Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  “What’s Larkin going to say tonight?”

  “We don’t know.”

  An agent rushed up. “Sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but we’ve got a positive ID on the treasury secretary’s killer.”

  Ten minutes later, on all four screens, a photograph went up of a burly man with a shock of unruly dark hair, a thick beard, and sunglasses. He was standing on a high point somewhere, rock and desert behind him. He wore faded military camouflage and a black-and-white-checked scarf around his neck. A black assault rifle hung from his chest harness, and he was smiling over ten dead bodies at his feet.

  “Martin Franks,” Carstensen said through a microphone so everyone in the hangar could hear. “Former U.S. JSOC operator, former Marine MARSOC operator, honorably discharged under an odious plea agreement four years ago. His COs came to suspect Franks had psychopathic tendencies. He liked to kill.

  “This picture shows the result of his unauthorized one-man foray into a suspected Taliban village. He claimed he was discovered and had to fight his way out. There was an investigation, but it was one live man versus ten dead, and it had happened at night. No one else in the village could say exactly what had happened. Or would. The JAGs cut a deal to let him walk out and save the country further embarrassment.”

  The screen split, and a photo appeared showing an older man among saguaro cacti. He wore green work clothes and carried an AK-47.

  “This is Morris ‘Moe’ Franks,” she went on. “Martin Franks’s father. Moe has been on and off our watch list for more than two decades. Lives off the grid in southwest Arizona. Been involved in various militia groups over the years and has published tracts espousing anti-globalist views and stating his belief that only an armed uprising will cure the country’s ills.”

  “So Moe is alive?” an analyst asked.

  “Far as we know,” Carstensen said. “I’ve dispatched a team to his compound. In the meantime, I want everything you can find about his son’s activities since his discharge. You have an open warrant to search. Dismissed.”

  She turned to me and Mahoney. “Thoughts?”

  “I think homing in on Franks and squeezing the old man are smart moves,” Mahoney said.

  “I’m sensing a but coming,” she said, crossing her arms.

  Ned said, “We just can’t lose track of the big picture in all this. The assassinations. The hacks. This all could be provocation to war.”

  “I think President Larkin has that covered.”

  I cleared my throat. “I think there’s also the possibility that this is not state-sanctioned, that we have a single, ruthless Machiavellian mind at work behind the scenes. In light of that, I keep asking myself, Who benefits here? ”

  “And?” Carstensen said.

  “There’s no way around it,” I said, lowering my voice. “Who benefits? Larkin. He most certainly benefits.”

  Carstensen shook her head, incredulous, and laughed. “You think Sam Larkin orchestrated the assassination of all the people above him in the succession chain so he could take over the country?”

  “I think we have a duty to investigate that possibility, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER

  71

  PRESIDENT LARKIN SPOKE to the nation from Air Force One at nine p.m. eastern time.

  Mahoney and I watched it on the big screens in the hangar. In the immediate run-up to the speech, the media noted that in city after city across America and despite the imposition of martial law, tens of thousands of young people had shown up in public places carrying flags and waiting to watch Larkin on their mobile devices.

  When Larkin came on, he was grave, not at all the crusader he’d once been.

  “My fellow Americans,” he began. “I come to you in a time of peril. We have been attacked in an effort to destabilize our great nation. The assassinations of our president, Speaker of the House, the secretaries of state and the treasury, and the assassination attempt on the secretary of defense are acts of war on America and its people, and those acts will not go unanswered.”

  Larkin said this last with such deep intensity and resolve that I was having trouble seeing him as part of a great plot to take power. But he’d been such a brash and ambitious man when he was younger. Could leopards change their spots?

  The acting president went on, outlining the steps being taken to identify the assassins and the people behind them. He asked for calm while the investigative team did its business.

  “I know the idea of martial law in the United States is a frightening one,” Larkin said. “But I believe it is necessary if we are to get to the heart of the matter fast and understand the identity of our common enemy. Until then, we cannot respond. Until then, we are in pure defensive and investigative modes.

