Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(46)

But I was so shocked at what I’d just seen, I barely noticed.

In the split second before the driver threw up his arm and hit the brakes, I’d gotten a look at him: a man in a dark suit and tie, black gloves, mid-forties, tinted glasses, sandy-blond hair, and the unmistakable nose, cheekbones, and prominent chin of disgraced and deceased former FBI special agent Kyle Craig.

The mental images of Craig throwing up his arm to block the glare were so vivid they almost blinded me to a panel van coming off the ramp from Maryland State Highway 50.

I hit the brakes, and the van swerved, horn honking, just in front of me. We barely missed colliding.

When I was sure we were not going to hit, I looked frantically in the rearview and side-view mirrors, trying to see the BMW. But it wasn’t back there.

Indeed, there were no headlights anywhere close behind me. Impossible.

I clawed at the passenger-side mirror control and this time aimed it wide to the right. I caught flashes of the BMW running dark under the highway lights and coming up alongside me so fast, I got rattled.

I knew I should pull an evasive maneuver, hit the brakes, and let him pass. Instead, I rolled down the passenger-side window and kept glancing over, trying to see Craig through the tinted windows even as I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was dead and gone.

The panel van hit the brakes in front of me. I had no choice but to do the same. The BMW shot forward and passed into my headlight glare.

The driver-side window rolled down. I couldn’t see his face, but I sure heard his voice. It seemed to boom back at me.

“M said you’d never learn, Cross!”

Then his gloved hand came out of the window and whipped something sideways and back at me. A blue balloon burst off my windshield, coating it with dark liquid and blocking my view.

I hit the brakes hard and swerved right, praying I could see something of the road in that bent side-view mirror. When I got over on the shoulder, I was gasping, sweating. Whatever liquid was in the balloon was now smeared across my windshield, and my headlights looked like they had a copper tint.

I almost pressed the spray button on my wiper control, but something stopped me. From the glove box, I retrieved my Maglite, then I got out on the passenger side to avoid being run over by passing cars.

The BMW and the panel van were nowhere to be seen as I stepped up next to the front quarter panel and shone the flashlight on my windshield. The liquid was a deep, dark red and already setting up into a tacky gel in the cooling breeze.

I touched some, rubbed it between my fingers, and then sniffed enough of a copper odor to know the blood was not fake.





CHAPTER 56





JOHN SAMPSON LOOKED AT THE windshield in his flashlight beam.

“You drove over here trying to see the road through that?” he asked, gesturing to the small area I’d cleared directly in front of the steering wheel.

“I didn’t want to tamper with the evidence any more than I had to.”

“Why blood?” Ned Mahoney asked.

Ned had been working late downtown and came over as soon as I called. We were in Sampson’s driveway. An FBI forensics unit was on its way.

“No idea,” I said.

“You get a look at the guy who threw the balloon?” Mahoney asked.

“Yeah. You’re not going to like it. I certainly don’t like it.”

Sampson said, “Lot of that going around.”

I paced away from the car, still wrestling with what I’d seen, then I turned and gazed at the two men I trusted most in life.

“The man driving that car looked just like Kyle Craig.”

“Oh, c’mon, Alex,” Mahoney said, groaning. “Get over it. The man is dead.”

Sampson said, “You killed him, Alex.”

“I know! I know! At the very least, whoever was driving that BMW had an uncanny resemblance to what I imagine Craig might have looked like … had he …”

They both reacted with squints.

“Come again?” Sampson said.

“That’s it,” I said. “That guy looked like a pre-op Kyle Craig who’d aged. You know, like when we take photographs of people and have computers age them? But think about it. The real Craig had his face completely rebuilt by that plastic surgeon in Florida so he could impersonate an FBI agent before I figured it out and killed him.”

They were quiet for a moment.

Then Mahoney said, “Unless that wasn’t the real Craig you killed.”

“My head aches,” Sampson said. “Is that even possible?”

“No,” I said. “It was Kyle Craig who died that night. The guy I saw could have been him before the facial work. Even his voice sounded like Craig’s.”

“What, you had a chat during a car chase?” Mahoney said.

“He yelled out the window so loud, it could have been amplified: ‘M said you’d never learn, Cross!’ He had the same kind of drawl Craig used.”

“And then he threw the blood balloon at you?” Sampson said.

“Correct.”

“What the hell is this sick bastard up to?” Mahoney said.

“Sick bastards, plural,” Sampson said. “If Pseudo-Craig is to be believed, then M told him you would never learn.”

“Pseudo-Craig,” I said, and I smiled. “I like that. And correct.”