe. Either the Taliban counterattacked and Condon risked his life repeatedly to kill and drive them back, or Condon went berserk with grief and rage and gunned down every male over the age of fourteen left in the village.
There’d been an investigation, and every one of the Dyson Security operators backed up Condon’s version of events. The widows and mothers claimed their dead were not Taliban and that they had been slaughtered.
Ultimately, Condon was exonerated. But losing his love changed him, made him violent and unpredictable. Dyson decided he could not be put in the field and paid off his five-year contract in a lump sum.
Condon had used the money to buy the land we were walking through.
Dolores said Condon was a hermit who liked to farm and go fishing on his boat out on the ocean alone. He distrusted anybody involved in the government. His only visitors, and they were rare, were the men and women who’d served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I’d asked Dolores how she knew so much about him.
She’d hesitated and then said, “Once, a long time before he met Paula, I was the love of Nicholas’s life.”
There was a picket stake in the trail with a piece of orange tape fluttering off it. We went around it and entered the field forty yards from its eastern end, where there was a ten-foot-high dirt embankment with a large red tub of Tide detergent sitting on top.
The field to our right lay fallow. It was long and narrow, three hundred yards to the other end and maybe fifty yards to the far tree line.
“The house is in the next field?” Sampson said as we started across.
“That’s the way I—”
We never heard the shot, just the bullet ripping the air before the Tide detergent tub on the embankment erupted like a land mine, throwing dirt, rock, and melted plastic everywhere and sending a plume of gray smoke toward the sky.
Chapter
34
As soon as we heard the bullet ripping past us, instinct kicked in. We were both diving when the bomb went off.
Sampson and I hit the ground and put our arms over our heads as debris rained down on us. My left ear rang and for a moment I was disoriented.
Then, like a boxer recovering from a glancing blow, I became more alert. I dug at my back for my service pistol and then followed Sampson as he squirmed forward into high grass and weeds.
“Where’d the shot come from?” Sampson asked in a harsh whisper.
“From Condon’s sniper rifle?”
“I meant from what direction?”
“No idea, but it had to have been far away if we didn’t hear the report before whatever was in that Tide thing exploded.”
“We need to reach the trees and call for backup,” Sampson said.
“Backup first,” I said, and pulled out my cell. “Great—no service.”
“I had it over by the road.”
“Not here,” I said, and then I heard something over the ringing in my left ear.
Sampson heard it too, rose up to look, and then ducked down.
“That’s an ATV,” Sampson said. “He’s coming for us. Two hundred yards out. Near the tree line.”
We stared at each other, thinking the same thing: Do we run for the trees and risk getting shot by a world-class sniper? Or—
I pushed myself to my feet, held out my badge, and aimed my pistol at Condon, who was less than a hundred yards away in a green Polaris Ranger. Sampson stood up beside me and did the same.
Condon pulled up at ninety yards, snaked a scoped rifle over the wheel, and shouted, “You trying to get yourselves killed? Didn’t you see the goddamned orange flag in the road?”
“We didn’t know what it meant,” I shouted back. “We’re detectives with Washington Metro Police. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Condon was hunkered over the rifle, aiming at us through his scope. At ninety yards, any shot we might take with the pistol would be a Hail Mary. But ninety yards with a precision sniper rifle was a chip shot.
I had a funny feeling in my chest, as if he’d put the crosshairs there. Then he lifted his head. “You the Alex Cross? FBI profiler and all that?”
“I was,” I called back. “That’s right.”
That seemed to satisfy Condon because he slipped the rifle into a plastic scabbard mounted to the side of the ATV and started driving toward us.
“How’d he know your name?” Sampson asked.
“I’m thinking he read our credentials through his scope,” I said, lowering my gun but not holstering it.
Condon pulled up about ten yards away. Late thirties and rawboned, he had silver-and-red hair and a matching beard. Both needed cutting.
“Azore,” he said. “Denni.”
Two German shepherds jumped down from the flatbed carrier behind the sniper. They stopped and stood there, panting, at Condon’s side.
“You mind telling us what the hell that was all about?” Sampson asked. “Shooting at us?”
Condon said, “Practicing my trade. You walked into a hot rifle range, my place of business, unannounced and forewarned. That’s what happened.”
I said, “You didn’t see us before you shot?”
He looked at me, blinked, said, “Hell no, I was in the zone. In the whole wide world, there was nothing but the I and the D and the trigger and me.”
“What’s the I and the D?”
He spelled it out. “T-i-d-e.”
“What was in that container?” I asked.
“Tannerite,” he said. “Exploding target material. Shot indicator.”
