Fear No Evil(Alex Cross #29)(52)

“Thirty seconds, taking a right onto José María Pino Suárez,” Vincente said. “Twenty-five seconds.”

“Got you,” Butler said, seeing the top of the nondescript white cargo van with graffiti on the side coming down the street at him in the far lane along a line of inadequate green traffic barriers. “Twenty seconds. Take him, Cort. Take him, Purdy.”

Butler heard Cortland’s first shot; it sounded like the thud of a beefy paintball gun. The dart whistled across the intersection and struck a federal police officer in the side of his neck. He staggered two feet and dropped.

Cortland changed barrels on his gun. On the far sidewalk, Purdy walked toward the main entrance to the seat of high justice in Mexico, using her skills at being small and going unnoticed, raising a kerchief over her face, just waiting for the first scream.

It came from the far corner of the block.

Purdy slipped diagonally left toward the two armed guards at the entrance to the supreme court. Seeing them strain to look toward the sounds of shouting, she brought out her two small air pistols and shot both guards at close range; it was no more than three feet from her to the sides of their necks, where darts were now embedded.

“Jump to it,” Butler said.

The men dropped in their tracks. Purdy stepped over them a nanosecond before the reinforced-steel bumper of Vincente’s cargo van smashed through the inadequate barrier designed to protect the courthouse and skidded to a stop on the sidewalk a few feet beyond the entrance to the court.

The rear doors flew open. Wearing a black Day of the Dead mask, Big DD leaped out, dragging two corpses by the napes of their necks behind him.

He hauled them up the steps of the courthouse and left them sprawled there, returning to help Vincente with the third and largest of the corpses, the one in the uniform of the Mexican army. They dumped him in the middle.

Purdy unfurled a banner over the three bodies, then ran to the rear of the cargo van and jumped in. Vincente accelerated down the sidewalk, laying on the horn before swinging the bumper at another inadequate steel fence that broke on impact.

“Diversion,” Butler said.

Cortland’s air gun coughed twice, sending a smoke bomb and then the tear gas into the street crossing. Vincente drove through the intersection and out the other side, leaving a curtain of yellow smoke and people coughing behind them.

Butler went to Cortland, grabbed pieces of the air gun as he disassembled it, and put them in his knapsack.

“Get rid of that van, JP, and get to the landing strip,” Butler said as he left. “We have a plane to catch and I can smell the Wyoming high country calling.”





Chapter





59


Northeastern Massachusetts



I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t the bitter cold that greeted us when we followed Paladin’s legal counsel Sheila Farr into a narrow hallway. This was more than icy air-conditioning to combat summer heat. I could see my breath and shivered and shivered again.

“What’s with the ice age?” Sampson asked.

“The supercomputers.” Farr sniffed as she pulled the collar of her puffy coat higher. “There are fifteen stories of them underneath our feet and two stories of them above us. They generate so much heat that we have to keep them at these temperatures just to do what we do best.”

“Which is what, exactly?” I asked.

Farr stopped at a door, looked at me, and smiled. “We’re asked questions. We analyze data. We give answers.” She opened the door and gestured inside. “Come in where it’s warmer, let Steve tell you how it really works.”

Ned went through first. Sampson and I had to duck our heads to get through into a large office with glass walls, floors, and ceilings, a block of glass suspended fifteen feet above and in front of a much larger workspace that teemed with activity. The bigger space was set up with clusters of desks and computers interspersed with screens hanging from ceilings.

The people down there ranged from the outwardly nerdy to the seriously buff, kind of like Steven Vance, who stood up from behind a plain wooden desk in the glass cube. The former Silicon Valley CEO was as tall as me but sported an extra twenty-five pounds of solid muscle under his black polo and jeans.

Vance wasn’t tanned, but his skin sure seemed to glow. I honestly couldn’t tell how old he was as he came around the desk grinning with bonhomie.

“Steve Vance,” he said, shaking our hands and looking us each in the eye as he did. “Ryan sends his apologies. His seventy-five-year-old mother was up on a ladder, painting her kitchen ceiling, fell and broke her femur in several places.”

“Ouch,” Sampson said.

I said, “Please tell him we send him our regards and best wishes for his mother’s recovery.”

“I’ll do that,” Vance said, gesturing us to chairs. “Water? Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea sounds good,” Mahoney said.

“I’ll call for it, Steve,” his attorney said as she took off her puffy jacket.

“How can Paladin help you?” Vance said.

“We’re working on a case,” Mahoney began.

“The cartel and the corrupt agents,” Vance said, drumming his fingers on his thighs. “I understand we’ve been helping you on that one already.”