An hour later, the road doglegged and dropped down beside Frenchman’s Creek itself. The vague outlines of a ranch house and barns appeared through the snow.
Potter stopped and used binoculars to look at the windows for lights inside.
“She’s still in Arizona, right where she should be this time of year,” he said after a few minutes.
“Let’s get it over with, then,” Mary said. “We’ve got a cold ride ahead of us.”
They rolled into the ranch yard. Potter saw no tracks anywhere.
He stopped near a shed between the house and the barn, said, “Good a place as any. You clean up inside, and I’ll get the horses unloaded. We’ll put the truck and trailer back where we found them, and we’re out of here. No one the wiser.”
His wife nodded absently and put on latex gloves. The windows were already caked in rime, and Mary was spraying and wiping down the interior of the pickup when Potter climbed out.
The wind howled through the ranch yard. With the wind chill, it had to be fifty below.
Potter ducked his face away from the wind, went around the back of the horse trailer, and opened it. He got the horses out one by one and tied them to a tree on the leeward side of the ranch house.
The wind gusted. As he came around the porch to shut the trailer, he put up his arm to shield his eyes and face from snow.
At first Potter didn’t see the old woman in the wheelchair on the porch, buried under wool clothes and quilts, wearing ski goggles, and aiming a lever-action hunting rifle at him.
When he finally spotted her, he threw up his hands and said, “Don’t shoot!”
She wiggled her lower face out from beneath a scarf, revealing sagging gray skin and an oxygen line running to her nostrils. She glared at him venomously.
“That’s my damn truck!” she shouted in a thin, bitter voice. “That’s my damn trailer too!”
CHAPTER
78
POTTER RAISED HIS leather mitts higher, thought fast, and said, “Please, Mrs. Linney, I work for the Montana Department of Justice. The truck and trailer were found abandoned down the Bitterroot Valley. Didn’t anybody call to tell you I was coming?”
The old lady’s glare did not diminish, but she lifted her head a few inches off the rifle sights before saying, “Phone’s been out since the storm hit. And the electricity. And the furnace.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Don’t you have anyone to help you?”
“My son’s coming for me.”
“Could you lower the gun, Mrs. Linney? It’s making me nervous.”
“You got ID? Badge?” she said, keeping the rifle trained on him.
“ID, no badge,” he said, lowering his arms. “The company I work for does contract delivery work for the state. I have papers for you to sign too. Can we go inside? Get out of the wind?”
Mrs. Linney hesitated until a frigid gale hit them. She grimaced and gestured with the rifle toward the closed front door. “You first.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Potter said. He bowed his head into the biting, whistling wind and started toward the door.
She’s an ornery old cuss, he thought, but he made sure he smiled at her over the barrel of her gun, which followed him in a way that let him know she knew how to use it. He twisted the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into a center hallway with old wide-planked wood floors.
There was a modern kitchen at the far end. He walked past a room with a television to his right and an old-fashioned formal parlor to his left. Both rooms were neat, tidy.
He stopped and pivoted to look back at Mrs. Linney, who was driving her motorized wheelchair with her left hand while her right gripped the rifle, which was now in her lap. That helped.
“Here,” Potter said, starting toward her. “I’ll shut the door for you.”
“No need,” she said, and she threw the chair in reverse and pushed the door shut.
She stared at him a moment, then pulled down her scarf. Her breath came in clouds. Even without the wind, it had to be near zero inside.
“Your pipes freeze?” he asked.
“Drained them, poured antifreeze down the lines,” she said. “I know how to survive up here.”
“I bet you do.”
She drove a few feet toward Potter and then stopped.
“Let’s see that ID and those papers,” she said.
He smiled again, unzipped his parka, and reached inside for his wallet. He dug out his fake Wyoming driver’s license and started toward her.
Mrs. Linney directed the gun toward him. “Just hold it up from there.”
Potter did.
“Wyoming?” she said.
“We deliver to both states and Idaho too. I kept my residence in Cheyenne because there’s no state income tax.”
“Montana takes ten percent of what’s mine,” she said, sounding disgusted. “What about those papers?”
Potter patted his chest, acted confused, said, “Darn, they’re in the truck. Can I get them?”
Mrs. Linney raised the rifle, aimed at his chest, said, “You do that.”
She put up the wool scarf, retreated, and reached around to twist the doorknob. The wind blew the door open. She drove a few feet toward him so the door was pinned against the wall, and then started to back out onto the porch.
Potter was beginning to regret his decision to borrow Mrs. Linney’s truck and trailer to bring his horses to Texas. But she was supposed to be in Tucson all winter.
Before Mrs. Linney’s wheels crossed the doorway, Mary stepped up behind the old bird, reached around, and tore out her oxygen line before clamping a leather mitten across her mouth and nose.
Instead of screaming and struggling, Mrs. Linney aimed wildly at Potter and pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Plaster exploded off the wall next to him.
She tried to run the lever. But he took two big strides and pinned the rifle against her thighs. Mrs. Linney showed no terror at being trapped and smothered. She just glared at him, making sputtering noises of hatred in her throat.
