The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(118)

Like Rostov, Krueger would be one of those security operatives in the diamond business, working for a competitor to Dobprom.

You don’t usually shoot your partner in the head…

Now Sachs brought all her senses to the game. In a recent case a suspect—a bit psychotic, more than a bit fascinating—had decided that Sachs was an incarnation of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt.

One of her finest compliments, even if it had come from a crazy man.

They moved as fast as they dared. Sachs and Jones kept low, scanning constantly, left right, the ridges of the trash mounds, which were indeed perfect sniper nests. Breathing hard, muscles knotted.

Oh, how Amelia Sachs loved this.

She ignored the pain in her left side from the fall at the muddy grave at the construction site, ignored the pain from her run-in with the Russian. There was nothing in her mind except her prey.

She used hand signals to tell Jones where to look, when to hurry, when to slow. He did the same from time to time. She suspected he’d never been in a firefight. Uneasy, tense but willing…and able: He held his Glock with confidence and skill.

They proceeded slowly. She didn’t want to stumble on Krueger and force a gunfight; she needed to find him, unawares, for a bloodless takedown.

Alive…

She also didn’t want him circling around on her and Jones. Two hundred feet away a huge backhoe was filling a barge with scrap. The roaring engine and the clatter and boom of the rock tumbling into the vessel obscured all sounds. Krueger could easily get close to them without their hearing.

So she scanned forward, to the sides and behind. Constantly.

Another fifty feet. Where, where, where?

She and Jones were nearly to the water when she spotted them.

Between two large piles of rocks and timber and twisted metal, Krueger was pulling Vimal along behind him. In a gloved left hand he gripped the kid’s collar; his right was under his short, dark jacket. He’d be holding his weapon.

Jones pointed to himself, then to the crest of the scrap pile near Krueger and Vimal. It was on the officer’s right, about twenty feet high. He then pointed to Sachs and made a semicircular gesture, indicating the pile on the left.

Good tactical plan. Jones would cover Krueger from above and Sachs would flank him. She pointed back to their staging area, held up three fingers—meaning the other officers—and pointed a palm his way. Meaning to have them hold position. Sachs didn’t want the others stumbling onto the scene and she had no way of explaining to them exactly where the target was.

Jones stepped aside and made a quiet call to the others. He holstered his weapon and began climbing the debris pile. Sachs trotted to the left, around the base of the mound to the right and began to close on where she’d last seen Krueger and Vimal.

As she eased around the pile, she noted that, yes, it was going to work, if she could just get closer. Jones was atop the debris heap to the right and had his weapon trained on Krueger. Sachs just needed to close the distance a bit more so she could demand his surrender—over the sound of the chugging backhoes and bulldozers.

Jones looked her way and nodded.

She reciprocated and then moved closer yet toward the suspect and Vimal, who had stopped. Krueger’s cold face—so different from the man he’d pretended to be—bent close and whispered something into his ear. The kid, who was crying and wiping tears, nodded and looked around. Then he pointed and the two of them turned abruptly and hurried down another valley, away from Sachs and Jones. Apparently Vimal had spotted the piles of kimberlite.

She glanced at Jones, who shook his head and pointed to his eyes. He’d lost sight. Sachs rounded the base of the mound closest to Krueger and began to follow. Then she looked beyond them.

Oh, no…

Not far away one of the male NYPD officers was crouching, with his back to Krueger, no more than twenty feet away. Without hesitating, Krueger whipped his pistol from beneath his jacket and fired a round into the officer’s back. The uniform plunged forward, dropping his own weapon. Sachs had noted that they wore body armor but at that range, even a slug stopped by armor would incapacitate him. He struggled to rise.

Krueger flung his left arm around Vimal’s throat, so he wouldn’t run, pulling him close. Together they moved toward the injured officer.

Sachs, behind them, stepped closer to the downed cop, drawing a target. “Krueger!” she shouted. “Drop the weapon.”

He didn’t hear and took one step closer, aiming, about to fire a fatal round.

Any incapacitating shot she might try would possibly hit Vimal too.

So, with the thought in her mind that only Krueger knew where the deadly gas bombs were planted, Amelia Sachs lowered her center of gravity, settled the white dot of the front sight on the back of Krueger’s head and gently added pressure to the trigger until her weapon fired.





Chapter 63



Now that they knew the name Andrew Krueger, they could assemble an accurate dossier on him.

While Sachs was searching the deceased’s residence motel in Brooklyn Heights, Rhyme, Fred Dellray from the FBI, the South African Police and ever-helpful Alternative Intelligence Service began filling in details.

The killer’s residence was a flat in Cape Town, not far from the water, in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront area. According to the South African Police, it was quite the posh neighborhood. The man had no criminal record but following his discharge from the army he’d been associated with some “dodgy” businessmen in the diamond trade. Though his father had been a vocal advocate of apartheid, Krueger himself rejected those prejudices, either because they were repugnant to him or, more likely, because they were not economically beneficial. He would work for anyone in the trade who would pay him, including some of the more dangerous “black diamond” businessmen, whose roots had been the impoverished squatter townships but who were now wealthy. When in the army, Krueger worked demolition. In civilian life, in his younger days, he’d been in mining and had studied engineering, which explained how he could rig the explosives to mimic earthquakes. It was his military connections, of course, that gave him access to both the C4 and gas line bombs.