  “I never sought this office. I believed I had reached the pinnacle of my career as your attorney general, and I was proud of my performance there. But now this responsibility has come to me, and I promise each and every one of you that I will try to make the best decisions for the survival of our great nation and our way of life.”

  He paused to smile a bit and nod his head. “Now, I’m not saying I won’t make mistakes or act in ways that you disagree with. But if I make a mistake, I’ll take responsibility, and if I act in ways that you don’t agree with, I’d ask you to give me a little time. There’s a method to my madness.

  “Good night, and God bless the United States of America.”

  The screens went dark and then jumped to various anchors and commentators, who were quick to describe the nation as being “under siege” and “ramping up for combat.”

  “What’d you think?” Mahoney asked.

  “I thought it was a little odd that he said there was a method to his madness, but otherwise, it was calming. I felt like the guy was trying to do what he said he would.”

  Ned glanced up at the screens, where pieces of Larkin’s short speech were being replayed. “I hope you’re right, Alex,” he said. “Because if you’re wrong, whatever trust people have left in Washington will evaporate, and God only knows what could happen after that. Riots. Chaos. Lawlessness.”

  “Not if we catch who’s behind it all,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  72

  PAST MIDNIGHT AND beneath a chill, driving rain, a pile of leaves stirred in a gully in Rock Creek Park, below Twenty-Sixth Street. A hand emerged slowly and pushed the sopping dead leaves off the cowl of dead skin Pablo Cruz still wore.

  The skin and the jacket had kept his upper body mostly dry, but when Cruz sat up, he was drenched from the waist down and using every breathing skill he knew to keep his core warm.

  His feet were numb, and when he stood, his knees were stiff. The narcotics the doctors had given him were wearing off. His face ached. His broken teeth screamed.

  An ordinary man might have succumbed to hypothermia by now. A weaker man might be focused on finding drugs to kill the pain.

  But Cruz was neither ordinary nor weak. He’d long ago trained himself to be a superior man, one who could control his emotions, mind, and pain. Whatever it took to survive, he would do, and he would deal with the physical damage later.

  The assassin peeled off the cowl of skin and buried it before he crawled out of the gully about three-quarters of the way up the slope above the creek bed. Blue lights flashed far to the northwest, down through the trees, down there on the parkway.

  Forcing his mind to his contingency plans, Cruz figured he had only one chance of getting out of the nation’s capital alive. He’d heard all the sirens heading toward the hospital and seen the roadblocks at the bridges to Virginia from a distance.

  Cruz expected that all major and minor roads leading out of the District were now closed. The Metro was down. He hadn’t heard a plane in the sky in hours. Few cars had passed, and even fewer helicopters were flying in the relentless rain.

  He traversed north along the muddy slope, using the shadows thrown by streetlights and buildings up on Twenty-Sixth to make out downed logs and low-hanging tre
e branches. He reached the M Street bridge and crawled through the brush and up the side of the embankment by the abutment.

  Above him on the bridge, he heard two distraught-sounding women hurrying toward Georgetown and talking about President Hobbs’s death. Cruz allowed himself a moment of congratulation, a mental pat on the back for a job not only complete but well executed. All in all.

  He considered climbing the rest of the way up to the street and just crossing it with his head down to the rain, the way he imagined the women who’d just passed him had done. But instinct overruled the idea. He scrambled back down and beneath the bridge.

  Cruz stopped there when he heard a mechanical noise in the distance. Tanks!

  They were bringing in soldiers and tanks. Of course they were. Larkin had declared martial law, hadn’t he?

  For a moment, the assassin felt unnerved. It was one thing to evade police and even federal agents, but an army?

  It won’t be an army, he told himself. They’ll be brought in as a presence, a threat. There won’t be a soldier on every corner. Or will there?

