I got out my pocket binoculars and used them to peer beyond the ring to a stage at the other end of the hall where a band was setting up. I scanned everyone on the stage but did not see who I was looking for.
Remembering Carstensen’s remark about ignoring the cheap seats, I looked all around the wrestling ring, the first ten rows, best seats in the house. Nothing.
But then I looked directly across the auditorium and one deck down, toward a row of skyboxes. Most were dark, which surprised me. Maybe e-sports weren’t a big enough business yet to attract a skybox sort of corporate clientele.
Whatever the reason, there was only one that appeared occupied. The lights were on. I moved over until I was directly across from that box and looked through the binoculars.
The first thing I saw was a woman with her back to me. She wore a glam outfit and a black wig, like the avatar Celes Chere. Beside her, also with his back to me, stood a big lanky guy wearing a black cowboy hat and the sort of long, hemmed duster that horsemen wear in the rain. Just like the avatar Mr. Marston.
I almost took my attention off the skybox but then noticed movement beyond the two. I moved another five feet to my left and saw Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the wunderkind founders of Victorious Gaming, and Philip Stapleton, the company’s director of security.
Crowley was sitting forward in a club chair, fingers pressed in a steeple pose, staring through his thick black glasses at Bronson, who had his head down and was working furiously on a laptop. Stapleton was slumped in a chair behind Crowley. His eyes were closed and he was bleeding profusely from a head wound. Standing behind Bronson was a man wearing the white robes of the Victorious avatar Gabriel.
I could see only part of the angel. The cowboy blocked my full view of his head.
“Cross?” the pilot called. The static was heavy.
“Copy.”
“You asked how the assailants at the Tropicana were dressed. A cowboy, an angel, and a punk rocker.”
In the skybox, Bronson took his attention off his computer, looked toward the big cowboy, and nodded.
The cowboy walked away from the window and straight across the room to Bronson, then paused, his back to me. Bronson handed the cowboy his computer, and the cowboy left the skybox.
But if I hadn’t been standing in that exact spot, I might have missed the latex mask the guy dressed as Gabriel wore, the way his left arm dangled oddly, and what looked like a pistol in his right hand. The veterinarian and Jared Goldberg both said that the president’s killer had been wounded in the left elbow.
I fiddled with the focus, trying to make sure. But then the woman dressed as Celes Chere turned to peer out the window and down on the building audience.
I lowered the glasses and triggered my mike, trying to remain calm.
“This is Cross. I’ve got Bronson, Crowley, and Stapleton in the middle skybox, south side of the auditorium. If I’m right, there are three assassins in there with them, including Kristina Varjan and possibly the president’s killer.”
Before Mahoney or Carstensen could reply, I raised my binoculars again and found Varjan, hand to her brow to cut the spotlight glare, staring right back at me.
CHAPTER
98
MY EARBUD CRACKLED.
Mahoney said, “Alex, repeat the location, you’re garbled.”
Varjan had seen enough. She spun around and headed away from the window fast. Before following her, Gabriel clubbed Bronson across the back of his head with the butt of his pistol, sending him sprawling.
“Cross?” Carstensen said. “Repeat?”
I jammed the binoculars in my coat pocket, pivoted, and headed for the exit. When I hit the hallway, I hesitated, knowing the skyboxes would be closer if I went left. Instead, I went right and broke into a dodging run through the growing crowd of fans, triggering my mike as I did.
“This is Cross,” I said. “Repeat, we’ve got two, probably three of the assassins right here in the building. The president’s killer and Varjan. She just made me. They’re fleeing the sky-boxes. Look for a glam girl, a cowboy in a black hat and a long brown duster, and an angel in white robes and a latex mask. The angel has a clipped left wing, like the president’s assassin, and he is armed. Assume others are as well.”
“Copy,” Mahoney said. “I’m heading toward the closest exit to the skyboxes.”
Carstensen said, “I’m calling in SWAT, sealing the entire venue.”
I spotted a stairway finally and wanted to bound down it, but there were too many people coming up. I had to squeeze hard right against the flow, which cost me more time.
When I made it to the skybox level, I decided to keep going down. There was no doubt in my mind they were trying to get the hell out of the venue.
Varjan saw me just now. She saw me at the motel, and again the first day of the e-sports championships. She knows I’m FBI. They’ll all be on high alert.
I reached the hall’s lowest level and almost went toward the west entrance where Mahoney had gone in anticipation of the shortest line of flight from the skyboxes. But something told me to do the opposite, to double back and go east.
Moving as fast as the crowd would let me, I kept one hand ready to draw my service weapon and swiveled my head as I ran, scanning the faces and costumes.
I got a look at several girls dressed as Celes Chere and two cowboys in black hats. But they weren’t wearing the horseman dusters, and—
An alarm began to whoop.
Diversion, I thought. Just like the last time .
Fans froze in place, not knowing what to do. Several panicked and I heard people saying, “Fire?” Then I heard screaming ahead of me.
I yanked out my badge and gun and yelled, “FBI! Get down!”
