Target: Alex Cross

Book 24: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

Genres: Crime Fiction; Police Procedurals; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Target: Head of State

A leader has fallen, and the procession route from Capitol Hill to the White House is lined with hundreds of thousands of mourners. None feel the loss of a President more keenly than Alex Cross, who has devoted his life to the public good.

Target: United States Cabinet

sniper's bullet strikes a target in the heart of DC. Alex Cross's wife, Bree Stone, newly elevated chief of DC detectives, faces an ultimatum: solve the case, or lose the position for which she's worked her entire career. The Secret Service and the FBI deploy as well in the race to find the shooter. Alex is tasked by the new President to take a personal role with the FBI, leading an investigation unprecedented in scale and scope.

Target: Alex Cross

Alex has a horrible premonition: is the sniper's strike only the beginning of a larger attack on the nation? It isn't long before his fears explode into life, and the nation plunges into a full-blown Constitutional crisis. His ingenuity, his training, and his capacity for battle are tested beyond limits in the most far-reaching and urgently consequential case of his life. As the rule of law is shattered by chaos, and Alex fights to isolate a suspect, Alex's loyalty may be the biggest danger of all.

Release date: November 19, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 432

Sample

 

Temperatures that late January morning plunged to four degrees above zero, and still people came by the hundreds of thousands, packing both sides of the procession route from Capitol Hill to the White House.

I was waiting at the corner of Constitution and Louisiana Avenues surrounded by my entire family. Bree Stone, my wife and DC Metro PD’s chief of detectives, stood in front of me wearing her finest dress blues.

My twenty-year-old son, Damon, was on my right. He had flown up from North Carolina the night before and had on long underwear, a suit and tie, and a black down jacket. Nana Mama, my ninety-something grandmother, had refused to listen to reason and watch this on TV. Sitting in a folding camp chair to my left and wrapped in blankets, she wore a wool ski cap and everything warm she owned. Jannie, my seventeen-year-old, and Ali, nine, were dressed for the Arctic but hugging each other for warmth and stamping their feet behind us.

“How much longer, Dad?” Ali asked. “I can’t feel my toes.”

Over the soft din of the crowd and from well up Capitol Hill, I heard the four drum ruffles and bugle flourishes that precede “Hail to the Chief.”

“They’re leaving the Capitol,” I said. “It won’t be long now.”

The presidential anthem soon ended, and the cold crowd quieted.

I heard a man’s voice call out, “Right shoulder, arms!”

Another voice repeated the call. And then a third. One by one, every fifty yards and moving east to west, the soldiers flanking the route followed the command, bringing their rifles to their right shoulders and standing at ramrod attention.

The drums began to beat then, the slow cadence sounding muffled and somber from that distance.

One hundred West Point cadets appeared at the top of Capitol Hill, all dressed in gray and marching in unison. Similar contingents from the U.S. Naval, Air Force, and Coast Guard Academies followed, striding in precision, heads high, eyes focused straight ahead as they reached the bottom of the hill and passed us.

Up on the hill, the slow, steady beat of the drums continued, getting louder and coming closer. A color guard appeared bearing flags.

I heard the clopping of hooves before seven pale gray horses trotted from the Capitol grounds. Six of the horses moved in formation, two following two following two. The seventh horse marched at the head of the column to their left.

All seven horses were saddled, but only the left-hand three and the horse at the head of the column carried riders, uniformed members of the U.S. Army’s Old Guard unit. The six horses in formation pulled the hundred-year-old black caisson that bore the flag-draped coffin of the late president of the United States.

 

The slow, steady clip-clopping of the horses came closer and closer, the noise building along with the somber beat of the drum corps.

Behind the caisson, a black, riderless horse, known as a caparisoned steed, shook its head and danced against the reins held by another member of the Old Guard.

The late president’s personal riding boots were turned backward in the stirrups.

“Why do they do that?” Ali asked in a soft voice.

“It’s a military tradition that signifies the fallen commander,” Nana whispered. “They did the same thing at President Kennedy’s funeral almost sixty years ago.”

“Were you here then?”

“Right where you’re standing, darling,” Nana said, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. “I remember it like it was yesterday, just as tragic as today.”

I wasn’t alive when JFK was president, but Nana had told me that it had been a time of great hope in the country because of its young leader and that hearing of his assassination had felt like a kick in the gut.

