Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(52)

OFTEN, WHEN I CLOSE my eyes, I can see myself sprinting toward the gray smoke and flame billowing from the blown-out windows, the rear door, and the loading dock.

My training screamed at me to stay out of the building, to wait for the firefighters. But I recalled the interior of the print shop—concrete floors. Steel posts. Trash. No wood. Little fuel. I leaped up the stairs, pulled my jacket over my head, and bulled my way into the chemical smoke and the heat.

“Bree!” I shouted. “Bree!”

My ears still rang from the blast. Fire blazed on mounds of trash to my right. The flames breathed slow and surreal.

“Bree!”

The heat got too intense, forcing me to my left; I was barely able to see. I stuffed the fabric of my jacket into my mouth and sucked cleaner air through it. Then I went down on my hands and knees to get beneath the heat and the rising smoke.

Visibility was better from that position. I could see the base of the steel posts like trees in fog as I crawled forward, pausing every few feet to scream, “Bree!”

No answer. I kept looking from side to side for a human shape.

And then I spotted one through the smoke, hard to my left, a woman lying on her side with her back to me. I crawled to her, fearing the worst.

When I reached her and turned her on her back, I saw it was one of the patrol officers. She’d been burned but was breathing.

I grabbed her by the collar, got to my feet, and started dragging her out.

The front entrance appeared, the sun shining through the smoke like a halo, and I stumbled toward it, coughing and hacking. When I got the patrolwoman outside, other officers ran to help me. My eyes felt singed. My vision was worse than blurry. I heard sirens coming.

“Chief Stone!” I shouted, feeling panic sweep toward hysteria. “Where is she?”

“Alex!”

I spun around, the despair of losing her disappearing at the sound of her voice as she came running across the street. It didn’t matter that my throat and eyes burned when she grabbed me.

“Oh my God,” she said as we hugged tight. “I was down the street and—”

“I thought you were inside,” I said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“No, baby,” Bree said fiercely. “You’re never losing me. You hear?”

“I need to flush my eyes, get some oxygen. That smoke. It’s chemical.”

She was all business then. She turned to the people standing outside of their houses looking at us. “Who has a garden hose?”

A woman yelled that she did, and Bree was soon running cold water up into my eyes. Sampson had come around the long way from the back of the burning building and he got firefighters to bring me a mask and oxygen.

The female officer was rushed into an ambulance that vanished in flashing lights and the wail of a departing siren.

With every breath and every cough, I felt a little better, less strangled inside by the taste of the smoke. And even though my eyes felt like I’d stared at the sun, my vision had improved by the time they brought the blaze under control.

“I still think you should go to the emergency room and have your eyes and lungs checked,” Bree said. “Please?”

She said it with such concern and love, that I nodded.

“Just so you know?” I said.

“Yes?”

“I think those heads were bait. Someone wanted to get us here and then detonate that bomb.”

Before Bree could reply, I felt my burn phone buzz. I pulled it out and looked at the screen, but my vision was still too blurry for me to read the words. I held it out to her. “What does it say?”

Bree took the phone from me, paused, and then replied, “It says, ‘You and your family need to be more careful, Cross.’ It’s signed ‘M.’ ”





CHAPTER 66





KEITH KARL RAWLINS CALLED THAT evening to tell me that my personal phone had indeed been hacked and compromised by an insidious piece of code that had most likely been written in China. The code evidently caused my phone to send a record of everything I did on it to an address on the dark web.

So M has been listening, watching, reading, I thought as I climbed into bed. For how long? And how had he learned of my burn phone number? I’d given it only to my family and close colleagues; were they bugged as well?

That last thought was the most upsetting. M had been listening to me through my phone, shadowing me electronically. And maybe he was doing the same thing to everyone else trying to catch him.

What else had he heard in the past week? Month? Year?

I barely slept. Despite an ophthalmic ointment given to me in the emergency room, my eyes still stung. And every hour or so, I had coughing fits.

But I was up before anyone else the next morning, padding around the house, checking windows and doors. I considered putting security cameras outside my home and wondered whether every electronic device we had should be checked.

My commitment to keeping my family safe and sound deepened after Ali and Jannie got up. I questioned them about their plans for the day.

Even though she felt even better than she had the day before, Jannie was staying home and working so she could get all caught up with her studies. Ali was going on a field trip to the Smithsonian and then on a Wild Wheels ride.

“I’ll drive you to school today,” I told him.