Sampson said, “You almost killed us with that stuff, which is illegal in Maryland, by the way.”
Ordinarily the mere presence of a pissed-off John Sampson was enough to shake the toughest of criminals. But Condon looked at ease.
“Not for me,” he said. “I have a federal permit through Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And, like I said, I didn’t know you were there. If I’d wanted to kill you, Detectives, you’d already be dead, and I’d have a shovel-and-shut-up mission on my hands. Know what I mean?”
I did know what the sniper meant and absolutely believed him.
Chapter
35
Condon crossed his arms and said, “So go ahead, ask your questions.”
“Somewhere we can sit down?” Sampson said. “Get out of this heat?”
Condon considered that, said, “Two weapons each? Primary and backup?”
I nodded.
“Azore,” Condon said. “Denni.”
The dogs circled us in easy lopes. Both hesitated, turned noses toward our ankles, then wagged their tails.
The sniper whistled and they went back to his side.
“Always like to kno
w for sure,” Condon said, and he started up the Ranger. “One of you can sit up front. One in the back.”
“I’ll take the back,” I said, then I holstered my pistol and climbed up onto the little flatbed carrier beside several toolboxes that presumably held the tools of Condon’s trade.
Sampson had to duck his head to squeeze into the passenger seat.
Condon put the Ranger in gear, glanced at Sampson, and said, “Guys big as you don’t last long when the shit hits the fan.”
“Which is why I like to be holding the fan at all times,” Sampson growled.
Condon almost smiled.
The German shepherds ran along as we drove to the tree line, where another picket with orange flagging blocked the road. The sniper got out, drew it from the ground, and handed it to me.
A minute or two later, we pulled up by a black Ford F-150, a Harley-Davidson, and a John Deere farm tractor parked in front of a white ranch house in need of scraping and painting. A Grady-White fishing boat sat on a trailer near a red barn in need of shoring and paint.
The long field in front of Condon’s house was shoulder-high in corn. His grass needed mowing, and the air smelled of stale dog dung and urine.
Condon turned off the ATV, tugged the rifle from the black scabbard, and got out. He walked with a slight hitch in his stride to retrieve one of the toolboxes.
“Nice gun,” I said.
“Designed it myself,” he said, grabbing one of the toolboxes and showing me a .338 Lapua with a Timney trigger, a Lone Wolf custom stock, and a Swarovski 4 to 18 power scope.
No wonder he’d been able to read my credentials at ninety yards.
“How far can you shoot something like that?” Sampson asked.
“Wind’s calm and I’m right, a mile,” Condon said, and he went with a slight hitch in his gait up a cracked walkway to the front porch.
He came up with a heavy ring of keys and used them to open three dead bolts. Opening the door, he called, “Denni. Azore.”
The dogs streaked into the house. Two minutes later, they returned.
“Kennel up,” he said.
The dogs trotted over to cedar beds and lay down.
Condon gestured for us to follow him inside and flipped on the light in a small living area off a kitchen. The place reeked of marijuana. Beer cans and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s crowded a coffee table between a couch with busted springs and a large TV on the wall. An image from Game of Thrones was frozen on the flat-screen.
The drapes were drawn. Condon crossed to an air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall and turned it on.
“Beer?” he asked.
“We’re on duty,” Sampson said.
“Suit yourself,” Condon said, and he went into the kitchen.
I looked around, saw Sampson had gone to a small table in the corner and was looking at several framed photographs, all of the same beautiful young woman in a variety of rugged outdoor settings. In the largest picture, an eight-by-ten, she was in Condon’s arms and he glowed like he owned the world.
“That what you’re here about?” Condon asked. “Paula and all?”
Even with the limp, he’d come up behind us so quietly we both startled.
When I turned, the sniper popped his Bud can, looked at us coldly.
“We’d heard about her. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Condon softened slightly, said, “Thank you.”
“What’s it been? Four years?”
“Four years, six months, three days, nine hours, three minutes. Was this what you came all the way from DC to talk about?”
In the car, Sampson and I had hashed out how best to approach him. Trying to bull or bluff a guy like Condon wasn’t going to work, so I opted to come at him from the side.
“We need your help,” I said. “Do you keep up with the news?”
“I try not to,” Condon said.
“There was a mass murder in a methamphetamine factory in Washington, DC,” I said. “Twenty-two people died. The assault seemed professional, as in highly trained. Probably ex-military.”
As if he were seeing an enemy in the distance, the sniper’s eyes hardened.
“I know where this is going,” he said. “I’ll save you some time. I had nothing to do with that. Now, unless you have a warrant, Detective Cross, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my house and off my land.”