People started running away instead of getting down, but it opened up a path through the crowd that allowed me to quickly round a curve in the passage and to see a red light flashing below an emergency exit sign. A security guard was lying in a pool of blood below the flashing light in front of an emergency door that was ajar.
“Help’s on the way,” I shouted at the wounded man as I vaulted over him, seeing that his pistol was missing from his holster before I threw my shoulder into the door.
It flew open, revealing a steel staircase landing and a short flight of stairs leading down to an empty ambulance parked in a bay.
Behind the ambulance, the overhead door was up. I ran toward it. Two EMTs carrying cups of coffee appeared.
“FBI!” I shouted. “Did you see people come out this door?”
“Two of them, a guy dressed as an angel and a glitter girl,” one of them said. He gestured with the coffee cup. “They ran like hell toward the boardwalk.”
CHAPTER
99
I SPRINTED ALONG the north side of Boardwalk Hall and triggered my mike.
“This is Cross again,” I said, gasping. “Two of them have escaped the venue. Repeat, escaped the venue. Get that helicopter in the air. They’re on the boardwalk somewhere ahead of me. Male in angel costume. Female dressed glam.”
“Copy,” Carstensen said.
I reached the boardwalk with a stitch in my side but managed to calm down enough to look through the binoculars south toward the Tropicana.
Despite the raw conditions, there were knots of people along the boardwalk, some coming at me, some walking away. No angel. No glam girl. No cowboy either, for that matter.
I swung around to look north along the boardwalk and saw similar small groups of pedestrians braving the—
“I got a visual!” I barked into the mike as I took off again. “Heading north on the boardwalk, two blocks north of the hall, near the pier!”
I’d caught a solid look at the back of a man dressed in white robes far ahead of me, and I’d gotten a glimpse of a woman at his side. There was no chance they were getting away again, I told myself, and I picked up the pace.
For the better part of a block, I couldn’t locate either of them ahead of me, and I was starti
ng to doubt what I’d seen. But then I spotted the angel again, still with his back to me, still heading north, going past Bally’s Beach Bar.
He was alone now and no longer running. His left arm looked useless. Sirens began to wail to my west, north, south.
My earbud crackled with static. I could tell it was Carstensen, but I could not tell what she was saying.
I hit the mike, said, “Suspect dressed as angel heading north on boardwalk north of Michigan Avenue toward Brighton Park. Suspect is alone now.”
I could barely make out Mahoney saying, “Copy.”
I ran on, trying to keep the few people on the boardwalk in front of me so the assassin wouldn’t see me gaining ground if he happened to look back.
I was less than half a block away from him when the tragedy happened.
A young Atlantic City uniformed police officer came out of the park in front of the killer. The patrol cop was moving quickly, and when he saw the angel, he started to skid down into a combat shooting position, his hands and pistol already rising.
The assassin was quicker; he threw up his gun and fired, hitting the officer square in his bulletproof vest. As the cop staggered backward, he pulled the trigger on his pistol. The bullet went wide, hit the boardwalk, and ricocheted out to sea.
The angel’s second shot caught the young policeman through the throat and dropped him in his tracks.
I was closing fast on him then. Two hysterical young women in raincoats were fleeing toward me.
“FBI!” I yelled to the angel. “Drop your gun! Put your hands up!”
The two girls dived to either side of me. The president’s assassin had already looked over his shoulder and started to spin in his tracks, his gun up.
He wasn’t quite fully turned when my first shot—in my off hand, and shaky—slapped him across the ham of his left leg. He jerked as he shot. I heard his bullet crack by my left ear, rattling me.
Because a trained assassin was not going to miss twice at this distance, I pointed the gun at him and fired again, just hoping to put him on the defensive.
But by some miracle, it center-punched him just below the sternum. He hunched over and then fell hard onto his side, gasping for air.
I ran up. When he tried to raise his gun, I kicked it out of his hand.
I squatted, pulled off the mask so he could breathe. His face was a swollen mass of stitches.
“Who are you?” I said. “Who hired you to kill Hobbs?”
He blinked at me dully, then shuddered and, through the blood that began to seep out his mouth, croaked, “I am … nobody … nowhere … in no—”
The assassin convulsed then, choked, and coughed up a gout of dark blood. He died quivering on the boardwalk.
I stared at him, hearing sirens closing on my location and a helicopter approaching, then turned to check on the two young women in raincoats.
Kristina Varjan was standing twenty feet behind me, squared off and looking at me over the barrel of a pistol.
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“DROP THE GUN , cross,” Varjan said. “Or die.”
I let go of my weapon, heard it strike the concrete.
“There’s an army coming, Kristina,” I said. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”
I noticed her expression tightened when I said her name.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said. “I just wanted you to know I had nothing to do with the president’s death or the death of any of the others. I was a maid. Cleanup. That’s all.”
“Maid for who, Kristina?”
“You saw,” she said, angrier but glancing around.
“What did I see, Kristina?” I asked, hitting her given name hard.
“Stop that,” she said, shaking the gun at me, “or I’ll kill you anyway.”