“Poor thing,” Mary said, keeping her grip firm. “Chair battery ran down in the cold. Oxygen tank empty.”
Potter nodded to his wife and to the old woman, who’d begun to struggle now and show fear.
“Poor thing froze to death, right on her front porch,” Potter said, more to Mrs. Linney than to Mary. “Her son found her.”
They left Mrs. Linney like that, sitting there in her wheelchair, dead on her front porch, eyes open, with the gun in her lap and her oxygen line back in place. By the time they’d dropped the trailer, put the truck in the barn, and mounted the horses, the snow was already collecting on the quilts in the old woman’s lap.
They trotted out of the ranch yard, heading true north along the creek. The cold and the wind were beyond bitter. But they forged on. The snow and the gales would soon obliterate their tracks. And they hadn’t far to go.
Seven miles farther on, the Linney ranch road became a cattle trail that snaked another three miles to a gate in a barbed-wire fence cutting across a vast, empty, broken prairie.
Beyond the fence, they’d be in Saskatchewan.
Beyond the fence, the Potters would almost be home.
CHAPTER
79
OUT IN THE hangar at Joint Base Andrews, I called Bree back. She answered at the first ring.
“Read the file I just sent you,” she said, sounding breathless. “I’m positive he’s Senator Walker’s killer, and wait until you see who’s mentioned in there!”
“Who?”
“Read it.”
I told her I’d call her back, went to my workstation, and downloaded the file.
It turned out that Carl Thomas, the medical-equipment salesman from Pennsylvania, was actually Sean Patrick Lawlor, fifty-four, a former member of the British elite SAS counter-terror team. Lawlor was a long-range sniper who’d gone rogue during the first Gulf War and shot forty-one of Saddam Hussein’s palace guards as they retreated from Kuwait toward Iraq.
Lawlor was court-martialed for mass murder. The prosecutors said he had acted mercilessly in the killings of the retreating Iraqi forces. His defense argued that he’d been given no written orders of engagement beyond stopping any Iraqi soldiers from using the road, north or south.
The British military court decided that Lawlor’s judgment at shooting forty-one of the men may have been beyond the pale, but given the lack of clear orders and the fact that he had been in a war zone engaged in mortal combat with the enemy, he was not guilty of mass murder, or of murder in any way.
Lawlor’s superiors let him know, however, that he’d never again return to the field for Britain, and he was offered an honorable discharge. He took it.
Afterward, Lawlor was approached by MI6 agents to engage in contract work as a killer for hire. He did so for more than a decade, but then he became too expensive, and they severed their relationship with him.
At that point, in his early forties, Lawlor became a shooter for hire, rumored to have worked at times for Russian, Chinese, and North Korean interests.
I scrolled down the names with which Lawlor had been associated and recognized none until three-quarters of the way down the list.
“There he is!” I cried. I jumped up and pumped my fist.
I turned to find Mahoney and FBI deputy director Carstensen coming toward me.
“There who is?” Carstensen said.
“Viktor Kasimov,” I said, my heart still beating fast. “At least twice, Kasimov seems to have hired a man named Sean Lawlor, a former British SAS operator who assassinated Senator Walker at the beginning of all this.”
“Where did you come by all that?” Mahoney said.
“DC Metro chief of detectives Bree Stone,” I said to Carstensen. “My brilliant wife, who got it from Scotland Yard. I think Kasimov has disappeared for a reason. As in a Kremlin reason.”
I shared the file with Carstensen and Mahoney. While they read it, I called Bree back to congratulate her.
“This could be the big break we needed,” I said. “Everyone here knows that if we find Kasimov, we might find the other assassins.”
“Good,” she said, sounding pleased. “Do me a favor? Have whoever’s in charge there drop a line to Chief Michaels to that effect?”
“Done,” I said.
“I love you,” she said. “It’s been only a few hours, but I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can’t wait to hold you,” I said, and I flashed for a terrifying split second on that threat of a nuclear bomb going off before adding: “And the kids. And Nana.”
“Talk soon,” she said, and she cut the connection.
I walked back toward Mahoney and the deputy director, who were no longer reading Lawlor’s file but standing with their eyes on the big screens overhead.
Mahoney saw me and shook his head in disbelief. “As if this whole thing couldn’t get any crazier.”
CHAPTER
80
UP ON THE screens, veteran NBC journalist and anchorman Lester Holt appeared doing a standup on the steps of the U.S. Senate.
“Is Samuel Larkin the legitimate president of the United States?” Holt asked. “Or, according to the arcane rules of Congress and presidential succession, should someone else be in the Oval Office with a finger on the cyber and nuclear buttons?”
The broadcaster asked us to recall that, prior to the attacks, the late President Hobbs had been in office less than two weeks and had not yet nominated a new vice president.
“That’s important to understand,” Holt said. “The president nominates his vice president, who must then be confirmed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress.”
The anchorman said this was different from the Speaker of the House, normally third in line to the presidency, in that the most powerful person in the House of Representatives had to be elected by the members of the majority party.