I’d felt the same way when Bree called me to say that Catherine Grant had collapsed in the Oval Office and died at age forty-seven, leaving behind a husband, twin ten-year-old daughters, and a stunned and grieving nation.

President Grant had been among the rarest of creatures in American politics, someone who actually managed to bring opposing sides together for the benefit of the country, and she’d done it by sheer force of her empathetic personality, her piercing brilliance, and her self-deprecating wit.

A former U.S. senator from Texas, Grant had won the White House in a landslide, and there’d been a real feeling of optimism in the country, a belief that the gridlock had ended, that politicians on both sides of the aisle were finally going to put their differences aside and work for the common good.

And they had, for three hundred and sixty-eight days.

Seventy-two hours after celebrating her first year in office, President Grant had been meeting with her military advisers when she suddenly complained of dizziness and seemed confused, then fell to the floor behind her desk. She died within moments.

Her doctors were stunned. The late president had been in top physical condition, and she had passed a rigorous physical exam with flying colors not two months before.

But the pathologists at Bethesda Naval Hospital said that Grant had succumbed to a fast-growing tumor that had enveloped her internal carotid artery, essentially interrupting the blood flow to most of her brain. No one could have saved her.

So there was a real sense of shared loss and broken hope the morning of her funeral. As her cortege approached us, the mourners on both sides of Constitution Avenue turned sadly quiet.

Damon helped Nana Mama to her feet. Bree and I came to attention, and I had to fight against the emotion that built in my throat as Grant’s coffin rolled by and the black riderless horse pranced and reared in the bitter-cold air.

But what really hit me was the sight of the limousine that trailed the black horse. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that the late president’s husband and daughters were inside.

I remembered how I’d felt when my first wife died tragically, leaving me lost, angry, and alone with a young son and baby girl to care for. Those were the worst days of my life, when I thought I’d never be right again.

My heart broke for the First Family as they passed. I blinked back tears watching the drum corps march by, eyes straight ahead, the cadence of the funeral beat never wavering.

“Can we go now?” Ali asked. “I can’t feel my knees.”

“Not before we all hold hands and say a prayer for our country and that good woman’s soul,” Nana Mama said, and she held her mittened hands out to us.

Chapter

Snow fell as Sean Lawlor slipped into a narrow alley in Georgetown. A ruddy-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard and unruly hair, Lawlor was dressed in dark clothes, gloves, and a snap-brim cap with the earflaps down. As he moved deeper into the alley, he knew he was leaving tracks in the snow but didn’t care.

Forecasts were calling for six inches before dawn, and he planned to be finished and gone long before the storm ended.

Lawlor padded to the rear gate of a beautiful old brick town house that faced Thirty-Fifth Street. After a long, slow look around, he climbed the gate and crossed a small terrace to a door he’d picked earlier in the evening after bypassing the alarm system.

It was four fifteen in the morning. He had half an hour at most.

Lawlor shut the door quietly behind him. He stood a moment, listening intently. Hearing nothing to disturb him, he brushed off snow while waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he put blue surgical booties over his boots and walked down a hallway to the kitchen.

He pushed aside a chair, which made a squeaking noise on the tile floor. It didn’t matter. There was no one home. The owners spent their winters in Palm Beach.

Lawlor went to a door on the other side of the kitchen, opened it, and stepped down onto a set of steep wooden stairs. Shutting the door left him in inky darkness. He closed his eyes and flipped on the light.

After waiting again for his vision to adjust, Lawlor climbed down the stairs into a small, musty basement piled with boxes and old furniture. He ignored all of it and went to a workbench with tools hanging from a pegboard on the wall.

He shrugged off the knapsack he carried, traded his leather gloves for latex ones, unzipped the bag, and retrieved four bubble-wrapped packages, which he laid on the bench.

Lawlor cut off the bubble wrap and stowed the pieces in the pack before turning to admire the VooDoo Innovations Ultra Lite barreled action in 5.56x45mm NATO. A work of art, he thought.

He fitted the barreled action to a five-ounce minimalist rifle stock by Ace Precision and then screwed a SureFire Genesis sound suppressor onto the threaded crown of the barrel. Picking up the Zeus 640 optical sight, Lawlor thought, A thing of beauty.