Behind her in the sky, I saw the helicopter coming. And patrol cars had squealed to a stop back on Michigan, their bubbles flashing blue. From behind me, from the park, I heard tires skidding to a halt and sirens dying.
“It’s over, Kristina,” I said. “Drop the gun.”
Varjan looked at the beach and the water.
“They’ll get you out there too. Save yourself. Drop the gun.”
“The CIA takes me. No one else.”
“I can’t promise that.”
She processed my response, and then all the tension in her shoulders seemed to vanish, as if she’d come to some decision and was resigned to her fate.
“Then I take it all back,” Varjan said, her voice flat. “You’ll just have to die before me, Cross. You’ll have to lead the way into hell.”
“No—” I managed to blurt out before she pulled the trigger.
Her bullet blasted into me eight inches below my Adam’s apple.
I was hurled back and off my feet. I landed hard, choking for air in a whirling daze. I heard another shot and a third before a barrage of gunfire that was the last thing I remembered before everything vanished into darkness.
CHAPTER
101
DANA POTTER MOVED at a steady clip west from Boardwalk Hall, forcing himself to exude easy confidence and showing only passing interest in the police cars that blew by him, their sirens singing.
After he’d left the skybox, his business done, Potter had gone out a service entrance and immediately saw a garbage truck backing up to a full trash container.
He tossed the cowboy hat, the duster, and Sydney Bronson’s laptop computer into the bin just before it was lifted and dumped into the truck.
Both identifying articles of clothing and that weasel’s computer were leaving the area even before Potter reached the entrance to Caesar’s Palace and went inside. He strolled to a souvenir kiosk he’d scouted earlier in the day and bought a hooded sweatshirt with the casino’s logo on it.
He pulled the hoodie on and left the casino just in time to hear shots to the northeast, back toward the boardwalk and the beach, three in a cluster, and then four more shots in rapid succession. There was a break, and then a shot, and then another shot a minute later, and then multiples, a firefight.
But since then, as Potter walked farther and farther west, he’d heard only the sirens. When he saw a bus about to pull into a stop, he ran to catch it.
Potter took an empty seat, yawned, and shut his eyes. Ten stops later, he got off, went into a corner store, and bought a Bud tallboy. He drank it as he walked the seven blocks to the train station, where he bought a ticket to Newark Penn Station.
Eleven minutes passed. He was aboard the train and it was pulling out. Two stops later, he got off. He watched everyone else who’d exited the train until he was satisfied there was no tail. Then he bought another ticket, this time to Hoboken.
While he waited for that train, Potter walked down the platform, away from all the commuters. Only then did he pull the burn phone from his pocket and punch in the number of another burn phone.
“Paul?” Mary said, using the code they’d agreed on.
“Right here, Sal,” he said. “We’re good. Get him out of that hellhole now.”
He heard her break down crying.
“C’mon, now,” he said. “I need you to be strong. We’ve done it.”
“I’m just so relieved, so hopeful, is all.”
Potter smiled. “Me too.”
“You following?”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But do not wait for me to start the therapy.”
“What about payment?”
“I got it. Now get to work.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too,” he said. He clicked off and broke the phone in two before tossing it in a trash can.
Potter pulled a USB drive from his pocket, looked at it, and imagined his son healed, on his feet, and walking again.
That will be worth the risk, he thought. Jesse is worth every risk.
He could even acknowledge that, sooner or later, U.S. federal agents would track him down. Sooner or later, he’d have to tell them he’d done the job in
Texas alone, that his wife had no idea he’d assassinated the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state using two identical rifles set side by side on bipods.
Mary had no idea what Jesse’s stem-cell treatments cost. He’d been the one to go to Panama to learn about it. His wife had zero to do with any of it.
He’d say all that, and then he’d die somehow, death by cop or suicide to seal the deal and keep Mary free to raise Jesse.
As his train pulled into the station, Potter was at peace with his fate. He stuck the USB drive in his pocket and got on board. He could see Jesse walking in his mind, and for that, he would accept every punishment that might come his way.
CHAPTER
102
MY HEAD SPUN A bit as the FBI helicopter lifted off from the beach by the boardwalk where Varjan had shot me high in my Kevlar vest.
The bullet at short range had been enough to knock me down and out.
But not for long. I’d come around within seconds and saw Carstensen, Mahoney, and a small army of Atlantic City police officers swarming past the bullet-ridden corpse of the Hungarian assassin.
They’d tried to make me lie still and wait for the medics, but I refused and was getting woozily to my feet when Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s director of security, staggered up to us. His face and suit were covered in blood. He held a wad of bloody napkins to his head.
“Arrest him,” Carstensen said.
“No,” Stapleton said. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Arrest him and his bosses,” she snapped.
“They’re gone,” Stapleton said. “That’s why I came to you. They left me there for dead. I came straight here after they left.”
“Where’d they go?” Mahoney demanded.
“The airport,” Stapleton said. “They have a jet.”
“Arrest him anyway. Get him to a hospital.”
“No! Believe me. I served my country. I love my country. I would never … I faked being unconscious in there. I heard everything they said. Everything.”
Target: Alex Cross Page 27