“Mr. Condon—”
“Now. Before I get all loony and PTSD, start thinking you’re the Taliban.”
Part Three
Mercury Rising
Chapter
36
Mercury rarely rode his motorcycle in broad daylight.
He generally took the bike out only at night and on patrol. But heading south on Interstate 97, he felt like nothing could shake him today, as if more balance were coming into the world, and into his life. He had been the avenger now in more ways than one, and he rather liked the role.
Hell, he loved everything about what he’d been doing these past few weeks—taking charge and acting when no one else would. Certainly not the police. Certainly not the FBI or NCIS. Do-nothings, one and—
Mercury noticed a beige Ford Taurus weaving in the slow lane just south of the Maryland Route 32 interchange. He hung one car back and one car over.
The Taurus drifted, and the Porsche SUV in front of Mercury honked at it. The Taurus wandered back into its lane.
The Porsche accelerated. Mercury sped up as if to pass the Taurus too and got just far enough to see what was really going on.
“Stupid bitch,” he muttered, anger beginning to build, boiling away all that good feeling. “Don’t you read? Don’t you listen?”
He backed off, telling himself that this wasn’t the time or the place.
But as he entered a long, slow, easterly curve in the four-lane highway, Mercury realized that, except for the Taurus, the southbound lanes were clear in front and behind him.
He made a split-second decision and zipped open his jacket. With his right hand he twisted the throttle, and with his left, he drew the pistol.
The motorcycle sped up until it was right beside the Taurus. The stupid bitch driving didn’t look at him, and she wasn’t looking at the road ahead.
She was texting on an iPhone while driving sixty-two miles an hour.
Years of practice had made Mercury an ambidextrous shot. He was about to pull the trigger when Ms. Textaholic actually took her eyes off the goddamned screen.
She looked over. She saw the gun.
She dropped the iPhone and twisted as he shot.
The tail end of the Taurus swung violently into his lane, almost knocking over the motorcycle, and then it veered back the other way, did a 360-degree spin, ran up an embankment, and flipped over onto its roof.
He put away the pistol and drove on at a steady sixty-three, two miles below the speed limit.
No need to draw any attention now that the traffic laws were being obeyed and a sense of balance, a sense of order, had been restored.
Chapter
37
That afternoon after we talked to Condon, we went to Bree’s office and gave her our report.
“So Condon threatened two law enforcement officers?” she asked, looking as stressed and tired as I’ve ever seen her.
“Oh yeah,” Sampson said.
“In a manner of speaking, anyway,” I said. “He’s highly intelligent. Knew what we were up to the second we mentioned the massacre.”
“You ask him where he was on the night in question?”
“He wouldn’t answer,” Sampson said. “Said he’d learned the hard way never to talk with an investigator of any kind without an attorney present.”
“But you put him on notice that he’s a suspect,” Bree said. “That can be a good thing.”
“It can,” I said. “But we can’t exactly put him under surveillance from here, and we don’t have evidence to support a search warrant.”
“Find me one thing that links Condon to th
at factory, and I’ll call in some favors with the state police in Maryland. Have them put him under surveillance.”
“I find one thing that links Condon to that factory and I think Mahoney will take over and call in the FBI cavalry, and it will be out of our hands.”
Sampson said, “I’m going to check if Condon has a Tannerite waiver. If not, he’s stockpiling explosives and we can walk in his front door with an army behind us.”
“Good,” Bree said.
We started to leave, but Bree called after me, “Alex? Can we talk?”
“Fine,” Sampson said. “I know when I’m not wanted.”
He closed the door as he left. Bree sagged back in her chair.
“You okay?” I said.
“Not today,” she said. “This morning, the mayor and the chief took turns using me as their verbal punching bag over the massacre.”
“And a few days ago, you helped them get the pressure off their backs by naming Terry Howard as Tom’s killer. You can’t go up and down emotionally along with their roller-coaster whims. Accept the fact that getting pressure from above is part of the job but doesn’t define it. Focus on doing the best you can. Nothing else. Three months from now you’ll have a whole different outlook on things.”
Bree sighed. “Think so?”
“I know so,” I said, coming around to massage her shoulders and neck.
“Ohhhh, I need that,” she said. “My lower back’s hurting too.”
“You’re sitting down too much,” I said. “You’re used to being up and active, and your body’s protesting.”
“I’m a desk jockey now. Part of the territory.”
“Get the chief to buy you one of those stand-up desks. Or better yet, a treadmill desk.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Bree said.
“I’m full of good ideas today.” I bent over and kissed her on the cheek.
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you too,” I said and nuzzled her neck. “But we’re good, right?”
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