  Cruz shook off the questions. In dire situations such as this, he’d always found it better to stick to the plan and execute it rather than ponder it to death.

  He kept on to the north of the bridge where Twenty-Sixth hit that dead end. When he climbed up to the edge of the park, he could see back to M Street, where one tank had blocked the entrance to the bridge. A second was continuing on toward Georgetown.

  Cruz crept across the slope, peering up at the lights in the nearest apartment building, then focusing on two windows on the third floor on adjacent walls of a corner. When he got the angle right, and still watching those two windows, he slid down the hill and shuffled his feet through the leaves, wondering if the dry bag could have been found by a kid exploring in the park or by a nosy dog. Or maybe the rain had flushed the drain cover off and then out and …

  His heel found the edge of the corrugated drainpipe, which was belching water. Cruz got around and below it, felt for the edge of the cover, and pried it off. The dry bag slid out and fell at his feet before he could reach inside. He knew smiling would be torture, but he grinned anyway.

  Cruz did his best not to moan at the pain as he stooped to pick the dry bag up, thinking, Now? Now I’ve got a real chance .

  CHAPTER

  73

  CRUZ SIDESTEPPED SLOWLY down the steep slope, the rubber bag held out in front of him to block the branches he couldn’t see in the darkness and rain. Several hundred yards to his north and down on the parkway, those blue lights were still flashing, and behind them he saw the bulk of yet another tank.

  He stopped in a thicket above Rock Creek itself and opened the dry bag. He found the headlamp, but he did not use it. And he tossed the hammer and chisel before feeling around for and tugging out a Bare X-Mission dry suit made tough enough and warm enough for cave divers.

  Black, and made of nylon ripstop, the suit could withstand extreme climates and still keep the wearer alive. He stripped out of his wet clothes, and, teeth chattering, he struggled into the suit, booties, and gloves.

  From neck to toe, he almost immediately started to warm.

  Only then did Cruz fish in the bag for the hood, a dive mask, and a smaller dry bag that contained a brick of cash in various currencies, several identifications, and a small book with critical phone and account numbers. He also got out a combat knife in a sheath on a nylon-webbed belt and a small Ruger pistol in a holster before finding the first-aid kit and the antibiotics and painkillers.

  Cruz figured the massive dose of antibiotics the doctors at George Washington had administered were enough to hold him for a while, but ate four painkillers and then a fifth before strapping the Ruger and the knife to his waist.

  He got his arms in the shoulder straps and hoisted the smaller bag onto his back. Carrying the hood and the dive mask, he eased in the shadows, going tree to tree, until …

  The assassin stopped, catching movement no more than ninety yards away. Across the creek, up on the parkway, a soldier stepped beneath a street lamp, and then more soldiers. A squad of them were moving on patrol and slowly coming his way.

  With a dog.

  A black and tan German shepherd.

  Even in the rain, Cruz knew, the dog would alert to his scent sooner rather than later. He yanked the hood down over his battered face, fought off the urge to curse at the agony that caused, and then tugged the dive mask on. He sat and then slid feetfirst down over mud and slick leaves, losing sight of the soldiers before plunging into the rushing muddy Rock Creek itself.

  With the bag on his back causing drag, Cruz had difficulty keeping his feet out in front of him. He got sideways quickly, hit a submerged rock with his hip, and was swept over it.

  Then his arm snagged on a branch, and he had to struggle against the current to get free; he turned around on his back, feet leading again. It was all he could do to keep his head above the water as he searched downstream for the shape of rocks and sharper obstructions.

  He hit several, all unseen, but took the blows without a sound. The raging creek was doing its job, whisking him farther and farther from that patrol.

  Ahead, however, up on the parkway to his right, Cruz soon saw flashing blue lights. Above them, on the M Street Bridge, soldiers were shining powerful spotlights down into the park.

  Other flashlights appeared behind the cruisers on the parkway. Another patrol of multiple soldiers were headed north toward him, shining their beams down into the creek bed, crisscrossing like so many light sabers.