Like the vice president, members of the president’s cabinet, including the secretaries of treasury, state, and defense and the attorney general, were nominated to their posts by the president. The Senate had to confirm their nominations.
“We nominate and congressionally confirm a vice president,” Holt said, ticking off points on his gloved fingers. “We elect a Speaker. And we nominate and confirm cabinet members at the Senate.”
Holt started to walk up the Senate steps. “Only one position in the immediate order of succession to the Oval Office is automatic. The person fourth in line to the presidency, the Senate president pro tempore, is always the most senior member of the majority party. When that senator dies, the next in seniority automatically and immediately inherits the position and title.”
The scene jumped to inside the Senate, with Holt standing outside the chambers.
“In the chaos of the hours that have passed since the attacks, a single fact seems to have been forgotten, or perhaps ignored,” he said. “When the Senate president pro tempore, West Virginia senator Arthur Jones, had a heart attack and was pronounced dead, the next senator in line automatically and with zero fanfare became Senate president pro tempore.”
The anchorman paused for effect. “This all happened a good four hours before the assassinations. In light of this obscure but very real rule, should Samuel Larkin be running the country? Launching attacks against the power grids of other nations? Provoking nuclear war? Or should the new Senate president pro tempore—Bryce Talbot of Nevada—be president of the United States?”
The screen cut to show archival footage of Senator Talbot, a slick, smart, silver-haired former prosecutor from Reno in his late sixties. I knew Talbot, or knew of his reputation, anyway, and it made me slightly unsettled.
The senator from Nevada was one of the top fund-raisers on Capitol Hill, and he held the power of the purse strings as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Talbot was reputed to be in the back pocket of, among other special-interest groups, the gambling industry. Then again, what senator from Nevada wouldn’t be?
The screen cut to Senator Talbot in his office. Talbot looked genuinely stunned when Holt said that according to the Constitution and rules of the Senate, he should be the president of the United States.
“Is that true, Lester?” he asked, shocked.
“I believe it is, Senator,” Holt said. “Will you seek to remove Mr. Larkin and take his place in the Oval Office?”
Talbot looked deeply conflicted but said, “Well, I’ll have to talk to people smarter than me about this before I make any firm decisions. But if what you’re saying is true, Lester, then it is my solemn duty to take office, regardless of the high esteem in which I hold Sam Larkin.”
CHAPTER
81
SHORTLY BEFORE SIX that Saturday evening, I was on my second cup of coffee at the Mandarin Oriental bar when the man I was waiting for entered, looking harried and jittery, a backpack slung over his shoulder.
I left my coffee cup to cut across the lobby to intercept him.
“Dr. Winters?” I said.
The concierge doctor started and seemed puzzled and then threatened by my presence.
“Dr. Cross? What are you doing here?”
“Can I have a few moments of your time?”
“I have a patient waiting.”
“The patient’s me.”
He looked confused. “What’s wrong?”
“Just a few questions we need answered sooner rather than later.”
Winters, who was in his early forties, scratched at his hand. “I get paid for this, you know, making calls.”
“The FBI will cover your fee. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Bourbon,” Winters said.
A few minutes later, a waitress set a tumbler with two fingers of Maker’s Mark in front of Winters; he raised it, drank it down, and ordered another.
“What do you need?” he said.
“What was your relationship to Viktor Kasimov?”
“I was his doctor.”
“Nothing else?”
/> “No. What do you mean?”
“I’ve read the file on your medical-license review,” I said.
Winters got disgusted and then angry. “I’m clean, and I have been clean for almost four years.”
“You were reprimanded for overprescribing pain medication,” I said.
“Four years ago,” he said.
“So you didn’t give Kasimov a script for Oxy?”
“No. He had a stomach bug. Why would I?”
“What about seeing makeup and masks? You neglected to tell us about that when we spoke.”
Winters ducked his chin, and you could tell he was wondering how the hell I knew that, and then he did know.
“That psycho bitch tell you that?” he asked. “Kaycee?”
I was almost going to correct him, tell him her real name, but instead I nodded. “She did. She thought it was the right thing to do.”
“I’m sure she did,” the concierge doctor said, almost sneering. “But so what? Is it a crime?”
“Depends,” I said. “If Kasimov’s men donned disguises to go to a liquor store, no. But if they went out and were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president, it’s quite a different story. A case could be made for your aiding and abetting murder.”
Winters’s hands flew up in surrender. “No way. They told me they just needed to be able to visit the Russian embassy without attracting attention. I swear to God.”
I studied him, thinking that I didn’t trust him. “Kasimov or his men mention where they were going the last time you saw them?”
“London,” the doctor said. “I told him to see a doctor there if he was feeling dehydrated after his sickness and the flight. That’s it. End of story.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you think of anything else, here’s my card.”
He took it without enthusiasm, didn’t look at it, and stuffed it in his pocket.
The waitress came with his second drink. I threw down two twenties and got up.
“My address is on the card,” I said. “Send your bill there.”
Target: Alex Cross Page 22