He clipped the sight neatly into place. Overall, he was pleased with how the gun had turned out. He had ordered the components from U.S. internet wholesalers and had them shipped to the same nonexistent person at four separate UPS stores in and around the District of Columbia.

Lawlor had arrived at Dulles International two evenings ago on a flight from Amsterdam using a fake British passport. He’d picked up the components at the UPS stores yesterday morning, relying on a fake Pennsylvania driver’s license he’d also bought online. He’d sighted in the gun yesterday afternoon in the woods of western Maryland. It was uncannily accurate.

It’s the right tool, he told himself. The perfect one for this job.

Chapter

Lawlor put the knapsack over his shoulder, took the gun up the basement stairs, and shut off the light before opening the door to the dark kitchen. He stepped out, pushed a button on the side of the sight, and raised the rifle.

The Zeus 640 was a thermal unit, which meant it allowed the user to see the world as heat images. When Lawlor peered through the scope, the interior of the house looked like it had been cast in pale daylight. Except for the heat registers. They showed in much brighter white.

The Zeus scope had been developed for hog hunters, and it had cost Lawlor more than eight thousand dollars. He thought it worth every penny, far superior to the kinds of rifle optics he’d been using just a few years ago.

Lawlor kept the gun stock pressed snug to his shoulder, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and entered the master suite at the front of the house. He ignored the antique furnishings and crossed to the window.

He lowered the rifle, opened the window sash, and looked outside. He saw the shadows of oak branches waving against the snowy background and the silhouette of a line of distinguished old townhomes across Thirty-Fifth Street.

He raised the gun again, peered through the sight. The snow-covered street and brick sidewalks turned dull black.

The heated town houses, however, were revealed in extraordinary detail, especially one to his right and down the street. A brick Georgian, it looked brilliant in the scope. The thermostat had to be turned up to seventy-five in there. Maybe eighty.

Lawlor swung the gun toward the front door of the hot house and studied the area, figuring he’d have four seconds, maybe less, when it counted. The brief time frame didn’t faze him. He was good at his trade, used to dealing with short windows of opportunity.

Lawlor fished in his inner coat pocket and drew out a microchip that he fitted into a slot in the scope in order to record his actions for posterity. Then he relaxed and waited.

Ten minutes later, a light went on in the house to his far diagonal right, the hot one. He checked his watch. It was 4:30 a.m. Right on schedule. Disciplined.

Fifteen minutes after that, a black Suburban rolled up the street. Also right on time.

The wind was blowing stiffly down Thirty-Fifth from north to south. He would have to account for slight bullet drift.

The Suburban pulled over by the curb across from the hot house. Lawlor flipped the safety off and settled in, aiming at the front door and the steps down to the sidewalk.

The passenger, a large male wearing dark winter clothes, got out of the Suburban, ran across the street and sidewalk, climbed the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, revealing a woman in a long overcoat.

Lawlor couldn’t make out her features or determine her age through the thermal scope, and he didn’t want to. He had seen several recent pictures of her, but through the Zeus 640, she was a pale white creature in a cold dark world, and he rather liked it that way.

Keeps things impersonal, like a video game, he thought, moving the crosshairs as the woman raised her hood and stepped out into the storm. He aimed at the right edge of the hood to account for drift. She followed the big guy, hurrying down the stairs, across the sidewalk, and into the street, eager to be out of the snow and get to her early yoga class.

Too bad, he thought as he pulled the trigger. I heard yoga’s good for you.

The rifle made a soft thudding noise. The woman’s head jerked and she crumpled on the street behind her bodyguard. Lawlor’s instinct was to flee, but he stayed on task, moved the crosshairs to her chest, and shot her again.

He pushed down the sash and never looked back. After finding his spent brass, he rapidly disassembled the gun and placed three of the components back in the knapsack. He kept the thermal scope and used it so he could move fast back through the house.

After Lawlor slipped out the rear gate, he turned off the scope and pocketed it. Hearing the wailing of sirens already, he ducked his head and set off into the storm.

Too bad, he thought again. Husband. Five children. Six grandkids. A real shame.

Chapter

Bree and I arrived in Georgetown shortly after dawn that first day of February. It was snowing at a steady pace with five inches on the ground already.

