Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(31)

Condon’s reputation for having a cool head even in the most extreme conditions continued after he left the military, and he soon led a Dyson team that specialized in protecting political and corporate dignitaries and rescuing private contractors taken hostage by the Taliban.

One of those private contractors was an American woman named Paula Healey who worked trying to improve the lives of Afghani girls, which had made her a target for the fundamentalists. Healey was also the love of Condon’s life.

She and three other women were taken outside of Kandahar. After several months, Condon learned where Healey was being held—in a remote village in a region known for poppy cultivation and opium production.

Condon and a team of his men went in under cover of night. After a firefight with the local Taliban, he found Healey strung out on opium and stabbed in the chest. She was the only one of the four women left alive. She’d been raped repeatedly and died in Condon’s arms.

What happened then depends on whose testimony you believe. Either the Taliban counterattacked and Condon risked his life repeatedly to kill and drive them back, or Condon went berserk with grief and rage and gunned down every male over the age of fourteen left in the village.

There’d been an investigation, and every one of the Dyson Security operators backed up Condon’s version of events. The widows and mothers claimed their dead were not Taliban and that they had been slaughtered.

Ultimately, Condon was exonerated. But losing his love changed him, made him violent and unpredictable. Dyson decided he could not be put in the field and paid off his five-year contract in a lump sum.

Condon had used the money to buy the land we were walking through.

Dolores said Condon was a hermit who liked to farm and go fishing on his boat out on the ocean alone. He distrusted anybody involved in the government. His only visitors, and they were rare, were the men and women who’d served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’d asked Dolores how she knew so much about him.

She’d hesitated and then said, “Once, a long time before he met Paula, I was the love of Nicholas’s life.”

There was a picket stake in the trail with a piece of orange tape fluttering off it. We went around it and entered the field forty yards from its eastern end, where there was a ten-foot-high dirt embankment with a large red tub of Tide detergent sitting on top.

The field to our right lay fallow. It was long and narrow, three hundred yards to the other end and maybe fifty yards to the far tree line.

“The house is in the next field?” Sampson said as we started across.

“That’s the way I—”

We never heard the shot, just the bullet ripping the air before the Tide detergent tub on the embankment erupted like a land mine, throwing dirt, rock, and melted plastic everywhere and sending a plume of gray smoke toward the sky.





CHAPTER


34


AS SOON AS we heard the bullet ripping past us, instinct kicked in. We were both diving when the bomb went off.

Sampson and I hit the ground and put our arms over our heads as debris rained down on us. My left ear rang and for a moment I was disoriented.

Then, like a boxer recovering from a glancing blow, I became more alert. I dug at my back for my service pistol and then followed Sampson as he squirmed forward into high grass and weeds.

“Where’d the shot come from?” Sampson asked in a harsh whisper.

“From Condon’s sniper rifle?”

“I meant from what direction?”

“No idea, but it had to have been far away if we didn’t hear the report before whatever was in that Tide thing exploded.”

“We need to reach the trees and call for backup,” Sampson said.

“Backup first,” I said, and pulled out my cell. “Great—no service.”

“I had it over by the road.”

“Not here,” I said, and then I heard something over the ringing in my left ear.

Sampson heard it too, rose up to look, and then ducked down.

“That’s an ATV,” Sampson said. “He’s coming for us. Two hundred yards out. Near the tree line.”

We stared at each other, thinking the same thing: Do we run for the trees and risk getting shot by a world-class sniper? Or—

I pushed myself to my feet, held out my badge, and aimed my pistol at Condon, who was less than a hundred yards away in a green Polaris Ranger. Sampson stood up beside me and did the same.

Condon pulled up at ninety yards, snaked a scoped rifle over the wheel, and shouted, “You trying to get yourselves killed? Didn’t you see the goddamned orange flag in the road?”

“We didn’t know what it meant,” I shouted back. “We’re detectives with Washington Metro Police. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

Condon was hunkered over the rifle, aiming at us through his scope. At ninety yards, any shot we might take with the pistol would be a Hail Mary. But ninety yards with a precision sniper rifle was a chip shot.

I had a funny feeling in my chest, as if he’d put the crosshairs there. Then he lifted his head. “You the Alex Cross? FBI profiler and all that?”

“I was,” I called back. “That’s right.”

That seemed to satisfy Condon because he slipped the rifle into a plastic scabbard mounted to the side of the ATV and started driving toward us.