Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(18)

She grinned and started strolling away coyly. “Can you imagine me in a steamy-hot rain forest, Chief Cross?”

“Vividly,” I said, and we both laughed our way back to the house.

I went upstairs to our bedroom and punched in the number for my recently found long-lost father. He answered on the second ring.

“Haven’t heard from you in a bit, Alex,” my dad said.

“You either, Dad. Retirement got you busy?”

“Picking up more work than I can handle with the Palm Beach County prosecutors,” he said, sounding as if he couldn’t believe it.

“Why does that surprise you?” I said. “They may have thrown you out of sheriff’s homicide, but they’re not going to waste talent.”

“I’m still pinching myself I’m not in prison.”

“You paid your dues. You became a good man, Jason Cross or Peter Drummond or whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days.”

“Pete’s fine,” he said. “End of that. What’s up with you and the family?”

I told him about the job offer.

He listened and then said, “What turns you on, son?”

“Being a detective,” I said. “It’s what I’m good at. Being an administrator—not so much.”

“You can always delegate,” he said. “Stick to the stuff you’d enjoy about being COD and get rid of the rest of it. Negotiate it with your chief up front.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll sleep on it.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision.”





CHAPTER


18


ON THE EVE of battle, he always changed his identity to suit his role. That night he thought of himself as John Brown.

Brown rode in the front passenger seat of a tan panel van that bore no markings. Perfect for a predator. Or a pack of them.

“Seven minutes,” Brown said, rubbing at a sore knee.

He heard grunts from behind him in the van and then the unmistakable ker-thunk of banana magazines seating and the chick-chink of automatic weapons feeding rounds into breeches.

They left Interstate 695 and crossed the bridge over the Anacostia River, heading toward the part of DC few tourists ever ventured. Drugs. Apathy. Poverty. They were all here. They all festered here, and because they were an infection, they had to be cut out, the area doused with antibiotics.

They left the bridge, headed south on I-295 and then east again on Suitland Parkway. They exited two miles later and went south of Buena Vista.

“Be smart and disciplined,” Brown said, pulling a sheer black mask down over his face. “Nothing gets taken, and nothing gets left behind. Agreed?”

Grunts of approval came from the blackness of the van behind him. Brown leaned over and took the wheel while the driver put on his mask.

A female voice in the back said, “Work the plan.”

“Smart choices, smart fire,” a male said.

“Surgical precision,” another male said.

Brown pressed the microphone taped to his neck. “Status, Cass?”

His headphones crackled with a woman’s voice

“Good to go,” Cass said. She was in the van trailing them.

Brown said, “Fifty seconds out.”

More rounds were seated in chambers. A few soldiers coughed or blew their noses. The tension in the van was remarkably low, given the task ahead. Then again, the men and women following Brown were highly trained. This was neither a new drill nor an unfamiliar assignment.

They pulled onto a spur road that hooked around back to the west, where it met the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. The van stopped where three streetlights had gone dark thanks to Crosman pellet guns two of his men used the night before. Brown’s driver killed the headlights. The rear of the van opened, and four men dressed head to toe in black spilled out.

Brown got out after them. Before clicking shut the passenger-side door, he said, “Oh three thirty.”

The driver nodded and drove away. The second van disgorged its passengers as well, and soon eight men and two women were climbing up and over the wall and into the cemetery. They turned on night-vision goggles. They wove through the green shadows and tombstones on a route that had been scouted repeatedly in the past three weeks. The intelligence was solid. So was this entry and exit route.

Now it was just a matter of executing the plan.

With his sore knee, Brown struggled to keep up, but he soon joined the others strung out along the tree line as they looked across a junky parking lot toward a dark and abandoned machine-tool factory. He listened, heard the purr of gas-fired electric generators, several of them, which was all the evidence you really needed to know that there was more to that relic of a factory than met the eye.

“See them, right there?” Cass whispered. “Two by the door, one on either end? Just like I told you.”

Cass was a big woman in her early thirties with short blond hair, and she was extraordinarily strong from years spent training in CrossFit. She was also one of the most competent and loyal people Brown had ever met. He’d had her scout the machine shop, knowing she’d do the job right.

He turned up the magnification on his night-vision, peered across the lot, and spotted the first two guards. They were lying on mattresses on either side of a double door. A third smoked a cigarette at the far corner. The fourth sat on his haunches at the opposite end of the building.