  When the president’s assassin realized he could die in the next few moments, he turned reptilian, cold-blooded, as he took and released several deep, sharp breaths and then plunged his head back and under the raging water. Rather than fight the current, he relaxed, let the flood have its way with him, smashing him against a boulder and then flinging him into deeper water just as the flashlight beams cut across the surface of the creek eighteen inches above him. He was soon past the soldiers on the parkway, but he remembered the ones on the bridge and stayed submerged.

  Forty seconds. Fifty seconds. Sixty.

  His lungs were close to bursting, but he did not lift his head until those lights had passed over him, and he was looking up through the heavily silted water at the dark underside of the bridge. Cruz surfaced, took four deep breaths, and ducked back down beneath the water.

  The creek was straighter there, and he went with the flow out from under the bridge and down a long dark stretch away from prying lights. Feeling the current slow as the creek widened and deepened, he surfaced and breathed deep again.

  It was remarkable just how warm he was. The suit was lined with material that reflected and trapped his body heat. The water was probably forty-five degrees, judging from the way it felt on his chin and lower cheeks, but the rest of his body might as well have been in Florida.

  Twenty minutes later, he floated beneath the off-ramps from K Street and the Whitehurst Freeway. Over the thrum of rain, Cruz could hear tanks clanking up on the overpasses, and he could smell their burning diesel.

  The current slowed even more as he approached the Swedish embassy, which was up on the western bank of the creek and lit up like a fortress. He swam to the opposite side of the waterway and stayed tight to its east bank until he was well clear of the place.

  Beneath the Virginia Avenue bridge, he stopped and crouched in the shallows.

  The lights were on ahead of him at the Thompson Boat Center. He could see Humvees and soldiers in the parking lot and imagined that others would be guarding the docks on the Potomac side.

  Cruz peered down the east bank of the creek and decided he’d hang tight to it, maybe even crawl up into the brush if it looked like a better—

  “Hey, what?” a man’s drunken voice said from Cruz’s left, high up the bank below the bottom of the bridge. “Frick’s that, Mikey?”

  “Huh?”

  “Down there, bro!” he said, and a flashlight went o
n.

  Before Cruz could move, the beam found him. He took two strides and dived toward midstream, hearing shouts behind him.

  He swam deep, let the current take him for a count of twenty, then cut left, trying to make it back to the vegetation overhanging the eastern shore. He reached it, grabbed onto roots, and lifted his head for air.

  The two drunken bums under the bridge were still yelling.

  “Hey! Hey, soldier man! There’s a frickin’ frogman in the creek! Frickin’ frogman in the water, dude!”

  Soldiers were running toward the creek, guns up, shining their lights. They were all to Cruz’s right, and looking back toward the bridge and the men shouting. He didn’t notice the two coming from the dock side of the boathouse until their lights had found him. The assassin wasn’t sixty yards from the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac when the soldiers started shouting at him to freeze and put his hands up.

  Cruz dived again and swam deep and blindly downstream, wishing for a surge of storm water to speed him into the Potomac.

  Even submerged like that, a good six feet under, he heard the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic-weapon fire and the shrill whine of the bullets cutting through the water all around him.

  Part Four

  A NATIONWIDE

  MANHUNT

  CHAPTER

  74

  A DOOR BANGED open that Saturday morning.

  I startled awake, dazed and unsure where I was, and Ali rushed to my bedside and broke down crying.

  “Dad,” he blubbered. “We’re all gonna die!”

  I sat up, bleary-eyed, still in my clothes, and remembered I’d gotten home past three a.m. and collapsed into bed beside Bree.

  I looked over at my wife, who was just stirring, and then back at my son, who was weeping with a pitiful expression on his face.

  “We’re all gonna die, Dad!”

  “Stop. What are you talking about?” I said, fighting a yawn.