DC Metro patrol cars had blocked both ends of the street on Thirty-Fifth. We showed our IDs to the officer.

He said, “There’s U.S. Capitol Police, FBI, and Secret Service already up there.”

“I’d imagine so,” Bree said, and we went through the barrier and up the street, noticing many anxious residents looking out their windows.

FBI criminologists were setting up a tent around the victim and the crime scene. Yellow tape had been strung from both sides of the town house, across the street, and around the Suburban, where a big man in a black parka was engaged in a shouting match with a smaller man in an overcoat and ski cap.

“This is our case,” the big man said. “She died on my goddamned watch.”

“U.S. Capitol Police will be part of the investigation,” the smaller man barked. “But you will not, Lieutenant Lee. You are compromised, and you will be treated as such.”

“Compromised?” the big guy said, and for a second I thought he was going to deck the smaller man.

Then FBI special agent Ned Mahoney appeared from behind the tent.

“That’s enough,” Mahoney said. “Agent Reamer, please do not assume in any way that you are in charge of this investigation. The FBI has complete jurisdiction.”

“Says who?” Agent Reamer said.

“President Hobbs,” Mahoney said. “Evidently, your new boss doesn’t have much faith in the Secret Service these days. He talked with the director, and the director talked to me. And here we are.”

Agent Reamer looked furious but managed to keep his voice somewhat under control as he said, “The Secret Service will not be cut out of this.”

“The Secret Service will not be cut out, but it will do what it is told to do,” Mahoney said, and then he saw us. “Alex, Chief Stone. I want you both part of this.”

Quick introductions were made. U.S. Secret Service special agent Lance Reamer had worked Treasury investigations for the past ten years. The big guy was U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee. Lieutenant Lee had served on the victim’s security team for six years.

With the snow and the wind, Lee hadn’t heard the shots or the sound of sixty-nine-year-old U.S. senator Elizabeth “Betsy” Walker falling to the ground behind him.

“I ran ahead and opened the rear door of the Suburban like I always do,” Lee said. “I looked back and there she was. Lying in the snow, bleeding to death.”

His voice choked. “My God, I had to go wake poor old Larry, her husband, to tell him. He’s in there calling his children and…who the hell would do this? And why? That woman was a great person, treated everyone just right.”

That was true. The senator from California could be tough when she was fighting for a cause, and she had a first-rate mind, but she was one of those genial and compassionate women who had never met a stranger. Walker was also the second-most-senior member of the GOP in the Senate and a highly respected politician.

“Can we see the scene?” I asked as the snow slowed to flurries.

Agent Reamer said, “Why exactly are you here, Dr. Cross?”

“Because I asked him to be here,” Mahoney growled. “Dr. Cross used to be with the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and he has more than two decades of exceptional service as an investigator. He’s under contract to advise us on cases like these because the FBI thinks highly of him.”

Bree nodded. “So does DC Metro.”

Chapter

Reamer looked like he’d tasted something disagreeable and threw his hands up in disgust.

Mahoney called by radio and was told we could look at the crime scene from the flaps of the tent. We went as a pack of five past Lieutenant Lee’s Suburban and around the other side of the shelter.

Inside, a team of Quantico’s finest were working in baggy white jumpsuits pulled over their winter gear. Senator Walker lay twisted on her side in the snow. Her hood was half off her head, revealing a bullet hole beneath her right cheekbone.

“What do you know, Sally?”

Sally Burton, the chief FBI criminologist on the scene, stood up from beside the victim. “The snow’s making it tougher than tough, Ned, but so far, it looks like she was hit twice. The head shot killed her instantly. Shooter put a second round into her chest after she fell.”

“Like someone filled with hate would,” Lieutenant Lee said. “A fanatic.”

“Or a professional,” Agent Reamer said.

“Or both,” I said. “Who had reason to hate her?”

“Good question,” Mahoney said, and he looked back to Burton. “Got an angle for the shots yet?”

The criminologist made a sour expression. “The snow and no witness to her falling make the first shot tough to call, but by the chest wound, I’m saying it’s roughly this angle,” she said, gesturing high into the corner of the tent.

Mahoney thanked her, then turned to Lieutenant Lee. “You have good rapport with the senator’s husband?”

