Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(30)

“Lovely image,” I said. “What about other shootings like these?”

Sampson frowned, said, “I’ll look. You?”

“I think I’ll go hunting for mercenaries.”





CHAPTER


32


THREE DAYS LATER, Sampson and I drove south on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Looking west across Chesapeake Bay, I saw something pale and white in the sky far away. I squinted. The sun caught it.

“There’s a blimp out there,” I said. “A couple of them.”

“Don’t see those too often. There a big sports event?”

“No idea,” I said before losing sight of them.

Forty minutes later, we were on the Nanticoke Road in Salisbury, Maryland. Farmers were cutting hay and harvesting corn in a shimmering heat.

“Feels like we’re going to kick a hornet’s nest,” Sampson said.

“Or a basket with spitting cobras inside,” I said, and I wondered whether we might be biting off more than we could chew, coming here without an entire SWAT team to back us up.

“This guy’s background is spooky.”

I nodded, said, “In some ways, he’s got the perfect résumé for a mass murderer.”

“That’s it up ahead on the right, I think,” Sampson said, gesturing through the windshield at a gated pull-off in a large woodlot between two farms.

Hand-painted signs hung from the locked gate: DOGS ARE THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES; DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT; BLAST ZONE; and, my favorite, THE LUNATIC IS IN THE GRASS.

“We might want to rethink this,” Sampson said.

“Dolores said he’s good until sundown usually,” I said and pulled the squad car over on the shoulder beyond the gate.

I got out, felt the breeze, smelled the salt air, and heard the sawing of cicadas in the hardwoods. I looked at the signs on the gate again, thought about the path that had taken us here, and wondered if Sampson was right, if we should rethink this unannounced visit.

Three days before, I’d started looking into mercenaries living in the Washington, DC, area, and I was shocked at the high numbers. But once it was explained to me, it made sense.

In 2008, at the height of the Iraq War, there were 155,826 private contractors operating in Iraq in support of 152,000 U.S. soldiers. Private contractors outnumbered the U.S. military in Afghanistan as well. Between the two wars, best estimates are that as many as forty thousand men and women were involved in security and other private military activities. In other words, guns for hire. In other words, mercenaries.

Most of them were highly trained former elite soldiers working through security companies like Blackwater, which had been based in Northern Virginia. These companies and ex-soldiers had made a lot of money for nearly a decade.

And then the spigot closed. President Obama ordered the troops withdrawn from Iraq, and with them went the need and the money to hire scads of private security personnel. Men who’d been making a hundred and fifty thousand to a half a million a year in the war zones were suddenly looking for work.

A friend of mine at the Pentagon told me there were probably five thousand of these guns for hire living in and around the nation’s capital. But it wasn’t like there was a directory of them.

I’d asked my friend if there was someone who knew a lot about that world, someone who might point us in the right direction. He’d called back yesterday and given me a phone number.

When I’d called it, a woman answered and said, “Don’t bother doing a trace, Detective Cross. It’s a burn phone. And call me Dolores.”

“I’m just asking for advice, Dolores.”

“Ask away.”

I asked Dolores if she’d read about the massacre at the drug factory in Anacostia. She had. I told her how clean an operation it was and how we believed ex-military were involved.

“Makes sense,” she’d said.

“Any candidates you can think of? Someone with military training, and maybe a beef with drug dealers? Someone willing to go outside the law and lead others into mass murder?”

There was a long, long pause, and finally Dolores had said, “I can think of only one offhand.”

Startling me from my thoughts, Sampson cleared his throat and gestured at the gate. “After you, Alex.”

With a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach, I walked to the gate of Nicholas Condon’s place and climbed over it.





CHAPTER


33


SAMPSON AND I had looked at Condon’s hundred-and-twelve-acre empire on Google Earth the night before. The dirt road beyond the gate wound through woods to a modest farm with several fields.

Now we could see that the road was not frequently used and even less frequently maintained, with wild raspberry and thorny vines trying to choke it off on both sides.

“Get your badge out,” I said. “You see him, you raise both hands and identify yourself.”

“Think he’ll care that we’re cops?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But someone with his background probably realizes that killing a cop would be a stupid move.”

“Comforting when you’re going to talk to a guy who considers himself a lunatic in the grass.”

I couldn’t argue with Sampson’s concern. Condon had graduated from the Naval Academy and been a sniper, a damned good one, with a SEAL Team 6 unit. A week after he had mustered out of the military for medical reasons, a company called Dyson Security gave Condon a contract and sent him to Afghanistan.