 “Excellent rapport, sir. Larry’s a sweet old guy, a real friend. Smart as they come too. He used to be a trial judge in San Francisco.”

“Go inside and talk to him frankly. Find out who didn’t like or had a grudge against his wife for whatever reason. Names. Phone numbers if he’s got them.”

“Wait,” Agent Reamer said. “Lieutenant Lee is compromised.”

“He knows the family,” Mahoney said. “Better than any of us. That helps.”

“But—”

Mahoney hardened. “Do you honestly think Lieutenant Lee could be involved?”

“Well, no, but it’s…it’s gotta be against protocol,” Reamer sputtered.

“I don’t give a damn about protocol,” Mahoney said. “He’s in.”

The lieutenant nodded. “I can also get you a log of threatening calls and letters. Even Betsy got them from time to time.”

“Were they turned over to the FBI?” Mahoney asked.

“A few. They’re in your files.”

When Lee left, the Secret Service agent said, “Okay, then what am I doing?”

“Take several of your men, go to Senator Walker’s offices, seal them, and then sit on them and her staff until we get there,” Mahoney said. “Dr. Cross, Chief Stone, and I are going to figure out where the hell those shots came from.”

It didn’t take us long.

We knocked on the doors to the two town houses across and down the street that seemed likely candidates and found the residents home and upset. One, a prominent patent attorney, said her next-door neighbors Jimmy and Renee Fairfax were at their winter home in Palm Beach and had been for more than two months.

We called Mr. Fairfax’s Florida residence to get permission to enter his house but got no answer. But when we found snowed-over tracks coming out of the rear terrace and discovered the rear door unlocked and the alarm system bypassed, Mahoney felt he had more than enough just cause to enter.

There was water in the hallway, probably melted snow, and smaller droplets crossing the floor to a door to the basement. There was no sign beyond that, certainly not of the footprints I’d expected to find, given that the shooter came in out of the weather.

We looked out the front window and decided the shooter had to have been higher, upstairs. We found a clear line of sight in the master bedroom, some hundred yards down the street from the evidence tent in front of Senator Walker’s house.

“He was right here,” I said, looking around. “Probably shot from his knees, using the windowsill as a rest.”

“No brass,” Bree said. “The place is clean.”

Mahoney nodded. “Either a fanatic or a professional.”

“Or both,” I said.

Chapter

I had to leave at quarter to nine to make an appointment with a new patient, an attorney at the Justice Department. In addition to my law enforcement work, I have a PhD in clinical psychology and practice on a part-time basis out of an office in the basement of our house on Fifth Street in Southeast DC.

In the northern United States or out west, six inches of snow is no big deal. But in the nation’s capital, it usually creates a state of emergency and near gridlock. I somehow managed to catch a cab, but I had to get out at the bottom of Capitol Hill and walk the rest of the way home.

The storm was clearing but a raw wind bit at my ears as I hustled along and thought about the late Senator Walker. Given her committee assignments—chairman of Energy and Natural Resources, and prominent seats on Appropriations and Agriculture—I was leaning away from the idea that a fanatic professional was behind the assassination.

As a matter of fact, I was tilting away from the idea of a fanatic at all. The entire thing felt surgical, or at least highly organized. Though I wasn’t completely dismissing the idea of a terrorist, I was thinking a pro was responsible.

But why? Why a professional assassin? What had Senator Walker done to get gunned down in cold blood in front of her house? Who had she crossed or destroyed?

Was the fact that she was shot outside her home meant as a statement, like a Mafia killing? Or was it merely a zone of opportunity?

I decided it was the latter. Before I left the crime scene, Lieutenant Lee had told me that the senator attended a yoga class Monday through Thursday. Every morning. It helped her clear her mind, he said.

It also helped her killer, I thought. The shooter knew about the pattern through personal observation or because he had been told about it.

Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax had been down in Palm Beach for two months. Mahoney believed it was possible the killer had been inside the house scouting Senator Walker multiple times and for extended periods. He had called for a second forensics team to comb the bedroom for DNA and microfibers, but I doubted they’d find much.

Making repeated trips inside the Fairfaxes’ residence felt unprofessional to me. If I were a gun for hire, I’d want to spend as little time as possible in the kill zone. Whenever a human brushes up against something, he or she leaves tiny bits of skin and hairs that people like Sally Burton can gather. . .